Every Rose Has its Thorn

5- black iris

        Somehow we’d made it to the middle of the week; it was Wednesday, and school was, in fact, already over for the day. Per the usual, Ethan and I were meandering on home. I had work again that evening; during the school year, I tended to work Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.

        Ethan and I bickered a bit about classes and homework and whatnot, and soon I was saying goodbye, and soon after that I was walking up the cobblestone path to my own home, saluting the rosebushes that stood as sentries on either side of the front door.

        Our house, like most good houses, had a personality all its own; I called it Oslo, because I thought it suited it accordingly. My father disagreed. He’d always thought it more of a Waldo.

        Speaking of my father, he wasn’t home, as was true to form for your typical Wednesday afternoon. Wednesdays were his days for exploring people’s houses, for begging their familial belongings off them; an antiquities dealer's delight.

        I think I’m the only person in the world who has always enjoyed a good Wednesday afternoon. This is because it meant I had the freedom to explore my own house, to scream at the top of my lungs or dance in the study or slide down the spiral staircase’s bannister. Not that I usually chose to do any of these things; the point was that I could if I really wanted to.

        No, what I usually chose to do on Wednesday afternoons, after dropping my rabbits off in their playroom for a couple hours of frolicking, perhaps even romping, was make my way up to the Tower, which was the study (as opposed to the Dungeon, which was the cellar), the study where my grandfather once drafted his eulogies for the people of the town and where my father once told him he would no longer be attending services.

        But the Tower was a family secret. Barely hidden on the ceiling of my bedroom was a trapdoor that let loose a few rungs of a ladder; this ladder led up to a small tower-like room, hence its name, a room full of windows and bookcases out of place, done in navies and burgundies and an assortment of browns, with a plethora of beanbags accompanied by a a few small wooden tables and stools arranged most obtrusively in the center of the round room. It was my special study space, the Tower. There was no overhead lighting and only one lamp; the sunlight was filtered in through the windows as the day went on, which I preferred. I’ve always preferred lamps to overhead lighting and the sun to lamps.

        The magical aspects of the Tower were 1. my father wasn’t allowed in there and 2. it was a family secret, so no one outside the family knew anything about it, not even Ethan and 3. though the entire house was admittedly brimming with treasures from scalp to toe tips, the Tower's disarray was where I found something new almost every Wednesday, without fail.

        I had both optimistically good and strangely bad feelings about this particular Wednesday, but they turned out to have nothing to do with the Tower and its mysterious contents.

        I found myself musing as I wandered the bookstore that evening. I hadn't spoken to Charlie Parkington since the first day of school; he hadn't approached me, and of course I didn't dare approach him. Not until I knew more.

        "I'm sorry, I don't believe I caught your name other day."

       I whirled around, feeling an uncanny sense of déjà vu as I stared at the mystery that was Charlie Parkington.

        Now that I'd remembered meeting him before, I could see the shadow of that fifteen-year-old version of him within his current presence. He was a bit taller now, with broader shoulders and more of that sturdy muscularity, and was clearly a bit older in the cheekbones and jaw, but that rumpled dark hair, those greyish-green eyes, and endearingly lopsided smile were all the same.