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

Chloe’s body held another little life.
    â€œYou’re not going to kill your roses anymore,” Ivy said again, opening a sideboard drawer. Each word was as calm and sure as the first time. “When you grow one, you’re going to bring it to us.”
    In Ivy’s face, Miel saw a calm that fell between them like a sheet. The Bonner girls were losing their strange power, but Ivy thought these roses could get it back. They could make any boys they wanted fall in love with them. This town would understand that the Bonner girls could take whatever they wanted. And that fact would ring louder than any whispers about Chloe.
    Miel looked around the downstairs, wondering where Mr. and Mrs. Bonner were. Either they weren’t home, or they were upstairs, or the sisters didn’t care. If they thought their daughters were, for once, having someone over, they might be keeping their distance, not wanting to disturb the strange, unknowable act of girls becoming friends.
    â€œNo,” Miel said. “They’re mine.” The words sounded petty, but they were true. Her roses belonged to her. Her cutting them away and then drowning them was her offering to the mother who had feared them.
    Chloe tilted her head. Her braid skimmed the side of her neck and traced the outer curve of her breast. Miel wondered if her breasts were heavy and full, and if so, how long it would take her body to realize there was no baby here, no one needing her milk.
    But Lian spoke before Chloe did.
    â€œIt must make you sad,” Lian said, in a way that wasn’t warm enough to sound kind or sharp enough to sound mean. “What happened with your mother.”
    Miel’s neck turned as perspiration-damp as the night she and Sam saw a lynx in the woods. Its pale fur had shone in the dark, its ruff banded in black. It had eyes the color of the dark yellow veins in canyon jasper. Two wisps of dark fur curved off the tips of its ears.
    Don’t run, Sam had told her. You’ll just be telling her you’re less than she is.
    I am less than she is, Miel had said. The lynx’s fur, gray tinged with red and gold, had looked like strands of light.
    â€œYou don’t know anything about my mother,” Miel said.
    â€œI heard a story from a woman a few towns up the river,” Chloe said. “One of my aunt’s friends. This old lady who talked about a woman who tried to kill her children and then killed herself.”
    â€œThat’s not what happened,” Miel said. None of that was the way it happened.
    â€œI doubt that’s what people would think if they knew,” Chloe said.
    Lower your head, Sam had told her the night they saw the lynx. And your eyes.
    Miel had, tipping her chin down, still watching the lynx’s face. She still remembered the feeling of perspiration dampening the small of her back.
    Now back up, he’d said. Slowly. You don’t want to look like you’re retreating.
    I am retreating, she’d said.
    Miel met Chloe’s gaze, shrugging and shaking her head to say, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The woman in the old lady’s story could have been any woman, anyone else’s mother.
    â€œYou look like her,” Lian said, without malice, not baiting her. But Miel almost asked where they had gotten a picture of her mother, did they have it or was it pasted into that old woman’s photo album.
    She didn’t ask. But stopping herself was enough of a flinch to tell them they were right.
    One flinch, and they had her.
    Miel not only had the petals they thought could root them back into being the Bonner sisters. She had committed the crime of witnessing one of them fail, seeing Ivy and that bored, polite boy.
    Peyton was still tracing that water mark. She couldn’t meet Miel’s eye. Of course she couldn’t, not after everything Sam had done for her.
    Miel tried to make her feet move, but her shoes felt heavy as glass.
    The