Tahira in Bloom

by Heron, Farah

  “Racist, you mean.” I had actually experienced a lot less racism personally here in Bakewell than I expected, but I wasn’t a permanent fixture in this town and locals pretty much treated me like a tourist. And the tourists to Bakewell were about as diverse as they could get—seemed everyone loved flowers. But I knew racism existed here, and I knew it had been aimed at Rowan and his family before.

  He nodded. “Yup. There are people who definitely resent a successful Black family living their best life. Just like some people don’t like that Leanne is openly pansexual. But we’re all still here. We have more allies than not—the Black Lives Matter protests in Bakewell were pretty big. The pride parade, too.” He sighed. “I’ve heard racist slurs thrown at my family in big cities when we’ve traveled. And there are not a lot of people of color in architecture, landscape or otherwise. When I went to the campus, three people thought I was with the groundskeeping crew instead of interviewing for the landscape architecture program.”

  “The racism in the fashion industry is a beast, too,” I said, watching his face as he looked at the stars. “And there’s a lot of Islamophobia. Last Toronto Fashion Week, barely eight percent of the designers featured were people of color. All of those were doing sportswear or streetwear—there are no POC in couture.”

  “You seen any of that firsthand?” he asked.

  I nodded, looking down at my knees. “Last year I tried out for this televised fashion contest, like Project Runway: Junior except on public-access TV. Anyway, they turned me down as a contestant because I was”—I made air quotes—“the ‘wrong kind of Muslim.’ They would have taken me if I wore a hijab so they’d get diversity points, or something. And once at school, a substitute teacher told me she hadn’t heard of Muslims designing clothes, and what was the point if my husband wasn’t going to let me wear any of this stuff, anyway?”

  “Holy crap. What did you do?”

  “Complained about the teacher to the school board and sucked it up about the show. Oh, and then I designed an outfit for my hijabi friend Ayesha to wear for the school fashion show as my own revenge. Ayesha looked hot.”

  He chuckled. “You’re a force, Tahira, you know that? You think you’re going to have to deal with that stuff at that school in New York?”

  “Probably. It’s an incredibly competitive school. Plus, I’m already going to have to work twice as hard there to make up for my lack of connections.”

  “Why do you want to go there?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the best. Anyway, I’m surprised you don’t see even more racism here.”

  “There are a ton of microaggressions,” he said. “Stupid stuff, you know? Like people being surprised that my parents, and my grandparents, too, are comfortably middle class, or people assuming the scholarships I was offered were all ‘diversity’ based. Little things. I ignore them.”

  “Those little things chip away at you, though. Like with Juniper’s YouTube harassment. Comments that mean nothing on their own can snowball inside.” I shifted and hugged my knees up to my chest. “It sucks we have to deal with this.”

  He nodded. “It does. But my dad says carving out safe spaces in these places is an act of resistance, and that people like us are changing the landscape. Let them hate—we’ll just keep going.”

  It wasn’t people like Rowan who were going to change the landscape; it was literally him. In a big way, or in a small, profound way, the world was going to be a more beautiful place because Rowan Johnston wanted it to be. The world was so incredibly lucky.

  I shifted again and stretched my legs out next to his.

  “I’ve been doing this forever,” he said, indicating the dark sky. “My parents used to find me asleep in the backyard in the morning all the time when I was a kid.”

  “You slept out here?”

  “Yup. Once I woke up to a skunk smelling my face.”

  “Oh my God, gross.” I shook my head. “You won’t be able to do this if you’re living on campus in Toronto. If the raccoons don’t get you, the drunk students will.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t see nearly as many stars there, anyway.” He lay back completely on the blanket. “Is that why you don’t stargaze? I have a hard time believing you’ve never lain down outside to look at the sky.”

  “Of course I have. It’s just . . .” How could I explain this? I bit my lip. “I mean, it’s not that I’m scared of stars or anything, it’s . . . it’s just really hard to focus on them. They’re just dots in the sky, and there’s usually too much going on in my head to look at just that. I worry that I’m not appreciating them right.”

