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They would remember only that Miel and Sam had been called Honey and Moon, a girl and a boy woven into the folklore of this place.
She had seen him naked. Almost naked. And she understood that with his clothes off, he was the same as he was with them on.
To her he had always been Sam, the boy who made the moon for her, the boy whose silhouette she’d found a hundred times on that wooden ladder, light filling his hands.
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.
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.
He. Him. Mister. Sir. Even teachers admonishing him and his classmates with boys, settle down or gentlemen, please. These were sounds as perfect and clean as winter rain, and they calmed each searing bite of those wrong words.
Samira. 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. She had never truly existed. She was a life that did not belong to Sam but that he’d tried too hard to belong to.
By saying that name that once belonged to him but that he never quite belonged to, they could strip him naked.
She was amber and last light. The moment between summer and fall. The honey she ate off spoons in Aracely’s kitchen.
How he wanted Miel in a way that hurt as much as the tightening of his lungs against the cold water, a desperation for a breath in matched only by the impossibility of taking one.
“We don’t get to become who we are for nothing. It costs something. You’re fighting for every little piece of yourself.
It was his. All of it was his. His body, refusing to match his life. His heart, bitter and worn. His love for Miel, even if it had nowhere to go, even if he didn’t know how to love a girl who kept herself as distant from him as an unnamed constellation. These things belonged to him. They were his, even if they were breaking him.
The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.
But even if they were the same inside their jeans, he was so different from her that she could not imagine his body as her own.
He was a world unmapped, a planet of valleys and vapor seas no one but he had a right to name.
She put her hand on him as though he had a body that would let him be called he and him without anyone ever daring to question it.
her touching him in the best way she knew to remind him there was no distance, no contradiction between the body he had and a boy called Samir.
But it was his body. It was his to name.
No one could make him be Samira. Not him. Not the Bonner sisters. Not the signatures on that piece of paper.
The truth was currency, new and shining. It let off light, glowing like the moon he’d set on the ground.
He could give his body, as it was, to the one girl who understood it was not the whole of him. That there was a story told not just in the contours of his chest and what he had or did not have pressing against the center seam of his jeans. The rest of him was in what he chose. His haircut. His clothes. His name.
Tonight, though, he wanted to feel every part of his own body, and know it could not name him. It could not force him into a life that had never been his.
