Blame The Weeds (gxg)

2

Though I hadn't meant to, I met green eyes at school the next day, and the next, and the few that followed, too. On Friday, I stopped dead in the middle of the hallway traffic, daring Freya to so much as blink in my direction. I'd had enough. Instead, her lips twitched into a smile as she lifted two fingers in a peace sign. Category 2 tornado, she mouthed. I offered her a nice look at a particular finger before shoving my way outside into the mist. I had phone numbers to figure out.

The soft ground was muddy beneath the maple tree, so I threw down my raincoat and sat on it, crossing my legs. Then, blowing out a breath, I opened my notebook to a sketch of Papaver rhoeas, the 428th species of plant I'd catalogued. Red petals, black centre, green stem. The poppy.

Plant has the alkaloid rhoeadine, a mild sedative.

I flipped to a new page and scribbled every phone number I'd associated with the Hoffmanns these past two years—until a thick stack of paper fell onto the ground beside me.

"Reddi wants your head on a stake."

I hummed, erasing a few numbers, then looked up. My least favourite redhead wore jeans and a sky-blue jacket. She pointed to the papers she dropped.

"Lucky you have a friend like me."

"I don't want to read your manifesto, Freya."

"That's our final assignment you missed yesterday."

"Don't want it, don't need it." I wrote the last four digits of the most recent number Frank had given me a year prior: 8273. Maybe that one would spark something in my brain.

"Your hair's a coal-black crow's nest."

"How poetic. And nice touch in the hall. For future reference, the categorial hurricane system doesn't classify tornadoes; the Fujita scale does. Tornadoes are F0 through F5."

"Looks like you've been through all those," she said, and that's when I noticed that something was different. Freya's pinkish skin was dull, her green eyes were dead, and her sleek was haphazardly knotted over one shoulder. I caught myself before daring to care, and lifted my page of scribbled digits instead.

"See this? I'm busy."

"Is it Luke?" Freya asked. "I read the McDonald article. It's all kind of insane, but maybe I can help." She shrugged off her bag and set it on the ground, sitting on top of it, arms up on her knees. "Let me hear it."

"I know you think you're a genius, but you can't help with this," I said. She sighed, pulled a container from her bag, and dug into a heap of cold rice and meat. I set my back against the trunk of the giant maple tree above us—Acer rubrum. Sometimes the creeping branches seemed too close.

"I have to hang out with you so you don't look like a weirdo," Freya explained.

"In ninth grade, you wore a May the Fourth be with you shirt every Tuesday with an Obi-Wan belt," I reminded her. Pink crept up her freckled skin, staining her neck and the tips of her ears. Freya had been a chubby ninth grader who loved baggy sweatpants and would fall asleep on my bedroom floor after an hour of studying. That Freya was easier to handle. But this Freya shook off the embarrassment and pointed to my notebook.

"I heard he's coming back to South Seabrook this afternoon. Two cops came into the bookstore looking for some—"

"Cops?" I sat up straight. "What bookstore? You work at that stupid fancy restaurant."

"Doesn't matter. The cops talked about some kind of police escort because of the press."

"Are you sure it was today?" I asked, blinking fast. She nodded. "What else?"