If she hadn’t been so streaked in her own blood, her shirt so dyed red, he would’ve laughed. She couldn’t stand on her own. The flush had come back into her cheeks and her lips, but she was still shaking enough that he was ready to carry her if he had to.
She was already leaning on him, trying to get to her feet. He steadied her, standing with her, holding an arm around her waist.
“You have to leave,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was watching a point between the trees, a dark space among the fingers of yellow leaves.
It wasn’t until the wind calmed that he heard why.
The sound of the Bonner girls’ voices, the mingling of higher and lower pitches, their shared cadence. But instead of reckless and laughing, their voices sounded taut and pressing. They hushed each other.
“Did they do this to you?” he asked. Every time he’d covered for Peyton, every time he’d tried to remind Lian that she was not as slow as everyone thought, each hour he’d worked for Mr. Bonner, stuck him like the thorns on his mother’s Callery pear tree. Not the short, clean thorns on Miel’s roses. The Callery pear’s were little daggers, rough, and each as long as Miel’s fingers.
He felt the warmth of Miel’s palm on his collarbone. Her blood had stained his undershirt, and her hand left a soft imprint of red.
Now she was looking at him. “You have to leave.”
“Miel,” he said, their faces close enough that he could see her pupils spreading and contracting. “Are they the ones who did this to you?”
“Go,” she said. “You have to leave.”
“So do you,” he said.
“I’m not backing down on this,” she said, looking toward the trees. Fear cut into the resolve in her voice. “I’m not backing down from them. Not anymore.”
“And I’m not leaving you alone.”
“Dammit, Sam.” She broke away from him.
The sudden movement must have hurt her. She clutched her wrist against her, rubbing the back of her forearm with her other hand. Her steps wavered, and he set a hand on her back.
Her eyes were so coated in tears she was a blink from them spilling over. She stared, her mouth half-open.
The trembling in her eyelashes and lips was more than pain. It almost looked like pity. Her pursed lips, the slight tilt to her head, the cringe of a lost cause. Like Sam was a child trying to bring back to life a bird fallen from a nest.
“They know about you,” she said.
Each word was another thorn off that pear tree. Their points didn’t slide all the way into him, like the thought of the Bonner sisters hurting Miel. But they pricked him, left him scratched.
“What?” he asked.
“They saw your birth certificate,” she said. “They have a copy.”
Now those thorns were shredding his clothes, cutting them away from his body.
“They could out you to everyone,” Miel said. She stumbled forward, away from his hand. That film of water spilled over and fell down her cheeks.
He could not shrug away the sense that his shirt, his binder, his jeans, were all turning to pieces. They were falling away from him, leaving him naked to the night and all these trees.
But it was his body. It was his to name. And he was under this roof of gold and darkness with a girl who would learn to call him whatever he named himself.
He would never let go of Samira, that girl his mother imagined when he was born. She would follow him, a blur he thought he saw out of the corner of his eye when he stood at the counter, making roti with his mother. Or he would see the silhouette of Samira crossing the woods, wearing the skirts that fit her but he could never make himself fit. Maybe one day he would see her shape, her dark hands setting the lantern of a hollow pumpkin into the water, candle lighting the carved shapes.
But this was what she would be now, his shadow, an echo of what he once was and thought he would be again. She would be less like someone he was supposed to become, and more like a sister who lived in places he could not map, a sister who kept a light but constant grasp on both his hand and his grandmother’s.
No one could make him be Samira. Not him. Not the Bonner sisters. Not the signatures on that piece of paper.
The girl he needed did not hide and wait inside him. She stood with him. She always had, this girl of wildflowers and feather grass, this girl he’d painted a thousand lunar seas, a hundred incarnations of mare nectaris and sinus iridum.
Sam pulled Miel into him, her forearm the only thing between them. “I don’t care what they have,” he said.
“Sam,” she said.
He held on to her, keeping her up. “If you’re doing this, we do this together.”
“Sam.” His name broke into pieces on her tongue.
“Samir.” He put his hand to her face, his thumb grazing her damp cheek.
She pressed her lips together, blinking against the tear caught at the inner corner of her eye.
He set the pad of his thumb against it, and she shut her eyes.
“You can call me whatever you want, but my name is Samir.”