A Single Daffodil

“You are just so embarrassing, Jayden.” We were barely a minute into the arena before Sophia was already starting on him. “I mean, really. Two bags of popcorn? Three hot dogs? Why do you enjoy looking a fool?”

“Fogk yoo!” He garbled a response through a mouthful of half-chewed hot dog buns. Ketchup dribbled at the corner of his mouth as he tried to retort again. Sophia watched him in disgust.

I’ve known Sophia since kindergarden and Jayden since the 2nd grade. Jayden was the new kid in our grade and due to his then huge curly brown locks, all the boys in our class made fun of him. Being the little angels Sophia and I were, we offered him to play with us at Recess that day. The three of us were inseparable ever since. My father coined the phrase “the three amigos!” at my 10th birthday party, and Sophia saw fit to call us that ever since.

It’s hard not to question what kept the three of us close over the years. As we grew older, we have all become increasingly aware of how different we were from one another. Sophia was your typical bronzed Latina beauty, with legs for days, thick black wavy hair and a perfect Columbian pout that drove every male in existence, crazy. She was a man-eating, Vogue reading, loud mouthed Goddess. Even if we didn’t agree on everything, I knew I could rely on her when it came to beauty tips, gossip, and loyalty. She’d never turn her back on me or Jayden, no matter how much we differed from each other. “You two are mi familia.” She’d say this once in a Blue Moon. It was like her mantra. Her thick, Columbian accent liked to make itself known too, when she spoke Spanish, just to remind us that her Latina sass was alive and well.

Jayden, on the other hand, was on the complete opposite side of the spectrum from our Columbian Queen. His parents were of the good ol’ Leprechaun decent, meaning he was as pale as the moon, freckled head to toe and went to Ireland twice a month to visit family. While Sophia held her party girl and social butterfly responsibilities very seriously, Jayden didn’t even bother going to parties. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to, but because he never had the time. Growing up, Jayden was big into bikes -- dirt bikes, to be more specific. It started out as a hobby in the sixth grade. He joined a club out in Plantations, Florida, and every other month he had big competitions against other dirt bikers from different parts of the state. Amazingly, Jayden won every competition he was in. By the time we graduated high school, he was a professional dirt biker, sponsored by Monster Energy drinks. He was making the big bucks -- although you wouldn’t believe it with the amount of holes he had in his clothes -- and was always traveling around the country for press and XGames-related things. He had his dorky moments, mind you, but he was kind-hearted and always knew the right thing to say when me or Sophia were feeling down.

“Oh it’s a full house tonight!” Sophia exclaimed, clapping her hands while I waved at Mark, the security guard that was securing our three seats by the team’s seating area. “Thank God I saved my vintage Gucci dress for this. The cameras are everywhere!”

Sophia looked like a model tonight and rightly so. Her stiletto heels were at a record breaking six inches and her dress was tighter than an old Victorian corset. The girl knew how to dress, especially for the guys. They were the only reason she even came to the games with me and Jayden. She didn’t know a lick about basketball, but she did know a thing or two about an athlete’s biceps.

“Ay yi yi, Norris Cole is looking sexy tonight.” Sophia bit her lip and pushed out her chest suggestively while she carefully pushed her hair behind her shoulders. She knew Norris had noticed because he hasn’t been able to make a basket since we walked out into the arena. This was a common occurrence.

“Sit down, Jungle Fever Jones.” Jayden rolled his eyes, stuffing a handful of popcorn in his mouth. “Let the man practice.”

Jayden and I, however, were looking less Vogue and more game time appropriate. Jayden had on Lebron James’s jersey (a “peace offering”, after the last mishap) and his usual black jeans and white lace-up vans. I opted for my cropped Dwayne Wade jersey with high-waisted black jeans and my open toe black sandal wedges. I had every single Heat jersey in existence, thanks to pops, and I always made sure to keep them in rotation when I went to home games. I even wore my black beanie with the Miami Heat Logo on the front, mostly because I was too lazy to comb out what was left of my salty blonde curls after spending the majority of the day at the beach.

