Page 19 of Petals and Plot Twists
Peter
I’min my bedroom adding clothes to a duffel bag when a series of frantic knocks sound at my door. The knocking is insistent enough that I half wonder if the building is on fire, and this is my warning to evacuate. But when I leave the now-full duffel bag in the kitchen and swing open my front door, I only find Sophie, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, looking more alive and beautiful than ever.
“You okay?” I say as she barrels into the apartment. “Who’s chasing you?”
Sophie’s smile stretches wide as she puts her hands on my shoulders and gives me a little shake. “No chasing. Just very exciting news.”
My eyebrows lift, even as my heart pounds a little faster for how close she’s standing. I haven’t seen Sophie since I ran into her on my way to the office. That was only two days ago, which isn’t that long. When we’re both busy, we’ll often go twice that or longer without seeing each other in person. But with how much I’ve been thinking about her lately, two days felt like ten, so it feels good to see her, to have her here. “Let me hear it, then,” I say.
Sophie grins. “Okay, I need you to brace yourself, because what I’m about to tell you isn’t going to make any sense.”
“Are we talking Willa teleporting into Archer’s closet kind of stuff? Or more like…you ran into your high school boyfriend, and he pretended like he didn’t know you kind of stuff?”
She scrunches her brow. “Maybe somewhere in the middle?”
“Okay. Shoot.”
She grins. “I figured it out.”
A pulse of trepidation pushes through me.
She figured out what, exactly? That I like her? That through all these years of friendship, I’ve always been low-key obsessed with her?
It’s a stupid thought. Putting my arm around her was a bold movefor me,but Sophie hugs people she meets in line at the grocery store. She wouldn’t read into something like that without any other evidence.
Sophie gives my shoulders a squeeze, forcing me to focus on the here and now instead of my own spiraling worries. “Do you remember the mystery flower I found in my garden?” she asks.
Relief washes over me, but I feel a tinge of disappointment mixed in, too. It would definitely make things easier on me if Sophie reallyhadfigured out how I feel. “The love flower?” I ask. “The one you were sketching on your iPad? Did you figure out what it is?”
“Sort of?” she says, eyes sparkling. “I still have no idea what it’s called, but Ididfigure out what makes it bloom.” Her hands fall away, and I immediately miss the warmth of her standing so close, but Sophie is clearly too full of energy to stand still. I watch as Sophie moves into my living room and rearranges my throw pillows, moving one from the chair to the couch, then swapping the ones on the sofa so the colors alternate.
Even just that subtle shift makes the living room look better. Shealwaysmakes everything better.
“I’m on pins and needles, Soph,” I say.
She props her hands on her hips, biting her lip as she takes a deep breath. “The flower reallyisa love flower,” she says. “It blooms in the presence of love.”
I let out a scoff. Because…what?“It does what?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. When two people who are in love stand in its presence, the flower blooms.” She sits, so I move into the living room and join her, sitting down in the armchair perpendicular to the couch.
“Do you remember the Serendipity Springs history room at the downtown library?” she asks. “Where we went to work on our final research papers senior year?”
I nod. “Yeah. Of course I do.” We spent hours in that room—usually alone—talking as much as we were studying. That was the room where Sophie discovered a chart on the inside of my history notebook filled with numbers. She asked me what it was, and I made up something about the number of times I wanted to play through a certain video game before I left for college.
Really, it was a chart counting down the number of days we had before we both left for college—the number of days we had left together.
“I went to the library searching, hoping I might find something on local flora and fauna. That idea didn’t pan out at all, but then the librarian helped me find a book of oral histories,” Sophie says, “published in 1954, and it includes a story from a college student who livedhere,in The Serendipity, while it was still a women’s dorm. She wrote about a flower just like mine. She even included a sketch, and it’s absolutely the same flower. Same leaves, same bloom. It was her theory that the flower blooms in the presence of love.”
“So, are you only going off what you read? Or…”
“No,” Sophie says. “Everything I read totally tracks with what I’ve observed on my own. The flower bloomed once when Willa and Archer were nearby, then again for the Hathaways. After I read the story, I came back to The Serendipity and took Iris and Matteo up on the roof, and sure enough, it bloomed right then and there. I watched it open with my own two eyeballs. And the flower closed up again when they left.”
I resist the urge to reject what Sophie is telling me as fantastical, even ridiculous. But flowers that sense feelings? It’s not quite as outlandish as a teleporting closet, but it’s close.
“Matteo and Iris?” I ask. The names sound familiar, but I don’t think I know them.
She nods. “They live on the third floor. Just started dating.”
