The Perils of Periwinkle

“Right, well,” I said faintly, already regretting every life choice that had led me to this moment. “I suppose we could… have a look at the site tomorrow? See what we’re working with?”

“Tomorrow it is!” Leo agreed, looking far too pleased with the arrangement. “I’ll bring some tools, and we can start making plans. This is going to be great, Arden. Really great.”

As I watched him walk away, a cheerful whistle floating back towards me on the afternoon breeze, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of impending doom. This community garden project, much like my brief foray into zucchini farming, was almost certainly going to end in disaster. I could feel it in my bones.

I sent a frantic text to Bram, my fingers trembling slightly as I typed out the details of my latest catastrophe. His response was almost immediate, and typically unhelpful.

“Community garden?” he wrote. “Arden, you can’t even keep a plastic succulent alive. What on earth possessed you to agree to this?”

“I didn’t agree to it!” I shot back, my embarrassment giving way to indignation. “It just sort of… happened. Like a natural disaster. Or one of your sentient fungi.”

“Oh, this is going to be good,” Bram replied, and I could practically hear him cackling to himself. “I’ll bring popcorn to the grand opening. If you live that long.”

I scowled at my phone, resisting the urge to throw it across the room. It wasn’t my fault that Leo had taken my throwaway comment about a community garden and run with it like an overenthusiastic golden retriever. It wasn’t my fault that I was now apparently committed to transforming a patch of overgrown land into a thriving hub of horticultural activity. It wasn’t my fault that I was, in all likelihood, going to make an absolute fool of myself in front of my charming new neighbor and the entire neighborhood.

Or at least, that’s what I told myself as I sank back into my armchair and reached for my laptop. I had a community garden to plan, whether I liked it or not. And if I was going to fail spectacularly, I was at least going to do it with style.

Little did I know, the periwinkles were just the beginning.

That night, under the cloak of what I mistakenly believed was secrecy, Leo and I set out to begin our clandestine planting operation. We’d agreed, after much debate, that the best approach was to work under the cover of darkness. This would, in theory, allow us to avoid the prying eyes of our neighbors and the inevitable questions about why we were attempting to plant five hundred periwinkle plants in the middle of what appeared to be a perfectly innocent Tuesday evening.

“It’ll be fine,” Leo assured me, hefting a box of periwinkles with alarming ease. “We’ll be in and out before anyone even knows we’re there. Easy.”

I eyed him skeptically, adjusting my black velvet cloak and wondering, not for the first time, how I’d allowed myself to be talked into this. “Easy,” I repeated, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “Of course. Because nothing says ‘easy’ like attempting to landscape in the dark.”

Leo just grinned, his teeth flashing white in the moonlight. “Where’s your sense of adventure, Arden?”

“Buried under a pile of gothic novels and common sense,” I muttered, but I followed him out into the night anyway, my boots crunching softly on the gravel path that led towards the old community center.

The moon was full and bright overhead, casting long shadows across the overgrown plot of land we’d chosen for our ill-advised project. I’d half-hoped it would be too dark to see, thus giving me an excuse to abandon the whole endeavor, but no such luck. The world was bathed in an eerie silver glow, making the tangled weeds and rustling bushes look like something out of one of my more dramatic chapters.

“Right,” said Leo, setting the box down with a thump. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

I watched, arms crossed, as he began to unpack the periwinkles with an enthusiasm that bordered on alarming. “You know,” I said, after a moment, “I really think we should use a flashlight. It’s pitch black out here.”

Leo looked up at me, his expression incredulous. “A flashlight? Where’s the romance in that? The moonlight is perfectly adequate.”

“Romance?” I sputtered, nearly tripping over a stray garden hose in my indignation. “We’re planting periwinkles, not having a moonlit tryst.”

“Speak for yourself,” Leo said, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. “I find horticulture very romantic.”

I stared at him, torn between exasperation and a reluctant amusement. He really was something else. “You’re impossible,” I informed him, reaching into my pocket for my phone. “I’m using the flashlight on my phone, and that’s final.”

“No, no, it’ll ruin the ambiance,” Leo protested, waving a hand at me. “We can manage without it. Just follow my lead.”

It quickly became apparent that Leo’s lead was not one I wished to follow. Within minutes of beginning our planting, he managed to trip over the same garden hose I had, sending himself sprawling into a patch of what looked suspiciously like poison ivy.

“Oof,” he said, sitting up and rubbing his elbow. “Maybe the flashlight isn’t such a bad idea after all.”

“I told you so,” I said, with only a smidgen of satisfaction. I held out my hand to help him up, but he ignored it, scrambling to his feet with a grimace.

“Right,” he said, brushing dirt from his jeans. “Operation Stealth Planting, take two.”

Things did not improve from there. We argued over where to plant the periwinkles (“They need full sun!” “It’s the middle of the night, how would you even know that?”), we tripped over our own feet, and at one point I very nearly beaned Leo with a trowel when he made an ill-timed joke about my gardening skills.

Throughout it all, my phone buzzed periodically in my pocket as Bram sent a series of increasingly unhelpful texts.

“Remember, Arden,” read one, “the key to successful gardening is confidence. And also not accidentally unearthing any ancient burial grounds.”

“Very funny,” I muttered, shoving the phone back into my pocket without replying.

Another text arrived a few minutes later. “I’ve done a bit of research, and it turns out periwinkles are actually quite hardy. So even if you do manage to kill them, they’ll probably come back to life. Like horticultural zombies.”

I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corners of my mouth. Bram, for all his sardonic teasing, was a constant source of comfort in my otherwise chaotic life.

The night wore on, and our progress was slow and haphazard. By the time the first hints of dawn began to color the sky, we’d managed to plant perhaps fifty of the five hundred periwinkles, and I was beginning to think that community gardening might actually be a form of torture designed by particularly sadistic suburban overlords.

“This is a disaster,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow and leaving a satisfying smear of dirt in its place. “We’ll never get all of these planted.”

“Don’t be so negative,” Leo said, his voice irritatingly cheerful. “We’ll get there. And just think how impressed everyone will be when they see what we’ve accomplished.”

I snorted. “They’ll be impressed, all right. Impressed by the sheer scale of our failure.”

But even as I said it, I felt a flicker of something that might have been, if not hope, then at least a grudging determination. We’d started this ridiculous project, and we were going to see it through, even if it killed us. Or, more likely, left us with a collection of angry rashes and a newfound appreciation for the comforts of indoor plumbing.

“Come on,” Leo said, holding out a grubby hand to me. “Let’s do one more row before the sun comes up.”

I hesitated for only a moment before reaching out and taking his hand, allowing him to pull me to my feet. His fingers were warm and solid against mine, and for a brief, heart-stopping moment, I found myself wondering what it would be like to kiss him.

But I pushed the thought away, burying it deep beneath layers of common sense and self-preservation. I was not going to develop feelings for my irritatingly cheerful neighbor, no matter how nice his smile was or how good he looked in a pair of grass-stained jeans.

We worked in companionable silence for a while longer, the only sounds the soft scrape of our trowels against the earth and the distant chirping of early morning birds. And despite everything – despite the dirt and the exhaustion and the sheer absurdity of the situation – I felt a small spark of something like contentment flicker to life inside me.