When the Moon Was Ours: List 4

The ways in which girls made formal their friendships, the ways they declared and solidified that yes, they belonged to one another, were as foreign to him as the ice-covered fjords in his geography textbook.

She left her clothes strewn over the floor of her room.

As long as he didn't question it, prod it, it stayed.

The warm scent of cloves and the honeyed acid of the bergamot orange wafted over him.

The truth ballasted her words. It kept them straight and tall.

But now Aracely whispered, "Get it all out of you," neither kind nor reprimanding, a recommendation no different from another curandera's prescription for curing nightmares.

There was no stained glass, there were no pumpkins turning clear and brittle, no gradations of red sweeping through the dark.

Sam took his mother's wooden rolling pin from the freezer, where she always put it, a trick she swore by for rolling out roti, but that Sam said his aunts considered just shy of sacrilege to the family recipe.

Fearless charm would never flow from her body like yards of chiffon.

He'd seen her in math class, drawing the kind of tessellations and polyhedrons that could have been illustrations in the textbook.

During their discussions of books, Mrs. Bonner moderated Ivy and Peyton's debate over whether Pip from Great Expectations was a romantic or a sap, while Lian sat staring out the holes in the lace curtains.

The history of Miel's family had said that, one day, she would turn on her mother, the roses growing from her body a warning of her treachery.

Miel felt them wondering, out loud but in hushed voices, if she was the witch who had turned those pumpkins on the Bonners' farm to glass. They had already ruled out the Bonner girls, who exonerated themselves by being afraid to touch those glass pumpkins.

Without her, the girl they called Honey, the girl who licked her own name off knives when Aracely wasn't looking and off spoons when she was, he was as diminished as an almost-new moon.

They rose close enough to the surface to catch only when the moon was a dark ring in the sky, and his father's family was known throughout Campania for night fishing, filling the hulls of their boats before sunrise.

Aracely glittered with wry mystery the way Leandro glowed with kindness.

Miel had given off such raw fear, such apprehension, that Aracely had never been able to say the words.

The hot metal had burned the opening on her wrist, pain spreading down to her hand and up her arm. Her own scream had ripped against the back of her throat. Her father explained, his voice low even through her screaming, that this would seal the wound on her wrist, cauterize it, stop the roses from growing again.

Even with that curse running through his family, he could not imagine his own daughter being intertwined with those stems and thorns.

"You really believe that?" Miel asked, and she heard in her own voice both skepticism and forgiveness.

The softness didn't deter Miel.

Fear. That was the plain, unadorned reason Ivy wanted Miel's roses.

Instead of twisting like the smooth green of morning glory vines, they were wearing one another down like brambles rubbing away the thorns of other brambles.

Those words would be thorns snagging his skin and clothes.

Sam let out a curt laugh.

Branches offered places to hang his moons that fallow fields didn't.

It was curling out, taking on the woody look of a rose stem. Then it uncoiled, turning green and pliable, like a morning glory vine.

The sound of the Bonner girls' voices, the mingling of higher and lower pitches, their shared cadence.

But instead of reckless and laughing, their voices sounded taut and pressing.

"Miel," he said, their faces close enough that he could see her pupils spreading and contracting.

She stood with him. She always had, this girl of wildflowers and feather grass, this girl he'd painted a thousand lunar seas, a hundred incarnations of mare nectaris and sinus iridum.

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.

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.

Ivy's eyes looked wet and faceted like cut stone.

It told him Miel was interested, not fascinated. To her, he was not a specimen.