  “C’mon, Tahira. Lie back.” He patted the area on the blanket next to his head. “I suspect the problem is the city sky. No way you’ll be bored looking at this one.”

  I lay back and exhaled. After one second of looking at the sky, I had to close my eyes again. I hadn’t been completely honest there—it wasn’t that I worried that I wasn’t appreciating the sky right, but more like . . . seeing so many stars together made me feel . . . alone. And I didn’t like that.

  But I wasn’t alone now.

  I opened my eyes again. In the city, when you looked at the sky, you could realistically count the stars. Here, that would be like counting the grains of rice in a gigantic bowl.

  “It makes me feel small,” I said quietly. “It makes me wonder if I’m actually not important. Like all the hard work I do, and my mind racing all the time with what I should be accomplishing, or my Plan or whatever, maybe it doesn’t matter in the universe. I feel . . . untethered. Like there’s nothing grounding me to the earth anymore.” My fingers gripped the blanket tightly. “I feel like there’s nothing to hold on to.”

  “I never would have pegged you for an existentialist,” he said.

  “It’s not that I—” I made a frustrated noise as I turned away from the sky. I was fine—I was sure all the work I was doing was right for me. The Plan would succeed.

  But when I saw that sky with thousands and thousands of stars, it forced me to think. Who was I really working for? Was it worth it?

  Rowan’s hand suddenly covered mine. He loosened my grip on the blanket and intertwined our fingers together.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t doubt for a second that you will accomplish all the things you want to do on your own, but . . .” He paused. “Tonight, I think you need something to hold on to,” he said softly.

  I smiled, holding his hand tightly as we stared at the bright night sky.

  18

  PLANT-BOY IN HIS NATURAL HABITAT

  With the Bloom only three weeks away, we all wanted to get our design finalized so we could start building the frame, so Gia, Juniper, and I walked downtown to meet Rowan at Hyacinth’s the next morning for the grand judgment on our designs. It was pretty early for a Saturday, but June and Gia were working at 9:30. Rowan and I both had the day off, but he claimed he had some errand to run before the meeting, so he didn’t drive us. I didn’t mind walking, but that little anxiety gremlin in my head wondered if Rowan was avoiding me after last night.

  We’d held hands out in the backyard for an hour, and if I tried, I could still feel his hand in mine now. Calloused, which was no wonder, considering all the manual labor he did, and probably dirt under his fingernails. We talked about Bakewell, about Toronto, about his silly shirts. He admitted he wanted to buy some nonbotanically oriented clothes for university. I offered to help him do some online shopping before the summer ended. We talked about why I wanted to go to FIT, and how he still hadn’t decided if he wanted to be a licensed landscape architect or work as a landscape designer, but he figured the landscape architecture program would be useful either way. We laughed, teased each other, and sometimes were just silent. We stared at the stars the whole time, our hands tightly connected.

  It was the nicest night I’d had in Bakewell.

  Everything seemed fine when we got to the coffee shop. Rowan was outside on one of the bench seats, and he
greeted us like normal. He’d done his sketch digitally as well, so he AirDropped it to my iPad. June and Gia very ceremoniously took my iPad inside to show Hyacinth. They said we weren’t allowed to come in and influence her decision. I sat in the seat across from Rowan. He was wearing his I CAN’T, I HAVE PLANTS shirt and had a Wynter’s tote bag next to him.

  “I’m nervous,” I said. “Is this what waiting for the results for the actual Bloom is like?”

  He seemed pretty relaxed lounging on his seat. I wondered if he was also having trouble not thinking about what happened last night. “I guess?” he said. “The judges deliberate for a while at the Bloom. Last year I left while Addison stayed and wandered the midway. She texted me the results.”

  “Not into rides and totally fixed sideshow games?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, I wasn’t feeling it. My dad and I had an argument that morning.”

  “Oh, that sucks. About the Bloom?” I had seen Mr. Johnston around but hadn’t really met him yet. I knew that his displeasure with his son’s career choice was a big conflict between them.

