Chapter Five
Nic
I pull into the Home Depot parking lot the day after Kira and I made our plan, still blinking against the sunlight after staring
at my computer all day. I feel like a full-on screen zombie.
Today was my first Saturday shift as the “responsible person in the building in case of unintentional fire,” which meant sitting
around to call 911 in case someone else’s experiment went awry rather than setting fires myself. I passed the time in full
research mode, spending eight and a half straight hours poring over academic papers full of math and chemical formulas, scarfing
leftover pizza with one hand while I made notes with the other.
My eyes may be ready to crawl out of my head, but my brain is in full Happy Science Mode. It felt a little like being back
in my master’s program, and for the first time since returning to Seattle, I actually... missed grad school a bit? I let
myself follow a little tangent in the research today, diving down the rabbit hole of a question that’s been bugging me ever
since I showed Kira that bit of new material. I like my new job okay, but I’d much rather be doing my own research than supervising
someone else’s.
My phone buzzes, and I look down to see Willow’s answer to my earlier texts.
Nic: Need your advice
Nic: Don’t get too excited, but...
Nic: IT INVOLVES *PLANTS*
Nic: I KNOW RIGHT IT’S LIKE YOUR ULTIMATE DREAM
Nic: You free this evening?
Willow: Sorry, doing a thing
Willow: Off the grid tonight
Willow: The ONE TIME you wanna talk about plants, ugh
Nic: You wandering out into the woods?
No reply. Ah, well. As much as I’d love Willow’s expertise here, I’m sure between me, Kira, and our creepy overlord Google,
we can figure this out. When Willow goes all distant and mysterious like this, there’s no getting their attention. They’re
up to something, for sure, but they’ll share it when they’re ready. With Willow, I can at least trust that it’s not a surprise
move to Fiji or something else wildly destructive. They’re far too cautious and methodical for that.
I hope, at least. I’m already unanchored and in danger of capsizing at the next strong breeze. I was really thinking that
returning to Seattle would help me get back on solid footing and rid me of my perpetual out-of-place feeling. I need something
(someone?) to keep me from flying off into the void of my own chaos, and in the past that’s always been Skylar and her family.
Without them...
Well. Anyway.
It’s a standard breezy and cool Seattle evening, and the sunlight peeking through the clouds feels delightful on my skin—a
beautiful pick-me-up after living my life under fluorescents all day. I can never get over just how different Seattle is from
Central Florida, where I grew up. They may be part of the same country, but they couldn’t be more different in terms of either
culture or climate. As much as I occasionally miss the sun here, where it’s always cloudy or misty, I definitely don’t miss Florida’s dog-breath humid air, daily 3:00 p.m. downpours, eighty-plus-degree Christmases, or instant sunburns. The one
thing they do have in common: wildfires. We lost our house to one when I was in elementary school, a few years after my mom
died. It kicked off my obsession with understanding fire right around the same time it kicked off my dad’s new streak of moving
every year and a half.
A steel trap clamps down in my brain at the thought of my dad.
Nope. Not today, Satan.
I take one more slow breath of cool air in through my nose, then head for the doors to the garden department. My phone buzzes
and I grin, fully expecting that Willow caved to their curiosity about the plants... but nope. It’s Skylar’s mom.
Mama Clark: NICOLE WELLS
Mama Clark: When are you coming to see me?
Mama Clark: Skylar tells me you’ve been back in town for a few weeks now.
Mama Clark: Which I had to hear from HER. Not from YOU. You never told ME, your mother who loves you, what day you were arriving.
Mama Clark: I will forgive you, however, if you start attending monthly brunches again.
Yikes. If I didn’t know Mama Clark so well, I’d be crushed by guilt, but reading the texts in her voice, I can hear the gentle
teasing that they’re meant to be. I... will admit that I’ve been avoiding her since I heard about the Fiji thing. In fact,
I’d been planning to do our monthly-ish check-in call the very night Skylar announced her grand plans. I was (understandably,
I think) derailed. Brunch could be a good way to ease back in. Skylar and her mom alternate months: one month, Mama Clark
drives into Seattle to go out to brunch with Skylar, and the next month, Skylar drives out to Ellensburg for the weekend.
I’ve always joined Skylar for both, throughout college and beyond—when I lived here, at least.
Nic: I’m so sorry!
Nic: Things have been super hectic since starting the new job and Skylar announced her plans
Nic: I will be there for brunch this month. Promise. ?
