When the Moon was Ours(9)

But the sound wasn’t coming from the sky. Or even from under the water. It pulled Miel’s eyes down the length of the bank.

The dark outlined the figure of a girl, arms crossed, wind fluffing her hair.

The Bonner girl, though Miel still couldn’t tell which one.

Miel got to her feet, pain spinning in her forearm.

“Are you okay?” she called, trying to keep her voice calm like Aracely’s, soft and clear as the trickle of water over stones.

But the girl still jumped. Her gaze snapped toward Miel, and the moon turned her face as pale as its own surface.

Ivy Bonner. The ribbons of light off the river showed her features. Her cheeks shone wet. Hints of copper warmed the edges of her hair, even in the dark. Her nose sat between Chloe’s, long and straight and proud like their father’s, and Peyton’s, short and upturned like their mother’s.

Ivy nodded, dabbing her fingers over her cheeks. Miel was not important enough for Ivy to pretend she hadn’t been crying.

That nod made Miel feel like she was intruding, like she’d been summoned and now was dismissed. She clutched the silver-plated scissors and turned her back to the river.

But Ivy took a few steps toward her. Not in a hurried way. But quickly enough that Miel stopped in her path.

“What are you doing out here?” Ivy asked, and in the same moment glanced down at Miel’s bare wrist, and the scissors. “Oh,” she said.

Ivy lifted her eyes to Miel’s again. This close, the salt and water drying on her cheeks looked like the thinnest frost.

“Does it hurt?” Ivy asked.

“What?” Miel asked, cringing at the uncertainty in her own voice.

“Cutting them,” Ivy said.

To say no would seem like a kind of defiance Miel could never wear as well as Ivy or her sisters. To say yes was too much of an admission.

Miel nodded.

She hadn’t been this close to Ivy since the Bonner sisters left school. And now, so close to her that she could smell the watery camellia scent of her soap, all Miel could think of was Clark Anderson, another of the boys lost to the Bonner sisters. Clark had thought a girl like Ivy, with her hair the color and shine of new pennies, could cure him of wanting to kiss John Sweden under the new water tower. He slept with Ivy in her bedroom in broad daylight, with Sam and the other workers on the farm below her window. And less than twelve hours later he was kissing John again, this time on the water tower ladder at midnight, where people could just recognize their shapes against the stars.

He disappeared from the town the next week. But unlike Chloe or the boy whose baby she had, no one knew where he’d gone.

The way Ivy kept blinking, stung by the salt of her own tears, made pity spread through Miel, until she had to give it words.

“He doesn’t matter, you know,” Miel said.

Ivy drew back. “What?”

Miel knew to be quiet, but she wanted to even out what she’d said, like smoothing the layer of cream on a tres leches cake.

“He’s just a guy,” Miel said. “Who cares?”

Ivy’s eyes tensed and narrowed.

With that pinching of her eyelashes, Miel knew she’d made a mistake. Now Ivy knew Miel had seen. She would hold against Miel her witnessing this sign of the Bonner girls losing their power over this town’s boys.

Ivy tilted her head, watching Miel’s wrist. “Why do you kill them?” she asked, neither horrified nor concerned. More curious. More like she thought drowning those petals was a waste.

Miel sank into the relief of Ivy changing the subject, then realized this was something she wanted to talk about even less. She knew how everyone looked at her, at her roses. The rumor that, if a girl slipped one under a boy’s pillow, if he breathed in the scent while he slept, she could make him fall in love with her. Or that, for even better effect, the petals could be sugared and baked into a vanilla cake or lavender alfajores, but only with the secret recipes used by the girls in the violet house.

For that second, her nervousness around Ivy, her feeling that she was her handmaid waiting for dismissal, softened. Miel might have been as strange to Ivy as the Bonner sisters were to her. She lived in a house as violet as blueberry cream. Roses grew from her wrist, and Aracely, this woman she lived with, invited lovesick men and women to lie down on her wooden table so she could cure their broken hearts.

If Aracely had been there, she would’ve told Miel to stop standing there, stop waiting for la bruja to give her instructions.

Miel tipped her head, a greeting and a good-bye.

But then her heart pinched. The Bonner sisters had rarely talked to anyone but one another and the boys they loved and wrecked. Lian had been quiet but friendly enough when she and Sam had to do a group presentation on the orographic effect; Sam wrote the report while Lian drew and colored in all the pictures. When Miel got her period a week early, Chloe had, without comment, slid her a tampon under the bathroom stall. They were neither rude nor warm; they just preferred one another’s company to anyone else’s.

Now maybe Ivy was lonely enough that she’d talk to anyone. Chloe had been gone for months. She’d missed Lian turning eighteen and Peyton turning fifteen. (Ivy, sixteen, wouldn’t have her birthday until December.) Now that Chloe was back, Miel imagined everyone as formal and careful, so attentive to Chloe that she felt smothered and the rest of the sisters felt both jealous and grateful not to be her. Lian and Ivy and Peyton would have crowded together not to miss her, to make it less obvious that she was gone. Now they would all try to shuffle apart to make room for her.