Go fuck yourself. Sometimes varied as fuck off. Always the same response, as classic and timeless as the moss-colored eye shadow the Bonner sisters all seemed to share.
He shrugged. “Just checking,” he said.
Sam had the distinction of being the only person in this town Lian Bonner was rude to. But he took it as a compliment, and every few months he offered.
When the Bonner sisters went to the same school as Sam and Miel, everyone thought Lian was as dull as the patina on her copper bracelets. They said she passed her classes only because her sisters did her homework, and she was so compliant and docile the school administrators couldn’t bring themselves to fail her. Teachers never called on her, or asked her to read out loud, or write on the board. Sometimes, if people at school were feeling brave and sure that none of the Bonner sisters could hear, they’d laugh and say that the reason Lian’s hair was the darkest red of the four of them was because every one of her sisters was so much brighter than she was.
But he knew better. Even with the jokes that the Bonner sisters were now homeschooled because the only teacher who’d pass Lian was her mother, Sam knew better.
He also knew better than to push it. So when Lian told him to fuck off, he did.
That was the second Bonner sister he’d pissed off today. That had to be some kind of record. But the whole Bonner family was on edge, made nervous by the glass spreading through their fields, and the whispers about their brittle harvest. That afternoon, Mr. Bonner, a man as mild as the loaves of bread in plastic sleeves at the grocery store, had yelled at Sam for the first time since he’d started work at the farm. It had startled Sam, but he wrote it off as a result of how, each morning, the Bonners woke and found that more pumpkins had turned hard and shining, dew beading the glass.
Earlier, at school, he’d seen the Bonner sisters hanging around Ms. Owens’ desk, acting like they were still enrolled. Ms. Owens, the young and pretty but bony and very pale woman who ran the school administration office, had near-permanent mascara stains around her eyes. She always seemed to be crying into a frill-edged handkerchief, but he knew from experience that asking her what was wrong just earned him her sharp insistence that it was allergies, and he should mind his own business.
Today the Bonner sisters, all of them, even though Chloe had graduated and the rest were now homeschooled, had crushed around Ms. Owens’ desk. Not even in front of it, but behind it, with Ms. Owens, sharing empty desk chairs and whispering to her as she nodded. Her thin ponytail bobbed enough to reflect the fluorescent lights. What were they doing with that poor woman?
When the four of them left, Sam had caught Peyton in the hallway.
“Isn’t she a little old for you?” Sam asked.
For a second Peyton looked terrified, the way she always did at any mention of the fact that she liked girls and not boys. Her eyes spread so big he could see a thread of white around each iris.
But then she glared at him and caught up with her sisters.
Sam should’ve known better than to cross anyone he didn’t have to. In this town, he was too dark to blend in among the fair-haired boys crowding the classrooms.
A few of the blond ones, their skin so pink their necks looked red even in winter, told him to go back home, and it had taken him a week of first grade to realize they didn’t mean the bright-tiled house where he lived with his mother.
The sons of the farmworkers assumed he thought he was better than they were, and he didn’t know how to correct them without proving their point. Being friends with Miel didn’t change anything to them. Their blood traced them back to the same parts of the world, but their grandmothers had taught them to stay away from any girl whose body grew something more than hair and skin, unless she was a saint.
After his shift, Sam walked home, the air cooling down and the sky turning from the blue-gray of Jarrahdale pumpkins to a deep, clear blue that made the clouds look sponge-painted.
On the way to his house, he always passed Miel’s. That house had become almost as much of a home to him as his own.
Miel hadn’t turned her bedroom lamp on. But light filled the kitchen window. As he passed the house, he found not Miel’s dark hair, full and messy, but Aracely’s, blond and brushed.
Aracely stood at the kitchen sink. She lifted her wet hands to her head and twirled her hair into a bun, pinning it in place by spearing it with the handle of a spoon.
Maybe sleeping with Miel had made Sam’s world a little sharper. He’d already felt it, how the rinds of pumpkins felt cooler against his hands. How Miel’s hair smelled like the rain-slicked lemons Aracely sent her outside for.