“Dad, how can I get a boy to like me?”
It was June. The sun was hanging high in the sky and small waves of heat emanated from the path Rachel Jones was walking on. The grass alongside her, wet from the sprinklers that spray periodically, grew tall and green and healthy. A single flower grew nearby, and she knelt down to pick it up. It was pink with four petals.
“You know, I could do the whole ‘he loves me, he loves me not; game with this glower, but it’s so pretty. Why would I waste it on something stupid like that?”
She said it more to herself than anyone. Who would hear her anyway? And even if someone did hear, why would they are? It was just a simple thought from a thirteen year old girl, and nothing more.
“There’s this boy in my math class, and I really like him. He has these brilliant blue eyes and totally gorgeous wavy hair and I absolutely melt inside whenever I see him. I really want him to like me, Daddy, I really do. But how?”
There were flowers scattered everywhere—lying on the ground, sitting propped up next to stones, falling from the trees above her. But she only chose flowers that grew wildly beside the path. It was cheating in her mind if she took any other flower. It was like taking credit for something she never did in the first place.
“I know what you’re going to say, Dad. You’re going to say that there’s more to a person than just the color of their eyes. You’re going to say that there’s only one thing a boy my age wants. I know you’re going to say that, Daddy, so don’t waste your breath on it now.”
She passed under a huge weeping willow and the ground beneath her feet turned cold. How appropriate, she thought as the leaves fell over her head, enveloping her in shadows. A log was visible just a few dozen yards away, lying on its side. She was almost there.
“But James is different. He’s nice to me, Daddy. He listens to me. He cares about me. At least, it seems like he does. But he’s not… he’s not like other boys. He’s different somehow. I can’t explain how, but he’s different.”
Another flower grew lose by, and she retrieved it from the clutches of the ground it grew from. Her fingers were covered in sticky chlorophyll from the broken stems of each of the flowers that she held in her hands. She removed a hair elastic from around her wrist and, with just a few swift movements, expertly tied it around them. Her father still would not speak a word.
“Sometimes,” she said, stepping off of the path, “I wish you would talk to me, Daddy. No, not sometimes. All the time.”
A sigh escaped from the girl’s worn-out lungs. She stopped walking and knelt to the ground.
“Has it really been three years, Daddy?” she asked the dirt below her.
She gently lay the flowers down, and she reached out to finger the letters engraved in the headstone before her.
She was in a cemetery. Her father was dead.
THE END.
