When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

“Sam,” she said.

  He held on to her, keeping her up. “If you’re doing this, we do this together.”

  “Sam.” His name broke into pieces on her tongue.

  “Samir.” He put his hand to her face, his thumb grazing her damp cheek.

  She pressed her lips together, blinking against the tear caught at the inner corner of her eye.

  He set the pad of his thumb against it, and she shut her eyes.

  “You can call me whatever you want, but my name is Samir.”

  The crushing of leaves announced the Bonner sisters. They emerged from the yellow leaves, the shades of their hair like the different colors in a bloom of flame. They wore sweaters as deep and vivid as the panels of stained glass. Dark green and purple. Blue and red.

  Their eyes, two sets of brown, the others green and gray, met on Sam and Miel, their bodies crushed together.

  Sam pressed his hand against the back of Miel’s neck. But he didn’t look away from the four of them. He met as many of their eyes at a time as he could. First Peyton’s and Lian’s, his stare straying to Ivy and Chloe.

  He straightened his back, trying to stand as tall as his mother. The soreness in his arm felt like a charm, a coin Miel had slipped into his hand. A reminder.

  “I’m a boy,” he said, because the rest did not matter.

  He felt Miel watching him. Her whispered What are you doing? warmed his neck.

  The lies, the rumors that might touch him tomorrow, did not matter right now. The truth was currency, new and shining. It let off light, glowing like the moon he’d set on the ground.

  “I’m a boy,” he said, “and I always have been.”

  The Bonner girls blinked at him, staying in their line, a row of vivid hair and sweaters.

  Then a splintering sound, like a sheet of ice giving beneath too much weight, cut through the air.

  Sam and Miel and all four of the Bonner sisters turned their faces to its source.

  A crack, thick and deep as a line of paint, crossed the stained glass.

  bay of rainbows

  The six of them were watching that crack crawl across the green and violet.

  Samir. He was calling himself Samir. And he was looking the Bonner sisters in their faces—their faces that seemed like different panes in the same sheet of stained glass—and telling them that he knew what they knew, and he didn’t care.

  One set of eyes at a time, the Bonner girls were looking from the cracked stained glass to Sam and Miel. Brown and green and gray all swirling and settling on them.

  Their stare was heavy as a coating of snow. It felt colder in contrast with the warmth of Sam’s body, his lack of hesitation when Miel dropped her forearm from between them and he let his chest touch her. He didn’t flinch away or twist his shoulder so he would not feel the front of him, would not remember what he had under the shirt that bound him down.

  She thought of Aracely, coming out of the water soaked and a stranger to her own body. Surfacing as someone older than when she’d gone in, while the water had kept Miel the same age. Back then, Miel had the sorrow of a child. But Aracely’s heart carried the sadness of the woman she would become.

  Sorrow kept Miel still, but had aged Aracely. And that same sorrow was keeping Miel still now.

  Her mother hadn’t hated her. She knew that. She’d feared for her. She’d loved Miel, seen her as a daughter she could lose to petals and thorns. She’d been a young mother little older than Aracely, panicked and desperate to hold on to the children she’d made.

  What mother could resist a hundred tales of roses that had stolen the souls of sons and daughters? What mother could stand against her husband’s insistence that their daughter was sick, and needed to be cured, and not want to find a gentler way to do it than the sting of hot metal?

  What woman could ignore the warnings of señoras and priests who said they knew how to save her child? How could she not bring her daughter down to the river when they promised the current would take this curse from her?

  Miel could not choose if Ivy or the other Bonner girls or anyone else told lies.

  But she could tell the truth.

  Miel found Ivy’s eyes.

  “My mother loved me,” she said. Maybe her father had too. Maybe all he did—the bandages so tight her fingers turned numb, the end of the butter knife in the gas flame—was the form his love had taken. Maybe fear had twisted it, leaving it threadbare.

  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.

  Miel and Sam shielded each other’s eyes as the pieces flew. The Bonner girls crowded together, protecting each other from the glass slashing their skin, until their hair became one mass of auburn and copper and rust. The air turned to cold and glass. The wind had teeth and nails.

  Sam held on to Miel tighter, their hands in each other’s hair.

  The echo of the glass falling faded, letting them breathe. The scent of every rose Miel had ever grown found her. Winter pine and wildflowers, cinnamon and Meyer lemons. The clash of seasons was so sharp that when she breathed it in, it traced the lining of her lungs.

  They turned, all of them, to look at the broken glass. Sam and Miel tipped their faces toward it. The Bonner sisters unfurled from their huddle.

  The pieces of stained glass were breaking away from the frame, not falling onto the ground but streaming up into the sky. Those tiny shards shimmered and glinted as they rose into the air, the night drawing them up. Streams of glimmering blue and violet mixed with ribbons of red and green, like the coins of sun on the surface of a river. Each piece winked with moonlight, reflecting back the gold of the birches and hickories.

  Then the rose brass frame sat bare as a forest in January. There was no more locking Miel in there. No more sealing each other in to make sure they were all neat and the same as the letters in Chloe’s handwriting.

  They had all given up their truths, things they guarded more closely than their secrets. The words they’d spoken were streaming toward the sky with all that stained glass. None of it was any of theirs to tell unless it belonged to them.

  The Bonner sisters left not together, but peeling away one at a time. First Chloe, then Lian, with a look over her shoulder. Then Peyton, hesitating and tipping her head before she spun in a half-circle and started walking.

