Page 36 of I Saw Her First
“Dahlia.”
“Dahlia,” he echoes slowly, as if tasting the name on his tongue. He wrinkles his nose, and it’s so cute I have to laugh. “Sorry,” he adds, smiling sheepishly. “I just… I can’t see you as aDahlia.”
I nod in agreement.
“Why did you change it?”
I look down at the daisy in my hand, gently stroking the velvety-white petals. “I changed it when I left home.”
“But… why?”
I let my breath out slowly, reluctantly. “It’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he murmurs. I don’t dare glance up, but I know he’s watching me through the lens of the camera again. I don’t know why he took a picture of me a few moments ago, why he might want to take more, but his careful, focused attention makes me feel so… seen. It makes me feel like I could tell him anything, and he’d listen. He’d care.
It’s been a long time since it felt like anyone really cared.
I remember what he said about grief a few nights ago—that it can come out of nowhere when you least expect it. I told him I don’t think about Beth much, but I do. I think about her all the time. I’ve never had a friend, never had anyone else in my life I’ve connected with like her, before or since. I’ve become a loner over the past few years. If it wasn’t for Denise and my regulars at Joe’s, people like Violet and Kyle—and, of course, Weston—I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. Most of the time I don’t dwell on this. I just live my life. Then I do something stupid like pick up a camera or put on a Steely Dan record, and I remember what’s missing from my life. What’s been missing since I was seventeen. It hurts a lot to be reminded; it’s much easier to work all day until I’m too tired to feel anything, then put on Netflix to drown out my thoughts.
But that’s why I’ve felt so stuck, I realize. I haven’t let myself feel things. Not for the past few years, at least. I grieved after Beth died, then I got swept up in life again, and I guess I got afraid to let those feelings back in. It was easier to numb them than feel them. But that’s the problem with numbing your feelings; you can’t just numb the bad ones, you numb them all.
Talking to Wes the other night, I felt that sharp sting of grief again, but as I gaze down at my daisy, I realize it wasn’t a bad thing. Thinking of Beth—letting myself miss her—wasn’t a bad thing at all. It felt… real.
I think of my first date with Jess, agreeing to keep things light, and how that, in a way, came to shape our entirerelationship. It seems that’s how Jess lives his entire life, actually. He focuses on having fun, but he never lets himself feel anything. I didn’t realize I’d done the same, but I don’t want to live that way anymore. Not when I’ve been feeling things lately that remind me what it feels like to be alive. Even if they’re painful.
“I told you about my friend Beth,” I begin, fiddling with the flower in my hand. “But I didn’t tell you about her parents, Willow and Sebastian Walker. They were the most wonderful people I’ve ever known. I felt closer to them than I did to my own parents.”
“Why’s that?” Wes asks quietly.
I heave a deep sigh. “I was always what my mother would call a ‘problem child.’ That is, I had emotions, and a huge imagination, neither of which my parents knew what to do with. They were very closed-off, emotionally. Always have been. As a kid, I had so many feelings.” I laugh humorlessly. “I’m fairly certain I was born to the wrong parents and should have been born to the Walkers.”
“Tell me about them,” Wes prompts.
“I was seven when they moved next door, the same age as their daughter, Beth. We became best friends, and her parents treated me like one of their own from day one. They understood me in ways my parents never did.”
I frown, thinking back to when I got my first period, at age thirteen. Willow sat me down and explained the birds and the bees. Seriously, I wasthirteenwhen I found out how everything worked, because my own mom had never bothered to explain it to me. Thank God for Willow, though. At sixteen, she took me to Planned Parenthood to go on the pill, “just in case.” That turned out to be a waste of time, obviously, but it didn’t matter. What did matter is that I had someone there for me when my parents refused to be what I needed.
I reach for another daisy, plucking it from the ground, and hear the camera snap as I do so. I glance up to find Weston watching me, the camera pressed to his eye, and quickly look away. Seeing the Nikon reminds me of all that I lost, and I wait for the lump in my throat to soften before I continue speaking.
“The Walkers were photographers. They had a darkroom in their basement, and that’s where I learned about photography. They gave me an old camera…” I lift my gaze to the Nikon in Weston’s hands. “Just like that. It was my first camera—myonlycamera—and I took it everywhere. I learned everything about how it worked and Willow would spend hours in the darkroom with me, showing me how to get the images to develop just right. She even encouraged me to study photography in college, and I was so excited by the idea. I never felt more like myself than I did in that darkroom.”
Weston lowers the camera now, his gaze intense as it roams my face. He says nothing, just waits for me to continue.
“They used to call me Daisy,” I say, smiling at the memory. “Willow and Sebastian and Beth—they all called me Daisy. They said I was too wild and free to be a dahlia, that dahlias are fussy, showy flowers, and I was nothing like that.” I laugh, remembering how, one afternoon, I told Willow that daisies were my favorite flower as we picked them from her yard and put them in a pretty, handmade vase on her counter. She turned to me, her wild black hair tucked under a scarf, and nodded sagely.
“Would you like to be a Daisy?” she asked me, and I grinned.
“I wish I could be.”
“But you can,” she said, pulling a daisy from the vase and placing it on each of my shoulders as if she was knighting me. “From now on, as long as you’re in this house, you shall be known as Daisy.”
I giggled, and Beth threw her arms around me.
“Daisy!” She squeezed me affectionately. “It’s perfect.”
I didn’t dare tell my parents about my new name; I knew they wouldn’t understand. They hated the Walkers, my dad especially, calling them “hippie commies.” I didn’t really know what that meant at the time, I just knew he thought it was bad.
Only, there was nothing bad about them to me. They were kind, and loving, and creative, and made me feel like I had gifts to offer the world.
