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“This looks like you,” typed Paulina, and when she clicked ‘Send’, a pleased thrill shot up her spine. Maybe that reaction was premature, but she knew this classmate of hers. Feeling herself smile, she slid the phone into her back pocket and journeyed down the remainder of the soybean field.
No rain meant drier lands, which made it easier to kick at the crumbly topsoil while minimising the clean-up required of her sneakers. Of course, if she had the choice, she wouldn’t be here; she’d be back at Amity with her friends, spending her well-earned weekend at the mall.
Because sure, the family farm was interesting. The cows moo-ed and the chickens squawked. But the adults kept their conversations within their circle and her cousins had gone to college this year, so who could Paulina talk to apart from the contacts in her phone?
At least the field was peaceful. Pretty, even—rows upon rows of soybean overlapping with each other, until they breached the sky at the horizon. The clouds were out, too, shielding her from crippling heat, and the crops weren’t entirely green; she came across weeds the width of her little finger, sporting pale purple petals. She counted about four of them so far, just from walking down this lane.
At weed five, her phone buzzed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” wrote the text. “What’s that?”
Paulina crouched, jeans brushing against the soybean leaves, and thumbed out a reply.
“A weed,” she sent. “Like you.”
Rocking on her heels as she waited, she reached out and tugged at one of the petals of said weed with a thumb and forefinger. Soft, but weirdly fuzzy. She wrinkled her nose.
A message popped up.
“My grandma says that’s a henbit. It ruins crops.”
Paulina waited for more. Nothing else came, and that felt strangely disappointing. “I know that,” she started typing, “it’s a WEED—”
“See those dots in the petals?”
Delete. Delete. “Yeah, why?”
“I mean the two small petals hanging under the bigger one.”
“Yes.” Paulina tried not to jab her irritation into the keyboard. “So?”
“They look like a pig’s snout.” Then, “Doesn’t that remind you of something else?”
Oh no. Paulina knew where this was going, but she couldn’t finish her own text before the next one came, hard and quick and final.
“It’s what YOU see in the mirror.”
A smiley face came with it.
Paulina deleted her message mid-writing, and fired out, “You’re SUCH A CHILD.” Conscious of her hypocrisy, she stuffed her phone back into her jeans before Sam Manson could—and would—point it out. That girl was vicious like that. After biting, she’d never let you go.
Still, when Paulina got to her feet and shook blood flow back into her legs, she felt more satisfied than before. She headed back towards the farmhouse, where she intended to curl up on a couch. Search up pictures of odd-looking plants, or the ugliest bugs. Manson couldn’t have the last word, after all.