Power Play

by Sophia Henry

  “I was trying to handle it so you and Papa wouldn’t be more stressed out than you already are.”

  “Well, that plan didn’t work, did it, Gabriella? And because of your choices, we’ll have to open late on our busiest day of the week. We easily could’ve brought in some produce from one of the stores hours ago.” Mom sighed. “What in the world were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  When Mom spoke again, there was a hint of hesitation in her voice. “Are you trying to make Joey look bad because your father put him in charge of Three-one-three?”

  “What? No!” I said, raising my voice when I had no right. “I was trying to save his ass for not completing the paperwork.”

  “You just told me you were the one who forgot the paperwork. What’s the truth, Gaby?”

  I sighed, realizing the original lie I’d told to keep Joey out of trouble had just blown up in my face. Like the decision to go to the garden before contacting anyone else.

  Best laid plans…

  “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but it’s not okay. The stores have practically run themselves for years. Your father gets sick and they go to shit? It doesn’t make sense. I know you weren’t happy about Papa letting Joey run Three-one-three, but if you’re intentionally sabotaging things so he gets in trouble, you should stop. Right now. This is not about your hurt feelings, Gaby. This is our livelihood. Our entire family relies on this business.”

  Shocked. Hurt. Angry. Those were the words that came to mind listening to my mother accuse me of sabotaging my brother.

  “I tried to handle everything myself, so no one else would have another thing to be stressed over,” I whispered. “My intentions weren’t spiteful, Mom.”

  “I really hope that’s the truth, Gabriella. You need to make better decisions regarding the business, not go out on your own. We know you’re young and still learning. That’s one of the reasons Papa left Joey in charge. Why don’t you go home for the day?”

  “Come on, Mom!”

  “You need a break. Go home.”

  It took every ounce of self-control I had not to scream or throw my phone into the road.

  I needed to calm down. To think about the situation. To regain control.

  I needed safety.

  I needed Landon.

  Chapter 21

  Sammy dropped me off at home before he drove back to work. I grabbed a few crates out of his truck.

  He lowered his window and leaned out. “What are those for?”

  “I’m going to go back to the garden to see if I can salvage anything for the soup kitchen.”

  “Good thinking. Sorry about the garden, Gaby.” He’d said it a few times on the short ride from the garden to my house, and though each time it had made me well up with tears, this time I let them fall.

  I nodded and turned away, instead of letting Sammy see me cry. I didn’t want him to think I wanted his sympathy. I knew my poor decisions caused this situation. Mom’s accusations ticked through my head again. I hadn’t deliberately sabotaged Joey, but I did put my stupid hero complex above the good of the business; above the good of the entire family.

  Hadn’t I read this fable countless times? Same story; different situation. When you actively seek your moment in the sun, it blows up in your face.

  After throwing the crates in my trunk, I climbed in the front seat.

  And cried.

  Calling Landon was out of the question, with all my hiccups and snorts, so I pulled out my phone and sent him a quick text.

  Need to see you. Can I come over in an hour?

  I wiped my eyes with my hands and waited for a return text. Times like this reminded me of my grandma’s advice to always keep tissues in the car. I never did, but it was sound advice.

  Landon: Of course. You ok?

  Me: No. I mean, yes, I’m ok. Long story.

  Landon: I love you.

  Me: Love you too. See you soon.

  I tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and drove back to the garden with a lighter heart, knowing I’d be with Landon soon.

  Before I got out of the car, I extracted a small spiral notebook and pen from my glove compartment. I wandered down each aisle and took stock of what was there, throwing a random fruit or veggie in my crate.

  After Papa had cleared both plots of land, he invested in an irrigation system for the garden, a maze of hoses along the dirt. Near the lettuce, I noticed one of the hoses lay severed almost in half.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that a person, or people, had been stealing from the garden. I dropped my notebook and pen and crouched next to the hose, flicking the frayed rubber with my index finger as I surveyed the damage. An animal must’ve chewed it.

