Chapter 3
3
Sonny
Present day
I hold up the sheet of paper I found slipped beneath my door last night toward Carol, my landlord and boss. She hardly glances at it before grabbing a bucket of old flowers and slides it out of the cooler to be brought into the back room.
She clicks her tongue, still avoiding eye contact with me.
“Well . . . ?” I impatiently prod.
“I had no choice, kid. The shop isn’t doing good, and they finally gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Stepping around me, she rushes to stack the other three buckets she’s already moved, then picks them up before heading toward the back.
I follow half a step behind. “You told me you’d never sell to those stick-in-the-ass bureaucrats. Paul would never have wanted you to.”
It’s a low blow, bringing her dead husband into it, but she knows damn-well that I’m right. The couple prattled on for years about how they resisted the investment companies that tried coming in here, offering the world for their priceless piece of downtown Briarwood.
“Paul isn’t here, and neither is the money. I have to do something to get myself out of this hole.”
I slow my steps as we pass the ‘employees only’ sign, forcing myself to lean against the metal work table and relax a little before I say something I shouldn’t. Something worse than calling her out for being a sellout.
As my hand hits the cool material, the edges of my vision blurs before a memory plays out in my mind.
A younger, happier version of Paul and Carol are locked into a tight embrace. The store room is cleaner than I’ve ever seen it in all my years working for them. In fact, it’s practically empty. When they pull away from each other, Paul keeps his hands wrapped around Carol’s arms and smiles down at her.
“Congratulations, my love,” he says, letting his gaze roll around the room.
I recognize their clothing from the photo Carol keeps in her office. It’s the first day they got the keys to the shop.
As quickly as it came, the vision fades out and I’m stuck back in the same spot beside an older, much more miserable Carol.
Ever since my fourteenth birthday, I get these random flashbacks at the oddest times. The first one I experienced, I thought I was losing my mind. We were packing up my parent’s home to sell after they died and I was going through my mom’s vanity table. I picked up a tube of her bright red lipstick, and was instantly transported to what appeared to be a memory of her and my dad leaving on a date. Her belly was swollen and pregnant, and his face had far less worry lines than the last time I saw him.
I thought I was going out of my mind. I don’t know why it happens, and I’ve never told another soul about it. Not even Poppy.
Blinking the rest of the memory away, I take a step from the table to avoid it happening again.
“You’re only giving me a month, though? How long have you known?”
She begins plucking the wilting flowers out of the pots and throwing them onto the table across from me, emptying the buckets into the floor drain as she goes.
“A couple months. I wasn’t sure it would work out.”
A couple months. She’s had no problem collecting my rent and utilizing my desperation for money as an excuse to add hours to my schedule. Hours that forced me to miss more than a few classes at the community college this semester.
“Carol, how the hell am I supposed to find a job and a new apartment in thirty days?”
She shrugs, turning away from me to avoid my stare. “I don’t know, kid. It hasn’t been easy for me, either. But people like us are resilient like that. We’ll both land on our feet.”
Yeah, except she’ll land on hers with a fat check to cash and still have a home to go to at the end of the day.
“You should have told me sooner,” I insist bitterly, tossing the paper onto the table beside me.
I can’t even stand to look at it anymore. I spent most of the night reading and rereading it so many times, I could recite it from memory. By the time I found it lying on my welcome mat, she was long gone and rejected all my calls for the rest of the evening. I woke up this morning positive it had to be some sort of prank she was pulling. The moment I heard her moving around downstairs, I came running to question her.
Carol sighs, bracketing her hands on her hips before she finally faces me for the first time. “Look, I’ll talk you up to anyone who calls—let them know you’re a damn good worker and you’re always on time for rent. This isn’t anything personal. I just had to do what was best for me for once.”
Rolling my neck, I lift my chin toward the ceiling—toward my apartment and everything I own sitting one floor above us. I’ve worked for Carol and Paul at Flower Power since I was fifteen. On my seventeenth birthday, when everything built up with Divina and we finally had the falling out that got me kicked out, they offered me the space upstairs as a place to stay.
