The Language of Flowers Read Free

onto her shins, and when she didn’t release my arms, I kicked her ankles. She did not step back.
    I let out a growl and snapped my teeth toward her outstretched arm, but she saw me coming and grabbed my face. She squeezed my cheeks until my jaw loosened and my lips puckered. I sucked in my breath in pain.
    “No biting,” she said, and then leaned forward as if she would kiss my pink puckered lips but stopped inches from my face, her dark eyes drilling into mine. “I like to be touched,” she said. “You’ll have to get used to it.”
    She flashed me an amused grin and let go of my face.
    “I won’t,” I promised. “I won’t ever get used to it.”
    But I stopped fighting and let her pull me up the front porch and inside the cool, dark house.

3
.
    Meredith turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove too slowly down Noriega , reading each street sign. An impatient car honked behind us.
    She’d been talking continuously since Fell Street, and the list of reasons my survival seemed unlikely stretched halfway across San Francisco: no high school diploma, no motivation, no support network, a complete lack of social skills. She was asking for my plan, demanding I think about my own self-sufficiency.
    I ignored her.
    It hadn’t always been this way between us. As a young child I’d soaked up her chatty optimism, sitting on the edge of a bed while she brushed and braided my thin brown hair, tying it up with a ribbon before presenting me like a gift to a new mother, a new father. But as the years passed, and family after family gave me back, Meredith’s hopefulness chilled. The once-gentle hairbrush pulled, stopping and starting with the rhythm of her lecturing. The description of how I should act lengthened with each placement change, and became more and more different from the child I knew myself to be. Meredith kept a running list of my deficiencies in her appointment book and read them to the judge like criminal convictions. Detached. Quick-tempered. Tight-lipped. Unrepentant. I remembered every word she said.
    But despite her frustrations, Meredith had kept my case. She refusedto transfer it out of the adoptions unit even when a tired judge suggested, the summer I turned eight, that perhaps she’d done all she could. Meredith negated this claim without pause. For a buoyant, bewildered moment I thought her reaction had come from a place of hidden fondness for me, but when I turned my gaze I saw her pale skin pink in embarrassment. She had been my social worker since birth; if I was to be declared a failure, I was, by extension, her failure.
    We pulled up in front of The Gathering House, a peach, flat-roofed stucco house in a row of peach, flat-roofed stucco houses.
    “Three months,” Meredith said. “I want to hear you say it. I want to know you understand. Three months’ free rent, and after that you pay up or move out.”
    I said nothing. Meredith stepped out and slammed the car door behind her.
    My box in the backseat had shifted during the drive, my clothes spilling out onto the seat. I piled them back on top of the books and followed Meredith up the front steps. She rang the bell.
    It was more than a minute before the door opened, and when it did a cluster of girls stood in the entryway. I clutched my box tighter to my chest.
    A short, heavy-legged girl with long blond hair pushed open the metal screen and stuck out her hand. “I’m Eve,” she said.
    Meredith stepped on my foot, but I didn’t reach for her outstretched hand. “This is Victoria Jones,” she said, pushing me forward. “She’s eighteen today.”
    There was a mumbling of happy birthdays, and two girls exchanged eyebrow-arched glances.
    “Alexis was evicted last week,” Eve said. “You get her room.” She turned as if to take me there, and I followed her down a dark, carpeted hall to an open doorway. Slipping inside, I closed the door and turned the lock behind me.
    The room was bright white. It smelled like fresh paint, and the walls,