Young Writers Society

Jaime survived about three weeks in university before dropping out. I stayed a little longer, and as months passed my room filled with medical books and term papers while Jaime’s room turned into a stoner’s dream. I got a job even though Jaime’s parents were gracious enough to get us an apartment. They didn’t know their son dropped out, leaving his life of higher study for questionable substances and obscure nights.

As for me, well, I knew I didn’t belong in medical science, and Jaime knew that too. I remember one night in particular, while watching The Fresh Prince and sitting in the thick air of Jaime’s blunt, he turned and said, “Who are you on the inside? Really?”

And the thing is, I was nobody. Still am. I never thought of it before and the realization made me hellishly sad, but it was the truth. I was nothing and nobody, so I told him that.

Jaime got sad. “Everybody’s something,” he said. “You’ve just got to find out what.”

I guess it’s a bit stupid now that I think about it, but it was important to me back then. It was important to us. So I started smoking a bit even though it wasn’t really my thing. I took to drinking, to swearing, to spending forgetful nights in our apartment or aimlessly prowling the streets at dawn. He caused a shift in me, I will admit; something that would’ve made mother have an aneurysm.

Jaime helped me through the transition. I skipped classes to do experiments with him and sold all my medical books and papers just so we could have enough money for the things I knew we shouldn’t have taken. We’d take lines of speed and talk, talk, talk ‘til the sun rose up and the workingmen trudged out of their homes to their nine to five jobs. We spoke about the past, the present, the future. We delved into ideas about the cosmos, the universe, his mother, my mother, and everything in between. Everything during that time held a celestial glow, some special light that only he and I could see. But through all the hazy nights and drugged revelations, we couldn’t find me.

We tried ecstasy next and mixed it with lines of speed. Jaime went wild. He hopped around the house sweating, talking about many things that made him trip over his words and bite his tongue until it bled. Despite me taking an equal amount, I struggled to keep up with him.

And I told him this. I said, “Jaime, I can’t keep up with you,” so he gave me more just so he wouldn’t fly off the end of the world by himself. But he was running so much faster than I ever could, and there was nothing we could do about it. He stripped every article of clothing. He shaved his eyebrows. He ran out the apartment stark naked and hysterical, screaming about God knows what.

“Jaime? Where are you going? It’s the middle of winter!” I said again and again, but he didn’t care. He told me something about finding Heaven and kept running ‘til I had to chase after him.

And that night, I’m sure Jaime found who he was.

Cops got us somewhere downtown in an alleyway, several blocks away from home. We’d been passed out for hours. Jaime was naked, and even though I wrapped my clothed body around him, nothing stopped him from turning an abnormal shade of blue. We weren’t entirely sure how we got there—not even until this day have I figured it out—but there we were.

We were arrested for drug possession and public indecency. Jaime was eerily calm and in his element while I was completely out of it. I kept saying, “Jaime, what will we do? I lost my scholarship, my job. What will we do?”

But Jaime was cool, collected. He requested for a phone call and when he got one, called his mother immediately. In a few harsh whispers and tense breathing, he hung up. Sat down. “We’ll be fine,” was all he said, and the tension just washed away.

They didn’t let us leave the station until Jaime’s mother came, and since she lived a few hours away we wasted half the day. Jaime and I barely spoke the whole way through. He had his thinking face on, one where there were creases where his eyebrows should’ve been and cracked lips downcast. I knew he was thinking about last night—what it all meant to him. I should’ve been happy for him, I guess, but I wasn’t. Jaime found himself and I didn’t. That was the only thing going through my mind.

When Jaime’s mother showed, she was livid. They both looked the same—two short fused characters just ready to blow. She wore designer everything except for the dented silver cross hanging on her neck. When she saw her son behind bars, she touched her forehead, chest, both her shoulders, then did what she needed to do.

“It’s a miracle you’re still alive,” she said when we finally left the station, but I could tell that deep down, she was annoyed by this too. “Good Lord, what happened to your eyebrows?!”

But Jaime was far gone. He sat in the backseat and looked out the window, eerily content despite his mother’s screaming. From that point on, I only knew one thing: the boy from second grade was right.

Jaime Cortez was dead.