  Rowan was obviously trying to look like this conversation wasn’t a big deal, but his jaw tightened. “My dad really wants me to go into science like him. He’s got a doctorate in biology with a focus on botany, and until last summer I intended to study biology, too. But I’d been taking art all through high school. And then last summer, when I redesigned the garden at home, I did all this research and even met a garden designer through the nursery. When she told me about this landscape architecture program, I just knew.

  “It’s the coolest thing—landscape architecture is like the perfect mixture of art and science. I didn’t know there was an entire field that designs outdoor spaces with the same precision and planning they do for buildings. They take into account sustainability and accessibility, and now even social equality. There’s a new movement toward creating more heterogeneous spaces—that means spaces are created from a decolonized framework to support all the diverse people using the space. I mean, they’ve always taken into account the diversity of plants and animals in landscape design; we should also be thinking about the diversity of different cultures and races, and how they want to utilize spaces, too. This is especially important in urban environments. Public spaces should be designed in a way to help foster community engagement. There’s this one park in Boston that just opened . . . it—” He paused, smiling shyly. “Sorry. I can go on about this forever.”

  I shook my head, in awe. He was like Juniper going on about books—there was so much passion in his voice. It was exactly the same excitement I felt about designing fashion. About creating clothes for all the diverse people who would wear them. “Don’t apologize,” I said. “This is the best reason ever to apply for that program. You’ve told all this to your dad?”

  He nodded. “I told him right before the Bloom last summer. I also applied for biology like he wanted, though. I didn’t expect to get into the architecture program. It’s competitive.”

  “But you did.”

  He nodded. “I got into both. I found out in May. I got a full scholarship for the biology program. Nothing at all for the architecture.”

  I knew the guy was smart, but I hadn’t realized he was, like, full-ride smart. “So, your dad isn’t happy you chose landscape architecture.”

  “I sent in the acceptance in early June, and we argued for about a month afterward. We’ve only now reached a kind of stalemate over the last few weeks.”

  This was why Rowan had been so grumpy when we first met in late June.

  “Considering your grandmother—his mother, right?—was a florist, wouldn’t he be happy that you want to design gardens for a living?”

  “For my dad, it’s such a big deal that I got that scholarship. I was the first Black student to get a full scholarship in biology at that school, or something.”

  “But he’s got to see your talent in landscaping, too,” I said.

  Despite Rowan’s easy posture, I could see that this was hard for him to talk about. He shrugged. “Maybe winning the Bloom and going to New York will show him I can still be the top.”

  I let out a long breath. I’d wanted to win the Bloom for my own career—for my own dreams—and this flower stuff wasn’t actually my dream at all. But it was Rowan’s. This was even more important to him.

  “I wish you’d told me this before,” I said, looking into his eyes.

  “Why?”

  “Because I would have worked even harder to win this thing for you.”

  He smiled. It lit up his face. Everything around us faded away: the street waking up, the people going into Hyacinth’s to get their morning coffee, the sound of birds in the air. It all disappeared.

  Because Rowan Johnston was smiling only for me. And there was more there: anticipation. We both knew we were on the way to something here—and last night was the first step to getting there. And it didn’t feel like a disaster after all.

  The door to the café opened.

  “We got it!” Juniper came out, waving the iPad in the air. “Sorry it took us so long. That place is busy this morning! But we have a winner! The design we’re using for the Bloom!”

  Gia was close behind, also grinning.

  I sat up straight. “Whose is it?” It didn’t really matter that much, because with me and Rowan working together, it would be amazing no matter what we did. But I was curious to find out if we’d be standing in an ice cream line for an hour, or if Rowan would be wearing the shirt I made with my own two hands while I finally got to photograph that face. Those forearms. Those beautiful hands.

  Juniper flopped onto the seat next to me. “Well, Hyacinth said she loved them both. She’s not a Bloom judge this year, but she knows what they like. She thinks they both could win, but based on originality, she’d give a slight edge to Tahira.”

