“You’ve got to break it off.” Melissa’s eyes are black and predatory. She leans in so close to me that I revisit the grapefruit she ate for lunch. “Naomi. You have to break up with him. There’s no other choice. Do it now. Text him.”
“Yeah, don’t break up with him to his face,” Zach advises. “I once dated a surgeon and I drove across state lines before I left a voicemail saying we were breaking up. This is the same shit; Nicholas is right at home with sharp tools. Those tooth-scraper things could be like a scalpel to the jugular if you know what you’re doing. He could turn out to be the Sweeney Todd of dentists.”
I know Zach doesn’t believe a word of what he’s saying, but I get a flicker of slasher-film Nicholas in his white lab coat, eyes glowing red over a hypoallergenic face mask, wielding doll-sized weapons. He’s high on bubble-gum-flavored laughing gas and in the fog of his zombiefied brain all he can remember is that I insulted his tie.
“If you don’t see me tomorrow, it’s because I’m dead,” I say.
Zach reminds me that we don’t work tomorrow, Leon does.
“If you don’t see me Wednesday, it’s because I’m dead.”
“Okay. We’ll wait till Wednesday to call the police, then.”
I chew my fingernails. Fuss with the flowers even though they might be poisonous. They’re so pretty that it’s hard not to. Nicholas is pretty, too. His pretty face will be the last one I see before I drift from this life. I’m only twenty-eight and I’ve barely done or seen anything. I hear his voice, my memory curling its edges into a taunt.You’re barely living, you know.
I’ve got to destroy these murder flowers.
We’re running around like animals escaped from the zoo, trying to figure out how to get them out of the store without touching them. Melissa, Brandy, and I are staunch feminists but today we turn our backs on equality by playing the help-me-I’m-just-a-girl card, and vote Zach to take one for the team.
He sets his mouth in a grim line and risks it all like a trooper. We package his arms in plastic bags, all the way up to the shoulders, and secure them in place with rubber bands. We pull up his collar to cover his nose and mouth.
He runs back and forth from the counter to a burn barrel Mr. Howard keeps out back for getting rid of leaves and twigs, and I think he might be a bit of a pyromaniac when he dumps a whole bottle of lighter fluid over the flowers and throws in a match. He stands there and watches the flames, hypnotized, while Melissa shouts at him that the fumes might be poisonous, too.
I know for sure that he doesn’t believe anything we’re doing here when he ignores her and starts tossing other stuff into the barrel to watch it burn. Old newspapers. A Dr Pepper bottle. Receipts from his jacket pocket. When he starts melting pennies, we give up on him and turn away from the back door.
Brandy and I scrub down the counter and floors with bleach, stopping every now and then to check each other’s pupils and heart rates. It’s too bad I couldn’t keep the flowers. They werearomatic, almost like lotion or perfume. Even the burning smelled sweet before Zach topped it off with garbage.
He tires himself out after an hour and pours water over a smoking hill of debris before nudging it to the other side of the parking lot with a hockey stick. We pass the rest of our shift with games of tic-tac-toe we draw in the sand of a miniature Zen garden. We take a few BuzzFeed quizzes and I find out that if I were a supernatural creature I’d be a poltergeist. Brandy gets phoenix. I retake the quiz a few more times, experimenting with my answers, until I also get phoenix. By the time we clock out, we’ve forgotten about our brush with death.
Then I get a chime from my phone.
Did you not get the flowers?
Nicholas’s text reminds me that he’s the evil villain in my story and I should drive forty-five minutes in either direction to recover from my trauma at a sibling’s house. I purse my lips and reply.
If you’re asking whether I’m alive, the answer is yes. Nice try! I incinerated them.
He texts back right away.
WTF DID YOU ACTUALLY BURN THEM
“Of course,” I huff to nobody, all alone in my car. The vents are still blowing out cold air and I’ve had the heat running for ten minutes. His damned Maserati has heated seats that make you feel like you’re sitting in the devil’s lap.
What else would I do with oleander?
He replies:You didn’t do anything with oleander, seeing as how I gave you jasmine.
I squint at my screen, trying to decide whether I believe him. I didn’t know until recently that Nicholas is a talented actor, so it’s hard telling.
After a break of two minutes, he adds:If it HAD been oleander, burning it would’ve been a really stupid idea. JSYK. Oleander’s toxic.He’s Googled it, too. There’s no way he knew that off the top of his head. Nicholas is fond of researching things and pretending that whatever obscure trivia he unearths is common knowledge. He watchesJeopardy!to show off (and because he’s an eighty-year-old man trapped in the body of a Disney prince), getting a high every time he delivers the correct answer before a contestant does. Then he glances sideways at me to make sure I’m impressed. If I get up to leave the room, he pauses the show until I return so that I don’t miss a moment of his genius.
Another text lights up my screen.It is ridiculously over the top, even for you, to make the leap from “Oh, my boyfriend sent me flowers” to “Oh, my boyfriend’s trying to poison me.” JSYK, if I were actually going to poison you I could find a cheaper method.
“Just so you know” is how he says “duh” to people without getting smacked. If I destroy him before he destroys me, I’m making sure his epitaph saysJSYK, dummies, it’s a myth that your hair and nails keep growing after you die.
I’m the only one left in the Junk Yard’s parking lot, watching my breath puff out in this metal icebox and dreading going home. To stall, I look up the significance of jasmine in the languageof flowers and hunt for hidden subtext like a sentimental Victorian paramour.
There are many different types of jasmine. I don’t know precisely which strain he got for me. Most of the symbolism is typically romantic. I doubt Nicholas is aware that flowers even have meanings, or that he would choose one deliberately for a symbolic message I wouldn’t know unless I looked it up. He probably had the receptionists at Rise and Smile find the closest florist and told them to choose whatever was on sale today.
