When the Moon was Ours Read Online Free Page A

her distance from the vines. No matter Aracely’s reassurances that they were just fruit, Miel still feared pumpkins the way other girls feared spiders or grass snakes.
    Then she saw the curtain of Chloe’s hair, the softening light turning it peach.
    The opening of Miel’s rose grew from prickled and turned hot.
    Chloe had graduated last year at nineteen, and had turned twenty while she was away. Twenty, that number that Miel always thought of as making someone, in some final way, an adult. Now Chloe swept across her family’s side yard wearing cigarette jeans that would have looked out of style on anyone else, and a sweater thin enough to show the pink tone of her skin underneath. She’d grown out her hair. When she left last winter, it had fallen to her shoulders in uneven curls. Now it tumbled to her hip, the weight stretching it straight, so light it was almost blond.
    She must have been wearing jeans that tight to show her flat stomach, to show that the thing everyone knew about had not happened.
    When Chloe left, the Bonner sisters had lost just enough of their hold to let every other girl in town breathe. Their parents, as frightened of their own daughters as they were concerned for them, had pulled Lian, Ivy, and Peyton out of school, convinced they’d end up like Chloe. So the girls stayed in that house. They sat at the kitchen table with their mother’s lesson plans. They peeked out of windows with white edging that stood crisp against the house’s navy paint. Or they wandered through their father’s fields, barefoot or in soft, worn slippers they borrowed from their mother but were too vain to own themselves.
    Chloe wore no shoes. Her feet and her ankles, bare from her cropped jeans, were pale as Lumina pumpkins.
    Miel dragged her gaze away from the corner of the farm where Chloe stood, sure if she stared too long Chloe would know, and catch her looking. Her eyes swept over the fields, and found Sam. First his hair, like black ribbon curled with scissors. The harvest season had left him even darker, his forearms the brown of a Welsummer chicken’s egg. He wore that color with the pride of knowing he’d inherited it from his grandmother, a woman Miel knew only from the few bright details he remembered enough to tell her.
    The metal of his shears glinted in his hands. He was checking for vines that had started to die off— going away, he said they called it—and shells just beginning to harden.
    For that moment, he could have been any boy. He could have been Roman Brantley, who once had a gaze so reckless teachers couldn’t meet it. But he’d lost that look to Lian Bonner, to her hair that was so dark red it was almost auburn, to the bursts of freckles fanning her temples like wings. She still had his grandfather’s hunting jacket, which Lian swore she’d give back if he ever asked. Of course he couldn’t look her in the eye long enough to do it.
    Or Wynn Yarrow, who broke up with his girlfriend of two years for Peyton. Peyton, the shortest and youngest of the Bonner sisters, with pumpkin-colored hair her mother barrel-curled every morning, and who everyone but him knew would never be interested. Wynn lost not only his girlfriend, but every friend who took her side.
    Miel backed away from the edge of the pumpkin field, trying to vanish into the shadows before Sam saw her. The Bonner sisters, like everyone else in town, had seen her with Sam so many times that they noted it no more than seeing her alone. But if Miel came up to him now, he might slouch and blush in a way that traced a ribbon of cool air in the dusty heat. And when he did, Miel’s smile might glint like a coin.
    The Bonner girls would see it. It would draw them.
    They would watch how Sam sometimes climbed trees to set his moons where the branches met and joined, but just as often threw a thin rope over a bough and pulled the moon up. They would notice how, when he had to climb