I shove my phone in my back pocket before she can reply, and I scan the garden area for Kira. My hand curls and uncurls around
my car keys in my pocket, a nervous habit I can never seem to kick. Why am I nervous? I know it’s not this whole Skylar scheme—I’ve
made my peace with that. Maybe it would be kinder to just let her do her thing and come home broke in a year, but she’s pulled
me out of my own self-destructive nosedives plenty of times. Without her, I would still be letting my dad drag my entire life
down.
She’s the one who helped me realize in our freshman year—when I came back from winter break completely wrecked—that sometimes
the healthy thing to do is to cut a person off completely. That summer, she brought me home to Mama Clark, and that was the
end of it. I haven’t been back to see my dad since. Every birthday and major holiday is spent with Skylar, her mom, and her
brothers and sister. Baby adult me was totally blindsided by her family’s unconditional acceptance. I was just suddenly...
part of them. A member of the family, expected at gatherings, included in the annual newsletter, teased and scolded like a
sister. It was strange, and I was really weird about it for a while. Now I can’t imagine my life any other way.
I can’t imagine losing them all.
Skylar has to stay, and I feel completely fine about what Kira and I have planned.
Kira.
Maybe that’s where the nerves are coming from. Maybe it’s that this feels weirdly like a date, even though I know it’s not. I’ve only just met Kira, and she’s awesome, but it’s Skylar I want to be with. I’ve tried dating other people, I
really have. But it’s never worked. I’ve never gotten her out of my head. It would be so perfect, you know? Then I’d really be a member of the family. Mama Clark would be so happy seeing us together, I think.
I’m not the best at making friends, but Skylar saw me in our shared freshman-biology-for-science-majors class and attached
herself like a barnacle on day one—a beautiful, brilliant, very talkative barnacle who I fell for in a heartbeat. My long-distance
high school girlfriend could tell immediately, even over the phone, and broke up with me two weeks into the semester. I didn’t
even mind, which probably makes me an asshole, but it wouldn’t be the first thing to do so. Our friend group came together
quickly after that—Marco and Willow (in our lab section for that biology class), Ian (shared a child psychology class with
Skylar), and Grace (at the second Queer Student Alliance meeting of the second semester; funny, since she’s one of the straight
ones). A few others drifted in and out over the years, but our core group has persisted. Skylar gave me a friend family, then
adopted me into her actual family. How can I just get over that?
It killed me to move away from them all for grad school, but I had to get some space. Skylar had a ton of girlfriends throughout
college, but it was way different when we were living together after graduation, while Skylar was in grad school and I was
working as a lab grunt, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my dual chemistry/materials science degrees. Suddenly,
I couldn’t get away from her and her girlfriends, our paper-thin walls, and the perpetual reassurances that “oh, no, we’re
best friends, it’s not like that, don’t be jealous, she’s like my sister.” I should have lived with Willow instead, but stupid
me thought that maybe, if we lived together, Skylar would see how good we could be if we shared more than an apartment.
And then things started to shift. We were on the edge of something, I thought. She broke up with her girlfriend. And just
when I got up the courage to make a move...
She started dating someone else.
I left. I tried to get over her. I kept in touch, of course. She’s still my best friend. My family. But it has to mean something that even after two years away, I still want her, right? And now that I’m back, it’s all poised to fall apart.
Unless Kira and I can stop Skylar and save the day. This is some straight-up superhero shit.
I find Kira standing by a long, low table packed with greenery and potted flowers in full bloom, chatting with a sales associate
who practically has hearts popping out of her eye sockets. I frown. No distractions, Kira—we’re on a mission. I slide up a
bit too close beside her and shoot a sugary smile at the saleswoman, then beam some apologetic thoughts at Kira. Hate to run
cliterference here, but we have to focus on the goal at hand.
“Hey, Kira!” I say, forcing my voice high and chipper. “Where are we at?”
She smiles and steps back to include me in the conversation. “I was just talking to Mel here about challenging houseplants.
There is a whole lot more to it than I thought.”
Mel nods with a polite customer service smile and pulls a few dead blossoms from a sad-looking marigold. “I was saying that
lots of plants are difficult to take care of, just because they’re fussy or whatever, but the real challenge will come in
making all your plants happy in the same environment without getting lazy.”
I snort, then cover my mouth, because I’m not trying to be a jerk here. Skylar isn’t lazy by any stretch of the imagination.
You don’t end up with two successful careers and a PhD by being lazy. But when it comes to detailed housekeeping... well,
I’ve found underwear in her fridge and apples in her medicine cabinet before, and though I guess the latter makes a certain
kind of sense, I could do without a lacy thong on my eggs. I can’t believe I actually thought that might be a hint . I’m hopeless.
Kira hands me a spindly miniature bush with pink buds dotting its branches. An African violet, according to the tag.