  I stood back up and dusted my hands off on my jeans. Then I bent down, grabbed my notebook and pen, and jotted a note to have someone come out to fix the hose.

  Technically the garden had two street fronts, but only the Iroquois Street side had a swinging entrance in the gate. Not that it mattered. An old-school, waist-high chain-link fence surrounded the entire area, so the lack of entrance gates wouldn’t hinder intruders. Anyone, including children, would be able to climb or hop over the fence.

  The last crop I wanted to check was all the way in the back of the garden, near the opposite street. I’d selected that location for the raised bed of strawberries because I knew how crazy strawberries could grow. I’d planted my very first crop of them in our old backyard when I was five years old. After a preschool project about planting, I’d begged Mom to help me plant strawberries, because they were my favorite fruit.

  About a year later, after being mesmerized by a book about fairies during story time at school, I created a fairy garden amid my treasured strawberries. Mom started me off with two fairies attached to long, thin sticks. Fairy magic zapped through my fingers when I pushed those sticks into the ground among the juicy, red strawberries. A whole world came alive. A secret world that only Mom and I knew about. For my seventh birthday she’d bought me a beautiful, pink, sparkly fairy cottage and a miniature birdbath with a crystal ball sparkling inside.

  A few days after the fire, Mom and Papa brought me and my brothers to see the ruins of our childhood home. They said we needed closure, but at the time it was pure torture. I didn’t want to see my home reduced to a blackened wooden frame, the remains of a Popsicle-stick cabin carelessly discarded into a campfire. Everything was gone. Everything.

  I stood there staring, horrified that the place that had once represented everything had burned to nothing. I wanted to get back in the car and go, until I remembered my garden. Had the fire reached the backyard? My strawberry garden? My fairies?

  I released Mom’s hand and ran to the backyard, ignoring Papa’s cry for me to be careful as I kicked up dust and ashes on my path to the back. But I never ran close to the house, just through the debris scattered across the lawn. When I reached the backyard, I found the garden covered in a thin layer of gray ash but still there. Still alive. Still thriving.

  And hidden among the strawberries, under the gross, grimy film, were my fairies. And their house. And their itsy-bitsy birdbath with its beautiful, shiny crystal ball.

  So I snatched them all up and carried them back to the car. Instead of planting them in our new yard at our new house, I tucked them away in the bottom drawer of my nightstand, among all my socks. Where they stayed until high school.

  Once the garden had been planted, and each type of fruit and vegetable had its place, I dug the forgotten fairies out of my sock drawer and hid them among the new crop of strawberries. Under those vines, the fairies were home.

  I knew exactly where they were, but took the long way around to check out the entire strawberry patch before taking a careful step into the middle and pushing the foliage away. My fairies smiled at me from under the green blanket of leaves and vines. The iridescent paint on their wings shimmered in the sunlight.

  Was it stupid that I continued to check t
he welfare of plastic garden figurines? Maybe. But as the only toys salvaged from the fire that seized every physical memento from my childhood, I didn’t care. Even at nineteen, the fairies brought me a sense of peace.

  “Mission Accomplished,” I said as I stood up. The unmistakable sound of clanging on the chain-link fence made me turn. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large figure in a bright red T-shirt jumping over the fence, from my garden onto the sidewalk.

  I hesitated opening my mouth, which is the smart thing to do before spewing venomous words at someone in Detroit. I’d lived in the city my entire life, and I didn’t live in fear, but I knew how to keep myself safe and what battles to pick. So I crept to the fence slowly and peered over. The intruder hadn’t gone far. He was kneeling with his back to me in front of two little boys. Both boys’ fists overflowed with perfect, plump strawberries.

  The intruder said something I couldn’t hear to the boys and turned his head slightly toward the garden.

  My stomach churned and I grabbed the top of the fence. I swallowed a clump of air and nothing, trying not to throw up.

