They turned, all of them, to look at the broken glass. Sam and Miel tipped their faces toward it. The Bonner sisters unfurled from their huddle.
The pieces of stained glass were breaking away from the frame, not falling onto the ground but streaming up into the sky. Those tiny shards shimmered and glinted as they rose into the air, the night drawing them up. Streams of glimmering blue and violet mixed with ribbons of red and green, like the coins of sun on the surface of a river. Each piece winked with moonlight, reflecting back the gold of the birches and hickories.
Then the rose brass frame sat bare as a forest in January. There was no more locking Miel in there. No more sealing each other in to make sure they were all neat and the same as the letters in Chloe’s handwriting.
They had all given up their truths, things they guarded more closely than their secrets. The words they’d spoken were streaming toward the sky with all that stained glass. None of it was any of theirs to tell unless it belonged to them.
The Bonner sisters left not together, but peeling away one at a time. First Chloe, then Lian, with a look over her shoulder. Then Peyton, hesitating and tipping her head before she spun in a half-circle and started walking.
Ivy’s eyes looked wet and faceted like cut stone. Her face said words Miel knew she would never hear. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken what was not mine. Her eyes strayed to Miel’s wrist, like she was wondering if she was still bleeding.
These were girls so unused to apologizing that they could not knit these unsaid things into words.
The Bonner sisters did not stay in their cluster. Instead, leaving the woods, they were red-winged birds among the yellow trees.
But they kept close enough together that they could hear one another. Sisters, four of them, instead of one organism in four pretty, blurred-together bodies. To become themselves, to become sisters to one another and sisters of their own, they’d had to give up being the Bonner girls, las gringas bonitas. The being that moved and breathed together, that stole boys and cats and roses and anything else they wanted.
Miel turned her back to the stained glass coffin, her forearm hot and sore but calming.
Sam stopped her, his hand on her back.
Miel’s eyes paused on her own collarbone.
A wave of copper spilled over her shoulders. Her hair had turned the color of scarlet oak leaves, as deep red as Ivy’s. It looked like a curtain of autumn.
Miel squinted toward the trees, picking out a dark fall of hair.
Ivy looked over her shoulder, the copper that once marked her now as dark as Aracely’s eyes. The brown, almost black, made Ivy’s face look pale as a cream pumpkin. Miel could almost pick out the two points of her eyes, now both bluer and grayer. But Ivy was too far off for her to be sure, and a rain of yellow leaves fell between them.
Miel pinched a lock of her own hair between her fingers. It could have been her hours locked in that stained glass where they locked each other. Or the moment when she realized she was as intertwined with Aracely as Ivy was with her sisters. Either way, the Bonner girls had left her a little of what made them.
But that wasn’t where Sam’s eyes landed now.
She lifted her chin, looking where he was looking.
Far off, in the direction of the Bonners’ farm, the glitter of broken glass was rising above the trees. Miel and Sam watched it drifting into the sky.
The glass pumpkins, in all those violets and greens and blues, had shattered like the stained glass coffin. And the little shards were floating up, like snow the sky was taking back. They were studding the stars with their jeweled light. A deep autumn of glass constellations, like the summer of Aracely’s arrival among those hundred thousand golden wings.
All these broken pieces, becoming a hundred thousand unmapped stars.
bay of love
There were whispers about it, about all of it. The glass rising into the sky like new-cut stars. The way Ivy’s hair had darkened to almost black. How Miel’s had turned so red that, when her skin was lighter in winter, at a distance, she could almost pass for one of the Bonner sisters.
How Chloe had left, and no one knew yet if she was staying with her aunt for good, both of them caring for her baby, or if she would bring her daughter—Clara—back with her. How the rest of the Bonner girls might or might not be coming back to school.
Not long after that night, Ivy sent Miel a cutting of her own hair, along with the pressed flowers of the roses she’d taken. The orange one, turned a little tan at the edges. The deep purple one they’d sliced away in the dark. The yellow one streaked in its own red and the dried wine stains of Miel’s blood.
Miel had shivered a little opening the envelope, seeing those flowers between wax paper, and the lock of hair that looked so much like her own it took her a minute to remember hers was now red.