Since then, I’ve found a home in this cozy, dumpy little flower shop and a family in its owners that I haven’t had since my parents died. And without a single warning from Carol, she’s ripping it all out from underneath me again. Reminding me that Divina was right all along, and I have absolutely no one in this world who truly has my back—outside of Poppy.
“I have to go pack,” I mumble into the sky, twisting on my heels to head toward the stairway in the back of the building before she can stop me.
P oppy falls onto the couch across from mine, throwing her phone down on the cushion beside her with a frustrated huff. Kicking her legs up onto the coffee table, she tilts her head backward and releases another long sigh.
She’s always had a key to my place to use whenever she needs, and I’ve never turned her away. Although, I’d much rather spend the night wallowing alone.
“How has your day been?” I robotically voice the question she’s begging me to ask without lifting my eyes from my laptop and endless apartment search.
At this point, I won’t be able to afford a place within twenty miles of the community college unless I take on a second or third job—if I can find them. And then there’s the question of whether my scrappy car can make the trip each day.
“Horrible. You?”
“Same.” I don’t bother to elaborate, nor do I ask what went wrong with her day. I know she’ll tell me either way.
“My parents invited me to lunch for another talk,” she begins bitterly, finally earning my full attention. Every time her parents—mostly her mother—arrange these family meetings, Poppy ends up in some new commitment she was adamantly against. “This time, it was to talk about Ravenshurst University.”
Shaking my head, I look back at the screen. “You already told them you aren’t going.”
It’s been a tired, running argument between them since her junior year in high school, when Aunt Divina found the wax-sealed envelope from her alma mater she had left on Poppy’s bed, discarded in the trash. Poppy has only dug her feet in further as the years passed, and I’ve sensed her parents nearing their wits end for a while now.
“Yeah, well you know Divina. Can’t ever lose an argument.”
“True.”
“They threatened to kick me out if I don’t. Which may not even be a bad thing, really. Moving out from under Divina and Graysen’s thumb sounds more like a reward than a punishment, if you ask me.”
She takes the remote from the coffee table and switches on our comfort show.
I want to argue that Uncle Graysen isn’t all that bad, but I know it would be a lie. He’s just as affected and controlled by Divina as anyone else. Worse, probably. He can pretend to be supportive all he wants behind her back, but the moment she expects him to take her side on something, he’s scampering back into her corner.
That’s how I ended up here.
“Believe me, it’s hardly rewarding to be on your own,” I deadpan.
“I envy you.”
Choosing to ignore her ignorance before I completely lose it on her, I shift the focus of our conversation. “Ravenshurst is an Ivy League university. It could be worse.”
Like, she could be homeless and jobless in a month with no place to go and no family safety net to save her.
“Sure, it could. But they don’t even consider the idea that maybe, I don’t want to go to school at all. I want to travel and experience things before I tie myself to a lifelong career I’m going to hate in ten years. And that’s if they allow me to work outside of my grandpa’s business. At what point am I considered enough of an adult to make that decision for myself?”
“If you want to travel anyway, would it be so bad if they kicked you out and forced you to fly a little?”
“No, but you know she won’t accept that. She’ll take away access to all my accounts and starve me into submission.”
Divina would do exactly that. Even if it meant making Poppy suffer, she’d put her ego before her adult daughter’s wants or needs, just to prove that she could. Poppy could handle hard work, but I don’t think she’s as prepared for the real world as she thinks.
After a few moments of somber silence pass, Poppy sucks in a breath. “We should just pull a switch on them. You go to Ravenshurst under my name, and I’ll travel under yours. They don’t care what you do.”
“Thanks.”
“You know what I mean.” Her fingers fidget with a loose string on her shirt, the twirling and untwirling a clear tell that she’s upset. “You’re free! You can do anything you want and no one questions it.”
“That’s not necessarily a good thing,” I interject, rolling my eyes.
I love Poppy, but she’s always romanticized my isolation. Even my grandparents haven’t bothered with so much as a phone call in years. Uncle Graysen and Poppy are the only ones who keep tabs on me, and it’s not as freeing as she tries to make it out to be.
