The Girl and the Grove
Page 19
RE: PROTESTING IN FAIRMOUNT PARK
Posted by A Dash of Paprika
AUGUST 23rd, 2017 | 2:09PM
I’m in.
RE: PROTESTING IN FAIRMOUNT PARK
Posted by WithouttheY
AUGUST 23rd, 2017 | 2:09PM
Yes obviously. :-P
RE: PROTESTING IN FAIRMOUNT PARK
Posted by D Meier
AUGUST 23rd, 2017 | 3:09PM
Same, sending a DM!
RE: PROTESTING IN FAIRMOUNT PARK
Posted by A Jimenez
AUGUST 23rd, 2017 | 3:19PM
They’re tearing down part of the park, and no one knows about it? I am SO in. That’s messed up. Let us know what the hashtag will be on social media.
RE: PROTESTING IN FAIRMOUNT PARK
Posted by JessDeLaCosta
AUGUST 23rd, 2017 | 4:09PM
LOL. Man fuck your park. You bitches are standing in the way of progress.
RE: PROTESTING IN FAIRMOUNT PARK
Posted by A Dash of Paprika
AUGUST 23rd, 2017 | 4:15PM
JESS GET OUT OF OUR BOARD. YOU ARE SO BANNED.
RE: PROTESTING IN FAIRMOUNT PARK
Posted by PAPRIKA SUX
AUGUST 23rd, 2017 | 5:02PM
OH NO PLEASE DON’T KICK ME OUT WHAT WILL I EVER DO.
ECO-ACTIVISTS MESSAGE BOARD: PERSONAL MESSAGES [USER: WITHOUTTHEY]
FROM
SUBJECT
DATE
WITHOUTTHEY
THE PROTEST
Hey Toothless!
So this week we’re going to do a bit of protesting in Fairmount Park to save this grove and old mansion and yada yada. You can see the message board post in the Philadelphia section. You should come. We could finally meet.
I have to be honest. I might have met someone? I dunno. I know you and I been like, flirting a bit on here. I just don’t want to mess up anything. Don’t hate me?
8/23
WITHOUTTHEY
RE: THE PROTEST
Hey, did you get my last message? I hope you’re not upset with me. I’d really like for you to be there.
Are you seeing the drama with Sarika and that Jessica girl? She’s from our school, always starting shit.
8/24
WITHOUTTHEY
RE: THE PROTEST
Silence says it all. I’m sorry.
8/25
XVII
Leila stared out the window of Belmont’s science lab at the trees in the distance, at the edges of Fairmount Park that were visible from the school, and the green that dotted the city landscape. Trees throughout the area had already started changing color, bursts of red and orange and yellow scattered about like paint. What she once thought of as a beautiful sight was now entirely ominous, and filled her heart with dread.
“It’s happening already,” Sarika said, standing next to her.
“Yeah,” Leila said. She closed her eyes, and for the first time wished the voices would come to her, but they remained silent. The dryad in the woods, her mother. She stayed quiet.
“Are you sure this is the best idea?” Sarika asked, as she pulled out one of the stools in the science lab.
“I mean, there are a few people who are into saving the planet in this club,” Leila said, shrugging. “And I know Shawn is a bit of a tactless prick, but I think he actually means well. We texted a lot last night. He’s on our team.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about all that. You know I’m on hashtag-Team-Landon right now. Shawn fell off the leaderboard a while ago, and Toothless isn’t even on it. I still don’t know why you talk to that troll.”
“Oh God, there’s seriously not even a team to be on,” Leila said, giving Sarika a shove. “Toothless stopped talking to me, and who knows what’s actually going on with Landon. I feel like there’s something there, but I don’t know.”
“Wait, Toothless isn’t talking to you anymore?” Sarika asked. “Why? What happened?”
“Eh, I brought up that I kinda met someone, wasn’t sure where it was going. You know, with Landon and all.” Leila shrugged. “I said we could be friends, I wanted to see where that would go, but he hasn’t messaged me back in days.”