  Ivy’s eyes looked wet and faceted like cut stone. Her face said words Miel knew she would never hear. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken what was not mine. Her eyes strayed to Miel’s wrist, like she was wondering if she was still bleeding.

  These were girls so unused to apologizing that they could not knit these unsaid things into words.

  The Bonner sisters did not stay in their cluster. Instead, leaving the woods, they were red-winged birds among the yellow trees.

  But they kept close enough together that they could hear one another. Sisters, four of them, instead of one organism in four pretty, blurred-together bodies. To become themselves, to become sisters to one another and sisters of their own, they’d had to give up being the Bonner girls, las gringas bonitas. The being that moved and breathed together, that stole boys and cats and roses and anything else they wanted.

  Miel turned her back to the stained glass coffin, her forearm hot and sore but calming.

  Sam stopped her, his hand on her back.

  Miel’s eyes paused on her own collarbone.

  A wave of copper spilled over her shoulders. Her hair had turned the color of scarlet oak leaves, as deep red as Ivy’s. It looked like a curtain of autumn.

  Miel squinted toward the trees, picking out a dark fall of hair.

  Ivy looked over her shoulder, the copper that once marked her now as dark as Aracely’s eyes. The brown, almost black, made Ivy’s face look pale as a cream pumpkin. Miel could almost pick out the two points of her eyes, now both bluer and grayer. But Ivy was too far off for her to be sure, and a rain of yellow leaves fell between them.

  Miel pinched a lock of her own hair between her fingers. It could have been her hours locked in that stained glass where they locked each other. Or the moment when she realized she was as intertwined with Aracely as Ivy was with her sisters. Either way, the Bonner girls had left her a little of what made them.

  But that wasn’t where Sam’s eyes landed now.

  She lifted her chin, looking where he was looking.

  Far off, in the direction of the Bonners’ farm, the glitter of broken glass was rising above the trees. Miel and Sam watched it drifting into the sky.

  The glass pumpkins, in all those violets and greens and blues, had shattered like the stained glass coffin. And the little shards were floating up, like snow the sky was taking back. They were studding the stars with their jeweled light. A deep autumn of glass constellations, like the summer of Aracely’s arrival among those hundred thousand golden wings.

  All these broken pieces, becoming a hundred thousand unmapped stars.

  bay of love

  There were whispers about it, about all of it. The glass rising into the sky like new-cut stars. The way Ivy’s hair had darkened to almost black. How Miel’s had turned so red that, when her skin was lighter in winter, at a distance, she could almost pass for one of the Bonner sisters.

  How Chloe had left, and no one knew yet if she was staying with her aunt for good, both of them caring for her baby, or if she would bring her daughter—Clara—back with her. How the rest of the Bonner girls might or might not be coming back to school.

  Not long after that night, Ivy sent Miel a cutting of her own hair, along with the pressed flowers of the roses she’d taken. The orange one, turned a little tan at the edges. The deep purple one they’d sliced away in the dark. The yellow one streaked in its own red and the dried wine stains of Miel’s blood.

  Miel had shivered a little opening the envelope, seeing those flowers between wax paper, and the lock of hair that looked so much like her own it took her a minute to remember hers was now red.

  This was the closest to an apology Miel would ever get. This was Ivy’s acknowledgment that she and her sisters had spent so long drawing life from the act of taking what did not belong to them.

  That was the part that found its way into the whispers of this town. Those pressed roses and that lock of hair became woven into the story they told.

  But there was something before that, that didn’t.

  The night after the sky had taken all the stained glass, Miel asked Sam for a moon he didn’t mind never seeing again. He’d known what she meant, and gave her one so light gray it looked silver. Like the moon in those library atlases.

>   Miel and Aracely brought it outside, held it up, waited for the sky to take it.

  Their mother would have a light to see by no matter whether the moon above them was a sickle or a bright coin. She could leave her broken heart with them. If she let it go, if she let it streak down to the earth like a fallen star, her spirit would be so light, so unweighted, she would float to places so beautiful they could not be told in stories.

  The wind came, and took the moon, the air filling it like a sail. It drifted away, pale and translucent as a slice of jicama. When the trees moved, leaves covered it, and its light flickered like a star.

  Miel didn’t hear her mother’s voice on the wind. Neither did Aracely. Later, Aracely said that was a good thing. She said it meant that, like all the stained glass—Aracely had seen it that night too, speckling the dark—their mother had drifted free of this world. She was untethered by gravity or worry over her children, and the water didn’t pull on her anymore.

  Miel and Aracely stood with the cut grass brushing their bare feet, watching the moon until its light turned as small and faint as a firefly.

  Then it was just them, on that patch of their yard, two sisters lifting their hands to the sky.

  sea of nectar

  For so long, talking about Samira, acknowledging her as someone who no longer lived in him, had felt dangerous as running his fingers along a sharp edge. It had been Miel eating a slick of honey off a knife. It was an heirloom blade his mother would not leave out, fearing Sam was still a child who might cut himself.

  But now he was Samir, and Samira was that friend he almost thought he imagined. And she would be a little more imaginary once he and his mother finished changing his name. He wanted to neither forget she existed nor live inside her.

  She was someone he could not be.

  He would need to consider everything he’d ignored. How hard he had to work to keep his voice at the pitch he wanted, how it was low enough that no one in person gave him a second look but still high enough that he avoided the phone whenever he could. The way he bled, at the same time each month as Miel, when the moon was a wisp of light so thin it was almost new. How he would have to figure out if these things bothered him because he didn’t want anyone else to know about the effort it took, or simply because they were.