Page 11

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Rose stared through the coffeepot, lost in the fog of what had happened the night before. She hadn’t gotten drunk, and yet the party came to her only in snapshots, not concrete memories. There was the garden’s haunting beauty. Boys in a pond. A perfect rose in the palm of her hands. And Hart. The way his hand inched closer to hers in the grass. The way a dimple appeared in his cheek when he smiled. And the way he’d made her feel both butterflies and doubt. But the most prevalent feeling that Rose was left with was that she’d been a part of something in that garden. A part of nature—alive—as though she’d sprouted right out of its earth. She didn’t know how else to explain it, except to say that now that she was away from the garden, she felt a lack of something.

She glanced at the inside of her forearm, in search of the golden tattoo, but it was gone, brushed away without her realizing it. And it only added to the uncanny feeling that last night had been a dream.

“You look refreshed.”

Rose blinked and snapped out of her reverie to find her dad in the kitchen, pouring himself a cup.

“Refreshed?”

“Reborn,” Dad added. “Revitalized, replenished!”

He was on an alliteration kick, which only happened when he’d had a good bout of writing. While the job at the hardware store was adequate in the sense that it provided stability and didn’t require much more than sitting behind the counter and ringing people up, Mr. Pauly found it extremely stressful when customers had questions. Questions like, “Do I need a lug wrench for this project?” or “Copper wiring or steel, do ya think?” or “Where are your hammers?” Mr. Pauly was convinced that if he could get another book out—something commercial this time, a propulsive, whodunit caper that involved both a 1940s hardboiled detective and aliens—he’d never have to work behind a counter again.

“The muse came calling last night?” Rose asked.

“Did she ever!” Dad said. “Three thousand words and only half of them bad! This book is going places, Rosie, I can feel it.” He sipped from his mug. “What about you? I heard you coming in early last night when I was pretty sure I would be hearing you sneaking in past curfew.”

“I went to a party at Hemlock Hill.”

“Oh!” Dad said, the word heavy with surprise and curiosity.

“What?”

“No, nothing.” He leaned against the counter and absently poked at its clutter. “I remember when Justin Hargrove would throw his garden parties in high school. I always wondered about them. I say ‘wondered,’ because I never got invited.”

Justin Hargrove. Rose had never put it together, but it made sense that her dad would know about the Hargroves. He was the same generation as Hart’s dad.

“Well, that explains your whole—” Dad gestured vaguely at Rose’s face. “The day after a garden party, all the kids who went always looked like they’d had the time of their lives. Hey, did you find out why they call it Hemlock Hill?”

“A tree.”

“Ah,” Dad said, frowning. “I thought it was after Shakespeare’s preferred poisonous plant. So, what’s the garden like?”

Rose caught her reflection in the opaque brown liquid in the coffeepot, trying to see what her dad saw. But she didn’t look any different. And she couldn’t adequately describe the garden. All she could say in the end was, “I want to go back.”

Her dad nodded, looking altogether like a high school boy who wanted to go there, too.

The only person Rose could really talk to about the party was Lowell, but as she pulled up to his house and saw him waiting for her on the porch, all thoughts of the garden flew out of her mind. She popped a tire onto the curb, knocking over a trash can, but that was the least of her worries.

She left the car door open as she walked up the lawn. “What happened to you?”

Lowell met her halfway, or tried to—he was clearly still getting the hang of going up and down stairs with crutches. Finally, he hobbled over the final stair, his left foot encased in plaster. “Oh, this?” He tapped the tip of one crutch on the hard cast. “It’s such a dumb story.”

“Did Heather try to kill you?”

He snorted, but Rose was only partly kidding.

“No, this happened after I left the garden,” Lowell said. “I was trying to make as little noise as possible when I got back home, but I ended up tripping on the stairs.” He hit the offending steps with a crutch. “The top one’s rickety. My dad’s been putting off fixing it forever. Or was I the one who was supposed to fix it?” He thought about it, shrugged, and continued ambling toward Rose’s car.

Rose swept her gaze from Lowell’s cast up to his face, dopey with the residual smile from last night. Her dad’s words suddenly came to her again. Replenished. Refreshed. For someone who’d just broken his leg, Lowell gave off a healthy glow. And he seemed to be in a great mood. “Let’s get ice cream!” he said.

Lowell spent the ride to town rehashing the harrowing tale of his entire family accompanying him to the ER last night. How everyone had piled into the minivan, with Lowell lying prone across his siblings’ laps, crying in pain because of his broken leg, but also because no one in his family actually believed that he’d just been to a party at Hemlock Hill. He’d tried convincing them, except every detail he relayed about the garden seemed more unrealistic than the last.

“Did you tell them about the grass?” Rose asked.

“Yeah!” Lowell said, his double-scoop mint chocolate chip and cookies and cream cone dripping onto his shirt. “Downright feathery!”

The two of them were sitting on the lawn in the town square, which they both agreed felt like steel wool compared to Hemlock Hill grass. Lowell’s broken leg was stretched out before him, and Rose leaned over it, using a purple Sharpie to transform the boring white cast into a van Gogh–style swirly-lined landscape. Between licks of her vanilla scoop, Rose added the weeping hemlock, the pond, and a starry sky. She drew all her favorite parts of the garden.

