Violet in Bloom

  “A blessing way?” Violet says.

  “Each guest is supposed to bring a homemade bead, and at the party, all the beads are going to be strung on a necklace.” She rolls her eyes. “Mom Joyce and Mom Abigail were fighting about Mom Joyce’s bead. I was like, ‘You guys! Seriously?’”

  “Why were they fighting about the bead?” Yasaman asks. “Was it ugly?”

  “Um, yes, but it was more cute-ugly than ugly-ugly.” Milla giggles, remembering the wizened lump of clay. “It was all wrinkly like a raisin. Maybe it got too dried up? And then Mom Joyce just had to paint it brown, which I don’t get. She refused to paint it pink or blue . . . but brown?”

  Katie-Rose scrunches her nose. “So what you’re saying—correct me if I’m wrong—is that your mom made a bead the size of a raisin, and then she painted it brown, the color of a raisin. What if the baby tries to eat it? And dies?”

  “It’s not for the baby, it’s for the mom. All the beads are going to go on a ‘labor necklace,’ and at the party, the guests are going to”—Milla concentrates, wanting to get the wording right—“they’re going to honor the unborn baby through singing and spoken blessings.”

  Everyone absorbs this.

  “California is weird,” Violet pronounces.

  “No, this Sara person is weird,” Katie-Rose argues.

  “That’s what Mom Joyce says,” Milla says. “She was all, ‘Did I ask to honor the unborn baby through singing and spoken blessings? No. No, I did not.’ And then something about, ‘Just wait till she has an actual newborn to take care of. Then she’ll be using Huggies, I guarantee you.’”

  “Newborns! Oh!” Katie-Rose yelps. “Max is getting a baby gerbil! Isn’t that so exciting? He’s at the pet store right now!”

  Max is Katie-Rose’s neighbor, and he goes to Rivendell, and he’s a fifth grader, like the flower friends. He’s also Milla’s crush. He also has really fresh breath, which smells like the same kind of toothpaste Milla uses. Colgate, the Great Regular Flavor.

  Normally, the merest mention of Max would make Milla blush and giggle uncontrollably. Today, however, the rest of what Katie-Rose said distracts her so much that she feels faint.

  “A . . . gerbil?” she says.

  “Or maybe he said a hamster. Does anyone know the difference?”

  “Hamsters don’t have tails,” Violet says. “And hamsters are the ones that have those chubby, chubby cheeks.”

  Milla’s stomach turns. She sees a chubby-cheeked hamster in her mind, supersize and larger than a house, and she draws her knees to her chest and hunches over them. “Yasaman, do you still want to know what my biggest fear is?”

  “Um, actually, I was never the one—”

  “Rodents. All rodents, but hamsters in particular, because of those chubby cheeks, and because they have those teeth that come out over their jaws.” She juts her own teeth out and over her bottom lip without consciously intending to. She shudders.

  “Rats are rodents,” Katie-Rose points out. “Are you more freaked out by hamsters than rats?” She doesn’t give Milla time to answer. “I think hamsters are cute. What scares me are chickens.”

  “Chickens?!” Violet says. “My gran-gran has chickens, back in Georgia. Chickens aren’t scary.”

  “Also, Michael Jackson’s ghost,” Katie-Rose continues. She nods. “Yep, chickens and Michael Jackson’s ghost, because that ‘Thriller’ video is disturbing.” She prods Violet with her foot. “What about you?”

  Violet blinks. “Me? Um, what do you mean, what about me?”

  “Stall-ing!” Katie-Rose sings.

  Milla tilts her head. Violet isn’t shifting or fidgeting—in fact, she seems to be keeping her muscles deliberately relaxed—and yet it’s clear she doesn’t like the question.

  “She’s not stalling,” Milla says. She bumps Violet’s shoulder. “She’s just Violet. She’s not afraid of anything, right?”

  Violet gives her a grateful look. It flickers across her face as quick as a moth, and then it’s gone.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Katie-Rose says, unaware of whatever just happened between Milla and Violet, and unimpressed with Violet’s nonresponse. “Yasaman, what are you scared of?”

  Yasaman looks from girl to girl. In a soft voice, she confesses that she’s afraid her house might catch on fire while she’s taking a shower and she’d have to run out naked.

  “Omigoodness,” Milla says, knowing that starting now, this will be one of her fears as well.

