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 turning their fields to glass.
The lies in the Bonner girls’ hands were a thousand pairs of scissors, brass and tarnished. If they spread that story, her mother’s soul would never be free of it. It would follow her, pin its weight to her and drag her down. Her mother already stayed too close, watching Miel and looking for the brother Miel would never see again.
She had to do what Ivy said. She had to wait for her next rose to grow and open, and then she had to let the Bonner sisters have it.
The question of why they wanted them pinched at her. It couldn’t have been as simple as making boys fall in love with them. They already knew how to do that. Even Chloe, months gone, with the rumors trailing through her hair like ribbons, hadn’t lost the shimmer that lived on their skin.
That was the worst thing, the not knowing. If them wanting the roses was about any boy in particular, or all of them. If it meant Ivy was set on the boy who’d been so disinterested at the river, or if one of her sisters had decided on a boy from another town who had never heard of the Bonner girls, and would be unprepared for the force of them.
Or Sam. That possibility whispered to Miel too. He worked at their family’s farm. No other boy had ever gotten that close to the Bonner girls without wanting them.
Miel put her palm to her wrist, the muscle still sore. And the words she hadn’t been able to find when Ivy opened those scissors filled her mouth.
No, she whispered over those fields. No, you can’t have this part of me.
If they tried to take Sam, she’d do anything she could to stop them, but that choice was his. This one was hers.
I am not your garden, she said, the words no louder than the thread of her mother’s voice the wind carried.
I am not one of your father’s pumpkin vines.
You do not own what I grow.
The wind, and the crackling sounds of leaves and vines, answered her.
Those glints of glass looked a little duller. Instead of their shine, she saw the cream gray of the Estrella pumpkins or the deep blue-green of Autumn Wings.
The wind, and that thread of her mother’s voice, quieted.
It was the first time the sight of pumpkins, fresh and alive, had warmed her. She stood facing those fields instead of cringing away. And this was as much of a sign as her mother had ever given her. Between them, pumpkins were a language as sharp as it was unknowable to anyone else. If she heard the distant rush of her mother’s voice, it was her blessing.
Miel wouldn’t do it. The next time she had a full rose on her wrist, she was staying far from the Bonner girls.
A tired feeling swept over her, equal parts exhaustion and relief. She wanted to sink into it, fall onto her bed with her clothes still on. No matter how the Bonner sisters thought they could threaten her, she wouldn’t give in to it. The decision had left her worn out, ready to slip beneath the glow of Sam’s moons.