The second half of that threat was so weak, Miel felt the sudden rise of a laugh. She took a breath in, stopping it.
To this whole town, she was odd and unnerving. To them, she was the motherless girl who came from the water tower and grew roses from her wrist, a girl whose skirt hem was always a little damp even on the driest days. Whatever they said about her liking girls or liking boys was a handful of water next to the whole river. It could not make her stranger, more unsettling to everyone else, than she already was.
But what took that stifled laugh, what folded it into something so small and dense it turned to anger, was going over the rest of what Ivy had said.
“He’s not a girl,” she said.
Ivy eyed the piece of paper. “That says different.”
The grain of the photocopy pulled Miel into wondering what they’d noticed, what that birth certificate had made them look at a little more closely.
How he fulfilled his PE credit with farm shifts.
That he’d never taken off his shirt outside, even for swimming; even when he and Miel found places the river pooled, shielded by rocks, he didn’t.
That Miel, a girl, was his best friend; so many boys were friends with girls, but not the way Sam was with her, not so close they became names like Honey and Moon.
How often boys at school had called Sam gay or a girl. Even with muscle filling him out, he didn’t have the hard angles to his face or the wide spread to his hands to keep them from calling him feminine.
Those boys had no idea what they’d been saying.
Miel’s eyes crept over to Peyton. But she had nothing for her but that stare, her eyes the same brown as Chloe’s.
There was so much art to it, how little they had to say to lay down the threat.
As far as they could take it, they would take it. They’d proved that the second they’d locked her into those walls of stained glass.
Miel’s wrist needled her, like peroxide in a cut. Like something biting her. They were all watching her wrist for the first sign of a new rosebud.
Lian looked at her wrist. “You have time to think about it,” she said, and because it was Lian, it sounded like nothing more than an observation, neither a threat nor an assurance.
Miel felt the point of a thorn dragging under her skin, ready to break it as easily as wet paper. She held her throat tight, killing the gasp.
This time she did not run. She slid the paper off the table, folding it over until it was small and would not stay folded another time.
She was halfway down the brick path when Peyton appeared from her mother’s herb garden, her hair bringing the smell of rosemary needles.
Miel startled. A minute ago Peyton had been next to her sisters, and now she was here, a cat that was in an attic window one second and on a porch the next.
“Miel,” she said.
The give in Peyton’s voice sounded almost like an apology, but there was too much of that Bonner pride, that shared sense of being one life in the body of four girls.
“How could you do this to him?” Miel asked, pressing the folded paper between her fingers. “He’s done nothing but cover for you.”
If Sam didn’t lie for Peyton, girls would laugh behind cupped hands when they saw her in the streets. Undisguised glances would needle her and her family at church. Mothers would forbid their daughters from visiting the Bonner house, not realizing their daughters were never invited there anyway.
And God knew what words, or worse, the Shelbys and the Hazeltons would have for Peyton and her mother. They probably wouldn’t come by the Bonner house either. They wouldn’t bother with discretion. This town punctuated its quiet with enough fury to sustain the gossips for months. Last year a woman shoved her husband’s mistress into a stand of tomatoes at the market, sending red and yellow heirlooms spilling down the aisles. Three Christmases ago the Sunday school teacher, in front of everyone, ordered the girl playing Mary in the pageant to relinquish her blue dress, because she’d been caught smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes behind the church. If Mr. Bonner were another man, less timid, less afraid of his own daughters, he probably would have flashed his shotgun at the boy who’d gotten Chloe pregnant.
“We don’t have to do anything to him,” Peyton said.
“You can’t do this.” Miel leaned in close, checking that Mrs. Bonner wasn’t in the kitchen window or on the landing upstairs. “You can’t out him. He is so screwed up about this, and he’ll figure it out, but he needs time, and he’s not gonna get it if the four of you put this out there.”
Peyton’s soft shrug came with a slight shake of her head. If her mother was watching from the upstairs landing, she wouldn’t have even seen it. “Just give them what they want.”