Cursed Boys and Broken Hearts, page 6
Ro watches from across the kitchen. Her face is soft and sympathetic. “It happens.”
I laugh bitterly. “Happened at the worst time. It’s hard to explain to colleges you took a gap year for a mental spiral.”
Silence fills the kitchen as I, apparently, got too real. And so it goes with this family. I miss talking to Dr. Patty, my therapist. She had this way of taking the roller coaster in my head and making it all make sense. She didn’t try to tell me I wasn’t on a roller coaster. She didn’t ask why I didn’t just get off the roller coaster mid-loop. She just…let me ride it and talked me through it.
I’d love to see her again, but it’s been so long, I doubt she’d have room in her schedule. Anyway, apparently I’m about to be a lot busier here than I thought, so maybe I won’t have the time either.
Finally, my aunt nods, her eyelids growing heavier. “This house is important to so many people, and I’m failing them. Bad things happened out of my control, but I also made mistakes. I know what it’s like to have one thing after another come down on you hard, throw you off your game, and you can’t correct it no matter what you do.”
She gives me a little smile, and I return it.
“But it’s not over,” Ro says. “I know we can fix things.”
“Sounds like I came at the right time,” I say.
Grinning more broadly, Ro extends her ring-laden hands. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
I sigh. “The thing with Ben…” I wince. “I would love it if things could be better—if Ben could magically be a different person, and I could magically not be messed up about it—but that true love shit is out of the question. It’s off the table. It’s in the trash can. In the garbage truck, heading for the dump. I’ll be nice. We’ll work nicely together. But anything more than that, forget it.”
Ro starts to protest again when—creaaaaaaak—the floor outside the kitchen doorway whines noisily. Aunt Ro—closer to the sound—leans through the arch. “Hello?”
Sheepishly, Ben emerges from around the corner. He wrings his ball cap in his hands, his wavy red hair sticking wildly in every direction. When he actively avoids eye contact, I know the truth: he’s been creeping on our conversation.
A sour sneer comes over me as I turn into a gargoyle by the fridge.
“I need the wheelbarrow for the compost,” he says. “Can’t find it where I left it yesterday.”
“Paul’s got it!” Ro says with a nervous laugh. “He should be done by now—let’s find him.”
Aunt Ro floats outside merrily, repressing that she just tricked me into confessing my jagged feelings for Ben while the dickhead himself was eavesdropping. Of course she doesn’t care. She’s another eavesdropper, listening in on my lowest, most desperate moment at the Wishing Rose!
That’s Vero Roseto. Ears everywhere. Privacy nowhere.
Ben doesn’t follow her out. He lingers in the doorway, half looking in my direction as if he has something to say. But he doesn’t. He heard me admit I’m a flop, still wounded by his carelessness, and all he has is pity.
“She runs fast,” I say. “Better catch her.”
He shuffles outside. And I’m left alone.
Before heading upstairs, I open a rear kitchen cupboard to see how little this place has changed. On the floor of the cupboard, surrounded by loose pantry items, is Grandma’s Singer suitcase—the first machine I ever learned to sew on. She taught me, but at first she just let me watch her work, whether it was hemming our clothes or mending the drapes.
I am the amalgamation of the skills of everyone in my family.
Lugging the suitcase in one hand, with its ancient iron weight, I open a kitchen drawer full of a dozen dishrags, each patterned with different fruit. I choose two towels with strawberries and take everything to my East Wing bedroom.
The silence is nice, especially after such a noisy day.
I open the suitcase, plug the 1960s monstrosity behind my room’s writing desk, and get my fingers feeling needle and thread again. Hours pass. The sun sets. I trace an outline of my hand on the strawberry dishrags, slice out the patterns, feed the cloth into the machine, and proceed to sew myself a matching set of strawberry fingerless gloves.
As I flex the gloves open and closed, my power returns. My skills are all still there. I just need the intent and to focus on what I’m doing. Yesterday’s fog—dissipating slowly since arriving at Vero Roseto—now clears entirely.
