A Girl Named Marigold

She was my Marigold. She was everyone’s Marigold, technically, as that was her name, but I was the only one allowed to point it out. From ages 6 to, apparently, 14, if you’re named after an object of any sort, the wordplay gets real old real fast. So she went by Mary… to everyone else.

We’d bonded around the time she’d stopped wearing yellows and oranges, which was too bad, because with her dark curls bunched around her head, I thought she’d looked more like a sunflower. I couldn’t find any sunflowers though. When my timid little first grade self finally got the nerve to approach her, all I could find was a marigold.

“Is this some kind of joke?” She snapped at my outstretched arm.

I opened one of my tightly shut eyes. “Um, no?”

“Just because my name is Marigold doesn’t mean I like marigolds. Do you know how many marigolds I’ve gotten in my life? I barely even like flowers anymore. ‘You’re as pretty as a marigold, Marigold,’ ‘one day you’ll bloom so beautifully,’” her sarcastic tone started coming out in Spanish and I stared back like a deer in headlights until however long the rant took to finish. It was about as long as tears took to well up in my wide blue eyes. She paused when she noticed.

“Oh, I didn’t…”

“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?” I blurted out, because that was the only line I’d prepared. Then I fully burst into tears because there was nothing more embarrassing in that moment than now knowing the answer to said question. I dropped the flower and ran.

“I’m guessing you didn’t actually know my name, did you?” she asked when she finally found me behind a brick wall at recess.

“No,” came a squeak from between my knees.

“Then why’d you give me a marigold?”

“’Cause Daddy said girls like flowers, and my mama grows a lot of those orange-y ones, and I didn’t know how to talk to you, but if girls like flowers and you’re a girl then maybe you’d talk to me if I had a flower, ‘cause I’m a girl and I like flowers too, but it doesn’t mean you have to like them, so if you don’t like flowers, I can get you something else, like a peach from the tree in the back, or maybe a tomato, or just like… grass…” my rambling finally trailed off as the handful of grass I’d nervously pulled at sifted through my fingers.

Her hand reached out in front of me to pick it up and she leaned in close. “I love grass.” Her golden eyes peered between my arms into the little crevice I’d been hiding my face in and wrinkled upwards. “And flowers, but that part’s a secret, so you can’t tell anyone.”

My face lit up. Secrets meant you had a friend. She sprinkled the grass on my head, so I was confused about the last statement for a second until she giggled. I grabbed more grass and returned the favor until our new friendship was officially cemented in a happy whirl of grass and dirt not even our moms’ admonishments over our clothes could take away.

It’s been history ever since. We were inseparable the rest of that summer and every summer since – even during the school years if we had the same teachers. Once a year, to celebrate the anniversary of our best-friendship, I’d pick her a single marigold from my mama’s garden, and a handful of grass. She always joked about the unfairness of never getting me anything, but that wasn’t quite true. Over the years, she helped me become more bold and fierce. Partially, that was thanks to her setting a sassy example, but I soon outshone her attitude when anyone made fun of her, especially her name. I was the only one allowed to call her Marigold. She’d given me more than enough.

“Look, nothing’s gonna change now that we’re going into high school,” Marigold had reassured me at the beginning of the year. The way she’d talked about actors and boybands at our Friday night sleepovers had me worried over the summer. It was like when she talked about the different parts in the airplanes she hoped to build when she grew up, or the math that went into her theory on time travel: I couldn’t understand any of it, but I loved seeing her so excited. This time though, there was a pang of something more. I could be there, reading or drawing in the background, looking up every now and then to see her working on the science and math. Somehow that seemed creepier when boys came into the equation. The fact that she’d sensed my uneasy assumption that we’d spend less time together didn’t actually make me feel better about it, but for the most part, she was good on her promise.

The first semester of freshman year, nothing changed but the coursework. We still snuck into the graveyard Halloween night. We still had Winter Movie Marathon Night on December 23rd, then Noche Buena at her house and Christmas dinner at mine. The second semester was when I noticed the smaller changes. We still spent the whole first day of County Fair seeing how many rides it took before one of us would throw up a funnel cake, but she also spent it with makeup on and looking over her shoulder like she expected to see someone else.

“Who are you looking for?” I finally inquired.

“Oh, no, I’m paying attention.” Her head snapped back around.

“You’re rarely ever paying attention, Marigold.”

