Love & Other Carnivorous Plants by Florence Gonsalves

Author:Florence Gonsalves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Because Janet made some Facebook status, I don’t have to tell Kate or Liz or any of Sara’s friends that Sara is, you know, what Sara is. I decide to deactivate all forms of social media because there’s something very creepy about finding out about death on the same platform where you get live updates about people’s cats. Besides, people are posting all these hokey statuses and sad pictures, and I don’t have that sort of public display in me.

I retrieve my cell phone from the drawer and discover a million missed calls and unread texts, but Bugg is the only person I want to talk to. She picks up on the first ring.

“I’ve been so worried. Are you okay?” she asks. “God, that’s such a stupid thing to say.”

“No, can you come over?”

“Be right there.”

I hear my mom let Bugg in, and when she comes into my room I’m tucked into bed with my dear friends: peanut butter, M&M’s, and pepperoni. I haven’t had this mutant snack concoction in too long, and my life has been severely lackluster because of it.

“Wouldn’t this be an awesome-sounding name for a rap group?” I ask, pointing to my goods. “Especially if you abbreviated peanut butter to ‘PB.’”

“You could be their manager,” Bugg agrees, sitting on the bed next to me. We smile for a moment but as soon as she kisses my forehead I burst into slobbery tears.

“What happened, Danny?” she asks, and I’m glad she’s whispering. It’s the sort of thing you can’t talk about, but if you have to talk about it, a whisper is all that feels right.

I try to say something but it gets lost in a great series of hiccups, so she pats my hair and waits for me to catch my breath. When I can finally breathe without gasping these weird seal gasps, I tell her everything Janet and Cal and the doctors told us.

“She knew she could have had it.” I can hear how angry I sound. “She knew it and she didn’t want it to ruin her chances of trying to get back on the team, which she told everyone about except for me. And on top of that she knew it could kill her because Cal got tested or whatever, and she never did anything. It was so fucking selfish.” I dig the spoon into the peanut butter jar and watch the soupy crushed peanuts inch back to their source. “I fucking hate this peanut butter,” I add because natural peanut butter is the grossest kind of peanut butter. “And I don’t mean that, about Sara. If she knew, really knew that it were possible to die, she would’ve stopped playing. I know she would have. She never wanted to be a tennis martyr or something. She wouldn’t have left me.” I stop stabbing the peanut butter swamp and look at Bugg. Tears are rolling down her cheeks. “She was wrong, but I can’t blame her for that. No one actually thinks it’s possible to die.

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