When the Moon Was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

Miel was a girl stained with rusted water and the blood on her hands of two people whose names she could not speak.

Wait, who??

The only thing she wanted more than she wanted Sam was for her mother to know that Miel forgave her. That she understood why she did what she did. That she knew her mother loved her.

When he was eight, and she walked in on him changing, she didn’t scream, or run down the hall. She just shut the door and left, and when he pulled on his jeans and his shirt and went after her, he found her sitting on the back steps. Her expression was so full of both wondering and recognition, as though she almost understood but not quite, that he sat down next to her and told her more than he’d ever planned to. Now, she slipped him tampons at school because he couldn’t risk carrying them in his bag. They had it timed so they passed each other while she was leaving the girls’ bathroom and he was going into the boys’, the two of them clasping hands just long enough for the handoff.

Sam is a trans boy

What were they doing with that poor woman? When the four of them left, Sam had caught Peyton in the hallway. “Isn’t she a little old for you?” Sam asked. For a second Peyton looked terrified, the way she always did at any mention of the fact that she liked girls and not boys.

Peyton is a lesbian

On the advice of an old woman from her church, Miel’s mother had gone out into the pumpkin fields and hollowed out the biggest pumpkin she could find. A cream white one as big as the space under a chair. She had left the stem attached to the vine, the carved top clinging to it so that when she put it back on, the pumpkin would still be tied to the earth. When the shell was cleared of its seeds and string, the inside scraped so clean it was damp instead of wet, she forced Miel inside.

Miel's mother sealed her inside a pumpkin overnight to try to get rid of the roses coming out of her wrists

If Miel had been able to understand when she and Sam were both children, Aracely, a grown woman, had no excuse now.

“Because you were right,” Aracely said. “I am Miel’s family. And not just because that’s what we’ve become to each other. I always have been.” This was the thing he’d wanted to know so badly a few minutes ago. But now, how much he didn’t want to talk cast a heavy shadow over how much he cared. “What does that have to do with anything?” he asked. Aracely crossed her arms, and her thin elbows turned pointed and sharp. “Because Miel remembers me as her brother.”

And I oop--

No one else, not his mother, not even Miel, could understand this wanting to live a life different from the one he was born into, so much that his own skin felt like ice cracking. It shouldn’t have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they wore skirts. Not when they went out as late as they wanted. Not when they told their brothers what to do, and borrowed their fathers’ books. But there was everything else. The idea of being called Miss or Ms. or, worse, Mrs. The thought of being grouped in when someone called out girls or ladies. The endless, echoing use of she and her, miss and ma’am. Yes, they were words. They were all just words. But each of them was wrong, and they stuck to him. Each one was a golden fire ant, and they were biting his arms and his neck and his bound-flat chest, leaving him bleeding and burning.

“Does my mother know?” Sam asked. “About you?” Aracely’s laugh was not the wild, reckless thing he sometimes heard coming from the wisteria-colored house. Now it was warm, almost pitying. “Of course she does. How do you think you ended up here?” “What are you talking about?” Sam asked. “I met your mother before you two moved here,” Aracely said. “She came with a cousin who wanted a lovesickness cure, and we started talking about you. I told her if she ever wanted to move out here, I couldn’t promise much, but I could promise I’d watch out for you.” This time Aracely’s laugh was lighter. She combed back a stray piece of her hair. “I never thought she’d take me up on it.” “But we moved because she lost her job,” Sam said. “The school was making cuts, and they let her go.” In Aracely’s smile, clench-lipped and sad, Sam saw the truth. The school hadn’t been making cuts. She hadn’t lost her job. “She loves you,” Aracely said. “She loves you as much as a daughter and a son and everything in the world put together.” His mother had gone from being a teacher to being something between a tutor and a nanny, for him. “That’s why we came here?” Sam asked. “Because of me? It’s my fault?” “Not your fault,” Aracely said. “Not because of you. For you.”

With his weight on her, she was water and he was a moon, his gravity pulling her closer. He was a world unmapped, a planet of valleys and vapor seas no one but he had a right to name. If he let her, she would learn the bays and oceans of him.

But the gossip in their old town had reduced all this to something as cold as trading olive oil or raw marble. You want a green card, and I want a baby. They called it a bargain his mother made to sleep with a man she didn’t love, as many times as it took to have the child she wanted. How they were married for only a couple of years, how she was the only divorcing woman who, seven months pregnant, wished her husband well as he left her.

The story of Sam's parents