“Don’t you get it?” Miel’s hand opened and closed, twitching with how much she wanted to grab a handful of Peyton’s curled hair and pull on it to make her listen. “A town like this, you have no idea what they’ll do. Don’t pretend you’re hiding from your parents.”
The openness in Peyton’s face disappeared, quick and smooth as water slipping from cupped hands. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said. “Or my parents. After Chloe, they want me to be thirty before I kiss anyone.”
Miel’s laugh came out small and cruel, but she didn’t bite it back. Because of the way Peyton referred to her own sister—After Chloe, as though the oldest Bonner girl could be reduced to the single event of her having a baby. Because of the implication that Mrs. Bonner wouldn’t sob into her casserole dishes if she knew what Peyton was doing with Jenna Shelby and Liberty Hazelton.
“So that’s it?” Miel asked. “That’s the only reason you wear concealer on your neck?” Each word came out sharp and clipped, like yelling pressed down to keep it quiet.
Peyton flinched, and then recovered, her shoulders straightening.
She knew. Peyton knew that if the truth about her and Jenna and Liberty crossed the barrier from classmates to parents—if it moved from rumors in the halls of a school she no longer attended and into the whispers that covered this town—she would feel the scorn even through the walls of the navy blue house.
After Chloe. After Chloe, the blooms of red on Peyton’s neck would make the town feel justified in calling the Bonner girls loose, immoral, sinful. Words the Bonner sisters would laugh off as old-fashioned, pretending each one didn’t cut.
“Yeah,” Miel said. “That’s what I thought. And now you want to force on him what you can’t even take yourself.”
God knew what words, or worse, this town would have for a boy who’d been born female. They would wrap their contempt and their cruelty in the lie that they wouldn’t have cared, if only he’d told them.
It’s just the dishonesty of it all, they’d whisper.
All that lying, it’s the lying I hate.
How can you trust someone who pretends like that?
As though the truth of his body was any of their business, as though they had a right to consider how he lived an affront to them.
As though who he was had anything to do with them.
Miel could hear those voices. She hated everyone who would say those words even if they hadn’t yet.
And that was if Sam was lucky. This town would scorn Peyton, but they would hate Sam. That was how it worked, judgment for girls, and hate for boys. Boys had been run out of this town for sleeping with other boys, ones meant to marry pretty, pale-eyed girls. The boys who’d called Sam gay or a girl would hate him for what they would call a lie, solid in their conviction that his life was an insult to them, a deception, a trick.
Judgment for girls, hate for boys. And because this town would not know what to do with Sam, he’d have to take both.
“This will destroy him,” Miel said.
“Then give them what they want,” Peyton said.
This town had never seen anyone like Sam. If they had, they hadn’t known. And Miel’s fear over this, their reaction to that which they did not know, made her fight to keep her breath quiet. Girls who’d once thought Sam was handsome might let it slip to their boyfriends, who would beat Sam up because they could not stand the thought of their own girlfriends liking anyone born female. Boys who hated that he’d matched them, hated that for so many years they had not known, would corner him when he went out to hang his moons. Fathers, holding shotguns the same as Mr. Bonner’s, would threaten him to stay away from their daughters.
“If he gets hurt, it’s on you. Because you should know better than any of them what this could do to him.”
“No,” Peyton said, again with that slight shake of her head, so slow her curls barely moved. “If he gets hurt, it’s on you. Because all you had to do was give up something you throw away.”
It wasn’t just throwing them away. It was killing them, destroying the petals her father could not heal her of and her mother could not baptize out of her.
Now she was supposed to hand them over to girls who misunderstood their awful force. Her roses didn’t have the strength the rumors said, the power to compel love from those who breathed in the scent.
But her mother had feared them so deeply she was willing to do anything the se?oras and the priests told her to save Miel from them.
“What do you even want them for?” Miel asked. “Just in case someone has the nerve not to fall in love with you?”
That got a tight-eyed blink out of Peyton, a tension in her cheeks.
“The four of you,” Miel said. “You’re worse than anyone on Aracely’s table. You want to fall in love more than you want to be in love, and you want someone falling in love with you more than you want them loving you.”
“That’s not true,” Peyton said.
“Then what are you doing with Liberty?” Miel asked. “You don’t like her the way you like Jenna and everyone knows it.”