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understood but not quite, that he sat down next to her and told her more than he’d ever planned to.
    Now, she slipped him tampons at school because he couldn’t risk carrying them in his bag. They had it timed so they passed each other while she was leaving the girls’ bathroom and he was going into the boys’, the two of them clasping hands just long enough for the handoff.
    Once they’d worked out the system, they never spoke of it again, and she never brought it up. He never asked how she always knew when. He didn’t have to. They’d spent enough time together that their bodies had pulled on each other, and they now bled at the same time, when the moon was a thin curve of light. If Miel had been anyone else, her knowing this, the steady rhythm of her knowing every month, would have been humiliating.
    Sam braced himself, though for what he wasn’t sure. Not a morality lecture. His mother had never cautioned him to wait until he was married. Agnostic, indifferent to the faiths of both her father’s family and her mother’s, she had barely tolerated Sam going along with Miel and Aracely to church and Sunday school. She allowed it only because she thought things would be easier for him if this town thought he was a good Christian boy, a phrase she never said without disdain edging her words. She’d made it clear that any God she believed in could not be contained within walls, certainly not inside the whitewashed clapboard of the local church.
    But he was never supposed to sleep with a girl. This had been temporary, him living this way, with his breasts bound flat and his hair cut as short as his mother would let him. It was so he could take care of his mother, so there would be a man of the house even though his mother had no sons.
    â€œAre you mad?” he asked, trying not to cringe and look down. His mother hated when he did that, which made him tend toward it even more.
    â€œIf you didn’t hurt yourself or anyone else, it’s not my place to be,” she said.
    Sometimes she said things like that, and he could almost see the pallor of frost on her words. It’s not my place to be disappointed, she’d said when he was failing math three years ago. It’s your future, not mine. And that made him feel even worse.
    But it wasn’t like that now. There wasn’t the same posture of holding herself tall and straight, her expression still. Now her face looked soft with worry. Worse, pity.
    â€œAre you upset?” he asked.
    She put her fingers to her temple, shut her eyes, let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. “Sam,” she said, the word sounding like wind, like a soft, sad song.
    Whenever she said his name like that, it meant the same thing. That whether she or anyone else was upset wasn’t the point. That, failing math grade or lost virginity, this was his life, and to her mind, he wasn’t acting like it, not as long as his first question was Are you mad?
    â€œAre you okay?” his mother asked.
    â€œI think so,” he said.
    â€œIs she?”
    â€œI think so.”
    He would grow out of this, he wanted to tell her. The same way he’d grown out of saying his favorite color was clear ( Why? Miel had asked him. Because everything clear is magic, because it’s invisible, he’d told her) and Miel had grown out of saying her favorite color was rainbow ( Why? he’d asked her. Because they all look prettier together, she’d said, and because I don’t want to pick. ).
    He would wait it out.
    His grandmother had told him the name for these girls. She had brought it with her from Pakistan, and from stories she’d heard from across the border in Afghanistan. Bacha posh. Dressed as a boy. Girls whose parents decided that, until they were grown, they would be sons. Sam and his mother had lost his grandmother when he was so small he could barely remember the wrinkles of her face and whether the brown of