The flowers in the shop are large and colourful, like ostriches, all genetically engineered to last longer than normal ones. Every new specie that the scientists in New London dole out is brighter, more flamboyant, and less like a flower and more like a five-year-old’s first attempt at building a house out of clay. You are not fond of that kind of flower. ‘What’s the point of them if they can’t breathe?’ you ask Jessica, and he just shrugs. Jessica doesn’t waste his time thinking these kind of things, even though you can tell he is not fond of the Prientas Gulgarum and Therndegs either. When he handles the large, cactus-like flowers, he does it with distaste.

‘It’s not natural,’ he says, and you wonder if he is talking about the ship hovering over City Hall, or the newest shipment of Carthage roses. The cash-register clatters beneath his lightning-fast movements; his forehead is scrunched up and a slip of paper is pressed between his teeth. ‘Yeah, some of them’re all right, I guess’—here, you gather that he is talking about flowers—‘but if it weren’t for your farmhand flowers, we’d have been out of business a decade ago.’

You nod distractedly as a gaggle of teenage girls cluster at the entrance and demand bouquets in different sizes to be tied to their hats—large, vulture-like creations in blue and black. ‘A wedding,’ they tell you, and you nod, wondering if the weight of their headgear would be enough to cause a domino-effect in the pews.

‘Oi, Miles, hand me another of those carnations over there,’ Jessica says, and you push your way through the crowd to get to him, squeezing your way between two men with handlebar moustaches as they argue over the stems of a Flora Contestus. A handbag swings into your face and you trip over your own feet. Finally, you duck underneath the counter and emerge on the other side, your mouth full of the leaves from somebody’s awry bouquet.

Jessica’s gaze is still focussed on the cash-register. He holds out a hand. You notice his palm is bleeding.

‘Your palm is bleeding,’ you say.

‘I know. Cut it on an untrimmed rose.’ Something flickers in his dark eyes. ‘Carnation, please.’ His teeth are gritted as he takes the yellow flower, and glances out of the large, circular window that takes up most of the Emporium’s west wall. His palms are sweaty and he jumps when you place a hand on his shoulder ten minutes later, nearly ramming into the low ceiling.

‘Jess ... you okay? You’re a little … er, you look like…’

‘Like shit.’ He runs a hand through his short spiky hair. ‘It’s nothing.’ He looks out the window again, then drags his gaze to the large antique dial clock that you imported from London five years ago. It reads three o’clock. ‘You’d better go on home,’ he says. ‘I’ll deal with the old coot, er, coots’—he gestures at the men still arguing over the Flora Contestus—‘and close down shop.’ You hesitate, looking down at your trainers, but Jess clicks his tongue impatiently. ‘Go on, Eileen’s prob’ly waiting for you.’

You laugh. It is the kind of laugh that speaks of bitterness in all languages, short and humourless.

‘Yeah, I bet she is,’ you say heavily, and Jess gives you a friendly pat on the shoulder.

‘Go on, man, it has to be better than last night.’

You look around the shop, at the years of work you put into it after your family migrated from the South, escaped the plague, died, leaving you nothing but flowers to arrange for their chain-funerals. The shop is a timeline. It started out as nothing more but a garden patch. The Emporium was your beginning, you think, gathering up the shop-apron between your fists. Eileen was your beginning.

You suck a breath in as you move towards the window, looking out at the ship—at the shadows it casts across half the city. It arrived a day ago, and it shows no signs of leaving any time soon. A stairway has been constructed at the ship’s gates, from where the … guests? Aliens? The newspapers weren’t clear on which … are expected to disembark the next morning. You look at the dark outline of buildings in the distance, and you remember Eileen’s threats from the night before, the crying and the crashing of a wine bottle so close to your face. You remember her melting to the ground, sobbing after hurling harsh words at you. Shouldn’t you have been the one to cry? you wonder. It’s not your fault she’s like this.

You pluck a single daffodil from one of the not-for-sale vases by the counter. Throwing a half-hearted grin at Jess, you mutter a ‘goodbye’ and stride out of the back entrance, chucking the apron over the door as you go.

When you get home that night, a purple lilac is speared to the front door with a kitchen knife. You pull the knife out of the door and a note flutters to the ground.

It reads: ‘Goodbye’.