When the Moon was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore Read Free Book Online

hung up, so softly the noise was a single, crisp click.
    Ivy’s voice stayed inside Miel’s ear like the sound of the ocean caught in a shell. The words had sounded open, guileless, one girl asking another outside to play. But there was also the edge of something a little alluring, like the piloncillo sugar Aracely melted into hot chocolate. It made Miel cringe, thinking of every time Sam heard that voice as he bent down to the vines crossing the Bonners’ fields.
    But in those two words, Miel thought she caught a little of that same sadness. Ivy’s voice matched that same blank, damp-cheeked look she’d had by the river. So she did what Ivy said.
    If no one in this town had cared what happened to Miel, she would still be wild-eyed, hiding in the brush where the old water tower had fallen, or in Sam’s house, his mother wondering what to do with her. It was the least Miel could do to go over, even if the Bonner sisters, the whole Bonner house, scared her. The Bonner sisters talked to so few people outside that house that Ivy’s request seemed like something of an honor, and something dangerous to turn down.
    Compared to the violet house Miel and Aracely lived in, with Aracely’s blue-green cups and her kitchen table, yellow as a Meyer lemon, the Bonners’ farmhouse looked so neat and tame. That navy paint made the white trim so bright. The shutters were hooked in place. The lace curtains in the windows looked age-softened, but Mrs. Bonner bleached them so often they never yellowed.
    The door was open, only the screen shut. That seemed like an invitation to come in without ringing the bell.
    The strangest thing about the house was their mother’s mint-green refrigerator, an antique that, according to Aracely, she spent more money to repair than it would have cost to replace it. The rest was so much more muted, so ordinary, compared to the girls and even the farm. The kitchen counters were plain white tile. Linen dish towels, creased and folded, were stacked next to the sink. There was no orange like the girls’ hair or the Cinderella pumpkins, flat and deep-ribbed. No deep green or gold or blue-gray like the few rare ones dotting the fields.
    Miel’s eyes moved over the first floor, until they landed on those four shades of red hair.
    Las gringas bonitas. All four of them. The Bonner girls clustered around a wooden dining room. Round, no bigger than needed to fit the six Bonners, or at most, them and a couple of guests. As though Mr. and Mrs. Bonner assumed their daughters would never leave them, or that they would leave and never come back, never bring their husbands and children for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
    Chloe still wore those cigarette jeans, but now with a turtleneck that covered her freckled collarbone. Lian had pulled her hair, so much darker than the rest of theirs but still so red, into a bun that was already falling out. She rested her elbows on the table, one hand cupped loosely in the other. Peyton was tracing her finger along the circle of a water stain, her hair in a braid so much like Chloe’s that Chloe must have done it.
    Ivy leaned against a sideboard, hip against a drawer.
    They all looked at Miel.
    They’d all been waiting.
    â€œYou’re not going to kill your roses anymore,” Ivy said.
    It wasn’t until that moment that Miel noticed the vase at the table’s center. She wondered how she’d missed it, the glass as dark blue as the Bonners’ house.
    The sleeve of Miel’s sweater covered her newest rose, as pale yellow as a candle flame. But Lian and Chloe were looking at her wrist as though they could see through the fabric.
    She pulled her eyes away from the vase, to the Bonner sisters’ faces.
    Miel looked at Ivy. “They don’t do what you think they do,” she said. Her roses, left under a pillow, would not make boys fall in love with the Bonner sisters. They would not give them back what they had before