Heat games in Miami were always the same: ridiculously rowdy, booming with die-hard fans and an atmosphere so thick with determination and zealous, you could suffocate. Lebron James had his trusty headband across his forehead while Dwayne Wade kept a keen eye on the Chicago Bulls team, which were standing by the opposite side of the basketball court. I didn’t even bother to say hi to my dad because I knew he was too wrapped up in tonight’s festivities to even acknowledge my presence.

The latest Kanye West song was on blast while the presenters finished getting touched up, the camera men tested their equipment and the last of the fans were finding their seats. It would be another five minutes before the ball was thrown and the first quarter began. I could feel the anticipation from all around me; this was going to be a big game.

“Ay dios mio!” Sophia exclaimed, leaning past me to get a good look at who Security was escorting to the floor seats next (she leaned over enough to give the whole damn NBA league a good look at her breasts. Completely unaware of it too, of course.). “That’s whatshisname...Bradley Cooper! Ay no, I can’t stand it. Too many celebrities. I’ll have a heart attack.”

I caught Jayden doing another eye roll. I smiled in response.

“And oh! Look, look, Vita!” She viciously tapped my shoulder (more like punched my shoulder, in my opinion) to get my attention and pointed across the court to three guys, who looked about our age. “Oh my God. It’s One Direction. No fucking way. My cousins would freak!”

“Can you stop scouting unavailable men for once in your life, Sophia?” Jayden started giving out. “Really, you’re worst then...I don’t know! Hugh Heffner!”

Sophia gave him an incredulous look. “Grosero, grosero!So rude! Can you let me and Vita window shop for like one second, please?”

“Wait, rewind. Who are they?” I tried to peer past Lebron and Dwayne on the court to get a better look at the three guys. One Direction sounded familiar, however the guys I kept staring at, were not. One had shiny bright hair and fairer skin than Jayden-- I didn’t even think that was possible?--while the one on his right had a buzz cut and the one to the left was decidedly ethnic.

“One Direction! Well, some of them anyways. I can’t see the other two. They’re a British band.” Sophia continued. She pulled out her phone and started typing in the Safari app. “I wonder why they’re in town? Perez Hilton should know. I check twitter.”

I wasn’t distracted by the band across the court or Sophia’s babbling about the gossip behind the band for long, because the basketball was thrown in the air and Dwayne Wade caught it in a millisecond. He had the ball through the opposing net in five seconds. A new record. Jayden and I were already on our feet cheering, leaving Sophia behind with her new research project.



“Thank you for calling Jane’s Flowers, this is Vita speaking. How can I help you?”

“Vita, its Mr. Davidson. I did it again!”

He sounded out of breathe, and a little frazzled. I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Mr. Davidson knew which buttons to press when it came to his wife, Mrs. Davidson. He was one of our most loyal customers.

“Mr. Davidson, you were only in here a week ago buying roses!” I said. “What could have possibly happened since then?”

If I could recall correctly, the last time he was in was because he missed his six year old son’s first soccer match. Mrs. Davidson was furious.

“Today was our wedding anniversary--I mean is. Is our wedding anniversary.” He quickly corrected himself.

I balanced the wireless phone in the crook of my neck, right between my left shoulder and ear, while I trimmed off the leaves of the new shipment of fresh roses we received this morning. I dropped the scissors on the metal table in front of me and swirled around to take a look at our inventory. I spotted a couple of buckets full of lovely light blue Hydrangeas and petite Freesias waiting to be spritzed.

“How about this.” I started, walking back to the table and filling out a new order on the pad of paper. “Come by the store after work, and I’ll have a new bouquet made up for you to bring home.”

A sigh of relief echoed on the other side of the line. “You’re a real life saver, Vita.”

“I’ll have to warn you though, Mr. Davidson, this isn’t going to be a cheap one.” I said. “Be ready to pay the big bucks.”

“I don’t care how big the bill is.” He countered quickly. “Anything to make her forgive me.”

“Well, Mr. Davidson, you came to the right place.”