  “Now that’s a good one,” Katie-Rose acknowledges. “Wow. Would you have time to grab a towel, at least?”

  Yasaman lifts her shoulders in a way that’s both anxious and cute. “Maybe, but maybe not.”

  The conversation gets loud as everyone discusses the horrifying nature of nakedness, and it’s giggly and fun and makes Milla feel lucky all over again. Lucky to have her flower friends, and lucky to be neither naked, nor in the shower, nor in a house fire. Eeeeee.

  She notices something curious, though. With all the chatter, Violet never does say what she’s afraid of. Milla is probably wrong, but she wonders, briefly, if Violet’s biggest fear might be telling her FFFs what her biggest fear is.

  home, Katie-Rose hears Max’s mom’s SUV pulling into their driveway. Max’s driveway, not Katie-Rose’s. She hops up, runs to her window, and calls, “Max! Did you get your gerbil, or hamster, or whatever? Do you want to bring him over? Milla’s here!”

  “Katie-Rose!” Milla cries, aghast.

  “What? You know you like him!”

  “Omigoodness, please tell me Max didn’t hear that. Please please please say he didn’t hear.”

  “I don’t know,” Katie-Rose says, frowning at the red minivan pulling into her own driveway. “But your mom’s here. Darn.”

  “Thank you, Lord,” Milla says to the heavens, scrambling to her feet and dashing out.

  Violet’s dad shows up right behind Milla’s mom, so she leaves, too. Then it’s just Katie-Rose and Yasaman.

  “Do you want to go see Max’s hamster-slash-gerbil?” Katie-Rose asks Yasaman hopefully.

  “Um, kind of—but my dad’s going to be here any minute,” Yasaman says. “Can I please tell you about my flower power idea?”

  “One sec,” Katie-Rose says. To Max, who is still in his driveway, she hollers, “I’m coming over soon. Keep your pants on, ’kay?”

  Outside, a car honks.

  “Oh, poot. It’s your dad. Why must everyone burst my bubble? Why?!”

  Yasaman sighs. “Fine, I’ll tell you later,” she says, standing and gathering her things.

  Only then does Katie-Rose realize that she might be bursting Yasaman’s bubble. Clutching Yasaman, she says, “No, tell me now. I want to hear your idea, I really do!”

  “You could have fooled me,” Yasaman says.

  “Tell me, or I’ll feel like the worst friend ever.”

  “You’re not the worst friend ever,” she says. She looks at Katie-Rose with fond exasperation. “I’ll email you, okay? Or—I know! I’ll write a blog about it.”

  “And post it to LuvYaBunches.com?”

  Yasaman makes a face that says, Where else? Then she scoots out of the house before her father has to honk again.

  So technically, everything got worked out, but Katie-Rose still feels guilty as she walks over to Max’s. She should have let Yasaman tell her about her flower power plan, even though, personally, Katie-Rose thinks she and her FFFs have already used their flower power for the greater good, simply by existing. They are the flower power fearsome foursome! Yeah! All Katie-Rose ever wanted was a forever friend, and now she has three. It’s mind-boggling.

  But friends are supposed to let one another talk and not always hog the conversation, which is something Katie-Rose’s mom is always harping on her about. Hmm. Maybe Katie-Rose needs to go to Attention Hogs Anonymous. Maybe she could get pamphlets and a cool AHA T-shirt, which she would totally wear, because she’s all about cool T-shirts.

  She reaches Max??
?s house, but before going any farther, she makes a private vow to do better in the attention-hogging department. There. Then she strides to Max’s door, where she’s greeted by Max before she even has time to knock. He grins and joins her on the stoop, holding a furry, nose-twitching herbil-slash-gamster. Gerbil-slash-hamster. Ag!

  “This is Stewy,” he says proudly. “Here, take him.”

  Katie-Rose sits down and holds Stewy in her lap. “Hi, Stewy.” She pets him. “Is Stewy a hamster or a gerbil?”

  “Hamster. Isn’t he cute?”

  “So cute.” His fur has a reddish tint, and his nose is twitchy, like a rabbit’s. His top teeth do jut out over his jaw, making him look just a little bit hamster-vampireish. His claws are scrabbly on Katie-Rose’s thighs, even through her jeans, and it feels funny. A millisecond later, something else feels funny. Warm funny. Runny funny. Not funny at all, actually.

