Petal Plucker

by Iris Morland

  Despite the long lashes, pretty eyes, and working in a flower shop, he still managed to exude masculinity. Maybe it was the confidence that he wore so easily, or how any parts of him that were pretty were overshadowed by the strength in his arms, or the firmness of his jaw, or the width of his shoulders. I had a distinct feeling that strong and firm were two of the best adjectives to describe Jacob West.

  “What am I doing?” I said.

  “You’re here to steal all of our secrets.”

  I snorted, only because my mom had said the same thing about Jacob. “What, like your secret ingredient? What’s in the fertilizer, Jacob? Please tell me so I can make a fortune.” I batted my eyelashes.

  He bit back a smile. “You’re different than when we were in high school,” he mused.

  “Um, I should hope so. If I was the exact same as when I’d been a teenager, I’d be concerned.”

  “No, I don’t mean how you look, but that is different, too, though not by much. I recognized you immediately.” He peered into my face, like he could find all of my secrets and hoard them for himself. To keep myself from squirming under his scrutiny, I stared at him, too, which made him full-on smile.

  “Have you figured me out, yet?” I said.

  “No, but I think I will.”

  To my surprise, he reached out and plucked something from my hair, but he didn’t move his hand right away. I waited from him to step away, but his gaze moved from my eyes to my mouth. Electricity seemed to crackle between us. My mouth went dry as I wondered if he was going to kiss me, right here in the middle of his store.

  The front door jingled. Jacob stepped back, holding up a bit of white. The moment collapsed like a house of cards.

  “Petal,” he said. “In your hair.” He twirled the petal between his fingertips.

  Heat made my skin prickle. My lips felt swollen, even though he hadn’t so much as touched me there.

  “Do either of you work here?” said the woman who’d just come into the store. She was about two seconds from tapping her foot.

  I stammered out a goodbye and hurried to Buds and Blossoms, wondering what the hell had just happened.

  Had I imagined the entire thing, or had Jacob actually wanted to kiss me?

  Chapter Five

  By the age of seventeen, I had fallen in love with Jacob three times.

  The first time I fell in love with Jacob, I was five. I’d just started kindergarten, and it was the first time I was away from home all day. I usually spent most of my time pulling up dandelions from the field next to the playground, my mission in life to find every dandelion in existence. It was a tough job, considering that dandelions were everywhere I looked.

  But I had a legitimate reason for this obsession. My name was Dandelion, and each flower I found was an extension of myself. Except I didn’t think of it in those terms at that age. I mostly just liked ripping the plants out of the ground and enjoyed the sound the roots made when they tore. I was a bloodthirsty little weirdo in those days.

  Jacob joined our kindergarten later in the year when his family moved into our little Wallingford, Seattle neighborhood. Initially, my parents were happy to make vegan casseroles galore for the Wests—until my parents learned that Jacob’s parents were opening a flower shop of their own not even a mile from ours.

  “They couldn’t have opened one in Fremont?” my dad bellowed every night for a month. “There aren’t any over there and God knows those hippy freaks love smoking all kinds of plants! Who does that, though? Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Honey, this is America. Capitalism is never illegal here,” said my mom.

  “Maybe they just wanted to start their own store,” said Mari with a shrug, a bit too wise for her age.

  In my mind, Jacob West and his parents were the enemy. I hadn’t met him yet, but I knew he would probably be worse than our class’s bully, Tommy Hedrick. He probably pushed girls into mud puddles and tried to pull down their shorts when they were on the jungle gym. He probably picked his nose and kept a collection of boogers under the lunch table until the teachers complained and some poor janitor had to scrape off the offending bits of snot.

  The following Monday, I was prepared to ignore Jacob West and show him that his family was basically evil incarnate. Anything that threatened Buds and Blossoms was a threat to me. Maybe if I were mean enough to him, he’d cry and his parents would move somewhere else.