  I croaked one word to the profile I recognized.

  “Landon?”

  My sight seemed distorted, as if I were looking through the wispy edges of a cloud. Was this entire day a figment of my imagination? A nightmare? I rubbed my eyes, but quickly realized this was real life and I couldn’t wipe life away.

  Upon hearing his name, Landon glanced at me, then back to the boys before cranking his neck toward me again, as if in disbelief. “Gaby? What are you doing in there?”

  “What do you mean what am I doing in here? This is my garden. I just saw you jump the fence. What were you doing in here?”

  “That’s the rich lady whose farm it is. She don’t ever share,” one of the boys said to him.

  “This is your garden?” Landon asked, his eyes scanning the rows of picked produce, rather than meeting mine again.

  “Yes. I told you about it, remember?” He couldn’t have forgotten. It was unfathomable to me. The Harry Potter books he’d given me when I’d told him my prized first editions had been lost in the fire sat proudly on my dresser. A thoughtful, treasured gift from him after I’d revealed my own family’s biggest Detroit tragedy.

  Landon finally looked me in the eye. “I didn’t—” he began.

  “Didn’t what, Landon?” I interjected. I squeezed my eyes shut and paused. I had to stave off the tears and keep a strong voice right now, even though I wanted to sink down and army-crawl under the empty vines where the stolen strawberries once hung. I opened my eyes but clenched my fists at my side, the need to squeeze something in anger still present. “Didn’t know? Didn’t steal?”

  The taller of the two boys leaned into Landon and said, “Old girl is maaad.”

  Landon, still on his knees, glanced at the boy and put a shush finger over his lips. Then he stood up and took a step toward me. “It’s not like that, Gaby.”

  I took a step back. Toward my garden, toward my car, toward my old world. The world where Landon was just a crush, not a real person with the power to help—or hurt.

  Out of nervous habit, I pressed each of my knuckles with the pad of my thumb. I heard the pops and crunches on the first go-round, but kept up my methodical squeezing to calm myself. Or maybe I was directing the pain somewhere other than my heart. I wasn’t sure.

  “Why would you steal from us? From me?” I yelled. Confrontation was becoming easier for me, which made me sad. I didn’t like this side of myself. But I couldn’t back down, either, because Landon taught me to be strong.

  “I didn’t know this was your garden,” he explained.

  I laughed, a hollow, sad chuckle. “Okay, why would you steal from anyone’s garden? This isn’t a rich community.”

  “I was trying to teach them not to steal.”

  “By stealing?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You have the fucking strawberries in your hand! I saw you jump over the fence!”

  “Oh my god, just listen for a minute.” Landon’s voice went from relaxed and patient to an annoyed growl.

  “How are you going to justify this, Landon? Because you’re such a good person from such a good family?”

  “No, I—”

  “Or the old, I play hockey so I’m above the law? Is that the excuse? Because you’re a big fish in a small sea right now, Landon. I doubt anyone outside of Metro Detroit would even recognize you.”

  “You’re not even making sense right now. You’re acting crazy.”

  “Crazy? I’m crazy?” He’d just pressed my trigger word. “Yeah, it’s totally crazy that I started a farm where my house once stood and have given the harvests to the local soup kitchen for the last four years. That’s totally crazy.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it. So don’t give me the sob story. You won’t even stop to listen to me.”

  “Why don’t you listen to me this time? I’m so damn sick of listening to everyone else. And doing what everyone tells me is best for me. How I should feel. How I should act. What I should do. I’m so over that bullshit.” I pointed a finger at him. “You’re the one who taught me to stand up for myself—right, Landon? But you just want to be the next guy who gets to have his way and tell me what to do. You feel invisible in your own family so you went after me, quiet little Gaby who wouldn’t stand up to anyone. Guess your plan backfired.”

  “That’s fucking bullshit. I think you know me by now to know—”

  “You’re right, Landon,” I interrupted, on a roll with my insults and throwing all common sense and compassion out the window. “I do know you by now. The man who never had to work for anything in his life steals from someone’s garden when he could easily buy the food.”

