Thursday and Friday we built boutonnière’s and corsages at the shop for the Senior Ball going on at the nearby high school. I couldn’t help but be charmed by the young boys coming in to order corsages for their dates. Pimply little young ‘uns that shuffled their feet and mumbled that they needed flowers, “I need one of those flower bracelet thingies.”
They’d sometimes mumble the ends of their sentences so bad I’d have to ask two or three times what they said, so I’m sure they all thought D was employing a deaf woman. I wondered all day, was I like that in high school?
Did I seem to have so much trouble asking for a boutonniere? Was I that insecure? Did I have that much trouble communicating?
It was a lovely glimpse into a watercolor dream that took place ten years ago. That High school drama that exists as a rite of initiation.
I kept all my flowers when I was a teenager, drying them and stapling them to my ceiling to make a flower garden I could stare at when I went to bed. A garden of remembered songs, flashes of color and snippets of those moments that make up the awkwardness of young love and heated hormones. Bodies pressed together on the dance floor, tentative arms around one another’s bodies, fumbling steps and squashed toes. Favorite songs, stealing away to a quiet alcove for a peck or a nuzzle. Wobbling in heels and relishing the steady body of another braced against me in the cold. Eyes looking at me with the first true amazement or appreciation. Laughing. Fluttering insides and hopes for the next day being full of something more.
I stood at the register handing out the clear boxes with bundles of beautifully wrapped rose corsages and ringing in orders. Each box that left the shop I couldn’t help but wonder what that particular creation would have looked like in my dried ceiling garden.
One gangly boy with dark shaggy blond hair paid with a wrinkled twenty dollar bill and mumbled, “It’s beautiful.” Then he looked directly at me, the boyishness vanished and I could see what he might be in five or ten years. A man.
He asked me, in a clear solid voice. “Do girls keep these things? I mean, does it even matter to her?”
I felt far away, lost in water color smoke. I nodded. “I kept every single one of mine.”
He flashed a boyish grin. All traces of the man he’d be evaporated to be replaced by the awkwardness of being young. “Good,” he said, and disappeared out the front door, his steps a little lighter than before.
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