Miel would not think of her mother, frantic and clawing the flesh out of a pumpkin big enough to hold Miel. She would blot out that memory with the yellow of the kitchen table, and the shades of the pumpkin rinds, and the smell of dark sugar in the air as she and Aracely passed each other spoons of sage and fireweed honey.
There would be no glass pumpkins. Everything would be damp and warm and alive. Miel and Aracely would paint their lips to go out, and while Aracely touched up the edges of Miel’s color, she would remind her that the achiote Miel loved for its earth and pepper and flower taste came from a plant called a lipstick tree.
Aracely was still staring.
“For the lighting,” Miel said. They would use the smallest blades in the knife drawer to carve patterns in their pumpkins. Then they’d set candles inside, and they would bring them to the river. The water would carry them alongside all the other pumpkins the rest of the town had brought, all those carved, floating lanterns.
Aracely’s laugh was not unkind, but disbelieving. “You want to carve pumpkins for the lighting?”
Miel still tensed with the thought of holding the cool shell of a pumpkin. But she didn’t want to live fearing the way they swelled and grew on the vine, never falling, just settling into the earth. She wanted to find the beauty in the cream Luminas, and the blue-gray Jarrahdales, and the deep-ribbed Cinderella pumpkins that looked as soft as the throw pillows on Aracely’s bed.
She didn’t want to fear anything. She wanted to be as fearless and generous as the woman who stood in this indigo room, for her laugh to be like Aracely’s, both reckless and kind.
“Yeah,” Miel said. “Can we go buy some?”
Aracely shut the wooden cabinet. “I’ll get my coat.”
small sea
He was already fake-tutoring Peyton. Mr. and Mrs. Bonner trusted him with so little reserve they had no idea how bad he was at math, or that he and Peyton had never even opened a book together.
Sam had first offered to help Lian with her reading when they went to school together. Every time he caught her in the hall when no one else was there, he told her that he or Miel would go over the English and history assignments with her. Miel probably wouldn’t have been so happy about him volunteering her, but Lian was so used to her sisters’ company he couldn’t help wondering if she’d say yes to help from another girl.
The first time he’d asked, Lian had been polite, the way she always was. “What are you talking about?” she’d asked, her smile still in place. A little shake of her head.
“You’re not stupid,” he said.
He knew she wasn’t stupid. He’d seen her in math class, drawing the kind of tessellations and polyhedrons that could have been illustrations in the textbook. She could be a designer or an architect. The fact that she struggled in English class to turn in one-paragraph in-class essays, that she’d given up on doing the reading, didn’t mean she was as slow as everyone thought.
It wasn’t his business. He knew that. But he hated seeing it, her bowing to the way other people saw her, her sinking beneath the lie of what everyone else thought. So if he could say enough to remind her that she still existed, that she was both other than and more than what everyone else assumed she was, maybe she would lose the truth of herself a little more slowly.
Lian didn’t see it that way. He’d said, “You’re not stupid,” and her expression had shifted, her green eyes half-closing, the smile turning into tension in her jaw. “Fuck off.”
But Lian was the one he went looking for today. He found her on the brick path that ran in front of and then around the side of the Bonners’ house.
She blinked at him, waiting for him to speak.
“I quit,” he said.
That blank expression slipped from her face. “What?”
“I’m done,” he said.
Lian’s stare flashed toward either side of them. She was looking for the shine of glass among the vines. He could tell from how her eyes were moving.
Her face tightened, filling with a look both offended and injured, as though she was taking this insult on behalf of her family. Who was he, she must have thought, to judge anything that happened here? How could the strange boy who painted the moon over and over say anything about these fields turning to glass? And what right did he have to quit?
“It has nothing to do with the pumpkins,” he said. “Look, I don’t know what you’re doing with Miel.”
He could still feel Miel’s hands spreading over his back, her body pulling the heat out of his. How he’d put his mouth not against her forehead the way he had so many times but to her mouth. She’d tasted so much like honey, like sage and wildflowers.
He looked up at the house’s windows. “All of you. But whatever your game is, I’m not gonna be part of it. I quit.”