“Me too,” I reply, tossing the spongy fungi into a small bucket for fertilizer. I wipe my sweaty forehead with my upper arm, careful to keep the muddy gloves away from my face.
I expect, or rather hope, that Dad will go back inside and leave me to make up for Sunday’s lack of gardening. But instead he strides over to stand behind me, taking a long sip of Materva.
“Samuel came over on Saturday. él me dijo que you weren’t answering his texts,” he says casually.
“Hmm?”
“He said something about you and Talia fighting.” Dad looks down at his soda, reading the nutritional facts, or at least pretending to.
“We talked about it this morning. We’re all good now,” I lie, turning back to my bucket. Sammie may have been desperate to hear from me a few days ago, but I doubt he wants anything to do with me now.
“Ophelia.”
“Hmm?”
“What about you and Talia?”
“What about us?”
“Was Samuel right? Were you two fighting? Weren’t you just fighting with him?” He pauses. “And Mom?”
I huff out a frustrated breath and spin around, catching myself before I yell. “Dad, I have a lot of work to get done out here. I don’t really have time to discuss my social life.”
“You always made time before,” he counters, setting his soda on the grass and taking a seat. I pause to watch the Materva wobble.
“We had an … argument. It doesn’t matter.” Dad frowns. I push aside dangling stems of Midas Touch and step around the bush. “We weren’t that close anyways, so it’s whatever.”
“You’ve been spending an awful lot of time together.” He picks at the grass with one hand, tapping against his Materva with the other.
“We studied for some tests, and she gave me a ride when Sammie was too busy trying to court Lindsay.” I tug a dead bloom off a bush harder than necessary. “I’d hardly call that ‘an awful lot of time.’”
“And what about Samuel and Mom?”
“Dad,” I moan.
“Have I ever told you about the first girl I ever loved?” he asks out of nowhere. Despite wanting him to leave me alone moments before, I soften and shake my head. Dad doesn’t talk much about growing up. I lean against the garden gate and listen. “Paola Dominguez,” he sighs. “Gorgeous girl, Mexican and Cuban. I swore on my life I was going to marry her.”
“I thought you didn’t date anyone before Mom.” Mom used to tease Dad about being his first and only girlfriend since she’d dated around so much as a teenager. She dropped the joke once I hit my teens, probably realizing before I did that I would be following in my father’s footsteps datingwise.
He laughs. “I didn’t. I tried to tell Paola how I felt, pero era un cobarde. The night before we graduated though, I showed up at her house. I told her I’d loved her for years and wanted to be with her even if it would be long-distance.”
“What did she say?”
“She turned me down. At graduation I saw her kissing this girl from another school she used to bring around to parties. It was a big scandal—huge. And I’ll tell you, mija, between you and me, I felt like el mayor tonto and cried like a baby until your abuelo knocked some sense into me. He told me, ‘La vida de esa chica no se trata de ti,’” That girl’s life isn’t about you. “And he was right.”
I swallow. “Why are you telling me this?”
He tilts his head. I feel like I’m watching myself, distorted slightly by age and gender. The look in his eyes is so painfully familiar that I have to look away, picking at a chip of white wood threatening to break off the fence.
“At the time, it felt like the end of the world. We’d been good friends; we were some of the only Latinos in our white-bread school. We dealt with enough assholes already. The guts it took for her to kiss her girl like that in front of everyone?” He whistles. “I didn’t see it then, but she was brave, braver than I’ve ever been. Then I met your mom a few years later, and it was everything I’d ever felt for Paola and more.” He nods to himself and moves to sit up. “I won’t be as harsh as my dad was with me, but whatever is going on with your friends, even if it isn’t anything at all, like you say, just know it’ll pass. You’ll see in a few months when you start college, mija, that the world is much bigger than it feels in high school.”
He gets up to head back inside, but at the last minute, turns around and places the Materva on the ground outside the door. “Don’t tell your mom I was cursing.”
I leave my garden and grab the soda as soon as he closes the back door, sipping on the fizzy brown cola as I walk toward the Olympiads. They’re one of my newer accomplishments, since the roses bloom in smaller clusters than most other types I grow. I had to adjust my routine to accommodate their more individualistic style of growth, but they’ve been worth the effort.
I remove my gloves and rub the pad of my thumb over a rubbery petal. The color is a sharp red, bright as blood, like I pricked my finger on a thorn and stained the clean, white petals of an Honor rose. They don’t smell as strong as my other roses, but I still lean in to inhale their scent and feel a sense of clarity when I open my eyes. This close my vision swarms with red, sparkling in the sunlight.
Like Talia’s nails. Like that damn brooch.
If I hadn’t gone with her that night and gotten so caught up in what it meant to be the one she turned to for help, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have ruined our friendship, or set off the chain of events that led to me ruining almost all my other ones too.
But I did. All because of a red rose brooch.
Before I can think better of it, I lean over the gate and dump the Materva across the Olympiads and their roots. I practically feel the bubbles boil against the flowers, corrupting their growth.
Regret grips my chest. They could be dead in days, all my hard work down the drain.
Or they could withstand this, the love and nurturing I’ve consistently given in the past strengthening them enough to prevail beyond the damage of today.
TWENTY
Lindsay doesn’t come to school today, a bold decision for someone in the final three days of her prom queen campaign. Agatha doesn’t bring up her absence, instead passively commenting on Danica’s newly dyed neon green hair when she picks me up for school. Sammie doesn’t speak to me in homeroom, and I work with Lucas again in chemistry, grimacing when he tells me he couldn’t find a lavender tie, so he’ll be wearing a red one he already owns instead.
So things are going about as swimmingly as expected.
I get Lindsay being mad at me. I’m not too keen on her at the moment either. But Wes and Sammie pulling the silent treatment because I had to be the bearer of bad news seems a tad unfair. Shoot the messenger, fine, but at least talk to her.