When the Moon was Ours Read Online Free PDF

cured.
    Aracely was all the magic and skill. Miel was just a body so restless petals burst from her skin. Aracely was all the beauty and goodness in their violet house. Miel was a girl stained with rusted water and the blood on her hands of two people whose names she could not speak.
    The silver-plated scissors, both the strangest and the most useful gift Aracely had ever given her, whined when she opened them. She poised the scissors low, close to her skin, and snapped the blades shut. Pain shivered along her veins. It found her heart and her stomach and everything in her that was alive.
    Blood seeped from the opening. Pain made Miel’s fingers heavy. It weighted her to the ground. It hurt like a knife blade, pressing into her wrist so hard she felt it flash to her ribs.
    She let the rose slip into the water, an offering to the mother who now lived on the wind but had died in this water. When the storms came, Miel could hear the murmur of her mother’s voice beneath the shriek of the winds, like she was trying to whisper Miel back to sleep.
    This was the only gift Miel could give her, the obedience of destroying the roses her mother had feared. She wanted to give her more, a fearlessness of water. But inside Miel was the small, echoing voice of the girl Sam had found, a girl whispering that she should not trust water she could not see to the bottom of.
    She didn’t remember her father as well as her mother. She knew he was a curandero, the kind skilled at treating wounds, with a talent for setting bones that gave him work as a huesero. And she remembered his hands, how gently he cut her roses away, and then covered the wound with a bandage. Sometimes she tried settling into the memory, but she knew him so little he was not really hers.
    The petals vanished under the surface, and the water rippled like the hem of a dress. The moon refracted into a dozen sickles.
    Even with as little as Miel remembered, she remembered the whispers about how children with roses growing from their skin would poison their own brothers, or steal the rings and rosaries from their family’s graves. It didn’t matter if the roses grew from their wrists, like Miel’s, or from their ankles or backs. Every son or daughter in their family whose body made roses, they said, turned bitter and ungrateful.
    Once their family made cakes with rosewater and cardamom. But that was before roses were things edged with the fear of new mothers. Young women worrying over their sons and daughters, looking for the first signs of green coming through their skin.
    The river settled back into its slow current, and the soft rushing of the water carried the sound of muffled sobbing. It broke into small, stifled cries.
    Miel startled, searching the sky and listening for the wind. When the wind came, she listened for her mother’s voice, hoped she wouldn’t hear her crying. The only thing she wanted more than she wanted Sam was for her mother to know that Miel forgave her. That she understood why she did what she did. That she knew her mother loved her.
    But the sound wasn’t coming from the sky. Or even from under the water. It pulled Miel’s eyes down the length of the bank.
    The dark outlined the figure of a girl, arms crossed, wind fluffing her hair.
    The Bonner girl, though Miel still couldn’t tell which one.
    Miel got to her feet, pain spinning in her forearm.
    â€œAre you okay?” she called, trying to keep her voice calm like Aracely’s, soft and clear as the trickle of water over stones.
    But the girl still jumped. Her gaze snapped toward Miel, and the moon turned her face as pale as its own surface.
    Ivy Bonner. The ribbons of light off the river showed her features. Her cheeks shone wet. Hints of copper warmed the edges of her hair, even in the dark. Her nose sat between Chloe’s, long and straight and proud like their father’s, and Peyton’s, short and upturned like their mother’s.
    Ivy nodded,