“Damn. Well, you’re better off. Speaking of the board, though, I can’t get over Jessica having the nerve to go on there,” Sarika grumbled.
“Don’t worry about it,” Leila said, pulling Sarika in for a hug. “She’s just trolling. We’ll figure out how to ban her I.P. address or something.”
The members of B.E.A.C. slowly filtered into the room. Several looked worn out and tired, no doubt after a busy morning of summer enrichment and/or gossiping. A flash of red caught Leila’s eye, and she quickly waved to Britt, the red-headed runner she’d met on the recent field trip. She smiled and waved back, hurrying over to join them as Mikey trailed behind her. They took the two seats across from Leila and Sarika, filling their small lab table.
“Sarika, this is Britt and Mikey,” Leila said.
“Great to meet you!” Britt said, reaching out and shaking Sarika’s hand, a beaming smile on her face. “Sorry I missed you saying hi on the trip and all.”
“It’s okay,” Sarika said. She turned to Mikey and winked at him as she stuck out her hand. “And Mikey, is it?”
“You too!” Mikey said, reaching out and shaking her hand, before immediately closing his eyes and sighing loudly. “I mean, me too. Me too, sorry I missed you. Too. Ahem. I mean, hi, my name is Mikey, and I’d like the earth to open and swallow me whole right now.”
“Smooth,” Britt said, nudging her shoulder against Mikey.
“I like them,” Sarika said, smiling at Leila.
The door to the classroom swung open and hit the wall with a loud bang, rattling the nearby tables. Everyone jumped in their stools, the seats squeaking against the science lab’s hard linoleum floor. Shawn barreled in, his expression hard, his hands balled into fists. Trailing right behind him was an equally as angry looking Jessica.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me!” Jessica shouted, the two of them stopping at the desk in the front of the room. Shawn sat down on it, staring ahead at the members of B.E.A.C. The look in his eyes was pained and distant. Leila frowned. His eyes were red, and there were shadows under them, like he hadn’t slept in days.
“I’m fucking talking to you!” Jessica spat, and pushed a bunch of papers and books off the desk, sending them clattering against the floor. Leila moved her stool back, ready to get up, when Shawn locked eyes with her. He shook his head softly, and looked down at the floor.
He rubbed his hands together, and eventually clapped them and jumped to his feet.
“Alright!” he exclaimed. “Let’s get things started.” He beamed a bright, visibly forced smile at everyone, the awkwardness in the air thick enough to cut with an axe.
“The hell do you think you’re doing?” Jessica yelled, walking in front of him with her back to the rest of the club. “You do not get to ignore me. You don’t get to break up with me. You’re mine, Shawn Kennedy. You and your whole family are mine. If you don’t stop this—”
“As Leila was kind enough to point out via our email list,” Shawn continued, standing up and walking around Jessica to speak to the rest of the room. Sarika shook, and Leila turned to see her holding in a laugh. Leila smiled.
Go Shawn.
“There’s a protest scheduled for outside the Fairmount Horticulture Center later this week.” Shawn began pacing the room, and Jessica sat on the desk, staring daggers at him. “The plan is to meet at the center p
romptly at 4:00 p.m., when people there are still at work, and hang in there until after 5:00 p.m. in hopes that we’ll have generated enough buzz for the local news to come out and catch some of the workers there off guard as they leave the building.
“If we can call public attention to what’s happening,” Shawn continued, “it’ll be easier to shut them down. People know that there is an amphitheater being built, but no one is talking about the fact that it’s going to demolish an historic building and garden. The more outraged the public is, the harder it will be to mow down that structure and take out that grove.”
“Shut them down?” Jessica spat, standing back up.
“Yes, Jessica,” Shawn said coldy, turning to her. “Just because something is old and forgotten, doesn’t mean it has lost its value. And there are the mice! Some of the park service tipped us off to them. They are endangered and deserve our—”
“Mice?” Jessica scoffed. “Who the fuck cares about some mice? You sound like your damn father.” She crossed her arms.
