Renata Santos doesn't expect her heart to flutter when she catches a boy stealing flowers out of her backyard. But as she unravels his reputation, she realizes puppy-eyed delinquent Isaac Marshall may just be the sunshine she needs to turn her life...
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T A N S Y
[tanacetum vulgare] ➳ resistance.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Isaac and I adopted a routine.
First, we stopped for Slurpies on the way to the bus stop right after school. I forced Isaac to pay for his own drink, and scowled at him when he offered to pay for mine. After that, we left flowers for his late best friend at the cemetery, and spent an hour or two by Oberon's grave.
In all the time we spent together, hours slid away in a sepia haze. And as nighttime settled in over our heads, Isaac lay down in the grass, and used his fingers to measure the ever-changing distance between two flocks of birds in the sky.
I watched him with unblinking fascination. Unblinking, because I could tell things were going too well. It was possible that disaster was just an eyelash flutter away.
"Hey," Isaac said suddenly, knocking me out of my reverie. "Have you thought about what you're going to do with your flowers?"
Taken aback, I stared at him, trying to envision a timeline during which my flowers were not in full bloom in my backyard. It was only the beginning of June, but I knew some of them would wither away soon. And it would be a shame not to do anything with them before they died.
"I could sell them," I mused. I could've used a little pocket money, and I didn't think it would be too complicated to put a sign up in front of the house, like a garage sale but with flowers instead of household junk.
"You could," Isaac said, though the breeziness in his voice was clearly an attempt to sound blasé that didn't quite work. "But then you'd be letting capitalism into your backyard."
I snorted, pulling my legs into my chest. "Never thought I'd hear that from the mouth of a literal burglar, but okay."I didn't necessarily disagree. "What do you think?"
"We should put your flowers on all the graves." He flipped onto his side, allowing me to see the determined set of his eyebrows. I glanced at the literal hundreds of graves in front of us, and he did the same. "Well, maybe not all of them. We could do a couple at a time."
I definitely hadn't thought of that, though now that he'd said it out loud it seemed like the most obvious thing to do. I remembered the first time Isaac had brought me to the graveyard. It felt like a century ago, but it had only been a few weeks. It was possible that part of the reason I had been so averse to him leaving my flowers here was because I didn't want any part of my garden — and by extension, me — to sink into the earth and become just as dead.
But there was a difference between dying and giving up a small part of my life to commemorate something dead. I was beginning to see it, and I was beginning to realize that I had at some point spent too much time doing the former instead of trying for the latter.
