When the Moon was Ours(71)

But this was the thing she could remember, the thing she could say out loud.

Miel couldn’t tell for sure from the faint light, the glow of the moon above them and the moon Sam had brought with him. But Ivy’s eyes looked slicked wet like silver.

“My mother”—Miel said, letting each word fall with its own weight—“loved me.”

She felt the sky taking the words, singing them back, like thunder echoing between clouds. They were the scream of the wind.

They were the sound of another crack snaking through the lid of the stained glass coffin. The faint light of stars and the sickle moon shining off the glass, showing how the crack had cut it in half.

A flare lit in Peyton’s eyes.

She took a step back from her sisters, her glance skittering between them and the stained glass coffin.

“I like girls more than boys,” she said, and a set of cracks snapped through the stained glass, with as many branches as a bare winter bough.

The rest of them flinched, drawing back.

Lian’s posture rose, making her look almost as tall as Chloe.

Her irises took on a brighter color, like the green of spring leaves warming and lightening to the green of tart apples.

“I understand more than any of you know,” Lian said, and another set of branching cracks frosted the glass.

These were the truths they had to tell. And Ivy looked like each one was crawling along her shoulder blades.

Chloe did not move. But the breath she drew in sounded like a finger of wind. Wisps of her hair softened her braid, the moon making the edges look almost white. Her stance looked so upright, so much like a dancer’s that Miel could imagine her twirling through the pumpkin rows barefoot.

“Clara,” Chloe said, landing on each of the syllables and letting her weight fall on the balls of her feet. “Her name is Clara.”

Her voice was trimmed with not just defiance, but correction, as if she’d stepped in after overhearing someone telling a lie.

Even through the pain in her wrist, Miel felt a flare of guilt, shared with the rest of the town.

That baby had a name. She wasn’t Chloe Bonner’s baby, the way Miel always thought of her. She wasn’t that baby the Bonner girl had, the words the gossip called her.

She had a name. Through all the glances and whispers, she’d had her own name, a name Chloe had given her. And until tonight, Miel had never known it. Worse, she’d never even wondered.

The cracks in the stained glass branched into smaller cracks, whitening the panels.

Their secrets were killing them. They knew it. Speaking them gave the power of those unsaid things back, but it broke them into pieces like the stained glass.

Miel had never noticed how different, how much more pointed, Chloe’s chin was than the rest of them. Or how Lian’s eyes were not just greener but darker, closest to Mr. Bonner’s of the four of them. Or how Peyton’s nose made her look so much like their mother.

Now they were all watching Ivy. Sam was watching Ivy.

Ivy, who had taken the weight of deciding when the four of them moved and breathed, the single living thing they were together. Ivy, whose secrets were so buried they didn’t even ride the current of whispers in the halls.

Ivy, whose lips trembled with the tension between wanting to speak and staying quiet.

Miel almost lifted her hand, stopping Ivy from speaking.

She understood.

The woman Miel had lived with for years she had once known as her brother Leandro. Now she was Aracely, and she and Miel were two halves of a matched set. The day and night girls. Aracely had hair as gold as late afternoon, her eyes the deep brown of a wet, fertile field. Miel’s hair was dark as a starless autumn, a night made brown by fall leaves, and her eyes matched the gold of low twin moons. Without each other, there was neither night nor day for either of them.

Without each other, neither of them existed.

Without her sisters, Ivy Bonner did not exist.

Ivy hadn’t just wanted Miel’s roses, convinced her sisters that they needed them, because she thought they would earn them the love of any boy, any heart they faltered in winning. She hadn’t just wanted them because if they could have any boy they wanted, they were still the Bonner girls. And she hadn’t just wanted them to be the Bonner girls so everything would go back to how it was before Chloe left them.

She had wanted them because if they were not still the Bonner girls, there was no Ivy.

If she did not live as part of the life that spread between the four of them, she did not exist.

Their mother and father, so tense with fear for and of their own daughters, had already sent Chloe away. Now Ivy would always worry over the four of them breaking apart, becoming a fraction of a life in each of their lonely bodies.

The rest of them had secrets. As much as they each existed as one Bonner girl out of four, Chloe and Lian and Peyton all had enough of lives and breaths outside of that dark blue house to have their own secrets.

But they were all Ivy had.

Ivy’s mouth wavered, her lips pursing shut and then parting again. “I have nothing that’s mine.”

The brass hinges and joints groaned, and the glass shattered. The milky stars and blue-green sky exploded. The curves of the red and violet planets broke into pieces. The clusters of stars burst into shards, and the blue whirled in on itself like the curves of a nautilus shell. Each panel splintered like ice, spraying into enough pieces for a whole sky of constellations.