In fact, it’s incredibly lonely.
I suppose we’re each prisoners of our own circumstances.
“You want to go to school. If we let them think it was me going, I could be on the opposite side of the world as them, and they couldn’t do a thing about it.”
“Ravenshurst is legacy admission only. Neither of my parents are legacies. Even if we lied and told your parents you were going, the school would never accept me.”
“Your mom went there,” she points out.
“Yes, and she was expelled her senior year. I doubt that will get me anywhere.”
My mother’s expulsion was front-page news in Nocturne Valley, the small Ravenshurst University town, for months. It was severe enough to have her blackballed from her entire family for the sake of preserving their own perfectly manicured reputations. It’s a topic that would have her blood boiling within seconds of bringing it up. I suspect it had a lot to do with her mental health issues, but no one ever outwardly admitted such a thing.
My father kept the newspapers framed in his office. Whatever happened there, he was proud of her for the part she played. Not proud enough to tell me the truth about it, though.
“Well, it wouldn’t matter. You’d be using my name . . . my mother’s connection.”
I shake my head dismissively. “It would never work, Poppy.”
“Why not?!” She sits forward and stands on her knees on the couch, her mind going a hundred miles a minute.
“Because I’m not you,” I say, a little too loudly, immediately offering an apologetic grimace. My irritation is misplaced, and it’s not fair to take it out on her simply for grasping at straws in a desperate situation.
“So? We’ve taken a lot of the same classes at Briarwood. I copied you for everything, so our GPAs are almost the same.”
I open my mouth to object to that and point out that mine is over an entire half-point higher. Not to mention, I have nearly a semester’s worth of extra courses that I’ve worked my ass off to get stellar grades in. I may have only been able to attend college part time, but I’ve mostly made up for it with summer classes while she was off vacationing on her parent’s dime.
Before I can say it, she holds her hands up and amends, “Okay, not the same, but close enough. This is one of your dream colleges that you’ll never have a shot at otherwise. If you have to retake a course or two, so what? You’ll just do that much better. Plus, everyone always says we could pass as sisters. This could work . . . How couldn’t this work?”
I allow myself a moment to fall into the madness beside her. To imagine a reality where I could attend such a prestigious school without the weight of tuition or bills holding me down. It would be a dream come true, and the perfect solution to my current situation.
But just as quickly as the fantasy appeared in my head, reality chases it away. It’s not possible. Perfect situations don’t exist.
“Poppy, why don’t you just tell your parents what you really want to do?” I ask her gently.
Deflated, she falls back onto the cushions in a pout. “Because they’ll never understand.”
“They’ll have no choice but to understand eventually.”
“I think we have a better shot at having you go to Ravenshurst in my place.”
I snort out a laugh. “So I can earn you a degree while you get to travel the world?”
It was meant as a joke, but Poppy springs forward with a serious expression. “Of course not. We’d get everything cleared up by the end of your time there. With your academic history, I’m positive you’d blow them out of the water and ensure they couldn’t deny you your credits.”
“You’re crazy.”
She tilts her head and blows me a kiss. “At least you love me for it.”
I grab the throw pillow sitting beside me and toss it at her face, sending her into a fit of giggles.
“Hey, maybe if you get kicked out, we can travel together, since I’ll be homeless anyway,” I offer hopelessly.
“What do you mean?”
I explain the conversation I had with Carol, feeling just as dejected now as I did when it happened.
Poppy’s face softens, her brows pulling together in a concerned frown. “You’re always welcome back home, Sonny.”
“Divina would never allow that. Especially with you off at Ravenshurst,” I reply dejectedly.
She bites her lip. “Shit. What are we going to do?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll take a semester off so I can keep my schedule open for any job that wants to hire me. Or maybe you’ll tell your mom to shove her ideals up her ass and we’ll run off into the sunset together.”
Poppy burst out laughing, the somber look marring her face completely gone.
“I don’t feel like wallowing over what we can’t control anymore,” I add with a sad smile.
“You’re right. Let’s take a beat and forget about it for the night. My favorite episode is on, anyway.”