Mom loved the stargazer lilies. Dad would deny it but I’d seen how partial he’d become to the pussy willows. And Grandma Amaryllis had written in her will that she’d wanted to be cremated and used in the planting of the forget-me-nots we kept upstairs.
The sliding of the glass door popped my perfect bubble. Zach’s laughter overshadowed any other sound in the building and hinted at who’d intruded on my peace, but a single look up proved me wrong.
Phil stood in the doorway. I wouldn’t have blamed him for taking in the room with awe, but he clearly didn’t care for the flowers. His hungry eyes lay on me. Only on me.
I recognized that look. Undressing or blood-thirsty? Apparently, that was a Bronwyn staple.
“Hello,” he crooned, easing the door shut.
I warred with myself whether to pull him close or keep my distance. In the end, I sat frozen and made no decision at all. “W…what can I do for you?”
He shrugged. “Nothing in particular, I think.” His bare fingers probed the flower petals as he circled the room at his leisure, never once taking his eyes off me. Finally, he settled on the yellow rose I’d been trying to sketch and cast a shadow over my book.
“Well, I hope you like the roses. If not, we’ve got some ferns in the next room.” Ignoring the sudden race of my heart, I tore my eyes away from him and focused on the single petal coming to fruition on the page. It was an effort in vain that I tried to reclaim the concentration this room provided. The sound of Phil’s breaths set me on edge. With every echoing step through the rows, I anticipated his touch a little bit more.
Which was ridiculous. He’d probably only come for Gregory—
“What are you doing?”
I hadn’t heard him close the distance, though by all accounts, I should have. He eclipsed the light over my head, casting a Phil-shaped shadow over the floor.
“Just…sketching for class.”
He sat beside me, leaning close to get a better look. My senses struggled to take all of him in at once: the outline of his chest through his sweatshirt, the smell of him like the most pleasant and odiferous rose, the weight of his stare that slumped my shoulders.
“What is it?” he inquired.
I grumbled, bringing my sketchbook to my chest so he couldn’t see it anymore. “It’s a rose.”
“It doesn’t look like—”
“I know what it looks like.” I ripped out the page, fist already clenching to crumple it up.
“Wait.” The long, slender expanse of his hand brushed up against mine, plucking the paper from my grip and sending a shudder down my back. He set to work at flattening it across his thigh. “Pencil?”
He reached for the one in my hand.
“Pencil. Please?” Though I tried to resist, the smell of roses that wafted off his lips rendered me helpless. “Which one were you trying to draw?”
“That one.”
“The yellow. Your favorite?” He looked at me as he asked but his fingers never stopped moving over the paper, the unmistakable stem coming into being where I’d begun.
“Only because I couldn’t draw them all.”
“Did you try the ferns? I think you might be better at those.”
I scoffed. It wasn’t a joke. Given the stoic look on his face, I wondered if he knew what a joke was. “The assignment is to draw what you love most.”
“And you like the roses.”
“I like my parents. I love the roses.”
“I do not think that would be a typical human response.”
I snickered. I guessed he could joke, if he put his mind to it. “What’re you going to draw then?”
“How do you know I have to draw anything?”
My jaw clenched. Whoops. “I saw it on your sketchbook. Today. When I brought you your bag.”
My body braced itself for jeering that didn’t come. “How deductive.”
If I hadn’t known better, I might’ve thought he’d just paid me a compliment. The burn in my face made it hard to shove those thoughts back. “You’re dodging. What are you going to draw?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, I thought the same. How do you pick just one?”
Phil hesitated. “Of course. How?”
I peered down at the drawing in his hands and choked. “Oh my god!” It looked…like a rose! Every petal reflected its true-life counterpart, more akin to a black-and-white photograph than a sketch. “That’s amazing! How did you do that?”
His face didn’t budge but his reluctance to speak made me think I’d taken him aback. “I drew it.”
“I gathered that,” I snorted. “I’ve drawn plenty of roses and they never come out looking like that. That’s a real talent.”
He stared down at me and I pretended not to notice. Easy enough, given I had the picture to hold my attention.
“Can I keep it?”
“If you would like. I have no use for it.”
I snatched it back, already running through the prospects of frames in my head. “Thank you. I’ll take good care of it.”
His stare burned. “Pictures make you this happy?”
“When they’re as gorgeous as this, yes!”
“And roses make you happy?”
“Always?” As his stare persisted, I shifted from the nerves. “Is that weird?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. It was just a question. Do other things make you so happy?”
The beginnings of skepticism reared their ugly little heads. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m going to use the information to drop your guard so I can sneak into your bedroom and steal your virtue.”
“Shut up.” The stoic look on his face only made me want to laugh harder.
His eyebrow disappeared beneath the cover of blonde locks. “Why else would I want to know what makes you happy?”
“I don’t know, no one’s ever asked.”
His stare narrowed and the corner of his lip turned up in an uncharacteristic smile. “I stand by my original answer, then.” With that, he let us fall into silence.
“Why don’t you tell me what makes you happy?”
“Why?”
“So you’ll have to worry about me coming in to steal your virtue, instead.”