  “Yay!” I said, grinning at Rowan. “See? A city girl can learn to play with flowers.”

  He laughed and nodded. “You won fair and square. Congratulations.” He picked up the iPad to study my design. “This really is awesome. It might be tricky to make these sharp corners on the petals with chicken wire, though. I think I know where we can get some brass tubing to use. There’s this junkyard out near—”

  I put my finger up. “Ah! Before anything else, you owe me a photo shoot. It’s been too long since I’ve had new content on my Insta. Today, Plant-Boy, you’re all mine.”

  June and Gia left for Lilybuds while Rowan and I stayed at Hyacinth’s for a coffee and planned my photo shoot.

  “I need somewhere that looks more urban,” I said. “The barn at the nursery is good, but we already used it for Lilybuds. There’s no secret graffiti wall or decommissioned subway station in Bakewell, is there?”

  He laughed. “No. What about behind the library or the clock tower?”

  I shook my head. “This damn town is too flower obsessed. The alleyways are all pretty.” Even the auto garage had window boxes full of seasonal blooms.

  “I thought you were into flowers now?”

  I shrugged. I was, kinda. “Yeah, but I don’t think the whole manicured-garden aesthetic is right for my designs. I need something more . . . industrial.”

  “What about the nursery itself?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Didn’t I say no gardens?”

  “No, not the garden center, the nursery. The actual greenhouse. It’s flowers, but it’s about the most industrial thing around here. Seriously, inside is all heavy machinery, skids, and forklifts. It’s nothing like the garden center. Wynter’s also has a botanical lab, too, if you want the whole science look. My dad heads it up, and he’s in today finishing some research, so he’ll let us in.”

  “Your dad wouldn’t mind?”

  “Are you kidding? He’d be thrilled to show off his lab. Wynter’s is so much more than the garden center—it’s pretty much a flower factory. Our plants are sold all over the country.”

  Huh. I mean, I’d seen the massive greenhouse at Wynt
er’s from a distance, but I’d always assumed it was a bigger version of the garden center. All cutesy and florally. But it made sense—this was a flower factory.

  “Oh, good. You kids are still here.” I looked up. The woman who I now knew was Hyacinth was coming out of the shop. She was white, and looked to be in her thirties, and had the most perfect magenta bobbed hair. She wore black jeans with a black T-shirt that said HYACINTH’S on the chest. “I just wanted to make sure I told you how much I loved both those drawings. They didn’t tell me who did what when I decided. Done well, I think either design could win.”

  “Thanks!” Rowan said.

  Hyacinth leaned in close. “You two make a good team—I’m glad you’re working together. Bloom couples are the best couples . . . my fiancé and I fell in love when we were on a Bloom team together.” She smiled at me. “Thomas owns the auto garage. Have you seen his flower boxes? The irony is that we’re missing the festival this year because we’re getting married that weekend. We’re having a tiny destination wedding because otherwise we’d have to invite all of Bakewell. If we did that, I’d just want to make sure everyone has enough coffee and food, and Thom would be reminding them they were due for an oil change! Anyway, good luck, kiddos! I’m rooting for you!”

  I thanked her, and she smiled and went back inside. I fidgeted with the clasp on my bag. Why hadn’t Rowan corrected Hyacinth about us being a couple?

  After a few awkward seconds, Rowan said, “So? Want to take the pictures at the nursery? Come see where I work. There is something else I want to show you at Wynter’s, anyway.”

  He had the sweetest smile on his face. I couldn’t seem to say no to it. “I’d love to. Let’s go back to where we met, Plant-Boy.”

  We headed home to change first—him into the handmade shirt and me into a halter tank and fitted wide-leg trousers, both made in the same cream linen with a subtle red thread running through it. These were older pieces, and they’d been on my page before, but I styled them differently now, with chains on the belt loops and my hair down. If the setting worked, I wanted pictures of both of us together on my page, too. I was neglecting my platform, which my mother reminded me of every time she called.