  “He peed on me!” Katie-Rose squeals, lifting him off her.

  Max laughs. “It’s just hamster pee. But you can give him back if it grosses you out.”

  It does gross her out, but Katie-Rose is stubborn about not being a girly-girl, so she resettles him in her lap. But you better not pee on me again, she tells him telepathically. Peeing on people is yucky and shows bad manners, mister.

  Stewy regards her intently. His eyes are beady and strangely shiny.

  “Um . . . does Stewy know what I’m thinking?” she asks.

  Max tilts his head. His bottlebrush hair is sticking up, as always, but for Max, he looks pretty good. He’s wearing nice jeans with his “I Read Banned Books” shirt, which Milla once complimented. Katie-Rose wonders if Max ran to his room and put it on when she yelled out her window about Milla being there.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “He might, I guess. He is a domesticated animal.”

  “Why would being a domesticated animal mean he could read my mind?”

  “I didn’t say ‘read your mind.’ That would be ESP. I never said Stewy has ESP.”

  “Oka-a-a-y.”

  “It would be cool if he did, though.” Max takes Stewy’s bullet-shaped head in his hands and looks at him. He tries to hold Stewy’s gaze, but Stewy doesn’t cooperate.

  “Pfff,” Max says, releasing him.

  “What’d you say to him? Or rather, what’d you try to say to him?”

  “I gave him a very simple math problem and told him to blink the answer.”

  “Well, Max, that just means Stewy’s bad at math. It doesn’t prove anything one way or another about ESP.”

  Glumly, Max shakes his head.

  “Forget ESP and explain what you were talking about before, about being domesticated,” Katie-Rose says. She thrusts Stewy at Max. “And here, I’m done.”

  Max nestles Stewy against his chest, and Katie-Rose knows that if Milla were here, she would melt. Afterward, Katie-Rose would tease Milla about it, and it would be one more thing gluing the two of them together. Katie-Rose would like that, because there’s a secret no one knows, and it’s that sometimes she worries Milla will decide not to be friends with her anymore. Like, Milla might realize Katie-Rose is too boring, or bossy, or unstylish. Or maybe Katie-Rose will have a booger in her nose and not know it, and Milla will think ew, and that’ll be the end of it.

  Ha ha, you thought you were good enough for someone as cool as Milla? Wrong! Buzzzzzz! You big dummy.

  Earlier, when the FFFs were sharing their biggest fears, Katie-Rose lied. Her biggest fear isn’t Michael Jackson, or Michael Jackson’s ghost, or chickens. Her biggest fear is being alone, like she used to be.

  Beside her, Max strokes Stewy.

  “Are you going to explain about the domesticated animals?” she asks him.

  “Oh, right,” Max says. He dives into an explanation about how in the olden days, when evolution was happening, dogs learned to survive by (a) being cute and (b) learning how to read their masters’ emotions. And not just read them, but care, in their doggy way. Like by wagging their tales when their masters were happy, or resting their heads on their masters’ laps when their masters were sad.

  “That’s why people say that a dog is a man’s best friend,” Max says.

  “What about a woman?” Katie-Rose asks. “Who’s her best friend?”

  “Um, another dog?”

  “Then the saying should be ‘A dog is a human’s best friend,’ Katie-Rose says. Except she doesn’t want a dog to be her best friend, now or when she’s a woman.

  Max shrugs. “Okay.”

  “Is there more about the domesticated-ness, or is that all?”

  “That’s all. Except maybe the same thing happened with other domesticated animals as well. Like cats, and possibly hamsters.”

  “Okay, but Stewy isn’t my pet,” Katie-Rose says. “He’s yours. So I bet he can only tell what you’re thinking.”

  Max holds Stewy away from his body so they can face each other.

  “You’re probably right,” he concedes.

  Of course I’m right, Katie-Rose thinks. I’m always right . . . except when I’m not.

  She stands and stretches. Maybe Yasaman’s posted her blog entry by now.

  “So . . . Milla’s not coming over?” Max says.

  “Milla left a long time ago,” Katie-Rose says. She tilts her head, because while Katie-Rose knows Milla has a crush on Max, she doesn’t know for sure if Max has a crush on her. “Do you like Milla, Max?”

  “Sure I like her.”

  “You know what I mean. Do you like her like her?”

  Max pats Stewy slightly harder than perhaps Stewy wants. Stewy hunkers down.

