If These Wings Could Fly - Kyrie McCauley Page 0,6

garden on the far side of my house. Your sister and her boys rode through it yesterday and ruined my Mister Lincolns.”

Her boys. Campbell’s bike-riding friends happen to be mostly boys. Mrs. Stieg likes to strongly imply her disapproval.

“Mister Lincoln?” I repeat.

“My roses. They destroyed a patch of roses.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Mrs. Stieg. That doesn’t sound like Cammy.”

Yes it does.

“I didn’t think so, dear. It’s those boys she spends her afternoons with. Shouldn’t a girl her age have girlfriends?”

“I think a girl her age should just have friends, actually.”

My rebuttal earns a stern look.

“I’m sorry for the flowers. Can we help fix them? I’ll bring Campbell over first thing tomorrow, and we will clean up any mess.”

Mrs. Stieg considers the peace offering, which I’m still not sure she deserves after the other night. I try to forgive it. Maybe she wasn’t sure what she heard. Maybe she was scared.

“Very well. Seven a.m. You girls should bring some gloves.”

We arrive at 7:15 the next day, holding gardening gloves we dug out of the garage and large coffee tumblers. Campbell isn’t usually a coffee drinker, but an early Saturday playing with thorns warrants some caffeine.

When I confronted her about the garden mishap last night, she said it was an accident. Her friends biked home with her, and they were all going down the hill too fast to stop, so they crashed into a flower bush. She tugged up her shorts, showing me the thorn scrapes.

“Why would I bike into thorns on purpose, Leighton. It hurt.”

I relented, unconvinced. Campbell was out on the roof when I went for help. She would have seen Mrs. Stieg’s light turn on and then off again. If any thirteen-year-old in the world believed in vigilante justice, it would be Campbell Grace.

Whether the damage was done on purpose or not, we’ll be spending the morning cleaning it up. We get our instructions from Mrs. Stieg and dive into the scramble of branches and wrecked flowers.

“You guys really demolished this thing,” I say, tugging on a stubborn piece. Mrs. Stieg wants us to remove all the broken branches, and then she will see if the thing is salvageable. If it isn’t, we owe her a bush. “Did you just run through it once?”

Campbell doesn’t hear me—or at least, she pretends not to. She has her arms buried in the bush, and there are little lines of blood where the thorns have already gotten her.

“Why don’t you go home and put on long sleeves? You’re going to get shredded up.”

“I’m fine.”

“Whatever,” I snap back. This is her mess. I’m just trying to help.

We work silently from then on, sweat and blood mixing on our arms and legs where the thorns nick us.

Why roses? Of all the flowers someone could obsess over, why choose one with a built-in defense system? It would be like trying to domesticate a garden full of Campbells—a constant battle, and one likely to draw blood.

We finally finish pulling apart the broken bush around nine and go get Mrs. Stieg for her evaluation. The bush does not look good. It is missing huge patches of branches. But she studies what is left, pushing and pulling at it. Testing its roots.

“It’ll live,” she says. “Though we’ll have to wait and see how rough it looks next bloom.”

Next bloom, meaning next year. I’ll take the reprieve.

“Great, thank you, Mrs. Stieg.”

I elbow Campbell.

“Thanks,” she says, halfheartedly.

“And here,” Mrs. Stieg says. “Take these home for your sweet mother.” She hands me a freshly gathered bouquet of roses, from a non-trampled bush. They are bright yellow, and they smell even stronger than the Mister Lincolns did.

“Young lady,” Mrs. Stieg says, facing Campbell. “Running wild around this town isn’t going to get you very far. You have to respect your elders.”

“I do,” Campbell says, but I grind my teeth at the statement. Not all elders deserve our respect.

“Did you girls know I was married for forty years?” Mrs. Stieg asks. I feel Campbell straighten beside me. It’s subtle, but there’s a tension there that wasn’t a moment ago, and it’s echoed in my own body.

“That’s great,” I mutter.

“My husband wasn’t perfect, you know,” Mrs. Stieg presses on. “Men aren’t perfect. But it is their job to provide for their families, and that is stressful for them. Do you know what a woman’s job is?”

Campbell’s hands clench at her waist, and I fold my arms over my chest.

We know where this is going, and it has nothing to do with the roses or Cammy’s