The Last Wild Flower

010| Unfolding petals

Truth slowly reveals itself,
like the petals of an unfolding flower.
🌷

On a perfect Saturday morning, I'm sitting in bed reading an encyclopedia and eating creamy oatmeal. Lincoln texts to ask what I'm doing, and I respond: Did you know that Newton's law of motion is responsible for the bounce in a basketball? He answers back with a lot of question marks, and I am taking a picture of the page to prove it to him, when Julie bursts into the room her hair dripping water droplets into the wood floors.

"Avery's having a party tonight," she exclaims as if it were the biggest news of the year.

"Aren't you guys in seventh grade?"

"I'm starting eight soon, so practically a grown up."

I roll my eyes at that. "Can you wrap your hair in a towel? Or at least get a mop."

"I can't do that, I watched a video about how towels damage your hair." She crosses the room now, and begins to pass a hand through my clothing rack.

"You want to know what causes your hair to fall out?" She turns to look at me, and I say, "Borrowing your sister's clothes without permission."

Julie tilts her head to the left , and regards me with an impatient expression that reminds me so much of mom. "Really Charlie, can you stop being so selfish for once?"

"Says the girl who won't even let our parents into the room."

"How about we play a game?" Juliet proposes as she takes my polka-dot dress off the rack. "If you answer a question correctly, I won't borrow your clothes ever again. But if you answer it wrong, I wear the dress to Avery's party AND you have to wear something of mine for the rest of the day."

"Alright." I cross my arms, and stare boldly at my baby sister.

"Did you lose your scholarship?"

Out of all the questions that could come out of Julie's mouth, this is the one that I least expected. I would have much rather she ask me about boys or anything remotely embarrasing, but not this. Losing my scholarship had been the most shameful moment of my life.

"Why would you ask me that?" I respond coldly, even though none of it is her fault.

"I saw the letter."

I can only shake my head, and turn to stare at the poster of a Korean boy band.

"Well, what does it mean?" She asks so seriously, that I almost tell her.

"You shouldn't ever go through my stuff."

"That's not an answer, Charlie."

I push off the bed, to a standing position a few feet away from her. We're practically the same height now. When I look at her face, instead of smugness, I see worry. "Congrats, you finally get to play dress-up on me." I mutter dryly.

<><><><><>

An hour later, I'm wearing an orange sundress with a string of fake pearls. Somehow I know that she could have done worse, but decided to go easy on me. Was this her way of apologizing for reading the letter?

I let out a breath. Maybe it'd been too hard on her, but come to think of it, it's not like I'd ever gone through her phone and read her texts.

<><><><><>

I get two messages from Frederick Alderidge. The first one comes in the form of a fiften-hundred dollar deposit to my bank account. As for the second, it's a message informing me that the actor has unexpectedly flown back to L.A.