“And you sound like yours.” Shawn glared at her.
“Fuck your trees,” Jessica said, storming away from the desk and shoving past Shawn, sending him stumbling against a lab table. “And your mice.” She turned to the whole classroom as she reached the door. “That old building and crappy garden will be gone in a week.”
“And you,” Jessica pointed at Shawn. “Tell your dad to pack up his office. I’m going to have a little talk with mine about all this.” She opened the classroom door with an angry swing and slammed it shut, rattling everything on the tables and sending a lone beaker shattering against the floor.
Leila winced. It was hard hearing someone talk about the grove so harshly, knowing what was actually in there. Sarika grabbed her hand, and she looked up at Shawn, who stared at the door, his shoulders sunk. He turned around and walked back over to the desk slowly, sitting on it with a sigh.
“As some of you know, as it isn’t exactly something secret, Jessica’s father funds my father’s nonprofit efforts,” Shawn said, wringing his hands. “I’m not super concerned by her threats, but . . . well, who can we count on being there?” Shawn asked, a forced smile on his face again.
Leila and Sarika raised their hands, as did Mikey and Britt. The rest of the room looked around uncomfortably, and Shawn crossed his arms, flashing them all a scowl.
“Right,” he said and leapt to his feet. “Then why are you even in here?”
Leila’s eyes went wide and she looked over at Sarika, who nodded approvingly.
“Is it for the summer credit? Is that the deal?” Shawn asked, as the students looked increasingly more awkward. “’Cause, newsflash, you’re not going to get it if you don’t participate in anything we’re doing. Instead of doing community service at the Japanese tea house the other day, a bunch of you walked around looking at birds. Which is fine, but I bet if I asked you to name more than two birds there, you wouldn’t have an answer. Saving the world takes work. You want to play along? Put the work in.”
A few of them muttered to one another. Leila glanced at Sarika, who winced. They were some of the people who had skipped out and wandered around.
“Look, I’m sorry for how I acted the other day on the field trip. Jessica’s family is in charge of the construction of that amphitheater. They’re handling the road construction and tearing down that Raptor Trust place, and I was . . . emotionally compromised.” Shawn continued, regret tinting his voice. “I know Dr. Rich isn’t in here supervising, but I’m the one who turns in the attendance. I tell him who has been going to what. I’m the one who signs off on those final papers of yours at the end of this summer. Me.” Shawn’s voice grew louder and more anxious. “This is something I’m in charge of. Now, you’ll go, or you won’t get the credit you want from this enrichment course.”
A few heads nodded.
“Am. I. Clear?” he said, angrily.
All the heads nodded.
“Good.” He crossed his arms and sat back on the desk, a smirk on his tired face. He looked over at Leila and winked.
“Now, everyone is going to have a role to play in this protest,” he continued. “It’s early in the day still. Some of you will work on fliers to tack around the school and outside in various neighborhoods around Philadelphia. I’ll need someone working on the social media aspect of things, as we definitely need an event page and a hashtag running through everything. As for me, I’ll alert local media. Everything about this protest will be perfect.”
Shawn walked around the room, handing out assignments to the members of the club, a majority of whom begrudgingly accepted them before walking out of the classroom to work. Social media here, fliers there.
“You four,” Shawn said, pointing at Sarika, Leila, Mikey, and Britt. “I’ll need you to flier up the school, which shouldn’t take all that long, and get to work on some signs. You can meet us over at the center with them on Saturday. Try to come a little earlier? 3:30 would be great, so we can distribute materials.”
“Sure, Shawn, but—” Leila started.
“Don’t worry,” Shawn said, smiling, a dimple on the corner of his mouth. “I’ve got this. You just worry about signs and fliers and keep an eye on your park, while I fuss over the logistics. This isn’t my first rodeo.” He leaned over on the table. “Look, I know this is important to you. And I, well, I fucked up. I hope this makes it up to you. I’m not totally an inconsiderate monster, I swear.”
