But he couldn’t force out the sound.
He wished he were different. He wanted to laugh off her words, to say back, Oh, very funny. Short of the kind of miracles Aracely taught Miel out of her Bible, Sam wasn’t getting anyone pregnant.
“And you trust her,” his mother said, more checking than questioning.
Of course he trusted Miel. She knew everything that could wreck him, but acted like she didn’t.
When he was eight, and she walked in on him changing, she didn’t scream, or run down the hall. She just shut the door and left, and when he pulled on his jeans and his shirt and went after her, he found her sitting on the back steps. Her expression was so full of both wondering and recognition, as though she almost understood but not quite, that he sat down next to her and told her more than he’d ever planned to.
Now, she slipped him tampons at school because he couldn’t risk carrying them in his bag. They had it timed so they passed each other while she was leaving the girls’ bathroom and he was going into the boys’, the two of them clasping hands just long enough for the handoff.
Once they’d worked out the system, they never spoke of it again, and she never brought it up. He never asked how she always knew when. He didn’t have to. They’d spent enough time together that their bodies had pulled on each other, and they now bled at the same time, when the moon was a thin curve of light. If Miel had been anyone else, her knowing this, the steady rhythm of her knowing every month, would have been humiliating.
Sam braced himself, though for what he wasn’t sure. Not a morality lecture. His mother had never cautioned him to wait until he was married. Agnostic, indifferent to the faiths of both her father’s family and her mother’s, she had barely tolerated Sam going along with Miel and Aracely to church and Sunday school. She allowed it only because she thought things would be easier for him if this town thought he was a good Christian boy, a phrase she never said without disdain edging her words. She’d made it clear that any God she believed in could not be contained within walls, certainly not inside the whitewashed clapboard of the local church.
But he was never supposed to sleep with a girl. This had been temporary, him living this way, with his breasts bound flat and his hair cut as short as his mother would let him. It was so he could take care of his mother, so there would be a man of the house even though his mother had no sons.
“Are you mad?” he asked, trying not to cringe and look down. His mother hated when he did that, which made him tend toward it even more.
“If you didn’t hurt yourself or anyone else, it’s not my place to be,” she said.
Sometimes she said things like that, and he could almost see the pallor of frost on her words. It’s not my place to be disappointed, she’d said when he was failing math three years ago. It’s your future, not mine. And that made him feel even worse.
But it wasn’t like that now. There wasn’t the same posture of holding herself tall and straight, her expression still. Now her face looked soft with worry. Worse, pity.
“Are you upset?” he asked.
She put her fingers to her temple, shut her eyes, let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. “Sam,” she said, the word sounding like wind, like a soft, sad song.
Whenever she said his name like that, it meant the same thing. That whether she or anyone else was upset wasn’t the point. That, failing math grade or lost virginity, this was his life, and to her mind, he wasn’t acting like it, not as long as his first question was Are you mad?
“Are you okay?” his mother asked.
“I think so,” he said.
“Is she?”
“I think so.”
He would grow out of this, he wanted to tell her. The same way he’d grown out of saying his favorite color was clear (Why? Miel had asked him. Because everything clear is magic, because it’s invisible, he’d told her) and Miel had grown out of saying her favorite color was rainbow (Why? he’d asked her. Because they all look prettier together, she’d said, and because I don’t want to pick.).
He would wait it out.