I’m me again.
I raise my eyes to the ceiling and ask Mama Bianchi—not Ro, the real one inside the walls of Vero Roseto—what I should do. Stay, save the house, and deal with Ben? Or leave and rebuild my life—and my portfolio—some other way?
I don’t hear a voice, but the answer still emerges.
Stay. Save the festival, the house, and the family, and use your new designs to get into a great school.
Then I’ll start a new life somewhere else with zero baggage.
And for God’s sake, I won’t ever let a boy get in my head again.
Chapter 8
The Wishing Rose
That night, I return to the scene of the crime. I know what I have to do.
Nobody in Vero Roseto is awake except me and the spirit of Mama Bianchi. Ro and Paul are in bed, and Ben went back to his dad’s house in Valle. I pull on the gray sweats my uncle lent me and creep downstairs with a flashlight. Pausing in the hall beneath my great-grandmother’s portrait, I whisper, “Sorry to bother you so late.” Her oil-on-canvas face—warm yet stern—seems to brighten as she stares downward. I draw an angry breath. “You only knew me as a baby, and you probably don’t like who I fall in love with—which is why you had your rose backfire on me—but tough shit. Because I’m gonna save your house. And without me, your portrait is gonna get sold online to some wine snob, and your magic rose garden will get bulldozed into condos.” I flash my dimples. “Which would be fine by me, but a lot of people care about that ugly weed, so I’ll save that, too!”
My respects now paid, I cross the hall toward the under-construction West Wing. Curtains of protective plastic still drape from the upstairs landing where the workers left it. As quietly as I can, I grip the plastic curtain and pull it free of the painter’s tape fixing it to the railing. It plummets softly to the ground, collecting in a massive pile. The plastic crinkles noisily as I fold it into a shape I can more easily carry.
I can’t be any quieter, so I at least try to be quick about it.
When I’m finished, I listen to the silence in the hall. No voices. No doors opening.
Everyone’s still asleep.
Exiting outside to the backyard is easy, but making it over the lawn to the rose garden is far more treacherous. Knowing what I know about the yard, there’s a million ways to get killed or maimed in the dark. I could fall into the drained pool or into the collapsed deck—and I need a shattered leg like a hole in the head, so I keep my flashlight on and take the journey slowly.
The night is pleasantly warm. A symphony of crickets and frog song keeps me company as I retrace my steps from the night I cursed myself—the night Ro apparently followed me. The closer I get, the more the moonlit sky disappears behind the massive shadow that is Valle Forest. With the sculpture garden trellis still lying in pieces, there’s fewer obstacles to maneuver around on my way inside the rose garden. The entire garden is housed within shrubbery walls. It’s like something from Alice in Wonderland.
Or the hedge maze in The Shining.
Next to the archway is a switchboard buried in the shrubs. When I made this nighttime trek at thirteen, I was so short I needed a stick to throw the light switch. Now, as a fully grown beast, it’s a cinch. The lights still work—the interior garden illuminates with cool footlights and overhanging stadium lamps. It’s not oppressively bright, just enough to pretty up the space.
If Ro looks out her bedroom window, she’ll be able to see the lights, but I won’t be long.
Gathering a courageous breath, I cross under the arch…and find a mess. The rose garden used to be the grand centerpiece of Vero Roseto—an open-air topiary masterpiece with fountains and rose-covered walls of green. Walking inside used to feel like you had shrunk down to the size of a bee and were walking inside a rose itself. Today, the fountains are as dry as that swimming pool—and they’ve become toilets for forest animals. The rose vines covering the walls are still there, but they’ve withered. Blackened corpses of rose bulbs droop pathetically off their stems.
However, one piece of the rose garden remains untouched.
When I see it at the end of a long stretch of horticultural death, my heart stops.
The Wishing Rose.