A phone call like this was not unusual at Jane’s Flower shop. We can always tell when a man’s in trouble. The trick is to find out how much trouble he’s in when they’re frantically calling us, and then we work out how to get him out of it. In fact, most of life’s dramas are brought to the flower shop’s unassuming door. Within our decked out 1950’s french kitchen inspired boutique --yes, black and white tile floors and all -- we artistically create bouquets for any occasion, may it be a baby shower, baptism, ornament brides, comforting the sick, honoring the dead and, of course, my favorite, applying the first aid kit to a ruptured romance. I guess that’s why I like this job so much. I’m given the ability to fix a romance with the very art form of making a flower bouquet. There’s a story behind every order we get and that’s the best part; I get to briefly look into other people’s lives.

It’s like playing Cupid. Or God.

“Vita, darling!” I heard Maggie’s voice call from the front of the shop. A beat later, her head popped around the doorframe to peer at me through her half-mooned glasses. “You’re not busy, are you?”

Maggie Rivers ran the show around here. She’s worked here since she could walk, to be honest. It was Maggie’s grandmother who opened up this store in the early 1900s, and it was a gold jewel handed down in the family until it was in Maggie’s possession. She was a sweet old thing that took me under her wing when I was looking for a job the summer after Sophomore year and I’ve been here ever since. I loved working for her because she always played my favorite Elvis Presley tunes on the record player and made the perfect cup of tea.

“I have a couple of orders to work on after I finish clipping the roses.” I answered. “Why, what’s up?”

“I forgot to tell you yesterday that the Four Seasons wanted us to come in and switch the flowers out of the displays a day early.” Maggie’s strawberry blonde bob swayed as she moved her hands. She always talked with her hands. You would think she was of thee Italian decent. “I would make Ronnie do it, but she called out sick today.”

After clipping the last leaf on the red rose I was holding, I stood up and wiped my hands on a nearby rag. “I can head out there now. I’ll just get a basket ready. They like the Daffodils and pink Orchids, right?”

“And the Queen Annes Lace!” She pointed to the refrigerator that held the flowers with a faster expiration date. “Thank you, Vita. I knew I could count on you.”

Alone in the back room once more, I grabbed the biggest basket I could find and started piling in all the hotel favorites. I made sure to pick only the best ones, since the Four Seasons was a long time client of ours. After spending a good fifteen minutes picking out all the flowers, I took them out to my car, which was about a million and a half degrees, even though I parked in the shade. It didn’t help that my shop uniform was head to toe black. I wanted to curse Maggie for thinking black was a suitable uniform color when we live in the agonizing heat of Florida, eleven months out of the year. “Black is sophisticated and very avant-garde!” Maggie would say. “And your outfits won’t distract our customers from the flowers!”

We couldn’t argue her further on that point.

Thankfully, we were given a lot of creative freedom with what we wore, as long as it was black. To continue with the shop’s vintage french kitchen vibe, I opted for a black high-waisted skater skirt that stopped right above my knees with a polo shirt tucked into it. Maggie seemed please enough since I never got any gripe from her about it.

When I got to the Four Seasons, I pulled up to the main entrance and gave my keys to the Valet person who opened the door for me. I noticed right away how insanely crowded the hotel was the minute I walked into the foyer -- June was always the highest peak of tourism season in Miami Beach. It was the perfect time for family vacations because all the kids started their summer break.

As I waved at the front desk to make my presence known, I looked around and realized the ratio of tweens to adults was incredibly unbalanced. There were tons of young girls, ten to sixteen, at least, circling around the foyer with their phones out. I looked behind my shoulder to get another look at the herd of girls as I toted the basket of flowers to the elevators. They looked like schools of piranhas, seeking out their prey. I couldn’t understand it. I ignored it, stepped into the elevator and pressed ‘2’.

Tending to the flower displays at the Four Seasons was one of the easiest tasks in the job description. It was a job that Ronnie, our other employee at Jane’s Flowers, usually preferred doing because it meant she could yap away to her friends on the phone while doing it --Maggie had a strict ‘no mobile phones’ policy back at the store. Unless you were on lunch break, of course.

Every floor of the hotel had a very intricate flower display sitting on a circular brown oak table that greets you the minute you stepped off the elevator. With every floor, comes a different carpet pattern, different wall color and different piece of artwork hanging on the walls. Picking out the right flowers to compliment the motif of each floor was like solving a puzzle. An easy puzzle.

