“Weren’t you supposed to be studying medicine all this time?”
“Oh, believe me, I was. For every horrific skin disease, cyst, and pustule we learned about, I imagined them on Lucas. For every slow, painful terminal illness, I pictured him suffering through them instead of just some nameless study participant. I was actually able to commit quite a lot to memory that way.”
“You’re hopeless.” She throws up her hands and heads for the door. “I’m going down to hang out with your guests. You need to do some serious soul-searching, Daisy. Whether you like it or not, Lucas will be working with you at Dr. McCormick’s, and I suggest you go in with a good attitude. Look at what he did today.” She points to the pink envelope sitting on my bed. She’d dug it out of the trash before I could slam the lid down on her arm. I now regret not drawing blood. “Those flowers are clearly a peace offering—”
What a na?ve girl, unhardened by a lifetime of continuous hostility.
“Oh please. They’re a warning shot.”
She rolls her eyes and walks out, leaving me alone in my Situation Room. The flowers are a secret message, his little reminder that nothing has changed between us. To everyone else, they look like a kind gesture. They can’t see the subtext, the torture, and that is precisely his point.
I look down at the pink envelope then back at the open door. I am tempted to read it, so I close the door. I can hear my mom shouting at everyone to use coasters. No one will know.
Without hesitation, I tear into the envelope. His sharp script gives me tunnel vision.
Roses are red,
Daisy is you,
I heard you came back,
and I did too.
Chapter Two
Lucas Thatcher and I have been in competition with each other since day one. Yes, the actual day one, the day on which we were born, all of 58 minutes apart.
I crawled first. He spoke first. I walked first and he potty-trained first.
And so it went.
Our parents dressed us up in matching outfits and planned joint birthday parties. I’ve seen the photo albums, filled with two little infants: one a quiet angel, the other, a brash hellion. My favorite photo, one I liked to use as evidence, depicted us sitting side by side at a Halloween festival when we were almost a year old. They’d plopped us down on haystacks hoping for a sweet photo, but Lucas had turned on me, tearing off my small yellow bow with his uncoordinated infant fingers and throwing it on the ground. They’d snapped the photo just as I’d retaliated with the few teeth I wielded at the time.
Obviously infants aren’t born with innate hatred pumping out of their tiny hearts, but I use our births as a starting point because nobody can pinpoint an exact date when our competition began. My mom swears we turned on one another when Lucas was chosen to be the preschool line leader. I tend to disagree—after all, you can’t place all the blame on Mrs. Hallow, even if choosing Lucas over me was the biggest mistake of her entire career.
In light of the sheer longevity of our rivalry, people always want to know what terrible event had transpired to precipitate it all. The truth is, we’ve always been this way. I am the Annie Oakley to his Frank Butler and I firmly believe that anything he can do, I can do better.
A rivalry like ours sustains itself by constantly evolving. In elementary and middle school, the tactics were juvenile: vandalized finger paintings in art class, stolen soccer balls on the playground, sabotaged shoelaces in the school play.
These crude encounters inevitably produced a certain amount of collateral damage. Letters were sent home about school property and behavioral correction. I endured my first and only detention because of Lucas. We even lost friends—the ones who weren’t willing to become lieutenants in our little war—but most importantly, we started to forfeit the respect of our teachers. As we grew older, we recognized the significance of these authority figures and the grades they doled out. The report cards sent home on thick white cardstock suddenly became our objective means of comparison, our apples to apples. Every six weeks those marks told us who was better, who was winning.
Now there are no more teachers, but there is Dr. McCormick, and I catch a lucky break when I run into him at Hamilton Brew the morning after the party.
I was planning on dropping by his house later, but this is better, casual. He sits in the corner near a window with the Sunday paper and a large coffee. I make note of the two empty sugar packets beside his cup.
He had seemed old to me in high school, but I now realize he’s only got a year or two over my mother. His brown hair is salty and he’s taken to growing out a white mustache. In all, I’d say he’s a suave version of ol’ Saint Nick.
“Dr. McCormick,” I say with a winning smile. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“Daisy!”