But then the next time she visited the Argent office she found a flower on her desk, a cute yellow one from one certain frumpy office neighbor. She’d stared at it for a good minute, just sitting on her keyboard, and then she slowly she picked it up to turn the little tag over in her hands, inspecting his penmanship, wondering when he’d thought of her enough to bring her something special. It gave her a funny tight feeling between her lungs, and her head felt dizzy. It demanded reparation. She had to get him back.
Luckily for her, she remembered that there were some sorority girls near the bus-stops, running their fundraiser all year long. Maybe she could get him a bouquet of flowers and then talk about her feelings--it was 2019, boys could get flowers, couldn’t they? And he’d initiated the conversation with one himself, which meant he had to be at least vaguely amenable to the whole ‘plant corpse as a token of affection’ thing.
Ella tried to be sneaky about it--she clocked out for lunch and left without a peep, hustling back to the bus station for a dozen flowers and a stack full of cards. She’d need more than one if she was going to write everything down about his nerd hair and his blue eyes and the way he frowned at her specifically when she bugged him from over their cubicle divider. With all the supplies in hand for Flower Revenge 2k19, Ella snuck her way back into the office, using a plastic take-out bag from her last lunch as the perfect disguise. From the moment she walked through the back entrance of Argent and all the way up the elevator, she did her best not to fidget, lest she give herself away. Covey was going to be so surprised when he saw his desk had multiple flowers on it. She couldn’t wait to see the look on his face.
The elevator doors slid open and Ella walked onto their floor with purpose, her mind alight with the words and phrases she wanted to say. She knew this much, each tag was going to have a different nickname on it, each more ridiculous than the last, and then maybe the final flower would have something actually genuinely heartfelt written as the message. She’d have to hide that one, maybe in one of his filing cabinets--
Ella paused, catching a small blip of yellow in her peripheral vision. In someone else’s cubicle, she saw the same yellow flower--not hers, she’d left hers on her desk to be made into a hair accessory later--but one of the other office girls, the same yellow, the same handwriting. To: Someone Else, From: Reid.
Oh. It had been...more of an office thing.
Ella settled in at her desk and considered her options, folding her hands in front of her mouth. Now that she thought about it, it did make more sense for her grumpy office mate to simply...get flowers for everyone, out of a sense of obligation, and the color had been yellow, which was strictly platonic in meaning. She’d been so eager to read between the lines that she hadn’t bothered to see the obvious, which made her feel all the more stupid for even going out. Of course they were platonic flowers, because they were friends. Maybe. Were they even friends? But her afternoon could recoup. She didn’t have to miss lunch for nothing.
Putting something screamy on in her headphones, she took the flowers out one by one, writing name after name in her best penmanship. The key to this all would be that Reid could never know who sent them, and so she had to send them to everyone in the office. To: Ari. To: Cerise. To: Delilah. To: Ella. To: Emilia. To: Jade. To: Yuri. And then, she tied each tag to a flower with a neat little bow, because she’d taken knot-tying as an arts and crafts class one summer and knew just the right flourishes to make them look fancy.
Ella lingered on the flower for Reid, thinking maybe to write something heartfelt on the back anyway, but she bit back on the impulse. It’s not what he would want, not from some bothersome neighbor. Best to keep things anonymous and friendly, like he had.
One by one, she dropped off the little flower grams to everyone in the office, making sure to watch for times where they’d be away. As the piece de resistance, Ella threw away all of the evidence in some nameless mook's garbage bin, so that if anyone did any digging, they would be implicated with having feelings, not her. She left his for last (because he so rarely left his desk, it was almost infuriating), and then she settled into her coding slouch and turned the music up high, high enough that even she couldn’t think. Cool kids didn’t care about flowers. She was a cool kid. It was all just a show of capitalism anyway.
Ella sighed, and began a new line of code. With all that ruckus, she now had a backlog to catch up on. That’s what she got for caring, she supposed. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.
(1062 words)
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