Aracely pressed her fingers to the corner of her eye.
“The day she showed up,” Sam said. “The day they emptied the water tower. Why didn’t you come forward? Why didn’t you do something? Why’d you wait until I did?”
The sadness on Aracely’s face turned pure and pained, no bitterness or anger.
“I was going to,” she said. “But then I hesitated. She had no idea who I was. This woman she’d never met before? If I would’ve come near her, I just would’ve scared her. You saw how she was looking at everyone.”
Aracely folded one hand into the other, pressing both against her sternum.
“But you were little,” she said. “Almost as little as she was. You didn’t threaten her. I hesitated, and you did something before I did.”
Aracely had a right to Miel, a claim on her as her sister. And Sam had acted before Aracely could. He had never once regretted coming close to Miel when no one else had. He’d always counted it as one of the few good things he’d done, pure and certain.
But now the sudden guilt rounded his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m not,” Aracely said. “You made her feel safe. Enough that when I came to get her, she was ready.”
“When are you gonna tell her?” he asked.
Now her smile was amused, almost cruel but not quite. “When are you gonna tell your mother you’re not putting on a dress anytime soon?”
His throat tightened, and he felt them both settle into their stalemate.
With her words, everything he’d tried to pull out from her story rushed at him, like a paper moon he could not push underwater. It might vanish into a dark river for a second, but then it would appear downstream, pale and bright and bobbing along the surface.
The fact that Aracely might understand what he could not say, it seeded in him a want, new and raw, like not knowing he was thirsty until water was in front of him. No one else, not his mother, not even Miel, could understand this wanting to live a life different from the one he was born into, so much that his own skin felt like ice cracking.
It shouldn’t have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they wore skirts. Not when they went out as late as they wanted. Not when they told their brothers what to do, and borrowed their fathers’ books.
But there was everything else. The idea of being called Miss or Ms. or, worse, Mrs. The thought of being grouped in when someone called out girls or ladies. The endless, echoing use of she and her, miss and ma’am. Yes, they were words. They were all just words. But each of them was wrong, and they stuck to him. Each one was a golden fire ant, and they were biting his arms and his neck and his bound-flat chest, leaving him bleeding and burning.
He. Him. Mister. Sir. Even teachers admonishing him and his classmates with boys, settle down or gentlemen, please. These were sounds as perfect and clean as winter rain, and they calmed each searing bite of those wrong words.
“Does my mother know?” Sam asked. “About you?”
Aracely’s laugh was not the wild, reckless thing he sometimes heard coming from the wisteria-colored house. Now it was warm, almost pitying. “Of course she does. How do you think you ended up here?”
“What are you talking about?” Sam asked.
“I met your mother before you two moved here,” Aracely said. “She came with a cousin who wanted a lovesickness cure, and we started talking about you. I told her if she ever wanted to move out here, I couldn’t promise much, but I could promise I’d watch out for you.” This time Aracely’s laugh was lighter. She combed back a stray piece of her hair. “I never thought she’d take me up on it.”
“But we moved because she lost her job,” Sam said. “The school was making cuts, and they let her go.”
In Aracely’s smile, clench-lipped and sad, Sam saw the truth.
The school hadn’t been making cuts.
She hadn’t lost her job.
“She loves you,” Aracely said. “She loves you as much as a daughter and a son and everything in the world put together.”
His mother had gone from being a teacher to being something between a tutor and a nanny, for him.
“That’s why we came here?” Sam asked. “Because of me? It’s my fault?”
“Not your fault,” Aracely said. “Not because of you. For you.”
Sam put the heels of his hands to his forehead, his fingers in his hair.
“Your mother wanted to move,” Aracely said. “When you wanted to live as a boy, she knew how hard it was gonna be to stay in the same place. A whole town calling you Samira? What was that gonna do to you? She couldn’t decide what was worse, you trying to get them to understand a tradition they’d never heard of, or her trying to get them to call you Samir.”
Sam kept his palms on his forehead, his fingers still caught in his hair. But he felt Aracely watching him, her stare landing on the backs of his wrists.
“She wanted you to have the life you wanted,” Aracely said. “So figure out what kind of life you want.”