  But when I met Jacob, I realized that he didn’t look remotely like Tommy Hedrick. He had hair that was so blond it was white, and he was tall and lanky. He had freckles all over his face, his nose sunburned. He looked like any other boy I’d ever met, and I had met at least a dozen in my short life to know what boys were like.

  I said hello. He said hello. And I assumed that would be our last interaction.

  Jacob West did not go away. He found me on the playground and asked me questions about why I was yanking dandelions out of the grass. I told him it was because I wanted to. He took that answer in stride and sat down beside me. He began to pull up dandelions, too, until we’d amassed a pile of yellow flowers that looked like bits of sunshine had fallen from the sky.

  Jacob didn’t say much that day. He didn’t say much the next day when he joined me again with my dandelion plucking. At first, I tried my hardest to get away from him, but either he didn’t get the hint or he didn’t care. Finally, by the end of the week, I’d accepted that he’d join me on the hill where there were tons of dandelions, no matter how many I pulled up.

  “Do you like the yellow ones or the puffy ones?” asked Jacob as he blew a cotton-headed dandelion into the breeze.

  “I don’t like any of them.”

  He frowned. “Why?”

  “Because.”

  I didn’t know why, really. I just knew that I didn’t like my name, and I didn’t like the flower associated with it. Besides, there was something rather thrilling about pulling up all those plants and making a giant pile.

  “I like them,” said Jacob. He took a few of the yellow dandelions and began to weave them into a crown. “They’re pretty.”

  I snorted. Clearly Jacob wasn’t as smart as I thought. He probably did pick his nose like Tommy.

  But when Jacob put the finished dandelion crown on my head, smiling his gap-toothed smile, a butterfly fluttered inside my stomach. I didn’t know that was possible. I wondered if I’d swallowed one by accident. It was the only thing that would make sense in my five-year-old mind.

  When I got home, I pulled out the dandelion crown Jacob had made me. The petals were already turning brown, but I found myself placing it gently inside a shoebox and hiding it under my bed. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d pull that shoebox out and gently touch the dried flowers, reminded of that fluttering butterfly in my stomach each time.

  Jacob and I became tentative friends over the next few weeks. He would join me on the jungle gym with my best friend, Anna; other times he’d play tag with the other boys and ignore us girls entirely. As the days got colder and we didn’t have recess outside as much, I didn’t have as many opportunities to pull up dandelions with Jacob. I missed it. I missed him talking about his favorite Power Ranger or his new pug puppy, Renaldo.

  But I never told him that. He was a West, and my parents had told me and Mari time and time again that we weren’t to have anything to do with that family.

  “Apparently they sell silk flowers in their store,” my mom said with a shudder over dinner one night. “Right beside the real ones, as if no one would be able to tell the difference. Why don’t they just open up a Michael’s and start selling ugly Christmas decorations while they’re at it?”

  “I don’t care what they sell. It’s that they opened a store so close to ours without even talking to us about it first. It isn’t neighborly.” My dad stabbed his fork into his seitan meatball with gusto. “Good people don’t do things like that. They just don’t.”

  I swirled my edamame pasta on my fork and almost bit my tongue in half. I hated
lying to my parents, but I also hated the thought that I wouldn’t get to hang out with Jacob West ever again.

  I was torn between two worlds, a Juliet pining for her Romeo as our Montague and Capulet parents dueled over floral arrangements.

  It was close to Halloween when Jacob became something more to me than a friend. It was a warm day for late October, and since Anna was sick at home with a cold, I was mostly on my own at school. I decided to go pluck some dandelions from my favorite hill. I hadn’t done that in over a month, and I’d barely talked to Jacob in as long. I hoped he’d notice what I was doing and would come over. Maybe he’d make me another flower crown. I’d tried making one on my own, but it hadn’t come out like Jacob’s. I wanted him to teach me how he did it.

  I heard footsteps. Turning, I had a bright smile on my face, only to realize it wasn’t Jacob: it was Tommy. And he had that stupid smirk on his face he always got when he was going to do something gross. I stood up and pointed at him. “Go away!”

