If These Wings Could Fly - Kyrie McCauley Page 0,7

bike or her friends that are boys, and everything to do with the other night. When I think of how scared we were, I feel like I could be sick. The combination of bile and the sweetness of roses is overwhelming.

“To support their husbands,” continues Mrs. Stieg, unaware of how close I am to throwing up in her rose beds. “To forgive them. To manage that stress. And to do so privately. Without embarrassing them or causing a fuss. Do you girls understand?”

And this is when quiet, always-thinking Campbell decides to speak up.

“That’s really fucking stupid, Mrs. Stieg.”

She turns on her heel and marches across the road and into our home, slamming the door behind her.

Mrs. Stieg’s mouth is open. She turns to me, and I know she’s waiting for my apology. Or maybe my apologies, plural.

I’m sorry for the noise.

I’m sorry for the disturbance.

I’m sorry for Campbell swearing at you, and I’m sorry I ever knocked on your door for help.

“Thanks for the roses,” I offer instead, and follow Campbell home.

Part of me knows it’s stupid. We’ve made an enemy where we needed a friend. But another part of me knows that Mrs. Stieg was never going to help us. Her generation was taught that appearances mattered most. That being a good wife is somehow better than being happy. Or safe.

Mom puts the yellow roses in a vase on a table at the bottom of the stairs, next to the wilted red ones our dad gave her earlier this week. They smell so strongly as they wither and die that I nearly gag every time I pass them. I smell the roses and think of women let down by other women. Women who are told their obedience is more important than their voice, not by their husbands, but by their mothers, their friends. Women willing to watch each other get hurt for the sake of image and tradition.

After a few days, I can’t take it anymore, and I march the vases out to the trash cans and dump the flowers on top. I want to leave them there so Mrs. Stieg can see them in the garbage, but I don’t. I bury them under a bag, and even the trash is a more welcome smell than the rotting sweetness of those flowers.

Chapter Six

ON MONDAY, WHEN WE WALK PAST Mrs. Stieg’s home to get to our bus stop, something catches my attention. Beyond the crows lining her fence, in the far corner of her garden, another bush has been decimated. Not just broken like the first bush, but pulverized. All that’s left is disturbed dirt and pieces of crimson petals, smashed branches . . . nothing is intact.

When I point it out to Campbell, she shrugs, but there’s something there—something in Cam’s big brown eyes that shine with pride—and I know that if I checked her bike right now, I’d find matching bits of crimson petals on the tires.

I don’t check.

Chapter Seven

SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE I’M STANDING on a precipice, and there’s nothing below to catch my fall.

When I feel like this, I reach for someone else’s words to pull me back. To remind me that the world is bigger than my home. Bigger than Auburn. It’s the best thing I inherited from Mom—her love of words. She loves classic literature and poetry, and every memory of my childhood smells like the stacks of paperbacks she’d stash all over the house. She made books our home in a way our house never was.

But now I can’t stand the classics. She always said they were romantic, but someone always ends up brokenhearted or dead. Or brokenhearted and then dead. As though tragedy is the only ending that has meaning.

These days, I’ll take journalism over literature. I’ll take truth over grief. Leave romance at the door, I’m a newspaper girl.

But I still have to take lit class, and we are learning Tess of the d’Urbervilles, so I’m not done with the tragedies quite yet. I slip into class early, flipping through the chapters we were supposed to review this weekend. When Liam enters the room, we make eye contact, and he nods at me.

I quickly look down at my book.

But when he sits at the back of the room, I can’t help glancing at him. Naturally, Liam sits with the most popular kids, but in AP English it’s a special subset. The very smart populars. They sit with their desk pushed up to their boyfriend or girlfriend, somehow always just at the