  Landon staggered back as if I’d landed a hook to his cheek or a jab to his gut.

  “You’re right, Gaby, I’ve never had to work for anything my whole life—including girls. This relationship just became too much work for me.”

  The last few months flashed before my eyes just as Landon turned around and walked away.

  I stood, shaking with rage, in front of the garden I created to be a symbol of resilience and perseverance after tragedy.

  Instead of directing my suppressed anger at Papa, Joey, or Jared Mitchell—I threw it all at Landon. Like the house that formerly occupied the land of the garden behind me, my relationship with Landon took months to build, and less than five minutes to go down in flames.

  Chapter 22

  “He’s a guy, Gaby. You have him on this invisible pedestal, but he’s just a guy,” Michelle reminded me.

  My best friend catapulted herself into sainthood for driving in from Chicago just to hang out with me this weekend. I didn’t even have to ask. I sent a text telling her Landon and I broke up and she jumped in her car. True friendship is worth a million relationships.

  “He gave me confidence, ya know? When I was with him, a different person came out. The best me. The person you know me to be, that I can’t be in public for fear of ridicule or mocking. But with Landon by my side, the quiet book-nerd, store-clerk me was cool. And I believed him.”

  “You threw mints at hockey hags. That’s something you and I would talk about doing after the fact. Not something you’d ever do in real life,” Michelle said.

  “Exactly! In what universe would I ever confront anyone, let alone girls who had been talking about me behind my back?”

  “Only in Landon-Land.”

  “Yep.” When I fell back on my bed, I felt a stuffed animal lodged between my shoulder blades and the mattress. I reached under and pulled the fuzzy friend out, then chucked it across the room.

  Michelle reached up with both arms and caught it in midair. “Don’t take it out on Paws.”

  As she turned it over in her hands, I realized it was a replica of the fuzzy stuffed tiger I had thrown at Landon the day of Papa’s heart attack.

  “You do it with all guys.” Michelle stopped fli
pping the tiger.

  I turned my head toward her, too exhausted to sit up. “Do what?”

  “Put them on a pedestal. It’s not just you,” she added. “A lot of people do that, whether it’s with celebrities or leaders. We have these ideal images of people, and when we see them as human beings, it deflates what we had them built up as. Maybe you should focus on seeing people for who they are.”

  I nodded. She had a point. I did think of some people as larger than life. Like when I thought Landon could never like me because he was a famous hockey player and I was plain old, never-went-to-college, never-left-her-parents’-house Gaby.

  “Tell me something about Landon that makes him a regular old human being like us,” Michelle said, encouraging the conversation.

  “I don’t want a Landon-bashing ceremony, Michelle.”

  “See! That’s what I’m saying. It’s not bashing. It’s talking. The things that make him human aren’t bad. It’s just life.”

  Part of me wanted to tell Michelle about Landon’s selfish feelings about his brothers, but that would be bashing, because Landon was entitled to feel jealousy just like anyone who had siblings. You can’t deny someone their feelings no matter how much you disagree or don’t understand. And that’s what Michelle was trying to say.

  Plus, Landon had been getting better. He’d been talking to his parents and trying to take some of the pressure off himself by changing his look-at-me-look-at-me-I-need-attention way of life.

  “I get it,” I said after a few minutes of silence. I still wouldn’t throw Landon under the bus.

  Michelle gathered her long, brown hair off her shoulders and flipped it behind her back. “So what happened exactly?” She settled deeper into the zebra-print beanbag on my floor.

  “I went to the garden to see what I could pick to bring to Capuchin’s and Landon was there. Taking the food and handing it out to kids.”

  “Taking the food from your garden?”

  “Yes.” I sat up on my bed.

  “Did you see him take the food?”

  “Uh, yeah. Strawberries. I literally caught him red-handed.”