  Tommy kept coming closer and closer, and soon he was raising a giant earthworm wiggling in his thick-fingered grasp. I could almost hear the silent screams of the worm as it thrashed. Tommy grabbed me by the back of my shirt. I tried to make a break for it, but Tommy was basically the size of a third grader. I was doomed.

  I thrashed like that earthworm. I saw my life flash before my eyes. I could feel the worm in my shirt and it would be muddy and cold and slimy and what if it bit me? Did worms have teeth? What if I died? I didn’t want to die just because Tommy was the worst human in existence.

  But a second later, I didn’t feel the cold slide of the worm against my back. I heard Tommy grunt, and then I watched Jacob pounce on Tommy like some kind of skinny tomcat trying to fight a bulldog. Tommy tried his best to get Jacob off of him, but Jacob was tenacious.

  “Run, Dani!” said Jacob.

  But I wasn’t going to run. I threw myself into the melee, tackling Tommy. It soon turned into a wrestling match between the three of us, and by the time one of our teachers broke up the fight, we were muddy and sweaty and bruised.

  As for me, I felt exhilarated. I smiled at Jacob. He smiled that gap-toothed smile at me. He was my savior, my hero.

  I fell in love with him right then and there. That was just the first time, though.

  Chapter Six

  My entire apartment was soon covered in supplies, sketches, flowers, and greenery for the design I was doing for the competition in Los Angeles in two months. For the first few rounds of design, I used silk flowers to save some money, but it really wasn’t the same as using actual flowers. Silk flowers didn’t stand or bend the same way real ones did.

  I considered following my dad’s advice and creating a more traditional design. Using an array of pastel-colored roses, I created an arrangement that, although pretty, looked like it had come straight out of a wedding banquet hall. I ended up donating it to my next-door neighbor, my sisters, and even my mailman when my apartment became so full of various arrangements that I couldn’t use my kitchen table to eat breakfast.

  My favorite so far was the arrangement I’d done with roses, buckeye, and porcelain vines, but I wasn’t convinced it was enough to win. So I’d started over, confused on how I should proceed.

  I was also throwing myself into designing because I didn’t know what the hell to do about Jacob. He’d almost kissed me and then…nothing. Although he lived only three blocks from me, I had no idea exactly which building that could be. I wasn’t desperate enough to go knocking on random doors, demanding to know where he was. An almost-kiss didn’t mean anything would happen between us.

  It was on a Thursday, a week after Jacob had almost kissed me, that I came home, bleary-eyed and exhausted, with a bouquet of lilies to use in my next arrangement. I never brought lilies home because they were deadly to cats, and Kevin wasn’t going to win any awards for intelligence. But I really wanted to include lilies in this next attempt, so I figured I’d hide the lilies in a cabinet and work on the arrangement with Kevin locked up in my bedroom.

  Sometime after midnight, I woke up to the sound of something digging around. I groaned, figuring that Kevin had decided to rip up a paper bag that I’d left on the counter. Not wanting to clean up a whole bunch of shredded bits of paper in the morning, I lurched into the kitchen, only to find that Kevin had gotten into the cabinet with the lilies.

  I awoke instantly. Grabbing Kevin, I looked him over. He had yellow pollen on his whiskers. I wiped it off frantically, knowing that even a tiny bit of lily pollen could make a cat seriously ill. He seemed fine, but I couldn’t take any chances. I practically threw him into his carrier, put on my flip-flops, and drove straight to the emergency vet.

  “Please don’t let my cat die,” I kept saying, over and over again, as I drove the mile to the vet. Kevin yowled unhappily from the backseat, which was a good sign. But when he grew quiet after I’d parked, I was close to throwing up.

  Before I knew it, I was in the lobby, waiting for the vet to check over Kevin. I realized that the shirt I’d thrown over my sleep cami was inside out, and that I’d put on two differently colored flip-flops. I’m sure my hair was a wild mess; I hadn’t even put on a bra, I’d been in such a hurry. I considered calling Anna or Mari, simply to have someone to sit with me, but I was such a mixture of exhaustion and terror that I couldn’t make a decision about who would be better to call.