It’s actually several roses filling a large, spherical bush. The bush is brightened by its own ring of overhead lights, dimmed softly so as not to overheat the flowers. The dim lights lend the Wishing Rose bush a romantic aura of magic. I can almost see tiny pixies encircling the bountiful, cherry-red hybrids, which (unlike the rest of this garden) continue to be meticulously cared for. Looking at the Wishing Rose, it’s easy to believe in its myth, its magic, its power.
The hairs on my arm frizz and stand at attention.
I’m a child again.
Five years wasn’t that long ago, but it feels like a century. I was so little. Not a drop of anger in me. The beast wasn’t awakened yet, but it was there, just under the surface—a hurt child, begging for help but given claws instead.
“Hello there,” I say to the Wishing Rose. Particles dance through the light surrounding it. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to wish. Not making that mistake again.”
In under five minutes, I’ve dressed the scene. I toss three plastic curtains over the garden—the fountains, the rotting walls—everywhere but the Wishing Rose. No one needs to know how dreadful it looks under the curtains; we’re just undergoing some remodeling.
Rule number one in social promo is conceal everything that would distract from your narrative. My narrative for Vero Roseto is mythmaking—we remain as powerful as ever. Everything can rot except the Wishing Rose, our family label. People used to come from other countries just for the chance to trust their heart’s desire to Mama Bianchi’s roses. That’s what matters. The rest is window dressing. So, if the rest looks like garbage, cover it.
Pardon our fairy dust. Vero Roseto is getting some work done to make it shinier than ever.
Rule number two for promo is get personal.
We do so much to hide our scars, but you can’t look shiny and plastic. There must be something organic, something imperfect, something raw and maybe even wounded. Show them one scar so they won’t go looking for the others.
That’s where I come in.
In my phone’s front-facing camera, I check my hair—bouncy but careless. I can’t look camera-ready. After some consideration, I pull down my hoodie’s zipper another two inches. This communicates that I’m in sweats, so I don’t care how I look, but here’s a flash of pec cleavage.
I’m depressed but still a cutie, America!
I position myself in front of the Wishing Rose, its magical, healthy light shimmering behind me in the dark. When you’re getting real, it’s best not to over-rehearse these things, so three, two, one, action—
“This is the Wishing Rose,” I say, recording. “These hybrids have been in my family since World War II. During the war, my great-grandmother—Mama Bianchi—grew these roses, started a winery, and built an entire mansion around it. Why? To win back my great-grandfather, who was fighting in France. Before the war, they were engaged, but he broke it off. She was rich, and it made him feel small. Not cool behavior, but it was the forties, and she loved him anyway, so she doubled down. When he came back, he saw this place—Vero Roseto!” I gesture grandly behind me, but never move the camera off the Wishing Rose. “The roses won him over, and eighty years later, here I am. There’s a myth that any bloom on the Wishing Rose bush knows true love. It’s brought together four generations of my family. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, my aunt, my parents, and my sisters.”
I pause to swallow painfully. Here it comes. Tell them, Grant.
“How it works is, um…” My voice cracks, but I don’t stop. “You hold one of the roses, think of the person you’d like to be with, and then you wish for a sign that they’re The One. It doesn’t work just for my family. People come from all over to stay at Vero Roseto and buy a rose to wish for the person they want to marry. We get dozens of messages from people saying it worked for them. Within a week of making their wish, they’re engaged.”
I brush back a tear, and on a wounded breath, I tell the truth:
“I wondered if the magic would work for me, too, because I’m gay. When I was a kid, I came out here when everyone was asleep. I had a crush on a boy—but I was with someone else. I felt so chaotic, I worried my problem wasn’t choosing between two boys, but the fact that they were boys at all. My family wasn’t homophobic, but you see stuff on the news, you hear people talk, and it gets you thinking maybe you’re the problem. I just didn’t want to be alone. I loved my family. I loved coming to Vero Roseto every summer for the Rose Festival. I never wanted to be the sad, alone person in the family.”
