“Welcome to Paradise Plants!” I hear Indie say so enthusiastically, I can imagine the unsuspecting customer jumping at the sound of her voice.
“So … Uncle Jonathan,” I try to say so nonchalantly that it ends up sounding pained instead. I turn away slightly so he can’t see the blush that hits my cheeks. I grab a stray balloon by its string and twist it into the nearest bouquet of red and orange. No big deal. Just doing my work and striking up a conversation with my favorite uncle, who isn’t actually related to me. “Um … so … when I’m done with this, do you think I could get off early? I mean, the decorations are being picked up in a few minutes, and I know we still have some cleanup, but CeCe said she’d stay later so I could beg off a little early. If that’s okay with you?”
Jonathan cuts one more ribbon and then squints his eyes in a way that makes me worried that my not-quite-lying omission of the truth came tripping off my tongue so fast that he didn’t comprehend my words and I’m going to have to start over again. Then he gives me a jolly grin. “Need extra time to get ready for your dance date, eh?”
“Yeah,” I say, concentrating a little too hard on tying the strings of my balloon bouquet into a big knot. “You know me. Gotta look my best for that big date!”
“Daphne,” Jonathan says, his tone shifting ever so slightly lower.
I glance at him and see that his grin has disappeared.
He shakes the spool of ribbon in my direction. “Cut the crap, honey. I do know you. Enough to know you rejected both the boys who asked you. Even after that sweet Richards kid sent you a chocolate-dipped-fruit arrangement from that store in Hurricane. You threw it in the trash.”
“Because I’m allergic to strawberries. You know that.”
“Yes, but you could have let me eat them,” Jonathan says with a pout and drops the spool on his worktable. He reaches into the front pocket of his bright magenta apron. “And I also know where you plan on going this evening instead of the dance.” He pulls out a folded-up flyer and splays it out on the worktable. He stabs one of his large fingers at the words: ALL-AMERICAN TEEN TALENT COMPETITION HOSTED BY SOUTHERN UTAH UNIVERSITY. ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Oh.
Crap.
The flyer must have dropped out of my apron when I hung it up during my break. I’d been keeping it in my pocket for good luck. Load of good that had done me.
“Jonathan, I can—”
He holds up his hand in a stop gesture. “Just be glad I found this and not your mother. You know the conniption she would have if she found out you were planning on sneaking off to Cedar City for the evening. You made a deal with your mother not to leave Ellis Fields again without her permission.”
Yes. I know all too well. In my almost seventeen years, I had been on one, and only one, trip outside of my hometown.
Ellis Fields is a tiny speck that you can only see on a Google map of southern Utah if you zoom in real close, tucked into Apollo Canyon and surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but desert and red-rock formations in every direction. My mom is so rooted here that the town legend goes that her ancestors were here even before Ellis was founded. And leaving it isn’t exactly easy, especially when your mom forbids it and you don’t have a driver’s license yet. A lesson I’d learned the hard way when I was almost thirteen years old. After fighting with my mom for, like, the ten thousandth time about how she never let me go on class field trips or even to the Zion outlet malls, which are a forty-five-minute drive outside town, I’d tried to run away to Saint George on my bike. But I crashed while careening down Canyon Road. I ended up sitting on the side of the remote highway, dehydrated, with a flat tire, a broken arm, and a concussion until Mom and Jonathan found me an hour later, merely one hundred yards from the NOW LEAVING ELLIS FIELDS—COME BACK SOON! sign. I did eventually make it to Saint George that day, but it was to spend the weekend at Dixie Regional Medical Center.
That’s when the infamous deal had been struck. While hopped up on painkillers and still freaked out about my near-death experience in the desert, I’d agreed to stop pressing my mom about leaving Ellis—and not run off again—and she’d agreed to give me a longer leash once I got my driver’s license. I’d been dreaming of ultimate freedom, but at just over two months shy of my seventeenth birthday, with still no license in hand (no thanks to my mom), I was beginning to think I’d been duped into a really bogus deal.
“But look”—I point at the flyer—“second prize is twenty-five hundred dollars. That’s exactly what Mom needs to replace the flower cooler in the front of the shop—and you know the bank isn’t going to give her another loan. It’s one night, Jonathan. Please?”
“But what about first prize?”