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Rosemary had a secret only she didn’t know what it was yet. She was as happy as most kids had been their Sophomore year at Roosevelt High School just outside of Chicago. She got grades good enough to keep her out of trouble at home and not good enough to get her too many awards at school. But she had one peculiar habit.

Rosemary loved her mother’s garden and was drawn to it in a way most sixteen-year-olds never are. Especially ones with driver’s licenses. Every day after choir practice at school she would drive home, grab her camera, put on her Crocs and walk the long, pebbled path to the raised beds of the vegetable garden just inside the deer fencing. The day she would discover her secret, the beds had just been tilled and fertilized and made ready for the spring planting of the usual–tomatoes, string beans, radishes, carrots, peppers and corn. She walked past them all, past the barely budding berry bushes to one bush in particular.

Every day, no matter the weather, Rosemary walked to the forsythia bush. Every day she took a picture from the same spot. She’d been doing this since she got her digital camera for her fourteenth birthday. She was born in the spring and there was something about the season, about everything coming alive, that spoke to her in ways she thought only spring babies really understood. On this particular day the bush’s little buds had slightly opened to reveal the tiniest peek at the yellow flowers to come. She walked to the well-worn spot where her wooden bench stood, sat down and took the shot. This was the second year she’d make a time-lapsed video out of her photos. There was something about watching the bush die and come back to life in a matter of minutes that hypnotized her. There was a beauty in it. A natural beauty. But, of course, nothing comes back from the dead.

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My father has a freeway named after him. I’d rather have my dad.

Guys don’t really talk like girls about it, but when I stood in the graveyard it just, well, was hard to tell him. And I needed to. I needed to tell someone. Someone who wouldn’t tell anyone else. But, it felt like all the dead people were listening. And the worst part was, Dad was buried next to Grandma.

“What’s taking so long?” Hector yelled, still sitting on his bike, waiting for me, with all the understanding of someone who couldn’t wait two seconds for his friend to run into 7-11 for a coke.

Dad’s at the corner of Serenity Way and Heavenly Drive just up a grassy hill, beside an oak tree. I didn’t like him being so close to the oak tree. It had already messed with some of the tombstones five graves over. I didn’t think Dad believed in Heaven. He believed in rules. Well, the law mostly, and the law is sort of like the Olympics of rules. But there were other rules that were way more important when I was growing up. Like The Cut-Off, when I couldn’t talk on the phone after 10. And how he made me and my sister check-in all our “devices” until morning so we wouldn’t get into any “shennanigans.” He was hard core. And made what happened to Alyssa and me nearly impossible, until this year.

“Fabian!” Hector, yelled.

“Just freaking ride around the block or something,” I yelled back.

“Aren’t you done yet?” Hector looked down the road and didn’t budge. “How long does it take to tell him your not half a virgin anymore?”

Now the whole graveyard knew.

© Laura Elliott, 2011