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“Well, that’s a start,” she grumbles.
“Come again?”
“I said you’re an idiot.”
A grin crosses my face at the insult. I can’t help it. She’s fun to rile up. “Fine. So what is it?”
“Roses.” A grin splits her face so wide that I’m not sure I heard her right.
“Um…aren’t roses supposed to be red?”
“Not all of them. There are a few colors they appear in naturally. Lavender is my favorite. Right after the corpse lily.”
Okay, now I’m sure I didn’t hear her right. “A... come again?”
“Corpse lily. They’re rare and mostly found in Indonesia, but when they bloom, they smell like rotting flesh.”
I scrunch up my nose. “And to think, I always thought girls liked a bouquet of roses. No wonder I could never keep a relationship.”
“That, and your sparkling personality.”
“Never been one to sparkle.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Let’s go back to flowers that smell like rotting flesh. That’s disgusting.”
“Did you know that if you were to cover your body in entrails from a rotter, then you’d be able to walk right by them if you didn’t make a sound?”
“Do I want to know how you know this?”
She thinks about it for a moment. “Probably not.”
“Not convincing enough. How do you know this?” Leaning forward, I kneel and rest my elbows on my knees, trying to trying to picture this corpse flower. It blows my mind that something like this exists in the world. Then again, the dead don’t stay dead in this world, so I really need to lower my bar for mind-blown moments.
“When that guy almost killed my friends—friend—and I by stealing our supplies and leading the dead in, I got a little carried away with my anger and slashed one up pretty good. It fell right on top of me, so when I stood up, I was covered in its guts and none of the other rotters paid me any attention until I screamed for my friend.”
My body temperature rises when she mentions this betrayal. I really want to find this guy and end him. “This guy who betrayed you. Where do you think he is now?”
She shrugs. “Hopefully dead somewhere. No, hopefully alive and starving and cornered by a horde with only a gun that ran out of bullets.”
“Harsh.”
“Not enough.”
“Touche. So does this corpse lily look anything like a rotter? Because I can’t imagine putting one into a vase on the kitchen counter.”
Her eyes widen. “They’re beautiful. Besides, add one into your rose bouquet and you’d have every girl in the country after you.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“I get it, you’re boring.”
“I’m not?—”
“So anyway, lavender roses.” Her eyes light up when she turns back to the flowers that brought us to this moment. I smile. I can’t help it. Seeing her excited about something so mundane as random flowers is a breath of fresh air I didn’t realize I needed. “They’re beautiful. I think someone stepped on one and I was trying to pep it up again.”
“Don’t flowers in the wild take care of themselves?”