  “It’s perfectly normal,” Katie-Rose says. She recalls a claim made by another boy in their grade. “Chance says he has seventeen girlfriends, all in different states. If Chance has seventeen girlfriends, you’re allowed to have one.”

  Max keeps patting. Stewy’s head sinks lower and lower.

  “He’s not a nail,” Katie-Rose says. “You don’t have to pound him into the ground.”

  Max stops. “Sorry, Stewy.”

  Stewy stays hunched for a moment, then reinflates. Max and Katie-Rose laugh.

  “But, Max,” Katie-Rose says, remembering what it is she needs to say. She eyes Max sternly.

  “Yeah?”

  “About Milla. She’s my friend first, and your girlfriend second. Got it?”

  Color spreads up from his neck. “She’s not my girlfriend. Jeez.”

  “I’m just saying,” Katie-Rose says. She leaps down his front steps, then checks to make sure nobody’s pulling out of the driveway before returning to her own house. You just can’t be too careful, even in your own neighborhood, because one wrong move and splat. You’re a goner.

  Yasaman isn’t allowed to talk on the phone after eight o’clock, and also how she isn’t allowed to get her ears pierced until she’s twelve. The ear piercing rule doesn’t really bother her, though. Natalia, a girl at school, has gotten her ears pierced three different times now, and each time, the holes have gotten infected, and Natalia had to let them close up so they could heal.

  Yasaman saw Natalia’s earlobes in their infected stage. They were red and puffy, and Yasaman felt sorry for Natalia. Plus Natalia has to wear a ginormous headgear, and Yasaman feels sorry for her about that, too. It’s some sort of newfangled “super” headgear that involves a chin brace and a forehead brace and a halo of wire that circles her whole head. Natalia told Yasaman it’ll fix her lisp “ten thouthand timeth fathter” than an old-fashioned headgear, and Yasaman nodded politely and said, “That’s great, Natalia.”

  But she thought, If I ever have to wear a headgear, please let it be the old-fashioned kind, and please, Allah, let me only have to wear it at night.

  She’d rather have no headgear, of course, just as she’d rather have no phone restrictions. But here’s the thing. While Yasaman isn’t allowed on the phone after eight o’clock, her baba never said anything about blogging.

  She sits in front of her computer and goes
to LuvYaBunches.com, the website she designed exclusively for the four flower friends. It’s got tons of cool features, like video uploading, blog pages, a Plant It Here page for sending out fun invites or group messages, and the Flower Box, a chat room for when all four FFFs are online at the same time.

  “How did you learn how to do that?” Katie-Rose asked when Yasaman first showed her the site.

  “I took a class at the Muslim youth center,” Yasaman answered matter-of-factly. She’s good with computers, just as she’s not so good at group work, or anything that involves standing up in front of a bunch of people and making words come out of her mouth.

  She’s working on that, however. If she wants to make a difference in the world, she has to be willing to take a stand—and that’s where her flower power idea comes in. The idea she wanted to tell her friends about at Katie-Rose’s house, but didn’t, because she was incapable of slapping her hands together and saying, “HEY! PEEPS! LISTEN UP!”

  No big deal. She’ll tell them about it now. She takes a moment to enjoy the delicious anticipation that comes before putting words to paper—or words to screen—and then starts typing.

  reading Yasaman’s blog. Well, “cute” isn’t the right word. Cute is for puppies and kittens and the laughing baby from YouTube that Katie-Rose showed her.

  Katie-Rose also showed her a video of a woman who can pop her eyes totally out of her eye sockets. First the woman is her normal self, and then she concentrates, and her eyeballs pop out. There are toys like that, where you squeeze the toy and its eyes bulge out like gumballs. The woman was a human version of that.

  Katie-Rose is a YouTube-aholic, because making videos is her passion.

  Yasaman’s passion is . . . hmm. How would Milla describe it? Blogging, and computers, but also defending the innocent, like when those boys in Nigar’s class bullied her and called her names. Maybe her passion is to make the world a better place, plain and simple, using whatever means she can?

  As for the Cheezy D’lites, Milla doesn’t have a strong opinion about them. She doesn’t love them, but she eats them when they’re given to her. They are an unnatural shade of orange, however. And yet she must admit that the thought of making Rivendell a Cheezy D’lite Free Zone has honestly never crossed her mind.