I take a deep breath and go on. “All I heard growing up was how the rose brought my family together and made it grow, but…I was a kid and didn’t think I’d be able to. I wanted to be part of the magic and the myth. So, five years ago, little me put my hand on the rose”—I walk backward and reach for a petal—“and I asked the rose to reveal my true love. But because I’d been society-poisoned into believing that my love couldn’t be a boy, I lost my courage. When I wished, I thought of the boy I wanted to be with, but for a split second, I thought about wanting to change. I said, ‘Or just take all these boys away. Show me my real love. A girl.’ ”
A quiet tear drops down my cheek, but I don’t let my phone drop.
I breathe out a loud moan and keep recording.
“Shocker, the rose didn’t change me,” I say. “That can’t happen. I was wrong to wish that, and my wish backfired. The next week, those boys I cared so much about got together with each other, and I did end up alone. But the curse didn’t stop there. Because I asked the rose to take all boys away, that’s what it did. Ever since then, no one’s stayed with me longer than a few weeks.” On a deep, cleansing breath, I deliver the closer: “I’m cursed, but I’m also proof the magic is real. We’ve got another Rose Festival coming up this August. Vero Roseto is a dream place, and there’s still reservations for rooms in our newly renovated West Wing.” I spin the camera around to show the tarps slung over the garden walls, and then pivot back to me. “We’re almost done with our renovation, and the Wishing Rose will be accessible to paying guests of the B&B, so snatch up those reservations quickly. But a word of warning…” I bring the camera closer, so they can see my tears are real. “Phrase your wish carefully.”
I flash a peace sign and stop recording. In the cricketing silence of the rose garden, relief floods my nervous system. I did it. My ugliest secret is now free. Hopefully, my confession should be enough mythmaking to draw in superstitious visitors.
Rule number three of promo: sometimes, a warning works better than a welcome.
Before leaving, I turn back to the Wishing Rose. Its petals stare blankly, unconcerned about the wreckage they’ve made of an innocent kid. I want to scream, How could you do this to me?!
But I’d just be yelling at a plant when I’m really yelling at myself.
Chapter 9
Jackpot
Thanks to the feelings dredged up by my public late-night therapy, sleeping upstairs is impossible. One gong from the grandfather clock outside my room, and my thoughts instantly spiral toward Ben. Ben—back in my life again. I’m still into him, but that’s only because my dick can’t understand the danger I’m in if I fall for this boy again. The damage I absorbed from my exes is a scratch compared to the gutting when I lost Ben.
Each day I spend here will be a challenge.
Since the upstairs bedroom is too haunted by bad memories, I opt to smother myself in good memories instead and sleep in the basement’s game room. Uncle Dom’s old camping cot is still there from the seventies. It was made for a large child, but I curl into enough of a ball to fit. Its earthy, stale-cracker scent and the texture of the hunter-green canvas activates a happy memory from when I was young, safe, and still loved Ben.
Well, back when I only knew the simple side of Ben. And of myself.
Finally, my brain lets me sleep.
In the morning, I have no idea what time it is. The storm-shielded basement has no windows, and I didn’t bring a charger for my dead phone. Upstairs, the workers’ bandsaws rumble faintly as they continue renovating the West Wing. In the dark, I grasp for a light switch near the stairs. Like the rest of Vero Roseto, the game room is as preserved as a museum. Behind my cot, an ancient dollhouse sits open, its flooring—made of contact paper patterned with sunflowers—now curled and peeling. Dolls and toys of every size (and era) lie scattered throughout the house like the morning after a raging party.
Next to the dollhouse, a library of children’s books wraps the entire back wall. Little Golden Books with shimmering foil spines, stacks of baby-blue titles I recognize as a Nancy Drew collection, and two full rows of Goosebumps. During those frequent summer storms, my sisters would read them out loud by flashlight. There was one that freaked Ben out about a mask that turned a boy into an old man. If it hadn’t been pitch-black, I wouldn’t have had the courage to reach over and rub his back to calm him. It’s something a straight boy wouldn’t think twice about doing for a friend, but when you’re confused—and touching a boy’s back means something—a million internal negotiations happen all at once.
