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

night they saw the lynx, Sam had put his hand on her shoulder blade, and guided her out of the lynx’s line of sight. The warmth of his palm had come through her shirt so quickly she thought the pattern of blush-colored flowers would turn dark as wet cranberries.
    But she was not as calm, as steady with logic, as Sam.
    â€œIsn’t it worth it to you?” Chloe asked. “So everyone doesn’t find out all the terrible things she did?”
    Of course it was worth it to Miel. If people told those stories about her mother, her mother’s spirit would feel it. She’d be haunted, weighted by all those lies. Her spirit would never find any rest. She was already weighted down having a daughter born with roses in her body, a curse that spurred those petaled children to turn on their mothers.
    Now, because of Miel, because of the roses the Bonner girls wanted, her mother would be blamed, slandered. What worse could Miel bring on her mother’s soul?
    Without even meaning to, she had become everything a rose-cursed daughter was feared to be, a disgrace and burden to her own blood.
    A breeze came in the screen door, ruffling Miel’s skirt. The damp hem brushed the backs of her knees. Streamers of chilled air snaked up her sleeves, cooling the wound her roses grew from. They felt solid as ribbons, tethering her to this spot on the Bonners’ floor.
    The sideboard drawer slid shut, the wood rasping against a worn track. But Miel didn’t see the scissors until Ivy was peeling back her sweater sleeve. Tarnish dulled the brass of the blades, the handle rubbed shiny by the oils of the Bonners’ hands.
    It didn’t make sense.
    They thought Miel could give them back whatever they had lost.
    They didn’t understand that the only way to do that would be for Chloe never to have gone away. Chloe was a tree ripped out of and then planted back into an orchard, her roots and the roots of every tree near her shocked by the turning over of earth.
    But Miel couldn’t move. She was letting them, because they were the Bonner girls, and all of them had their stares on her. Ivy’s, her eyes a gray that made the red of her hair look hot as a live coal. Lian’s, a green as deep as her hair was dark red. Chloe’s and Peyton’s, both their eyes a brown that in certain lights looked dark gray.
    Because together they had so much shared gravity they pulled toward that navy blue house anything they wanted. Because they were four brilliant red lynxes, and she could not run.
    Ivy snipped the stem.
    The cut bit into Miel, like thorns waited under her skin. She cried out for just a second before biting back the sound.
    The feeling came back into her body. Pain snapped away the ribbons of cool air tethering her to the floor. And she ran, holding her wrist against her chest. The stub of a cut stem dripped blood onto her sweater sleeve, like a broken branch of star jasmine letting off milk.
    She threw the screen door open and let it slam shut.
    Among the flecks of orange and white in the pumpkin fields were small glints of light, like the field was dark velvet dotted with white opal.
    Her eyes adjusted, the vines and little points of light sharpening.
    Glass. The pumpkins were turning to glass. Everything that whirled between the Bonner sisters had not stayed inside that house. It had not huddled inside the sisters’ bedrooms. It would not be locked inside their closets or hidden on shelves under their sweaters.
    It had slid out here, creeping over their family’s fields, this land they would inherit. It was seeping into the pumpkins so that each one now held a little storm spinning it to glass. It made the pumpkins brittle and hard and unyielding as the bond between those four girls. Miel could almost feel it skimming her neck like fingers of cold air. If she stayed still, it would find its way into her. It would make her breakable.
    It would turn her to glass.
    Miel ran down the path to the