“If I could tell you about it I wouldn’t need to show you.” Ivy said it like it was a secret shared with a child, not with the allure, the tilt of her neck, that the Bonner sisters liked showing both boys and other girls.
Miel looked over her shoulder at the road. But running again felt like both an admission that she was afraid and a kind of escalation.
“Will you relax?” Ivy said. “I’m not mad.”
“You’re not?” Miel asked, hating the deference in her own voice.
“I don’t get mad,” Ivy said. “Nobody should. What does that do?”
She sounded like Sam’s mother, and Miel wondered if she’d picked it up from her. Even the Bonner girls must have appreciated the glamour of Yasmin’s pressed white shirts, her thick eyeliner and jewelry made of oversized quartz and jasper. She’d tutored the Bonner girls a few times, not every week the way she did with the children of so many families, but when Mrs. Bonner had a bad cold, and they fell behind on their lesson plans.
“You’re mad though,” Ivy said.
“No, I’m not,” Miel said.
“Yes, you are. You feel like I took something from you without giving you anything.”
The thought of the tarnished scissors in Ivy’s hands made Miel clutch her forearm.
It wasn’t about Ivy not giving her anything. It wasn’t about her and her sisters keeping their stares on her, the numbing spell of those eight eyes, so she didn’t realize what they were taking until the snap of those brass blades.
“That’s why I want to show you something no one else gets to see,” Ivy said. “Something I haven’t shown anyone.”
A flickering in Miel’s rib cage told her to run. But another current inside her pushed her toward following Ivy. Both because she was a little curious, and because when a Bonner girl offered a secret, it seemed foolish and antagonistic to refuse it. Once Lian Bonner had a birthday party, one of the few the Bonner girls had invited anyone but family to. Lian heard Elise Shanholt calling the girls creepy, saying she wouldn’t come within a mile of that house, wouldn’t go to that party even if Nate Stuart’s hot older brother wanted her to be his date to it.
So Ivy and Peyton had stolen her cat, a beautiful orange tabby as big as a raccoon. They petted it, gave it cream they skimmed themselves, laughed when a dose of catnip made it bat at its own tail.
It didn’t take long before Elise discovered who’d taken it. But when she came to get it, it wailed and clawed and wouldn’t go with her. It ran from her, circling Ivy’s legs and then jumping onto Lian’s lap. Elise’s parents said they’d get her another cat, told her to look, weren’t the girls taking good care of it, and it wasn’t their fault if it had taken to them.
Miel remembered Elise crying in the halls for a week over that. Even her parents had taken the Bonner girls’ side. And that cat roamed the Bonners’ farm until it died last spring, always running back to the girls who’d stolen it.
For Miel to refuse Ivy’s gift, to turn her back now, would be a declaration of war. The girl from the violet house against the sisters who lived in the navy one.
So she went with Ivy.
The deeper they walked into those gold and orange woods, the more she flitted between fear and excitement. That was the thrill of the Bonner sisters, she guessed, to the boys who loved them. That they never knew in which parts to be elated and terrified. Their time being loved by a Bonner girl might be short and sudden as a firework, or long and spun out, and they never knew which. The letdown would be either soft or brutal, and they never knew which.
Only a few columns of light pierced the trees. But this time of year the trees were their own light, amber and coral and butter-colored. Ivy stopped in a grove that was almost all yellow, the flat gold of cottonwood and birch and tulip poplar.
A large box, long and wide as a florist’s case or a coffin, sat on the ground, its sides and lid and even its floor made of stained glass. It had been laid down, on the base where a body would rest flat, as though at any moment the whole box might sink into the ground and become a grave. Whorls of deep red and violet crossed the panels. Sprays of milky stars floated over a field of dark blue and green. Even the long cracks slicing the planets and constellations didn’t make it less beautiful.
“So it’s true,” Miel said.
“Half-true,” Ivy said. “It doesn’t make us pretty if that’s what you’re wondering.”