When the Moon was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore Page B

pumpkins and deep orange Rouge Vif d’Etampes, and Miel would hide in the hallway closet. Aracely would narrate her progress from the kitchen. I’m splitting it open, Miel. Okay, now I’m hollowing it out. I’m putting it in the pot now. But Miel stayed in the closet, worried that new vines might sprout from the pumpkin’s severed stem.
    That was probably another thing Aracely had almost asked ten times, opening her mouth and then hesitating. Why, to Miel, a pumpkin couldn’t just be a pumpkin. A question Aracely knew better than to say out loud. That hesitation always told Miel that the words on Aracely’s tongue had more weight than Are we out of blue eggs? or Have you seen my yellow sweater? Miel wondered if a look crossed her face that showed Aracely the thread of fear in her. Please. Please don’t ask questions. Please don’t wreck this, this life I have with you, by making me tell you.
    Now, standing at the edge of the Bonners’ farm, Miel wrapped her arms around herself, fingers digging in. Light from the Bonners’ house poured onto the fields, warming the soft gray color of the Lumina pumpkins. The sight of each rind covered Miel in the feeling that it could crush her, that it could put out vines and sink them into her. It would draw the life out of her and grow bigger, and she would become small enough for it to swallow.
    She was stupid to come here, and she knew it. It was after midnight, hours too late to pretend she’d stopped by to find Sam, or even to lie that she’d come to see Lian or Peyton.
    But she had to see the pumpkins.
    It hadn’t been the fever of Ivy cutting away her rose. More of the pumpkins had become glass. Constellations of them glinted, each one heavy and shining. The living flesh of a few pumpkins had turned, like flowers freezing into ice.
    The little storm held between the Bonner sisters had spilled out of their family’s house. They were shifting to try to give Chloe back the space she’d held, but they couldn’t settle into where they’d been before she left. They still held that shared power of being Bonner girls. It had kept its sharpness. But it was turning into something halting and jagged. And now the fields were showing it.
    The night air covered Miel. The cold threaded through her, and in the hollow of the wind she heard the sad murmur of her mother’s voice. To everyone else, it would sound like the warning of a storm. But if Miel listened, if she shut her eyes and found that humming under the wind, she heard her mother, caught between this life and leaving it.
    She could never hear her father. She couldn’t even remember if he’d died or if he’d left them. But how could he have left them? Miel held on to the thought of him wrapping a bandage around her wrist. Her saying It’s hurting me when he fastened it too tight, and his calm voice saying it needed to be tight, to heal.
    His mild dismay when he checked on the wound and found it growing new leaves. His assurances that don’t worry, mija, we’ll get it next time, as though he could will her rose to vanish.
    Those memories—even if they were laced with the feeling that they were not real, that they belonged to some other girl and Miel had stolen them—were her certainty that her father did not leave them.
    That left the awful possibility that they’d lost him. It left Miel to guess how, to wonder if it was her fault.
    With each wink of glass the moon found, her mother’s song sounded a little sharper, a little more like weak sobbing.
    Mr. and Mrs. Bonner would notice. And if they asked, their daughters would blame Miel. Chloe and Ivy would tell their mother and father that Miel was not only a girl once made of water, but that she’d had a mother who tried to kill her. The girls half this town thought were witches would call Miel a witch, a wicked girl the river had kept and then given back, and who was now