  The vet tech took me back to one of the exam rooms, but Kevin wasn’t in there. I wanted to throw up. If my stupid mistake had killed my cat, I’d never forgive myself. He’d already managed to survive with only three legs and one eye. Surely something like a lily wouldn’t kill him off.

  “Hi, Dani,” said the veterinarian. “This sure is a blast from the past, isn’t it? When I heard someone named Dandelion had brought in our next patient, I knew it had to be you.”

  I started in surprise when I realized it was Tiffany McClain, who’d put a fake valentine on my locker in the eighth grade and who’d been Jacob’s ex-girlfriend. The same ex-girlfriend he’d driven off with on the night of prom.

  Despite the late hour, she looked perfectly put-together: her blonde hair curled, her lipstick a pinky nude that suited her complexion. I’d had a vague recollection that I’d heard somewhere that she’d become a veterinarian, but I’d had no idea she practiced nearby.

  Of course the night I ran into the girl who’d made my life hell as a teenager would be when I had crazy hair, an inside-out shirt, and two differently colored shoes.

  “We gave Kevin an examination, and he seems okay,” she said, smiling reassuringly. “But we’ll keep him for a few more hours to make sure.”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding, perilously near tears. The thought of crying in front of Tiffany McClain was more than I could bear, though. Sure, she was nice now. But I still remembered that fake valentine she’d taped to my locker. More importantly, she’d been the reason Jacob had stood me up. I wasn’t absolving Jacob of guilt—not by a long shot—but it was more that he’d chosen her over me. That still hurt, even if it had become a vague hurt as the years had passed.

  “You were smart to bring him in so quickly,” said Tiffany.

  “I never bring lilies home, but today I wasn’t thinking. I did hide them, though. Kevin is just…determined.”

  Tiffany chuckled. “Based on the fact that he doesn’t have an eye or one of his legs, that would make sense.” She wrote something down and then added, “I’ll have the vet tech bring him in here so you can see him for yourself. You’re welcome to stay or go home while we watch him. We’ll call you if anything changes, of course.”

  A vet tech brought Kevin to me, a yowling ball of fur, and I hugged him so close his yowling almost broke my eardrums. I let out the tears I’d been holding, relief making me weak. “You stupid, stupid cat,” I muttered into his fur. “I hate you. You almost gave me a heart attack tonight.”

  I considered going home, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I hung out in the waiting
room, watching people bringing in their dogs and cats. One woman had a cat that’d gotten run over by a car, poor thing; another woman brought in her dog who’d eaten some old Valentine’s Day chocolate. Right as the woman was telling the receptionist the story, the dog puked what I assumed was the chocolate all over the white tile.

  I’d just dozed off in my chair when a hand touched my shoulder. “Dani?”

  I lurched awake. Tiffany stood over me. How did she manage not to have circles under her eyes when it was 3:00 AM? It was impressive. I wanted to know what magic spell she used to achieve that.

  “What’s wrong?” I blurted.

  “Nothing. I just thought you’d like this.” She handed me a cup of tea. “You should be able to take Kevin home soon.”

  It was such a strangely kind gesture from the same girl who’d done her level best to humiliate me more than once that I was totally nonplussed. I took the tea and half-wondered if this were another prank. Then again, if it were, it wouldn’t be a very good one since the only other person around was the receptionist, who was currently playing on her phone.

  I’d always wondered if Tiffany had been aware of Jacob standing me up. Had she been in on it? All I’d known was that they’d gotten back together the day after prom.

  Tiffany sat down next to me, her hands in her lap. “You might think this is weird,” she said all of a sudden, “but I’ve been meaning to get in contact with you.”

  I sipped my tea, but at her words, I accidentally inhaled and ended up choking. Coughing, tears leaking from my eyes, I tried to tell her between wheezes that I was fine. God, could this night get any worse?

  Once I’d stopped coughing and crying, she said, “I just wanted to apologize. I never did, you know.”