Page 32 of Poetry of Flowers

Her heart bleeding and ready to be freed.

ChapterNine

MATILDA

When I woke up the next morning, the sun was shining through my window. Kayden’sforget-me-notnecklace sparkled in the sunlight.

After my mother had died, I had thought about asking him to give it back, maybe it would have helped me because it was from her.

But I had given it to him for a reason, and never in my life would I ask him to give it back.

It would break the promise and I believed in bad luck, so our friendship would probably fall apart when if I tried to get it back.

Of course, that’s not how friendship worked, it wasn’t built on a necklace, but I still worried about that sort of thing.

“You should pack your ChapStick,” Kayden reminded me, still laying on my bed. He had his guitar on his knee and plugged the strings to soften the atmosphere in my room.

That Guitar was a normal acoustic guitar, he had two others at home, but this one was his favorite. His brother had gifted it to him for his fourteenth birthday.

It had a dark wooden body with a sound hole round like the moon. The pickguard looked like red marble and had a French proverb carved in beautiful cursive letters.

Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid

Little by little, the bird makes its nest.

It’s a metaphor about perseverance.

Nash knew of his brothers' dream to build a future based on his talent and music; I remembered him asking me what would be a good idea to use for the engraving, and I had come up with the proverb.

“I don’t need it; and that one is empty anyway,” I answered and grabbed another pair of trousers out of my closet to stuff it in my sports bag.

“I don’t want to hear about your dry lips ruining your lipstick, Tillie,” he replied and handed me the ChapStick from my nightstand.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, throwing the empty ChapStick in my bin.

“We stop at target, and I get you a new one,” Kayden said between hums of a new melody he had in his head for around a month now.

He wasn’t good at writing his ideas down straightaway, it was alwaysI don’t need to write it down, it’s in my headbefore he’d forget and get frustrated over it.

Shaking my head, I folded the laundry I had put on yesterday evening. I wanted to take my hoodies with me, I got cold easily and there was no way I was going to freeze my ass off.

“I don’t want your money anymore.”

“Come again? I’m not your sugar daddy, I like buying you stuff because I know those things are a luxury for you.”

I can feel my eyebrow lift, “That’s undoubtedly what a sugar daddy would say.”

Next thing I knew, a pillow hit me right in the head.

“Avril, that’s what a friend would say. Call me asugar daddy,and I will take Blake on our journey instead.”

His body shook with laughter as I stuffed the pillow in my bag.

I sighed, “You spent enough money on me, for once in my life I’m going to be selfish.” I knelt before my nightstand and opened the lowest drawer to pull out a box with the inscription“Don’t.”

It was a note from me to keep me away from my own money. When I was fourteen, I wanted to get those new shoes everyone was suddenly wearing in school, so I took the money I made from working at the movie theater and bought them, wasting hundreds of dollars. In the end, I didn’t have enough money for Remy’s birthday present and felt so bad that I gifted him my shoes instead. I don’t have big feet, so they were only around an inch too big for him. He accepted them with a big grin and wore them every day until they didn’t fit him anymore.

Remy didn’t need much to be happy.

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