Leila smiled.
“I appreciate that, and I know,” she said. “It’s a good start.”
LEILA: Good morning!
LEILA: Hey we’re planning out the protest this afternoon, you at work?
LEILA: You around at all?
LEILA: Hey! You there? We’re on our way to pass out fliers near the Trust.
LEILA: Heading to that café I told you about.
LEILA: Come on, you should come to this thing. I want you there.
LEILA: Landon, everything okay?
LANDON: Hey. Yeah sorry, won’t be able to make it.
LANDON: Send me pictures, let me know how it goes.
LEILA: Sure? You okay?
LANDON: I’m fine, really. Don’t worry.
LEILA: K.
XVIII
Leila wiped the sleep from her eyes and shuffled through the stack of fliers on the kitchen table. They were printed on colorful paper, each practically see through, like the recycled, brown paper towels in the school’s bathroom. She made a mental note to ask Shawn where he found this kind of printer paper. It was the same as the flier she’d seen back in Adam’s Café when he first walked in. He’d been nice, he was trying to fix things, trying to build some sort of friendship out of the mess he created, and he was clearly making some sacrifices to come through for her.
But Landon. Radio silence. After everything they’d been through together, he’d just gone quiet.
Leila held up a flier and angled it towards her light box for a moment. The bright light shone right through the paper, and she added it back to the stack. She took her phone out, but before she could turn it on, she blinked at the dark screen, surprised. In the vague reflection, she saw something different on the side of her face.
Her birthmark.
It seemed to have grown a little, the pale spot spread a little higher on her cheekbones. But that was impossible. She scratched her head, fussing with her scarf, and when she pulled her hand away, noticed a few strands of hair coiled around her fingers.
What was happening? She glanced out the window towards Major Willow in the yard. The soft, green sphere of leaves was turning red and yellow. Some of the bark on the thin trunk looked a bit paler, and like it was peeling. Her heart ached. It was far too soon for the little tree to be changing color. And shedding bark wasn’t a good sign, either.
“Hey, Leila?”
She turned and spotted Jon
standing in the door of the kitchen, his hands awkwardly clasped around one of her fliers, his eyes darting about nervously. She put down her phone.
“Can we, uh, talk about these?” He held up one of the fliers, a light-green one, and made his way over to the kitchen table. He slowly pulled out a chair and sat down next to her.
“What’s up?” Leila asked, putting the sheets into a folder. She reached under the table and unplugged her light box, and then slid the folder into her backpack. “You look all . . . you don’t look good.”
“Ha, thanks,” Jon said, smiling. “Look, Liz and I really love your spirit, Leila. We do. How you care about the environment and the world around you. Most kids your age, well, frankly they couldn’t care less.”
“Tell me about it,” Leila groaned, thinking about the “members” of B.E.A.C. who didn’t want to do a thing until their credit was threatened. “You, um, sound like you’re building up to a really big ‘but’ moment.”
“And you’re also incredibly perceptive,” he said, shaking his head. “What can you tell me about all this?” He placed the flier on the table and slid it across, so it sat in-between them on the polished wood surface.
“It’s a project B.E.A.C. is taking on,” Leila said, feeling her heart quicken and warmth pour over her skin. Did he know about the dryads? Her biological mother and father? Of course, she hadn’t posted about it anywhere and barely texted anything about it with Sarika or Landon. He couldn’t know, there was absolutely no way he knew. Liz either. And she wanted to keep it that way. She’d seen enough made-for-TV movies about adopted kids seeking out their birth parents to know it could hurt the adoptive parents, no matter how much they claimed it didn’t bother them. And the fact that her biological mother might be a mythological being living in the woods and keeping Philadelphia’s greenery alive would be a stretch way too far.
“Yes, but, why?” Jon asked. “Why this particular place?”
“Have you been there?” Leila asked, raising an eyebrow.