Young Writers Society

~1045 words

Ivy

Nikki couldn’t go to the Society on Thursdays. She was only in town on Tuesdays and Saturdays to sell her family’s crops. Her family grew many different things, but they supplied Ivy with most of the flowers she sold. Ivy would do the arranging and provide a convenient location for townsfolk to buy flowers whenever they wanted. Ivy grew some flowers in her back yard, but flowers such as the paper rose required very specific conditions to grow.

Paper roses were flowers whose petals could be unfolded into a newspaper. They grew naturally, with mother nature and the climate of the place in which they are grown dictating the news. Because nature is all connected, the paper roses were the fastest way of receiving important news form the other side of the country. But they weren’t limited to human news. Sometimes natural events made the paper, and the weather section was always exactly right. Mother nature also seemed to have a good sense of humor when it came to the comics.

Needless to say, paper roses were Ivy’s best-selling item, and Nikki and her family—the only paper rose farmers in the area—sold almost all of the flowers to Ivy. They could easily have sold them anywhere else (shops knew how the news could bring in customers), but Ivy and Nikki had both grown up together. They had sat next to each other the first day of school and had been best friends ever since. Ivy had spent the night at Nikki’s farm more times than she could count.

The sun ducked beneath the horizon, and the street outside the flower shop window was plunged into dusk. Ivy flipped the sign in the window to read “closed.” She reached for the door, intending to lock it behind her as she left to go to the society, but her hand paused and her step faltered.

She didn’t know if she could go to the Society on her own. She never would have even gone if Nikki hadn’t dragged her into it. Did she even want to go if Nikki wouldn’t be there? Sure, Grey seemed nice enough, but it mostly felt like a “with Nikki” thing rather than an activity Ivy would choose to do by herself.

She paced the room a bit, and eventually settled on the chair behind the money lockbox. It was getting darker and darker outside. She should have been at the workshop by now. Grey would be waiting for her. She’d told him she’d be there. But that had been when Nikki was at her back and Ivy was feeling confident. How much did they even know about Grey and the society, really?

Ivy was jolted out of her worries as something butted up against her leg. It was ghost, of course. He rubbed his face against Ivy’s legs, still limping. She reached down, her head sinking below the top of the lockbox desk, to stroke his back. He began to purr, sounding like one of the machines in the workshop. She imagined Ghost as an automaton cat, and let loose a strangled laugh because it was such a bizarre idea: this cat that bled so much on her writing table being a machine. She laughed again at the sheer ecstasy Ghost seemed to be feeling from her attention, but the laugh again sounded strange. It wasn’t until then that Ivy realized she’d been hyperventilating. As she pet Ghost, she felt the tension flood out of her. She was an adult. She could make her own decisions, and her decision was that she wouldn’t go to the Society without Nikki. And there’s nothing Grey could do about it.

“Hey Ivy? Where are you?” Grey’s voice boomed into the silent flowershop.

Ivy hit her head on the desk as she sat up straight. “Ow! What was that for? I mean, how did you get in here? How do you know where I live? What are you doing here? Oof.” She rubbed her head, where she could feel a little blood trickling through her hair. She looked around for Ghost, but he’d disappeared somewhere.

Grey winced. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you like that! I figured you were in the back or something. Actually, I honestly thought you weren’t here. Are you ok?”

Ivy held out her hand. It had trails of blood on it. “Does this look okay?” she demanded.

“Sorry! Sorry!” Grey’s eyes looked panicked. “I didn’t mean- I understand if- Is there anything I can do for you?”

Ivy grunted as she stood up. “No, you’d probably just make things worse. I’ll be right back.” She walked gingerly into to her study where she’d patched up Ghost just a few days ago, and where the cat was currently standing, his fur raised, looking as if he’d been electrocuted.

“It’s okay,” laughed Ivy as she smoothed down his fur. “He’s a friend.” The tone of Ivy’s voice must have soothed Ghost, because, after she had cleaned the cut on her head, he wasn’t afraid to follow Ivy back into the front of the store.

Grey was leaning against one of the display tables, staring down at the floorboards, a look of horror still on his face.

Ghost, normally skittish, surprised Ivy by slinking right up to Grey and sitting right on the spot where Grey was staring. Grey blinked, finally seeming to focus on the real world again. He looked up at Ivy, his eyebrows pushed down. “Is this your cat?”

“I guess. He’s kind of new. Name’s Ghost.”

“He has a very… intense stare.”

Ivy shrugged. “How did you know where I live anyway? And how’d you get in?”

Grey looked away and his eyes idly fell back on Ghost, who continued to stare at him. He shifted his weight uncomfortably and looked off into a distant corner of the room. “I heard Nikki mention a flower shop. Only one of those in town. And the door was unlocked. As for what I’m doing here,” he went on, before Ivy had the chance to ask, “I came to see why you weren’t at the workshop. You could’ve been attacked or something on the way there. You said you’d be there.” His gaze shot back to Ivy. “You were coming, right?”

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(This is not the true end of the chapter, but it is the logistical end of it. Tune in next time to see how this conversation/night ends!)