Peaches

the other couple’s kiss at all. Their kiss had been secret, stolen, special. The kiss she gave to Rex was sweet but flat—like a Coke without the bubbles.

    Murphy usually knew why she was miserable. She could enumerate the reasons proudly, like a kid counting out birthdays on his fingers, and she liked to enumerate them often. But Friday afternoon she had to search herself for why she felt so dark, and it didn’t come easy. With two nights left on the orchard, she blamed it on the fact that her spring break had just about ended and she could never redeem it. Coming to the closing point was a fresh reminder that two weeks had been stolen from her. That was what she told herself, but it didn’t ring quite true. It kept nagging at her that since the weeks of hard labor were over, she should feel like a jailbird spreading its wings. And she didn’t. She felt like she was about to fly into a window.
    She thinned trees that afternoon, hardly noticing she was doing it at all. After her run-in with Leeda she steered clear of everyone altogether, feeling like a menace to society. Before she knew it, the workers were straggling in ahead of her instead of behind her like they usually did. She lingered in her row, watching them disappear, and continued to thin the trees here andthere, feeling the emptiness of the rows around her. She finally walked out to the edge of the trees and stood there, looking toward the dorms. She couldn’t deal with the sad, worried faces of the workers as they listened to the radio, like they had at breakfast and lunch. They shook their heads at the radio as if they were trying to will the frost away, and it just made Murphy darker. So instead of walking up the stairs of Camp A, she turned right and walked alongside it. There was low brush behind here, Murphy knew, but now that she got close, she noticed a tiny overgrown footpath. She followed it.
    The air smelled like invisible flowers. Murphy breathed it in as the trail lost itself a few times, becoming tall grass and brambles, and then sorted itself out again into a little dirt line that wound toward the side of the Darlingtons’ farmhouse, ending at an odd little open patch with a trellis in the middle.
    Murphy peered around, then touched a few of the bushes, letting her fingers run along the ridges of the leaves while she looked at the different shapes and structures of them and the plants they belonged to. There were rosebushes, azaleas, peonies—none of them blooming yet, all being strangled by kudzu and grapevines. It was like a nightmare garden—the kind a creepy old lady with a bunch of cats would have, Murphy decided. A creepy old lady in an old wedding dress she’d been wearing since being jilted at the altar fifty years ago.
    Murphy pulled a cigarette out of the pack in her pocket and lit up, taking a deep inhale and looking at the disrepair of the garden. It only blackened her mood. She was thinking it was typical. People didn’t know how to finish what they started.
    A rustle came from behind her, and Birdie emerged from thetrail that went toward the house. Birdie stopped, startled, and blushed.
    “Oh. Hey, Murphy.”
    “Hey.” Murphy was at a loss for words with Birdie. She looked stricken. Murphy shoved her left hand in her pocket. “This your garden?”
    Birdie looked around as if trying to orient herself. “Oh. My mom’s.” Silence. “I tried to revive it a couple of years ago. But there’s too much other work.”
    Murphy nodded, as if she knew what Birdie was talking about. But she’d never had too much work. She’d almost made a full-time job out of avoiding work of any kind.
    “Poopie planted that nectarine tree, but the fruit is always filled with bugs.” Birdie looked up at the tree. “She said it’d be a miracle if it ever made a healthy fruit,” Birdie added quietly. Again, silence.
    “I bet it gets boring.”
    Birdie looked confused. “Farm work?”
    “I mean, living on an orchard in general.” Murphy only half believed this. She said it more out of trying to be helpful about the frost thing. Like, Look on the bright side—your life really sucks anyway.
    “Oh God, it’s not boring.” Birdie smiled gently and sadly. That was all.
    Murphy took a long drag on her cigarette. “So your mom ditched the garden, huh?”
    Birdie lost her smile. “She ditched…it, yeah.” She looked worried, shy, nervous, lost—each expression passing over her face like a cloud. Murphy tried to imagine the