Inara snorts. “No. I’ve had enough of those for a while, thank you. He’s just trying to pace himself exhausted before he goes in to see her, I think.”
Vic gives Eddison a look, then knocks on the door. “Keely? This is Agent Hanoverian. Is it okay if I come in?” He waits for her muffled assent before he pushes the door open, and gently closes it behind him.
Eddison leans against the wall next to Inara, both of them watching Keely’s father pace. “You only hit her the once?”
“Yes.”
“I’m impressed at your restraint.”
“If the security guard hadn’t been there by that point, I might have done more. Maybe not. Guess it would have depended on whether or not she came at Keely again.”
Mr. Rudolph finishes another lap and spins to start the next.
“They’ve been talking about moving to Baltimore. He can transfer, and her mom has family there. They think it might be better for Keely to get out of Sharpsburg.”
“What do you think?”
“I think Baltimore gets basically the same news,” she sighs. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the best judge. I went back to the same apartment, the same job.”
“Eighteen is different from twelve.”
“Is it really? I never would have guessed.”
He smirks, and because they’re side by side, he can even pretend she doesn’t see it. “You injured at all?”
She holds up her left hand, which has a bandage wrapped around the palm. It’s not the same as when he first met her, but it’s close enough to make him wince. “I was an idiot. Went to grab her hand, grabbed the knife instead. But it gave me the leverage I needed for the punch. It’s a couple of stitches. Shouldn’t scar too badly.”
The burns from the explosion in the Garden scarred, and she has a set of stretches to do whenever she thinks of them so she doesn’t lose flexibility with the hand.
“I’m surprised you’re not in there with her.”
“I was for a while, but she kept looking over to me when the officer was trying to take her statement. I offered to come out here so the officer could be confident the statement was Keely’s alone.”
“And you stayed out because?”
She mutters a curse and pulls her phone out of her pocket, awkwardly because it’s on her left and her grip isn’t as strong. But as she thumbs the screen on, ignoring a fresh stream of texts with names he can recognize as other Butterflies, she pulls up a message from Bliss that makes his heart skip.
It’s a screenshot from an article online, time-stamped less than an hour ago, and under an obnoxious click-bait headline, there’s a picture of Inara. He can’t see much of Keely, hidden behind Inara’s body with the older girl’s too-large hoodie wrapped completely around her, arms holding it in place in a tight embrace. But he can see where Inara’s tank top rode up her back and hasn’t been fixed yet, showing the lower wings of a Western Pine Elfin, can see the fierce protectiveness on her face as she looks off to one side.
“They call me by name. The restaurant, too. Bliss is warning Guilian; he’ll remind the staff that no one answers questions about anything that isn’t connected to the food.”
“Do they mention her?”
“Keely Rudolph of Sharpsburg, Maryland. They even say her school. Her fucking middle school.”
“Maybe Baltimore wouldn’t be a bad idea. They could register her under her mother’s name.”
“We survived. We shouldn’t have to keep hiding.”
“No, you shouldn’t.”
“Some of her classmates have been giving her a hard time. Keep covering her locker in butterfly stickers. Leaving craft-shop butterflies on her desk. Even one of her teachers asked if the Gardener had a butterfly picked out for her.”
“Inara.”
“I’m used to a shit life. It means I’m grateful for my friends at every moment, but it also means I’m used to being deluged with terrible things. She’s not. She shouldn’t have to be. She’s a good kid, with parents who would do anything for her, and . . .”
He clears his throat uncomfortably. “It isn’t fair?”
“What is? This is just wrong.” She puts her phone away and knocks her head gently against the wall behind them, closing her eyes. “Scars fade,” she says quietly. “They don’t disappear. It isn’t right. We live with the memories; why do we have to live with the scars as well?”
He doesn’t have an answer for her.
She wouldn’t accept one if he tried.
So they watch Keely’s father pace the hospital hallway, listen to the indistinct murmurs that come through from the room, and wait.
Her name is Laini Testerman, and the silk hibiscus she wears tucked behind one ear every day may be the most concealing piece of clothing she willingly wears.
You’ve really never seen anything like it, but the hotter-than-usual Mississippi spring has this girl stripping down at every opportunity, even when she really shouldn’t. You’ve never seen shorts so short, so high up her ass you can see the curves of her cheeks. If she’s not at school, she’s in a bikini top, each one smaller than the last.
When she babysits, she brings the children out of doors to run through sprinklers and hoses, or to play in pools, and never urges them to change into swimsuits first. Right out in the open where anyone can see, she tells little girls to just strip down to their underwear and jump in, often with boys there in the yard or pool with them. Right out facing the street.
You were contemplating killing her for her own lack of modesty, but this seals it. You can’t let her corrupt other girls like this.
You don’t want the children to see, though, and she spends most of her time when she’s not at school babysitting. She’s saving up for a car, you learn, listening as she waxes eloquent to a friend about the freedoms she’ll have with her own car. It’s hard to get her alone given how busy she is.
But late one night, she leaves her house and rides her bike to the community pool, climbing over the fence despite the lock on the gate. She drops her bag and towel on a chair, but follows it with her swimsuit, until she’s diving gracefully into the water naked as the day she was born.
The clip is still in her hair, bright and bold even in the distant glow of the streetlights.
Then you hear the fence rattle again, and a boy drops down to the deck. He drops his towel and trunks next to her things, but he doesn’t jump in. Instead, he sits down on the side, his legs in the water, and watches her swim laps. She’s swift in the water, her strokes strong and clean, and you know she swims competitively for school.
Would they still want her on the team if they knew about this?
She laughs when she notices the boy, and swims over to brace her elbows over his spread knees.
It’s tempting to get it over with that night, but you don’t have any flowers. You know where you can find them—you’ve been watching her, after all, you’ve known it would have to be her—but it takes another day to drive a few hours out. It’s more effort than you’d normally go to, but the town’s having a Hibiscus Festival. It feels appropriate.
And it feels appropriate to place a bloom over each nipple, where her tops should cover, a cluster of them over her too-often revealed crotch, and one more, the brightest bloom you could find, right in her whore mouth.
After seeing Agents Sterling and Archer off with the Tuesday delivery of marigolds, I head to chess, needing an escape from the house and the boxes and journals. Mum loves marigolds. Dad was allergic to them, or said he was. Really he just hated them, and said he was allergic so Mum wouldn’t bring them into the house or plant them outside. It meant that she planted a border of marigolds along an entire wall of the old church, and he always had to go around to the other door in order to maintain the fiction.