“Not sleepy, huh?” he asked softly, his voice barely audible above the rasp and texture of his head sliding over the pillow. When I shook my head, the left side of his full mouth curled up. “Yeah, me either. Whaddya do when you can’t sleep?”
I shrugged, feeling heat in my cheeks as I fiddled with the edge of my comforter.
He nudged me with an elbow then winked when I looked at him. “C’mon, you can tell me. You know I won’t make fun. Hell, maybe I can even steal some’a your tricks. I could use the sleep.”
“I make lists of flowers,” I admitted. “I was on Suntastic Yellow Sunflowers when you came in.”
His lips twitched, but true to his promise, he didn’t laugh.
“Suntastic, hey? Well, I’m pretty fuckin’ sure I can’t name varieties of sunflowers, but I could do other flowers good enough. You wanna do it with me?”
I stared so hard at him my eyes burned, and then when that didn’t work, I reached out to touch the warm skin over the hard curve of his tricep.
He quirked an eyebrow at me in question, but I surprised myself by admitting the truth of my action.
“Sometimes, Dane and I don’t think you’re real,” I confessed on a breath, horrified that tears started to well at the backs of my hot eyes. “You and Molly and Diogo and your brothers. We never met anyone like you.”
Something shifted in the planes of his face, like tectonic plates beneath the crust of the earth. Whatever emotion passed through him was too deep for me to decipher, I only knew it left his eyes so dark they looked black as he blinked at me.
“You know what, Li? You’re gonna grow up and meet tons more people who treat you well, and then my family and me won’t seem so weird to you.”
“Not weird,” I corrected harshly, nails digging into the arm I still held. “Beautiful.”
I watched his mouth soften, thinking it was too red for a man but that I liked it anyway.
“Okay, not weird. But I mean it, this…” he gestured to the cramped room, the lingering memories of the argument in the kitchen haunting the space like a silent spectre, “is only temporary. Dane’s almost eighteen, and he’s gonna take care of you. He’s gotta plan.”
I knew Dane had a plan. He’d been hatching plans to get us out and away from our parents since I could remember. He was smart, but it was hard to do well at school when you had a part time job as a drug dealer’s protégé combined with the stress of raising a little girl because your parents couldn’t be bothered to do it well themselves. He was noble and strong with a sense of heroism that we both shared. I knew he wanted to be a cop or a soldier or something important where he could fix broken lives like he swore he was going to fix ours. But that kind of job took education, and education took money that we didn’t have and time we couldn’t spare. So he figured he’d get into some sort of trade, and we’d get a little apartment, just us two.
But something about the plan made me sad and in the confessional silence we’d created in my bedroom, I was brave enough to admit that much.
“I wish he didn’t have to plan,” I murmured. “I wish he only ever had to dream.”
Jonathon made a sound at the back of his throat, an involuntary grunt like my words had socked him in the stomach.
“Do you have any dreams, Flower Child?” he asked me, trying to lighten the mood with one of his sideways smirks. “You wanna open a flower store or something?”
I frowned because I didn’t have any dreams, not really. I clung to Dane’s plans for us like a dream, because I was hopeful but suspicious of our ability to succeed.
But for myself?
No.
I hadn’t been given the tools to even know how to build one.
Instead of answering, I turned my head on the pillow to offer Jonathon my shining eyes in reply.
His lips twisted, a smile deformed by pity. “We’ll find you a dream. Don’t worry. There’s plenty’a time yet for you.”
“I bet you have dreams,” I said, because Jonathon was always moving and shaking, meeting new people, trying new things. Almost like his good life bothered him, always searching for something new to test his edges against.
He exhaled deeply and looked up at the ceiling like it held all the answers. “Yeah, I got dreams.”
“I can keep a secret really good,” I rushed to say, then blushed at my eagerness and shrugged lamely. “I mean, if you wanna tell me.”
I traced his slightly smiling profile with my eyes and felt warmed by his ease with me. He was loose and relaxed, still in a way I rarely saw him. I liked that. I liked that he could be at rest in my small room wrapped in the hot green scent of leaves on my cramped twin bed.
“My dreams don’t line up real well with my family’s dreams for me. So I think I’ll keep ’em to myself for a while longer. But you’ll be the first person I tell, yeah?”
That was somehow even better than being told right away.
“Okay,” I agreed easily, the last syllable warbled by a mammoth yawn.
Jonathon chuckled. “Okay, Li, why don’t we try your flower game, huh? We can get some sleep before Dane comes home. You start us off.”
I snuggled deeper into the warm bedclothes, turning on my side so I could face him and tuck my knees up to my chest to hug while I slept.
“Anemone.”
“Baby’s Breath,” he countered, reaching over to gently flick my nose.
I scrunched it up. “I’m not a baby.”
“No, but it’s gotta be said, I wish you were. You’re eyes are too damn old for six years’a life.”
I pressed them closed so he couldn’t read anything else I had written in my hazel eyes and stubbornly continued.
“Carnation.”
“Daisy.”
“Evening Primrose,” I murmured because it was already working.
An hour ago, sleep had been out of the question, but enclosed in my room with Jonathon like a sentry at my side, I trusted him enough to reach for the hand of sleep and be led into the dark.
“Flower Child,” I heard him murmur distantly as I sank into slumber. “I hope you find some dreams tonight.”
* * *
* * *
I woke up because I couldn’t breathe.
There was a hand over my mouth, fingers pressed up under my nostrils so I couldn’t drag air through my nose. Instantly, I froze. It was a conditioned response. The history of abuse in my family had taught me that the only course of action in a crisis was to be still and be calm or else face an escalation of violence.
So I tried to focus my eyes on the figure looming over me.
My mamá.
The whites of her eyes glowed in the dark, her irises pools of depthless black. She looked haunted. No, not haunted, because I always imagined ghosts as sad beings.
She looked demented.
Driven by some crazed force that was telling her to steal my air.
I blinked hard to clear the fuzz at the corners of my thoughts and tried not to panic.
“Hey nena, come with your mamá now, okay?” Mamá swooped lower over me, and I realized she was at the end of the bed, being careful not to disturb Jonathon who was still passed out beside me.