Floor fifteen was the very last story, and accessed all the grande presidential suites. I loved this floor the most because the flower display was, in my opinion, the prettiest. It was filled with bright, yellow daffodils and delicate stems of lavender, so the aroma was alluring. I started to pick out the flowers that started to wilt -- mostly daffodils, since lavender lasts longer than a week -- and replaced them with fresh ones. I snipped and rattled and pushed and prodded until everything looked perfect once again.

Right when I was about to do the final spritz of water on the petals to keep them hydrated, a bright twist of colors on the wall caught my attention. I looked up from the display and noticed that a new piece of artwork was hanging on the wall. It was about the length of my body and was splattered in all types of shades of purples, blues and oranges. I was mesmerized. It held the color palette of a Picasso painting, but had the quirkiness and eeriness of a Salvador Dali masterpiece. I took out my phone immediately. There was no way I wasn’t going to take a picture of it and show it to Grandpa Gene. He would be obsessed with something like this.

I moved closer to it, and was about to snap a picture of it, until the weirdest thing ever happened to me.

“Alright. Who do you think you’re fooling?”

I jumped back, startled by the new presence in the elevator area of the fifteenth floor. I turned to my left to see a boy about my age, leaning on the wall with his arms folded at his chest. His left eyebrow was raised so high, it almost disappeared into the mop of curly hair on his head. The hair was almost too much for me to comprehend.

It took me a second to find my voice. “Excuse me?”

“Come on.” He gave me a knowing look. He was British, that much I could tell you. What I couldn’t tell you was, what the hell was he talking to me for?

I lowered my phone, feeling completely disarmed by this strange British boy questioning me. My mouth was hanging open slightly, like an idiot. I was trying to catch on to what he was talking about, but I came up with nothing.

He clearly caught onto this too, because he closed his eyes, let out an exasperated sigh and walked over to me. “Look, I’m really flattered, yeah? It means a lot to me that you listen to my music but this is considered trespassing, and you lot can get us into trouble if you’re sneakin’ up here.”

I clutched my phone to my chest, watching this guy in awe.

I had no idea what this guy was talking about.

“I’m so confused. What is happening right now?” I said this out loud, my stare completely fixated on his nose. It was the cutest nose I’d ever seen.

What wasn’t cute, was the pitied look I suddenly received from this potentially confused and clearly unwell British stranger. He put a hand on his heart, like he was touched by my mystified expression. I didn’t like that.

“I get it. You’re mesmerized by all this. It’s really nice to meet you too, but-”

“Wait, rewind.” I had to cut him off because his tone felt oddly condescending and I was not about that. “What, exactly, do you think is happening here?”

“Come on.” He said it again. The phrase was starting to disagree with me. “You clearly snuck up here to get a picture of me. You can take one picture but that’s it. You’re going to have to leave after that or I’ll have to call securit-”

“Are you kidding me?” I laughed maliciously. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt very offended. “I was taking a picture of the artwork!”

“Right.” He agreed sarcastically. “The ‘artwork’.” He made bunny ears with his index and middle fingers.

My face felt hot with anger. “Listen here, buddy. I don’t know who the hell you think you are or why in the world you would think I’d want a picture of you and your stupid dumb nose--” I poked him square in the chest. “--but I’m actually up here doing a job for the hotel, not lurking around for impertinent British boys. So you know what? You can fuck right off!”

I turned swiftly, leaving him in my dust. I stomped over to the table and grabbed my basket that held the leftover flowers in it.

“Stupid dumb nose?” This was the only thing that came out of his stupid dumb mouth.

I whipped around to offer him a snarl. The elevators would take forever to come to the fifteenth floor and there was no way I could stay on this floor a second longer, so I headed towards the stairs exit. As I did this, I pulled out a leftover daffodil from my basket.

“Here, have something you’re clearly lacking.” I threw the daffodil at his face. He caught it, still looking dumbfounded. “It means chivalry.”

Before he could question it further, I back kicked the emergency exit door open and left in a huff.