“Our what? We found this. It’s not like you and I built this ourselves. It’s not a church or a temple; it’s just a shittily maintained rose garden,” Kai says, gesturing around as if shocked I don’t agree. He reaches down, grabs a pair of clippers, and opens the end. He places them at the base of the nearest rosebush and, before I realize he’s serious, slams the handles shut. The blade slices through the plant easily, and it hangs there, held up by its brambles but separated from its roots. “There,” Kai says. “Now it’s not our place anymore; it’s just a dead plant. Better?”
“Kai, I can’t.” I stop and inhale raggedly. “I can’t do this without you.”
“Do what?”
“This,” I say, motioning to nothing and everything, because both are true.
Kai shakes his head at me, almost pityingly, and thrusts the clippers to another rosebush and kills it instantly, as if it’s nothing. Another, and another; he moves around Mora as if he’s orbiting her. The sound of the clippers on the plants, the sliding of the metal against itself—they become louder as Kai snaps the blades with more and more intensity. In the fray, I find Mora again. She’s still and beautiful, while I am a mess of hair and tears clinging to my face. She looks happy.
I turn and run for the door.
CHAPTER SIX
When we were small, Kai and I didn’t know all the tricks of the rose garden.
The thorns snagged our clothes; the uneven floor tripped us. Once we accidentally locked ourselves up there. We were able to signal to Ms. Snyder, who was coming home with her groceries, and she agreed not to tell Grandma Dalia if we’d take out her garbage and change the cat box for six weeks. We made the deal. It was worth it.
We cleaned up the garden as best we could, though, not knowing anything about gardening. Mostly that meant we hid Capri Suns in an old toolbox, swept off the bench, and cleared a path through the overgrown bushes. It took the better part of three weeks, but we treated it like a job, going up there immediately after school and not coming down until Kai had to go to dinner. There was an unspoken rule that neither of us ever went up there alone.
We didn’t know the trick to the door. It’s big, heavy, and metal, and it has one of those mechanisms that makes it automatically shut. One day, I opened the door on the way to get my beanbag chair from downstairs so we had something new to sit on. My fingers were curved around the door frame when I saw it—a bird’s nest, wedged under an awning. Inside were three tiny, perfect blue eggs; I stared. There was something so beautiful about them, nestled together, safe from the wind. I turned my head to Kai, who was just walking up behind me, and opened my mouth to tell him about the nest. I didn’t see the door swinging back. I didn’t realize my fingers were still in the jam.
Kai shoved me, hard—I almost fell down the stairs, and he tumbled after me. I looked up just in time to see the door slam against his ankle with a resounding crunch.
He tried to pretend it didn’t hurt, but eventually, he gave in and cried. It swelled up as if there was a golf ball lodged under his skin, and the spot turned dark purple and green. I helped him limp downstairs to my apartment, where we sat in my room with a bag of frozen peas pressed against his ankle for an hour.
I asked him why he didn’t just yell at me, or pull me toward him, or let me smash my own stupid fingers. He said it was because he didn’t think about it. He just did it.
“And besides,” he said, wincing as I removed the peas to inspect the damage. “It would have broken your fingers.”
“I think it broke your ankle,” I pointed out.
“One ankle. Four fingers. It was the better choice,” he joked, though his face was tense from pain.
He didn’t go to the hospital, and he forced himself to walk on the foot rather than limp in front of his grandmother. If she had found out what happened, she’d take the garden away. She’d put a new lock on the door. She might even tear down our rosebushes. The break eventually healed, though his left foot is still turned a little funny, if you look at it closely.
He said it was worth it.
I feel as if someone has pulled out an organ. One of those that doesn’t seem essential, to the layman—not my heart or my lungs, but rather my pancreas, or my spleen, or my gallbladder. Something that doesn’t seem as if it should matter so much, until it’s gone and your body can’t figure out how to operate and your heart won’t stop beating and just give up already. I sit on my bed, trying to figure out what’s just happened. Trying to figure out how he went from loving me to killing the roses.
I don’t turn on the lights as the sun begins to set. I want to be asleep, because surely, surely when I wake up Kai will be the Kai I love again. And we’ll be together, the way we’re supposed to be, and I won’t be so confused and lost.
“Is this yours?” my mom’s voice calls from the living room. I jump and realize I’m shivering from the cold—how long have I been sitting here? I rise, open my bedroom door, and see her peering down at Grandma Dalia’s cookbook.
“No,” I say. “It’s Kai’s.”
My mom looks up at me and her eyes widen, as if she’s seen something frightening. “God, Ginny, what’s going on?”
“I’m fine,” I say swiftly. I walk over and collect Grandma Dalia’s book. My mom is staring, unsure how to proceed. I head back to my room, eager to get back into the dark cold—
“Are you all right?” my mom asks. I turn in my door frame, a little startled that we’re still talking. “You don’t look all right.”
“Kai and I got into a fight,” I say, shrugging. “It’s fine.” I’m lying.
“Oh,” my mom says. “Well… maybe it’s not the worst thing for the two of you to spend a little time apart—oh, don’t look at me that way, Ginny; I don’t mean it like that. I’m just saying, I married my first boyfriend, and look where it got me—”
“That’s not it,” I say, glowering. I don’t mean to slam my door, but I’m not sorry when I do.
My mouth is in a firm line and my hands are stiff as I open Grandma Dalia’s cookbook on my bed so roughly that I tear the first page a little. I picture her disapproving glare as I begin to flip through the middle section, through her spells, her charms, her beasts. Was that your final plan, Grandma Dalia? Die just as Mora arrives, so Kai ends up with her instead of me? I want to scream at her, even though I know it’s mostly because I can’t scream at Kai.