Phil sniffed. “You would be hard-pressed to find it.”
Crossing my arms to mask the flush of red staining my exposed skin, I huffed, “It’s starting to sound like you don’t want to tell me.”
“Of course not.” He held his hands up in surrender. “I suppose I don’t know what makes me happy.”
“You don’t—” I spluttered indignantly. “You’re lying. You don’t want to tell me.” He said nothing. “Well music must make you happy.”
“Music makes people happy?”
I snapped my fingers at his t-shirt. “It does when they wear band shirts every day. You like White Snake?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Of course. I love them.”
Somehow, I found that doubtful. “What’s your favorite song?”
“All of them.”
“Really?” I demanded. “I’d have to say ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ has to be mine. We’re big White Snake fans.”
“That one is high on my list, as well.”
I studied him for some crack in that confident demeanor but he remained unsettlingly unbroken. “You’re lying.”
“I never lie.”
“That makes two,” I countered. “I’ve listened to my dad’s tracks enough times to know that ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ is by Guns N’ Roses, not White Snake. And I don’t even own a t-shirt.”
He narrowed his eyes. Through a minor gap in his pouted lips, I could see him suck his teeth. “How deductive.”
“Just wondering.” My heart leapt, sensing danger ahead of my brain. Or attraction…No, no, no. Danger is fine. “If you don’t like music, what do you like?”
“I do not know. The normal things.”
“What are the normal things?”
; “Whatever you like.”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. Tending plants and reading Shakespeare don’t seem like your thing.”
“If that is what you like, then that is what I like.”
“That’s not how it works…”
I didn’t see his hand slither toward mine until that overcoming sensation of weightlessness washed through me. It leeched away my suspicion, crooning soothing words in my ear that told me to inch closer. To touch him in return. To trust.
The thoughts felt foreign, although I had no clue where else they would’ve come from. I didn’t like to be touched. I didn’t make a habit of trusting strangers. Hell, more often than not, I didn’t trust my own best friend, a guy I’d known for years, not to hit the snooze button and leave me stranded every morning.
But as much as I knew the thoughts were not my own, I didn’t know how to escape them. The purple haze collapsed atop my head, pushing me toward Phil’s side.
I seized my dormant panic like a lifeline, flinging myself to my feet. “Shakespeare’s definitely an acquired taste though,” I shrilled. It was the first thing I thought of. “If you can suspend disbelief long enough to forget they’re thirteen, I’d probably recommend Romeo and Juliet, but I’m a closet romantic…” Cradling his drawing to my chest so it wouldn’t wrinkle, I started toward the door.
He stood, stopping my exit before it could truly begin. “You are leaving?”
“I just thought I’d go look for a frame. Maybe take a shower. Do some homework. It is a school night. Erm…” my tongue swelled. “Thank you for the drawing.”
I dodged him with eyes planted firmly on the ground; I knew what I’d find if I looked up.
On my third step into the shop, I collided with something solid. An arm wrapped around my waist to save me the fall to the floor. “You have to be careful, Edy. The next guy might not be as quick as me.” Gregory winked, keeping a firm grip around my middle as he drew his gaze upward. Something, or someone, behind me gave him pause.
“Phil,” he greeted. “I didn’t know you’d be paying us a visit.”
I followed his stare to a very different Phil. While the constant of the Phil Bronwyn I knew was a blank stare or false smile, this Phil looked furious for reasons unknown.
“Thanks,” I hissed, extricating myself with the hand that didn’t hold Phil’s drawing.
An inarticulate growl eased through Phil’s teeth. “Gregory. I didn’t realize you’d be here.”
“How could I stay away with such lovely company as this?”
Zach’s giggle drew my attention to the register, where he leaned against the counter. Which reminded me of my mother, who straightened up to watch from across the room. The sudden silence felt even weirder.
Phil scowled at Gregory. Gregory only stared back, brow climbing toward his hairline. The brunette muttered, “Interesting.”
“It’s getting late,” I said. “I think I’m going to head upstairs.”
Gregory’s eyes flashed to me. “Is that an invitation?”
“It looks like we should go home as well. Right, Greg?”
“It’s only four,” Zach protested, abandoning my mother to loop his arm through Gregory’s. I didn’t know which one of them made the leap but they suddenly held hands.
“If it is all the same to you, Phil, I think I will stay out a little longer.”
“The sun is going down.”
He sent a pointed glare in my direction and winked. “Full moon tonight. I will be seeing you again, Edy.”
My ginger promptly forgot my existence as he followed Gregory through the door. “See you in the morning, Edy!”
The door shut, the store descended into silence, and Phil watched after them, chewing his tongue. “I am sorry, Eden. My brother is—”
“Awfully creepy,” I sang. “It’s fine. You can’t help it.”
He didn’t let his face give him away, but, by the way his eyes narrowed down at me, I gathered he didn’t approve of my answer. “I am sure that is not the first word that comes to mind when people think of Gregory.” He shrugged. “You are not wrong.”
“I know,” I started toward the stairwell only to hear his foot strike ground behind me. As I stilled, so did he.
