Flowergirl

✿✽❀~ fifteen ~❀✽✿

We went through our usual pleasantries; we said g'day and then I bought some flowers whose type I can't even remember. I was too busy looking at her lips as she told me about them that I didn't actually hear what she was saying. After I paid her, I invited her into the house, and for the first time in the four months I'd known her, she accepted gladly and followed me inside, leaving her cart on the front porch.

That meant that she wasn't coming in as Flowergirl, she was coming in as Juliet. A girl whose last name I didn't even know and yet I was still so in love.

We sat on the couch in the living room—opposite ends, but facing each other.

Juliet smiled, "How was your week?" she asked, fiddling with the hem of her dress. It was pastel pink dress that came up like a turtleneck, but was short enough that the amount of leg showing made me have to really think about my grandmother.

I smiled back at her. "It was long," I said. "Boring. School went as usual, Mum was well, Stacy was moody. How about yours?"

With a laugh that I feared was sarcastic, she leaned back onto the cushion and sighed. "Hard," she said.

I hoped that she meant hard, as in it was hard to break up with her ex hard, and not hard, as in it was hard to figure out how she would tell me she changed her mind and chose him instead hard.

I didn't say anything. I only looked at her, breathing slowly as I tried to keep myself calm. Whatever the outcome, it would be okay. Whatever the outcome, I would be okay.

Juliet's eyes flickered up to mine and she didn't have to speak for me to understand her answer. Her eyes always said more than her mouth ever could.

A grin stretched its way across my lips before I had time to stop it or realise that it was pretty insensitive considering she was going through a tough time. I quickly sobered up. "I'm sorry," I said.

She shook her head, chuckling softly. "Don't be," she said. "You should be happy."

"Not if you're sad."

"I'm not sad," she said, tugging at the long sleeves of her dress. It looked way too warm for the current weather, but I didn't say anything. Juliet scratched the back of her head, the space between the two stringy braids that her hair had been forced into. "I just feel weird," she finally said. "I've been with Ben for so long that it feels weird to not be with him. I'm not sad though. I miss the relationship and the consistency, but I made a choice and I have to live with it."

Ben?

I'd known a few Bens throughout my life. They'd always been guys that I liked and tended to be close with. In fact, my closest friend at the moment was named Bene, (and that was pronounced beh-neh, not 'bean')—he was Nigerian. For the most part, Bene and I only talked at school, but he was still someone to eat lunch with and borrow notes from. Obviously we weren't super close—but I wasn't sure if I was or had really ever been super close with anyone. For some reason, unlike everyone else in the world, I didn't have a best friend from birth or from when I was five. I just had Mum, myself, and Stacy. I had always thought that something was wrong with me because I could never keep a close friend for more than a few months before they found someone else that was more interesting or was just a better friend than me.

Eventually I had grown to accept that I was an introverted introvert and I didn't like to spend time around people too much. Being in big groups stressed me out, just as keeping track of a lot of friends did too, and so I tended to limit myself to one or two at a time, knowing that even if I didn't like them that much, they would eventually grow tired of me.