“Get this,” she says with an evil gleam in her eye. “This one can’t stand having any water on its leaves! You gotta water
from the bottom or keep it in a special pot, and it has to get indirect, filtered light.”
Mel picks up a droopy fern with long green arms flopping over the side of the pot. “This one wants humidity, and it’s gotta
be warm, and with the right kind of light, or it gets really pissy and starts dropping leaves all over the place.”
“And it gets better,” Kira says, motioning me over to the next table down and pointing to a bunch of little succulents. “These
ones, right?”
Mel nods her approval, and Kira picks up a pot with several adorable little spikey plants nestled around a larger version
of the same plant. The label reads Hens and Chicks. What?
Kira grins. “This one is adapted to survive in super shitty soil with barely any water. You can totally neglect it and it’ll
live forever.”
Surely there’s a catch here. “But...?”
“But, if you water it, it’ll die,” Kira says, walking two of them back to her cart.
Mel laughs. “I mean, it’s not that dramatic, but yeah, if the soil isn’t really well drained, and you water them more than like... once a week at most, it
won’t be happy.”
Kira turns to me and gestures expansively to encompass the entire garden section. “Well? You ready?
I rub my hands together, cartoon villain–style. Skylar is guaranteed to massacre these plants in a week, tops. Farmer Skylar: foiled.
“Hell yeah,” I say. “Let’s get some death plants. What else have you got?”
Mel loads us up with two carts full of plants, including peacock plants (must be misted regularly and watered with distilled
water), miniature roses (require their own growing light and a fan for air circulation), and Venus flytraps (must be fed live
insects regularly—gross). Kira and I cackle all the while, and Mel is kind enough to find us a coupon that will knock twenty
percent off the whole total.
This is a hell of an expensive prank, but I keep reminding myself it’s for a good cause. My new steady adult job paycheck
may as well go to something worthwhile, even if that job is a one-year contract that’s likely to get axed if they lose funding.
It’s steady for now . And on the off chance Skylar manages to keep all the plants alive and leaves us anyway, the plants can move in with me or
Kira. Who knows? Maybe I have a heretofore undiscovered green thumb? I can’t become a cat lady, because allergies , so maybe I’ll just fill my apartment with plants and candles until I inevitably die by lighting a plant on fire.
Kira and I pay and load the whole mess into the back seat of Kira’s car, which she cheerfully calls the Toyonda Civry. It’s
a Frankenstein’s monster of a car, a small black vehicle with a right front fender in a muted gold color, a hood in bright
silver, and a left rear fender in blue. The badges on the back are confusing as heck—there’s both a Toyota and a Honda logo,
and someone spliced together the badges for a Civic and a Camry so it reads Civry in two very different fonts. Kira insists
on being the pack mule for this errand since, in her own words, “Toyonda is a piece of hot crusty garbage ready to die any
day now, so what’s a little dirt?”
I am two hundred percent okay with this arrangement. I may be a mess both physically and spiritually, but my car is the one
thing in my life I’m fussy about. She’s ten years old, bought used with eighty thousand miles on her, but she’s mine . My dad may as well live on another astral plane, but my last car was technically half-funded by him, and I couldn’t stand
the constant reminder, that vague connection. As soon as I could afford it, I traded that generic early 2000s fuel-efficient
box on wheels for Stella—a reasonably priced but fun-to-drive manual transmission Mazda3. I love her, and I’m pretty sure
we’ll be together forever. Another benefit to being with Skylar—she already knows that any relationship with me is necessarily
a poly arrangement between me, her, and my car. I’m glad that Kira appreciates my sweet Stella and respects her exalted position
in my life. A position that definitely does not , under any circumstance, involve dirt on her nearly spotless seats.
We leave Stella in the Home Depot parking lot and head for Skylar’s, chatting all the while about our next move after this
one. I’m not naive—I know that this one scheme won’t convince Skylar of the error of her ways. It’ll be a cumulative effect.
This is the first step, though, and I can’t wait .
We arrive, and Plant Strike 2025 commences. Kira and I load our arms up with as many potted plants as we can carry, biting
our lips to keep from cracking up as we pile them outside Skylar’s door. Once they’re all there, Kira produces a spare key
to Skylar’s apartment. The lock clicks open, and we pass the plants inside like we’re in a bucket line, putting out the fire
that is Skylar’s life. We pile them on her coffee table, every windowsill, her bedside table, and even a few in the bathtub.
I’m going back for the last zebra plant when I turn out into the hallway and walk straight into Skylar, who’s standing there
with the plant in her arms, gazing at it like it’s a newborn puppy.
Shit.
