The crushing of leaves announced the Bonner sisters. They emerged from the yellow leaves, the shades of their hair like the different colors in a bloom of flame. They wore sweaters as deep and vivid as the panels of stained glass. Dark green and purple. Blue and red.
Their eyes, two sets of brown, the others green and gray, met on Sam and Miel, their bodies crushed together.
Sam pressed his hand against the back of Miel’s neck. But he didn’t look away from the four of them. He met as many of their eyes at a time as he could. First Peyton’s and Lian’s, his stare straying to Ivy and Chloe.
He straightened his back, trying to stand as tall as his mother. The soreness in his arm felt like a charm, a coin Miel had slipped into his hand. A reminder.
“I’m a boy,” he said, because the rest did not matter.
He felt Miel watching him. Her whispered What are you doing? warmed his neck.
The lies, the rumors that might touch him tomorrow, did not matter right now. The truth was currency, new and shining. It let off light, glowing like the moon he’d set on the ground.
“I’m a boy,” he said, “and I always have been.”
The Bonner girls blinked at him, staying in their line, a row of vivid hair and sweaters.
Then a splintering sound, like a sheet of ice giving beneath too much weight, cut through the air.
Sam and Miel and all four of the Bonner sisters turned their faces to its source.
A crack, thick and deep as a line of paint, crossed the stained glass.
bay of rainbows
The six of them were watching that crack crawl across the green and violet.
Samir. He was calling himself Samir. And he was looking the Bonner sisters in their faces—their faces that seemed like different panes in the same sheet of stained glass—and telling them that he knew what they knew, and he didn’t care.
One set of eyes at a time, the Bonner girls were looking from the cracked stained glass to Sam and Miel. Brown and green and gray all swirling and settling on them.
Their stare was heavy as a coating of snow. It felt colder in contrast with the warmth of Sam’s body, his lack of hesitation when Miel dropped her forearm from between them and he let his chest touch her. He didn’t flinch away or twist his shoulder so he would not feel the front of him, would not remember what he had under the shirt that bound him down.
She thought of Aracely, coming out of the water soaked and a stranger to her own body. Surfacing as someone older than when she’d gone in, while the water had kept Miel the same age. Back then, Miel had the sorrow of a child. But Aracely’s heart carried the sadness of the woman she would become.
Sorrow kept Miel still, but had aged Aracely. And that same sorrow was keeping Miel still now.
Her mother hadn’t hated her. She knew that. She’d feared for her. She’d loved Miel, seen her as a daughter she could lose to petals and thorns. She’d been a young mother little older than Aracely, panicked and desperate to hold on to the children she’d made.
What mother could resist a hundred tales of roses that had stolen the souls of sons and daughters? What mother could stand against her husband’s insistence that their daughter was sick, and needed to be cured, and not want to find a gentler way to do it than the sting of hot metal?
What woman could ignore the warnings of se?oras and priests who said they knew how to save her child? How could she not bring her daughter down to the river when they promised the current would take this curse from her?
Miel could not choose if Ivy or the other Bonner girls or anyone else told lies.
But she could tell the truth.
Miel found Ivy’s eyes.
“My mother loved me,” she said. Maybe her father had too. Maybe all he did—the bandages so tight her fingers turned numb, the end of the butter knife in the gas flame—was the form his love had taken. Maybe fear had twisted it, leaving it threadbare.
But this was the thing she could remember, the thing she could say out loud.
Miel couldn’t tell for sure from the faint light, the glow of the moon above them and the moon Sam had brought with him. But Ivy’s eyes looked slicked wet like silver.
“My mother”—Miel said, letting each word fall with its own weight—“loved me.”
She felt the sky taking the words, singing them back, like thunder echoing between clouds. They were the scream of the wind.
They were the sound of another crack snaking through the lid of the stained glass coffin. The faint light of stars and the sickle moon shining off the glass, showing how the crack had cut it in half.
A flare lit in Peyton’s eyes.
She took a step back from her sisters, her glance skittering between them and the stained glass coffin.
“I like girls more than boys,” she said, and a set of cracks snapped through the stained glass, with as many branches as a bare winter bough.
The rest of them flinched, drawing back.
Lian’s posture rose, making her look almost as tall as Chloe.
Her irises took on a brighter color, like the green of spring leaves warming and lightening to the green of tart apples.
“I understand more than any of you know,” Lian said, and another set of branching cracks frosted the glass.