When the Moon Was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

They feared that if they were not kind to the beautiful things that grew wild, their own farms would wither and die.

Moon had become his name to this town because of her. Because of her, this town had christened him. Without her, he had been nameless. He had not been Samir or Sam. He had been no one. They knew his name no more than they knew who this girl had been before she was water.

Miel still had thousands of secrets, small and shimmering. She held them tight in her hands, and he had nothing left that he had not given up.

They gave her the same inconsistency they might give a lover, adoration at night, disavowal in the morning. How indebted they were to her meant they offered her either scorn or respect, depending on the time of day and how many people were watching.

Not that they ever tried to break anything. They never meant to hurt anyone. They were children petting a cat too hard for no reason except that they liked the feel of its fur.

Las gringas bonitas, these four girls who’d made the moon disappear, were back.

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

Sometimes she tried settling into the memory, but she knew him so little he was not really hers.

Miel was one of a hundred girls who would sleep better if the Bonner girls lost their peculiar power. But she couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Ivy.

She’d made it clear that any God she believed in could not be contained within walls, certainly not inside the whitewashed clapboard of the local church.

Sometimes she said things like that, and he could almost see the pallor of frost on her words. It’s not my place to be disappointed, she’d said when he was failing math three years ago. It’s your future, not mine. And that made him feel even worse.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Miel asked. Aracely leaned in. “I think that’s the same thing she wants to ask the guy.”

Aracely ran her fine-boned fingers through a lock of Ms. Owens’ hair. “Let go,” she whispered, her voice warm with the assurance that everything was good and right, that it was the golden hour of afternoon and not night, that there was no fear in the world.

Giving someone else a little of who they were hurt more than giving up none or all of it.

She might have once loved water, and swam with the current, realizing too late that it did not love her the way she loved it. Or she might have been small enough to see the moon on the surface, and think she could wade in and catch it.

She had the self-control he didn’t, the gift of ignoring what prickled and stung and wanted to be blinked away.

“She wanted you to have the life you wanted,” Aracely said. “So figure out what kind of life you want.”

All the stories were lies. His mother’s fables about chukar partridges and women who disguised themselves as lynx. Miel’s fairy tales about stars falling in love with moons.

This town didn’t love her the way they loved

the Bonner girls, even if they feared them. They didn’t gather to protect her and Aracely when strangers threw empty bottles at the violet house, calling them witches.

This was one of the things he loved about her, that they called her Honey, and she was so quick to eat her own name.

She had loved him since they were small, when they’d met on feral land among the brush of feather reed grass. They had spent nights pretending the stars were things that could be lured to earth. That the fairy rings thick with white-capped mushrooms were the light of the moon seared into the ground.

But Ivy was gone, and the trees didn’t answer.

Or they wanted to be sure he never forgot that he was different from his classmates. The Henrys and Christophers. The Lilys and Julias.

Who was he going to believe? A dark-skinned boy who’d just had his arm against his classmate’s neck, or this freckled girl with curls the color of the construction-paper pumpkins six-year-olds cut out at the grade school?

“We don’t get to become who we are for nothing. It costs something. You’re fighting for every little piece of yourself. And maybe I got all of me all at once but I lost everything else. Don’t you dare think there’s any water in the world that makes this easy.”

The thoughts of everything he wanted were so bright and numerous, like threads of sun coming through at the edges of his mother’s curtains. He wanted to be a girl who wanted to be a girl, or a boy who was, in

a way no one could question, a boy. He wanted to be able to hang his moons in the trees without having his name stripped down to Moon. He wanted to remember if he’d asked to be called Sam or if his mother had decided this was his nickname, if she worried that Samir was a name that would, to everyone else, make him even more different than he already was. He wanted to know if Miel had chosen him, or if she’d just fallen into the familiar rhythm of their nights outside because he was the first one to be unafraid of her. 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.

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.

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. She would know him as well as he knew the maria in the moon atlases.

She didn’t want to fear anything. She wanted to be as fearless and generous as the woman who stood in this indigo room, for her laugh to be like Aracely’s, both reckless and kind.

“Miel,” Aracely said. “This isn’t me hiding. Me trying to be her son, that was hiding. This”—the tips of her nails, painted the color of champagne, grazed Miel’s forearm—“this is me not hiding.”