“No,” she said.
She grabbed at the water, reaching out for the rose she’d broken off. Her fingers clawed for the flower head, her eyes scanning for the violet petals, the pink center.
“No,” she said, the word splintering across the flickering water so she couldn’t tell if the river was echoing it or if she was saying it, over and over.
They’d never believe her that she hadn’t meant to.
“No,” she said, and this time she could hear her own voice, repeating it.
She’d lost something the Bonner girls considered theirs. She’d lost the only thing protecting her mother’s wandering spirit, and a secret rooted so deeply in Sam that if anyone tried to tear it out of him he’d break apart.
She saw the flash of copper in the same second she felt Ivy’s hands on her.
“No.” This time the word hardened and turned to screaming. “No.”
Ivy had seen her. Of course Ivy had seen her. Miel had been kneeling here long enough that the she could smell the faint warmth of the sun, and there was nothing the Bonner girls did not know.
Ivy was pulling her to her feet, gripping her on the sorest point of her wrist.
Miel kept screaming, twisting out of Ivy’s hold.
Ivy dugs her nails into her. “Stop,” she said, the word hot in Miel’s ear. “Or I’m telling everyone about her.”
Her. That one word, that word that did not belong to Sam, worked better than all the threats the Bonner girls could have made.
Miel could have begged, could have sworn that she didn’t mean to lose the rose. But she owed this to Sam, and to his mother, and to Aracely. She owed them whatever compliance would satisfy the Bonner sisters. As long as it wasn’t forcing Sam into the light, she would accept the consequence of not handing over that rose.
Miel went slack, and let Ivy take her.
She let her pull her deeper into the woods, toward the stained glass coffin. She let Ivy force her inside, accepting this punishment decided by these four sisters and given under their watch.
Ivy shoved the lid closed, and the latch clicked.
Miel tensed, trying to breathe in the little ribbons of air from the holes in the stained glass.
She looked through the side panels, wondering who would stand guard. She searched for the color of Peyton’s hair, that orange that looked softened by sun and dust. The almost-auburn of Lian’s, even the red-blond of Chloe’s. Though she doubted Chloe was made to do such chores as watching defiant girls. Chloe no longer led her sisters, but she had once, and even to Ivy, that must have counted.
Miel looked again for Peyton and Lian, for their hair standing orange against the gold trees.
But all Miel saw was that bright fall of copper.
The back of Ivy’s hair.
Ivy was walking away from her, leaving her, and none of her sisters were here. There was no other red. Just the yellow of hornbeam and hickory leaves.
Miel threw her hands against the lid, screaming into the small space between her mouth and the stained glass.
Without the other Bonner girls keeping Ivy in check, Miel was locked away, unseen and easy to forget. There was no one watching to make sure she was still alive and breathing.
There was no one waiting to let her out.
Miel rammed her hands into the stained glass above her. “They’re not gonna give you what you want,” she screamed.
She wished, as hard as she wished to be out of these walls of stained glass, that the Bonner girls knew how little her roses could do for them. If they did, they couldn’t still demand she give them up. They couldn’t want them for the simple reason that they could take them. The roses weren’t some much-loved cat, and Miel hadn’t refused an invitation to a birthday party.
But Ivy was so desperate to believe the rumors that the petals could cast a kind of love spell. She wanted four of them so she and her sisters could slip them under pillows or bake the petals into vanilla cake.
They were grasping at anything that could show they had no less power than before Chloe had left them. A point they wanted to make with four roses and four stolen hearts.
They were lashing out at Miel, because she had seen what no one ever should have, Ivy and an uninterested boy, a boy who did not matter except for the fact that a Bonner girl had bored him.
But understanding this would not crack these glass walls. It would not make the Bonner girls hear her.
Miel’s hands stung from the impact, but she kept throwing them at the glass.
“You don’t need them,” she called out to the space between trees. “They won’t help you.”
But Ivy was gone, and the trees didn’t answer.
sea of the edge
Miel wasn’t in their first class of the morning. He hadn’t seen her in the halls, or on the walk to school he’d taken fifteen minutes early, both trying to avoid her and hoping he’d see her.