When the Moon Was Ours: List 3

Aracely folded one hand into the other, pressing both against her sternum.

His throat tightened, and he felt them both settle into their stalemate.

He. Him. Mister. Sir. Even teachers admonishing him and his classmates with boys, settle down or gentlemen, please.

The name sounded less like a thing that had once belonged to Sam than the name of some specter, a spirit that might come and take him if Miel did not keep it away. It was a name of a girl who had not died because she had never quite lived.

"Who?" Miel asked, but she heard the wavering in how she said it now. Not the true confusion of the first time she'd asked, but a false start to the word, a breath hitching before she got it out.

She felt a flare of anger toward his mother, that beautiful, kohl-eyed woman who told her charges stories of brazen, fearless daughters.

But she was as intent on letting things take their own course as she was indifferent to religion. She accommodated both the boy at the core of him, and his brittle, tight-held hope that one day he would want to be a girl.

Miel let that little shred of resentment float away from her. It wasn't his mother's fault.

Miel tensed, even though there was no malice in Lian's words. Only a bluntness, a carelessness evolved to make up for how long thinking took her.

But because of Miel, Aracely had botched Ms. Owens' lovesickness cure.

And God knew what words, or worse, the Shelbys and the Hazeltons would have for Peyton and her mother. They probably wouldn't come by the Bonner house either. They wouldn't bother with discretion.

This town punctuated its quiet with enough fury to sustain the gossips for months.

Three Christmases ago the Sunday school teacher, in front of everyone, ordered the girl playing Mary in the pageant to relinquish her blue dress, because she'd been caught smoking one of her mother's cigarettes behind the church.

Because of the way Peyton referred to her own sister—After Chloe, as though the oldest Bonner girl could be reduced to the single event of her having a baby. Because of the implication that Mrs. Bonner wouldn't sob into her casserole dishes if she knew what Peyton was doing with Jenna Shelby and Liberty Hazelton.

God knew what words, or worse, this town would have for a boy who'd been born female. They would wrap their contempt and their cruelty in the lie that they wouldn't have cared, if only he'd told them.

As though the truth of his body was any of their business, as though they had a right to consider how he lived an affront to them.

Each time the stem crawled a sliver further out of her wrist, she wanted to let a scream pour from her throat.

The grass smelled clean and strong as citrus pith, and each blade looked a little gilded, taking in light from the house like a cloth soaking up oil.

The grass smelled clean and strong as citrus pith, and each blade looked a little gilded, taking in light from the house like a cloth soaking up oil.

He'd covered it in the blue-black of a new moon, and then added the sharp slice of a waning crescent.

But that stark beauty made her want to kiss him so badly that the lack of it made her lips feel cold.

This morning her rose had given off the scent of honey and apricot, but now its perfume had the weight and spice of copal incense.

The more they saw how she looked at him, touched his arm when she laughed, pulled him into the trees when he was on his breaks, the more they'd wield that birth certificate.

But half this town must have assumed they were best friends by default.

This woman was so much a mother, so much an adult, and any reminder of that made addressing her by her first name feel strange and irreverent.

"You're so many questions to me," he said. "And you always will be." He said the words without admiration. They were bitter, resigned.

That resignation, the giving-up, made her body feel light, unmoored.

If she went home, she'd take Sam’s words home with her, and they'd rattle around in that empty house, barren and cold without Aracely's noise and laugh.

Miel was their kind of pretty. Not perfect and polished, not like Nina Chan, one of the girls who knew as well as Sam that if they wanted this town to love them, they'd have to give themselves nicknames; Nina had been crowned Pumpkin Queen last year, her curls so coated in hairspray they looked varnished.

But the Bonner girls started out bony, all jutting elbows and knees so skinny the sharp round of the cap showed, and each year filled out a little more.

He only knew him by the way he wore a different pin on his tie each day of the week, and by the stories about how, at the start of each year, he held a lawn games party half the teachers looked forward to and the other half felt obligated to attend.

"I just want to say that this is why my mother doesn't want us going to this school," she said, in a nasal, indignant voice she'd probably grown out of years ago but dredged up to make a point with anyone more than twice her age.

She coaxed them into practicing the violin or flute with promises to tell them more about Laila and the boy who loved her so much he was called Majnun, because people thought his own heart had driven him mad.

He wanted not to want the girl whose attachment to him had been so tenuous that the Bonner girls had stepped into it as easily as Adair Lewis turned across a stage floor.

The roots and stones and contours of the riverbed made whirlpools and riptides that, in most years, more rain and greater depths smoothed out.