Phil glanced down at his leg in accusation. “Sorry,” he whispered.
“It’s…okay? I’ll see you tomorrow?” I backed toward the stairs to ensure that, this time, he didn’t follow.
He nodded.
“Goodnight, then?”
“Goodnight, Eden.”
I took sanctuary behind the stairwell door. My hand held tight to the picture, an action that came unconsciously now, and a single look down revealed that I’d marred it with my sweaty palms. The pencil stained me grey.
I swore under my breath. Just another injustice I could chalk up to Gregory Bronwyn’s existence, though I doubted it would be the worst. Some part of me already anticipated that I’d be walking to school in the morning.
Lingering in that dusty enclosure far longer than I should have, I heard the goodbye Phil mumbled to my mother, then the shutting front door, and my mom’s racing footsteps. When she found me on the other side of the door, she yelped but didn’t lose her grin.
“So you didn’t make any new friends today?” She pointed at the drawing in my hands. “That looks like a friend to me.”
I didn’t know what it was. And I didn’t want to get any hopes up by thinking about it. I shrugged, expecting my voice to waver if I used it.
“Eden! He’s so handsome!”
“You thought he was weird yesterday?”
“Yeah, well, so are you. Match made in heaven.”
Rolling my eyes, I turned toward the apartment and trudged upstairs.
She followed. “He’s so tall! It’s amazing. He looks a little old to be in high school, sure, but who’d complain about that? And those eyes, they’re practically purple. I’ve never seen hair so red. Do you think he colors it—?”
I’d originally intended to ask if she had anything better to do than fawn over a minor, but she stopped me up short. “Red? Are you having a stroke or something?”
She paused. “No. His hair is red.”
“Not even close. It’s blonde. Practically white.”
“Were we even looking at the same boy?” she laughed. “There’s no way you could mistake those red curls.”
And now there were curls? “I guess we weren’t…” I’d spent plenty of hours at school memorizing that face. If anyone were the expert here, it had to be me, and I said white-blonde locks fell over that forehead. Just like I’d say my own hung in chestnut ringlets down my back.
“Please don’t tell me you need glasses,” she sighed. “The last thing on this Earth we need is another expense.”
I waved her off, darting toward my bedroom. Dad lay across the couch, passed out and snoring amid a graveyard of empty soda cans. The television droned on with whatever crime show he’d been watching before sleep hit.
The sight distracted Mom enough that I slipped away, unnoticed. From the other side of the bedroom door, I heard her tell him that his break was over.
My room looked much unchanged from my infancy, with the exception that in recent years, we’d sprung for a twin-sized bed in place of the futon in the corner. Back then, I’d shared the room with my mom, who’d slept on her own cot beside me. It had been grandma who’d stayed in the room next door, a woman who’d generously reopened her home to her adult daughter when she got knocked up at a Duran Duran concert.
The pink paint was left over from Mom’s childhood, along with the border of hearts that lined the walls. Its pale color looked orange in the light of the setting sun, coupled with the glow reflecting off the array of picture frames on my nightstand. Some held photos of my family on what few vacations we’d taken. Others held the pitiful drawings I’d scrawled through the years. I surrendered one from my elementary years—that I assumed was a horse but may very well have been a hotdog—to the garbage to make room for t
he rose. Phil’s rose.
My rose.
4. Intuition
Mom brought me to school.
I’d waited until the very last second for Zach to appear at my door and then five minutes more, but he never showed. Since then, I hadn’t called, hadn’t looked, hadn’t thought of my wayward best friend. Any break in that resolve led to thoughts of Gregory, and what they could be doing.
Thoughts I didn’t want to have.
I tried to think positively. At the very least, waiting had given me the chance to imitate Phil’s rose—even if the results were less-than-stellar. For one tiny, insignificant second, it had occurred to me that I could pass off the original as my own, but I didn’t have the guts. For one, Mrs. Brown would never believe that I’d improved so spectacularly in my artistic abilities overnight.
For another, I didn’t want to share.
She skipped into class, somehow later than me. “Good morning, everyone. How did your sketches come out last night?”
A low groan answered from the collective.
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” she countered. “Pass them over and up.”
The paper smacked against my shoulder. Lily held her sketch out with one hand, head still facing the window.
Was she as amazing an artist as her brother? I took it from her, sneaking a peek before I moved to pass it along.
She drew him in sleep, head cast backward over his pillow so a shock of hair fell over crescent-moon eyelashes. Such care had been taken with his lips, lining and dotting them like she’d taken a mental snapshot of that precise moment, where his mouth hung slightly ajar. A young man. What she loved most.
She wasn’t as amazing as Phil; she was better.
I expected her vacant stare, peering out into the nothingness, but she’d shifted to fix me under a scowl so bleak, so cold, so utterly dead…it chilled me to the bone.
The heat of my shame flooded me from my face to the tips of my fingers and beyond. I practically tossed the drawing to the person two rows up, along with my own and considered apologizing, but, by the time I looked back at her, Lily had already turned back to the window.
The Amaryllis Page 4