Before you go... //h.s

Iris

Ash stomped through from the back room, a scowl on his face and something that looked a lot like a can of paint in his hand.

'We need to redecorate,' he announced grumpily and my brows furrowed, confused.

'You don't look like you want to, so why do it?' I spoke,

'The committee who run central park have told me that Split Bean needs a 'spruce' and since we're right opposite central park apparently they have the rights to do that,' he says, and his venomous tone sounds so wrong on his usually friendly tone that I take a step back. 'and that means closing the café for at least two days to paint it and hiring decorators,' his grumpiness continues, and I pause, a small idea forming, turning itself over in my head as I decide whether it's really a good idea.

Fuck it, I'll just suggest it.

'What if...what if me and my friends paint it overnight...you know so we only have to close for one day and don't have to hire decorators?' I say cautiously, and he scoffs.

'You? A decorator?' but somehow once he'd repeated it, it sounds less ridiculous to him and he stays quiet as he thinks it through.

'Iris fricken' Burrows, you're an absolute life saver!' he announces, then hugs me tightly.

I guess that means we're painting the coffee shop.

Better to have something to do so that I didn't sit in bed staring at the ceiling and overthinking why everyone seemed to hate me. Or at least that's how it felt when I looked at my Instagram.

 

Three days later, Maya and I were covered head to toe in overalls and as we wielded paint brushes. All the tables and chairs had been taken somewhere – where they'd gone, I had no bloody clue – but that wasn't my problem right now. The wooden floor was covered in dust sheets because Ash had sworn to us if we'd got paint on his beautiful, wooden floor he would make sure to kill us himself. The speaker played the lyrics and chords of iris playing over the speakers.

Once upon a time, this song had been my absolute favourite. But then people had started singing it every time I'd told them my name so I'd begun to like it less because people constantly singing it to me had become annoying and fucking embarrassing. But it was still a good song I guess.

And I don't want the world to see me,

Cause I don't think that they'd understand,

When everything's made to be broken,

I just want you to know who I am.

I hadn't listened this song for a while and only now it struck me that I could really relate to this song. Ironic really – a song with my name singing about things I thought about, yet it wasn't written about me.

'Well where the fuck are we supposed to start?' Maya grumped, only now realising the scale of what we had to do. At first, she been excited about the idea but as she understood it was actually going to be a shit load of hard work, the enthusiasm had died down.

'Wherever you want, pick a wall and start painting,' I told her, she just rolled her eyes.

'I'm going to call Ollie, Luke and Callie and see if they can maybe help us.' She muttered, grabbing her phone and stalking outside for a second to get away from the loud lyrics playing from our speaker. I collapsed backwards from my sitting position, so I was splayed backwards like a starfish as I stared at the ceiling of the coffee shop.

It was weird...I'd spent so many hours in this small building, serving coffees, talking, cleaning...but I'd never ever seen it from this angle.

'They're coming!' she announces cheerfully as she re-enters Split Bean.