Rosie Coloured Glasses. Brianna Wolfson

and broad and his shoulders pressed forward. If you were up close enough, you could see that his black eyes were always tick, tick, ticking back and forth. He was always scanning the room and the people in it. And his lips were always pursed like he was ready to say something. But the way his eyebrows pressed in toward one another and the way he held his jaw tense, you knew you didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But whether he was talking or quiet, looking at you or ignoring you entirely, Rex Thorpe commanded your attention when you shared space with him.

      Willow sat down at the table and poured a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal for her brother and then one for herself as Rex tilted his right arm up and down like a steel machine taking sporadic sips of coffee. Willow and Asher used their heavy silver spoons to scoop the nonmarshmallow bits into their mouths first. They liked seeing the color that the specific mix of horseshoe, pot-of-gold and heart-shaped marshmallows might tint the milk. It was a game they played at their mother’s house too. After the Lucky Charms milk settled into a certain color, they would each scramble through the box of crayons at the center of the table and search furiously for the one that best matched the color in their bowl. Whoever announced the closest color first earned a big red kiss from Rosie.

      When they played this game at their father’s house, Willow and Asher just stirred and observed the milk quietly. But at least they were both having fun.

      Asher broke the silence when he loudly asked, “Can we go bowling this weekend?”

      “Maybe once all your chores are finished,” Rex said without lifting his eyes from the notepad next to the coaster he put his coffee on.

      Willow already knew her dad would say something like this. Because the set of things that Dad said yes to was specific and almost always conditional. You could watch TV for fifteen minutes, if your laundry was already folded. You could have ice cream, two toppings maximum, if you finished every last pea on your plate. You could go outside, jackets zipped all the way up, only after you practiced piano for thirty minutes. You could open a new cereal box when the old one was finished, and then you could fold up the old box so it was efficiently flattened and put it in the recycling bin. It didn’t matter to her father if none of your favorite horseshoe-shaped marshmallows were left in the old box.

      Asher returned to his cereal bowl with an “Oh, man!” and then dipped under the kitchen table to play with his action figures. Which meant that everything went back to quiet at the breakfast table. Back to a quiet that disappointed Willow. She liked noise and chatter and music and games.

      She liked her mother’s house.

      Willow looked up from her bowl and considered whether to ask her father what color he thought the milk looked like. But his temples flared with each chomp on the wad of pink Bubblicious gum in his mouth. He looked so serious sitting there like that. So intense. So engrossed in his notes.

      So Willow took her creased word search book out of her backpack and scanned the page for the next word on the list—ZIPPER. Willow searched the grid for a letter Z. She tapped the Jazzberry Jam–colored crayon on the paper as she stared at the page. Willow smirked at her secret. The secret of how she came upon that crayon. And even though no one even noticed that Willow was smirking or holding a crayon, she was still proud of that dark pinkish cylinder of color in her hand. Proud that she had a mom who loved her so much she met her in the tree house in the middle of the night. Proud that she had a mom who played with her hair every Wednesday night. Proud that she had a mom who always let her win in thumb war.

      Right before the “bus alert” that Rex had set up sounded, Willow found her word. There it was, lettered straight across the middle. Z-I-P-P-E-R. She circled all the letters, closed her word search book and tucked it into her backpack. She needed it to keep her company on the bus. And at her lunch table. And under the slide at recess. And in her mind’s eye.

      Willow brought her and Asher’s empty bowls to the kitchen sink, zipped up her jacket, then her brother’s, then said, “Bye, Dad,” loudly enough for him to hear as they left for school.

      “Bye, guys!” Rex shouted back from his seat at the kitchen table.

      If Willow created a morning checklist for her father and taped it to his wall, it wouldn’t say check your notes or tighten your tie. It would only say one thing:

      Kiss Willow and Asher goodbye.

       3

      Twelve Years Ago

      When Rosie got to her favorite willow tree by the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir for the fourteenth time in fourteen days, she took off her helmet and leaned her bike against the rugged bark of the trunk. Then she started climbing. The fourth branch up on the left side was Rosie’s favorite to sit in. She could hear the ripples of the water and the murmurs of conversation below, but no one ever saw her up there. She sat up in the tree and made drawings, scribbled doodles and wrote notes to friends in faraway cities.

      Two weeks ago, she walked out of Blooms Flower Shop after Rex came in yelling, and she decided she wasn’t going back. And if she had ever bothered to check her messages, she probably would have learned that she had been fired anyway.

      Rosie pulled a few straggling Pixy Stix out of her tote bag and tore them open. She poured some of the sugar into her mouth and the remainder onto her notebook. The purple crystals scattered so beautifully on the page. She added some orange and then some red and swirled them around with her fingertips.

      Art, she thought. Ha. She stuck her tongue in the pile for a taste, and then blew the rest of the sugar off the notebook. Rosie watched the colorful crystals scatter into the air and trickle down toward the ground.

      “What the fuck?” boomed a familiar voice from below. She couldn’t forget that voice. The incisive way with which Rex Thorpe said “fuck.”

      Normally, Rosie might have apologized, but there was no way she would say she was sorry to that handsome jerk of a man. Not after the way he treated her. Not after the way he treated love.

      She shimmied down the tree prepared to walk away from him for the second time in two weeks. And as she did, her dress flipped up above her head revealing her polka-dot underwear. As soon as the paisley fabric fell back into position, Rosie and Rex locked eyes.

      There was a pause.

      “Hey, I know you. You work in the flower shop. You wrote that card to my girlfriend. The one with the crazy e. e. cummings love poem.”

      Another pause.

      “That was fucked-up.”

      Rosie adjusted her dress, squinted her eyes and decided to do battle. But only for a second.

      “Your note was fucked-up.”

      “Yeah? What about it?” Rex came back quickly, ready to spar.

      Rosie almost walked away with her grimace, but then something just slipped out.

      “Even Maleficent had something original to say to Sleeping Beauty.”

      Instead of firing back, Rex just stood there staring at her. And then he laughed. He found Rosie’s retort bizarre, immature and adorable.

      Rosie tried to make her escape from Rex for the second time, tote bag in hand. Rosie’s body jerked just as awkwardly and charmingly as it had two weeks ago at Blooms Flower Shop. But this time there were strange comebacks and endearing polka-dot underwear.

      Rex thought about Anabel. She never moved like this. Or dressed like this. Or talked like this. She always had a tall spine and a straight neck and a freshly dry-cleaned shirt.

      Rex was surprised to find that everything about Rosie right here under this willow tree was warming his heart. Especially the awkward manner in which she tried to wiggle out of their encounter. Rosie marched determinedly in one direction. Then abruptly she turned around and marched equally determinedly in the opposite way.

      But Rex had positioned his body right in front of Rosie’s and stared down at her.