Except for the Rose Garden. She’d loved that garden room the most, but her memory of it was tainted by how things had ended there. If Rose was hanging with her girlfriends, they probably would’ve been hounding her for details about what happened between her and Hart. But Lowell was an oblivious boy, happily eating his ice cream, and Rose had to be the one to bring it up. She angled Lowell’s cast to put the finishing touches on the hemlock tree. “So, what’s Hart’s deal?” Rose asked. “Does he bring girls to the garden all the time? Ply them with roses and stuff? Like, is that his thing?”

Lowell glanced at the powder-blue sky, speckled green ice cream running down his knuckles. “He’s not a player, if that’s what you’re asking.”

This was good news. And yet, Rose felt a pit forming in her stomach as she second-guessed all the conclusions she’d jumped to in the Rose Garden the night before. “I just think me and him are really different.” She was trying to convince herself of this fact, and said it out loud in the hope that Lowell would affirm her suspicions.

“Why do you say that?” he asked. “Because he’s rich and you’re poor? Because you’re a New York snob and he’s this rugged outdoorsy nature freak? Or is it because you have pink hair and—let’s be honest—kind of a bold sense of style, and are constantly covered in paint and junk and he looks like he’s been cut out of a J.Crew ad?”

“I’m not a New York snob,” Rose muttered around a mouthful of vanilla. She looked down at her clothes with new eyes. She wore a Charlie Brown shirt, and yes, it was faded, and she’d bought it for a dollar at a flea market, and it was a men’s size medium, and it had dryer holes dotting the short sleeves, and Charlie’s bummed expression matched Rose’s right now, but, “This shirt was a total find.”

Lowell went on talking, ignoring her. “Okay, so you and everyone else think Hart Hargrove is hot or whatever, but he’s more than just a pretty boy.”

“He is?”

“Yeah,” Lowell said. “He’s, like, really into gardening.”

“I know,” Rose said.

“No, I mean like, really into gardening,” Lowell said. “Like, to a disturbing degree. Like, people think I’m a dweeb, but at least I’m not spending all my time alone talking to flowers.”

He was obviously trying to be derisive, but Rose only heard the compliments in his words. She nodded absently, realizing just how sensitive Hart must be to care about flowers so much.

“And did you see how he carried around those pruning shears on his belt?” Lowell asked.

Had Rose noticed the way his gardening holster was slung low on his hips? Yes. Yes she had.

“Hart Hargrove’s a total weirdo!” Lowell said.

“Weirdo,” Rose whispered wistfully. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted at the end of the day? A beautiful weirdo. She wondered if she’d ruined something with Hart before it even got started. Maybe they weren’t as different as she thought.

“Unlike his twin sister,” Lowell said, lapping up what was left of the mint chocolate chip, “who is perfect.”

Rose leaned in, wanting to hear more about the maze, trying to figure out why Lowell had been granted access to it and why she’d been denied. “What happened between you and Heather in the hedge maze?” she asked.

Lowell bit into the melting cookies and cream scoop, taking his time before finally saying, “A gentleman never tells.”

Rose narrowed her eyes. “Lowell.”

“Rose.”

“I leave you with her and you end up with a broken bone—the two things can’t be unrelated.”

“She had nothing to do with this!” he said, lifting his cast an inch off the ground. “Look, if you must know, me and Heather actually had a nice time. We bonded. I told her I’m trying to bulk up—letting her know I’m gonna be, like, totally swole by the time school starts—and she told me she used to be insecure about her looks. I mean, can you believe that? Heather Hargrove: insecure. Oh! And the whole strip show she orchestrated? She picked those guys because of me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I told her Patrick and Mason were the guys who, you know… bullied me in the locker room that one time.”

Rose shook her head, trying to better understand what Lowell was getting at. “So she made them strip? Like, as payback for you?”

Lowell nodded so emphatically that his glasses slipped down his nose. When he pushed them back up, he left a smear of cookies and cream on the corner of the frame. “People will do anything Heather tells them to.”

It seemed that Rose and Lowell had very different reactions to the strange striptease. Either way, she’d never seen him look happier. “Last night was epic,” he said, sighing. “And I have you to thank for it.”

“Me?”

Lowell nodded, his lopsided grin trimmed with ice cream. “Since you got here, my life has gotten exponentially better.”

“You’re only saying that because I got you into the garden party and I give you rides everywhere and I bought you that ice cream.”

“Exactly!”

Rose laughed and shoved his shoulder. “Lowell, come on,” she said. “I’m just being a friend.”

“Oh, no, yeah, totally.” He bit into the rim of his cone, but a look came over him like Rose’s words were just starting to hit him. “Guess I never really had one of those.” He swallowed. “Like, a best one, I mean.”

A funny feeling swelled in Rose’s chest, like her heart was both breaking and coming together all at once.

“This year’s gonna be awesome,” Lowell said. “Maybe I’ll even join a team.”

Rose snorted. “You’re kinda small, dude.”

He shoved her arm but ended up laughing so hard his glasses fell clean off his face.