Miel wondered how long it’d been here. Where the Bonner girls, whichever generation of them, had gotten the stained glass, Miel would never know. Maybe they had bought it, bartered for it, or stolen it. Not that the Bonner women ever needed to steal anything themselves. From what Miel had heard, sets of beautiful sisters glittered through this family like flecks of mica in sand. It made Mr. Bonner as terrified of his daughters as he’d been of his sisters and aunts, and Mrs. Bonner baffled by her husband’s family, all those flame-haired women.
All they would have needed to do was lower the soft screen of their red-gold eyelashes to get men to tear the bright glass panels from the windows of their own church. With flashes of their cream-white shoulders, they could have gotten those same men to hand over the stained glass like boxes of violet candy. Miel imagined them flirting with metalsmiths, who would have charged them nothing to join the loose panels into this box and trim the corners and edges in rose brass.
“It got covered over for a few years,” Ivy said. “Vines and leaves practically buried the thing.” She made a half-circle around the stained glass, and Miel felt the unease of thinking that somehow, if there were smudges or fingerprints, Ivy would hold her responsible. “My parents didn’t want us to know about it. They pretended the whole thing was a rumor. But we found it.”
When Ivy said something she hadn’t shown anyone, she’d meant anyone except her sisters. It hadn’t so much been a lie—the Bonner girls were as linked as cells in a single organism, breathing together—as the fact of Ivy keeping no secrets from her sisters was implied.
“Well, Chloe and I found it,” Ivy said. “But we all cleaned it up.”
“Why?” Miel asked.
Ivy stopped, her face scrunching into a smile like Miel was slow. “Because it’s ours,” she said. “Everyone should take care of what’s theirs.”
Miel caught the movement of two shadows. She couldn’t make out their shapes yet. She just sensed them passing under the trees, like the minute before she and Sam had seen the lynx.
“I’m surprised you don’t know already,” Ivy said.
Miel turned back to Ivy. “Know what?”
“That things go easier when you just give people what they want.”
Miel felt that pair of shadows drawing closer. The second she looked toward the trees again, Ivy grabbed her. Miel tried to wrench away from her hold. But Ivy’s fingers were hot on her wrists. When she grabbed the place Miel had just trimmed a rose from, pain spun through her arm.
Miel tried to twist away from her, but then everything was orange and red, not just Ivy, but Lian’s loose auburn hair and the muted orange of Peyton’s curls. And when their hands all fell on her, she knew it was true, that they were one animal in many bodies. When one set of fingers lost its grip, another tightened. When Miel threw her weight against one of them, another pulled her back so the force dissipated and did not land.
Ivy pushed the lid of the stained glass coffin open, and they forced Miel in. Miel’s knees hit first, the impact reverberating up to her wrist. She collapsed on her side, and all those hands shoved her limbs within its walls so Ivy could throw the lid shut.
Miel turned, holding her hands up to stop it from closing, but the weight drove her down, and the sound of a latch clicking echoed through the glass.
She pushed up on the lid. It did not move. She shoved her weight against the panel. It stayed in place, sealed shut.
That latch would not open from the inside.
She banged on the lid.
The walls barely gave her enough room to twist her body. She tried to throw her shoulder at the side, and then the lid. She tried to shove her weight against the panels, aiming for the places where long cracks cut through the patterns. But the cracks, even the long ones, were shallow, and didn’t give, and she was trapped like a moth in a killing jar. Only the cold wisp of a few holes in the glass let her breathe.
Movement outside the glass made her turn her head.
The bright fall trees and the color of the stained glass blurred her view. But she thought she made out Ivy’s copper hair vanishing. Peyton and Lian stayed, the orange and auburn of their hair still. They left their pale arms loose by their sides, standing guard.
Miel tried to scream, but there was so little air in here that the heat and the walls stole the sound from her throat. She tried to grab on to something that would let her breathe. The smell of Sam’s skin and hair.
The way Aracely had just painted her nails with plum polish and tipped them in silver, or how she put on her alexandrite bracelet, sparkling like the soft purple of hydrangeas.
The roof tiles on Sam’s house, varied like kernels on an ear of glass-gem corn. Slate blue and deep yellow. Dull rose and dusk violet. She thought of the rows of flat stones, set in the grass, that led to the door of Sam’s house.
But she could only smell the salt on her own damp skin. Thinking of Aracely’s nails or those roof tiles made her think of the colors of all this stained glass. She was losing her breath to it. It was taking her under.
southern sea
That afternoon, Sam ran into Lian on the brick path that led to the Bonners’ door.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“I think you should go fuck yourself,” she said, and turned around fast enough that her hair fanned like a wing.