“No.” Aracely weighed each egg in her hand, pale blue and rich olive green, deep copper and peach. “You know why? Because she’s at school.” She side-eyed him. “Where you should be.”
So Miel wasn’t sick. He’d never known her to cut class, but if anyone could get her to do it, it was the Bonner sisters. If they could get Mrs. Galen to tell their parents they were in Sunday school when they’d really snuck off to try nail polishes at the drugstore, then they could get Miel to skip school. She was probably somewhere looking through magazines with Lian while Chloe braided her hair. The ways in which girls made formal their friendships, the ways they declared and solidified that yes, they belonged to one another, were as foreign to him as the ice-covered fjords in his geography textbook.
Maybe they weren’t friends anymore, but he wasn’t turning on her, not even for Aracely. If Miel wanted to cut class with the Bonner girls, it was her call, not his. If she was willing to have Ivy come in and lie for her, and the teachers were stupid enough to believe everything Ivy said, it was none of his business.
Aracely had narrowed her choices down to three eggs, one blue, another brick red, another dark brown. “And where you would be if you hadn’t punched some guy in the face.”
“I didn’t punch him in the face,” he said.
Aracely took the sheet and unfurled it, letting it spill over the table like milk. “Lie down.”
Even through the sheet, he felt the grain of the wood. In a few minutes, he would look like Aracely’s other visitors, calm, as though they could see the stars on the walls of the indigo room.
From this angle, he saw a flash of green.
A sweater the color of clover hung over a chair. Sam’s heart pinched. He recognized it as Miel’s, remembered unfastening each button as they climbed the stairs, eyes shut, his mouth on hers. It had ended up draped over the edge of his bed.
So many times, he’d found a scarf she’d left behind in a classroom. Halfway through their study sessions, she’d take down her hair, and then she’d forget to pick up the hairpins. He had learned, early on, that Miel was both clean and sloppy. She left her clothes strewn over the floor of her room. But when she came over, and Sam left her alone for more than a minute, she would start doing any dishes in the sink. “Will you stop that?” he would say when he came back into the kitchen. “What?” she would ask, and then say, “It’s here, and I’m bored.”
He had spent the last ten years making sure he pushed exactly as hard against her as she did against him, so that everything they had built would stay standing. If he either let up or gave it more of his weight, it would fall.
And until the night he ran the pollination brush over her arm, this kept him still, the possibility that if she did not feel how he felt, it made no difference, unless he put her in the position of having to tell him.
This was what they had created, a place where she was more than the girl the water tower had spilled out, and he was more than a boy painting a hundred moons, a boy who knew mare nectaris and sinus roris, the sea of nectar and the bay of dew, and every other lunar feature better than his own body. As long as he didn’t question it, prod it, it stayed. But now he had, and he was losing her.
It’s here, and I’m bored. The words came back to him. Maybe why she once met him on the open land every night was that simple. He was here. She was bored. And now she wasn’t. But he was still stranded in this world that only half-belonged to him.
Aracely considered a blood orange but then set it down, and chose a bergamot, the kind grown in the place that made the father he had never known.
The warm scent of cloves and the honeyed acid of the bergamot orange wafted over him. He opened his eyes just enough to see the pair of eggs Aracely had chosen, one red, the other copper.
Her hands settled on his shoulders. He tensed, then reminded himself that this was how the lovesickness cure worked. He had to let himself take it.
The room turned into a whirl of scents, cloves and cardamom and laurel leaves. The walls took him into their blur of indigo. Aracely whispered a prayer under her breath, keeping her hand on his chest. Not off to one side enough to touch either place his binder flattened. But in the center, below his collarbone.
The rhythm of her hushed words cut through him. Her hand hovered over his body.
The perfume of the spices, the calcium of the eggshell, the sweet acid of the bergamot left his forehead throbbing. Under the pressure of Aracely’s palm, he felt his love for Miel turning over and pulling away from the places it hid. It had woven itself into his veins, as much as the stem of her rose had roots under her skin.
He felt the sting of the lovesickness dragging away, like tearing the weft out of a woven cloth. His body resisted, but Aracely kept him still, pinned like a butterfly under glass.