“Oh, hi, Skylar!” I chirp, sounding totally unlike myself. Inside the apartment, there’s a loud THUNK. Guess Kira heard me.
“Uh, what are you doing home so early?”
She raises an eyebrow at me. “They were having technical issues at the radio station today, so my show got canceled for the
afternoon. But really, that’s the question we’re going with?”
She weaves around me and ducks inside the doorway before I can formulate a response, and Kira squeaks as Skylar catches her
climbing down from the back of the couch, where she was hanging a planter from the curtain rod.
“Well,” Skylar says. “Isn’t this a surprise? It... is...”
I hold my breath, meeting Kira’s eyes for a terrified second.
“... beautiful in here!” Skylar finishes with an excited clap. “It feels like Fiji!”
“Yes, totally, that was the goal!” Kira says. “We thought they might help you...”
“...adjust to your future home!” I cut in and finish. “And to your new farmerly lifestyle!”
Kira jumps the rest of the way to the ground and drifts to my side, her shoulders tense. “Oh! And we also thought they could
be party decor and favors, you know? At the end of the summer, you can give them away to your party guests, since you can’t
take them with you.”
Wow, yeah, good thinking on your feet, Kira. Though it would have been better if you’d sounded less like the idea had just
occurred to you this very second . I force a smile and back her up.
“Yeah, absolutely! I know you’re going to take great care of them,” I babble. What happens if you water a plant with vodka,
I wonder? “We just wanted to... show our support. For your decision. Which is... a smart one. Yeah.”
Okay, so I have no room to criticize in the whole thinking-on-your-feet department. It’s fine, though, because Skylar lights
up at my words, her eyes doing that crinkle-smile that I love. She puts her plant down, steps forward, and smooshes my face
between her palms, then does the same for Kira.
“I just love you two so much ,” she says, wrapping us both in a joint hug. “Your support means the world to me. And these plants are a genius idea! You’re
so right, they’ll be the perfect decor for the party. Whiiich, I can not wait to tell you all about my plans .”
She actually waggles her eyebrows like a cartoon villain. I feel like I should be very concerned. Mostly, I just want to kiss
her right between those eyebrows. Good to know my feelings haven’t faded at all in the last two years. I almost wish they had. It would have saved me several totally tragic dates while I was away. All the
more reason to stay totally committed to the mission. No distractions.
My eyes drift to Kira, to the long line of her neck and the snug fit of her jeans over her hips, the way her lips curve as
she laughs at whatever Skylar is saying. Was there ever anything between the two of them? Groups of queer women can be a little
messy—everyone’s hooked up with everyone else at least once—but our group has never been like that. At least, not to the usual
degree. Grace and Ian hooked up once, which feels like it shouldn’t count, and Willow and I had a one-time pity party. That’s
it as far as I know. But Kira and Skylar?
God, they’d be gorgeous together. They contrast in every way—hair, height, body type, temperament—and the differences would
only accentuate each other’s beauty. I glaze over for a long moment, a daydream unspooling: Kira’s long, probably freckled
legs wrapped around Skylar’s pale shoulders, bare breasts rising and falling with every gasping breath, Skylar’s tongue venturing
down, teasing at—
“Nic, you okay?” Kira asks, brow furrowed with concern. “You look a little flushed.”
I snap back to reality, my cheeks totally on fire. Skylar is biting her lip to suppress a laugh, and I would like to open
the nearest window and fly into the sun now, please and thanks. How obvious can I be? Though... maybe this isn’t totally
a bad thing. Maybe Skylar should know how much I want her. If the end result could be us together, then...
I flick my eyes back to Kira and force myself to meet her gaze. “Just zoned out for a minute, sorry.”
She hums an acknowledgment and studies me, her eyes drifting from my reddened cheeks to my forehead to my... lips? Like
she’s trying to figure me out. Skylar, never one to abide a silence, breaks the spell with a proclamation.
“Dinner!” she declares, snatching up her keys and heading back out the door. “The oyster place, my treat, as thanks for all
these gorgeous plants. Plus, I have so much to tell you about my plans for the party. In? Yes? Great, let’s go, I’m driving.”
She marches straight out the door without us, expecting us to follow and lock up behind her, I assume. I look at Kira and
shrug.
“Mission accomplished, I guess?”
“Maybe?” she replies with a shrug of her own.
“TBD.” I grab her by the hand to drag her outside as she stares, puzzled, at the plants we leave in our wake. I get it. Skylar’s
reactions can never be predicted. I honestly can’t tell what she thinks of this whole thing, or whether she’s on to our scheme.
What I do know is that Skylar will leave for dinner without us if we don’t catch up.
It takes me a full minute to remember to drop Kira’s hand.