“That’s fair.” She wiggled her eyebrows and flashed a smile that showed even her gums. I still raised mine in return though, not giving up so easily. “Okay, it’s just this guy from my church. He said he might run into me here or something, and well, I’m hoping it happens before we throw up.”

“Is he as cute as Jensen Ackles?” I tried to keep it light.

“No,” she glared, “but he’s real.”

“Jensen Ackles is technically real.”

“Not a real possibility… probably. Raoul is my age.”

“Raoul?” Even the guys at school she thought were cute got nicknamed ‘ponytail guy’ or ‘blue eyes.’ This one had a name.

“Yeah, it’s no biggie though.” Marigold wasn’t one to shrug off her emotions; that was me. She seemed almost timid for the first time ever, so I let it go. The second time though, when she tried to hide her disappointment at not seeing Raoul by the end of the day, I had to say something.

“Hey, Marigold?” She snapped out of it and looked at me. “You know I love how expressive you are, right?”

She sighed, “was I being ‘too much’ again today?”

I swiveled her towards me, disrupting the flow of people leaving the fair. “Never. You know I don’t use those words like your family does. You are expressive, and I truly and genuinely love you, for that.” I hoped just the right amount of honesty was getting across through my intense stare into her eyes. “You’re allowed to tell me anything, with however much it excites or upsets you, no fear of disappointing me.”

“And that’s why you’ll always be my absolute best friend.” Her eyes watered before she hugged me, pushed me forward, and proceeded to spill her guts about Raoul.

Disappointment did creep up, but only in half of me, so I didn’t count what I said before as lying. Every time something Raoul did or said got relayed to me, Marigold’s brightened eyes would feed light into mine too, just like they always did, but somehow, some of that sparkle was being pulled from the other side of me instead. I buried and hid it. Like Jekyll commanding Hyde, I only allowed it out on Sunday mornings, in the form of tears or poetry, neither of which helped me understand it any better.

My mother had evidently started to notice the pattern. “You’re looking awfully chipper for a Sunday,” she remarked as I skipped down the stairs to breakfast. Whether she knew the cause for my periodic melancholy or not, it caught me off guard.

“Oh, well… it just so happens it’s on a Sunday this year, I guess.”

“Your anniversary!” She gasped. “Pick whatever flower you want from the yard. I’m sure it’ll be so much fun this year. You girls need more girl time, I think.” She nodded as if in on a secret I'd told her but didn’t know myself. “Mary can even spend the night here, if she wants… we’ll just forget it’s a school night. The year’s almost over anyway,” she shrugged.

“Thanks mom,” I laughed, “but I doubt her parents would allow it. I’ll settle for us grabbing coffees that are mostly milkshakes down at the bookstore after she gets out of church.”

“If you insist. Maybe bring a change of clothes then though, in case of a DIRT FIGHT!” She chased me out the kitchen door to the garden despite my protests of both Marigold and I being a little too old for that part of our tradition anymore. We ended up laughing on the ground anyway, only quieting down when I finally glanced over at the flowerbed beside me.

“You’re both a lot older now, I know. But no one can ever take those dirt fights away from you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” I smiled. “We’ll always have our thing.” I picked the marigold closest to me, the prettiest one anyway, and got up to head out.

I kept up my smile the whole way to the church, lingering on my mom’s words, humming idly as I waited. Finally, people started to filter out and I searched through the crowd for Marigold.

I saw her before she saw me.

While I stared at the shimmering yellow dress draped perfectly over her figure, she stared up at who I assumed must be Raoul. They were laughing. My chest hurt. It felt better when I looked back down at the flower in my hand, but by the time I looked back up, Raoul had a flower too. He’d grabbed the first one he could reach in a nearby flower box. Smooth at a moment’s notice, sure kid, but you picked the wrong one. I smirked and charged forward, expecting Marigold to see the irony of his pick, and not wanting to miss a second of her inevitable outburst.

“A marigold for my Marigold,” he crooned, digging himself deeper.

To my surprise, she blushed. “Aww, thank you.” My heart fell. I swiped it off the proverbial ground before she could notice as soon as she looked up and yelled, “Vicky!”

Focusing on this one moment in which she would run from Raoul over to me, I imagined different intentions to help get a soft smile back on my face. “That’s right,” she remembered. “Raoul!” she yelled back behind her, “It’s our friendiversary today, so I’ll catch up with you later.”

My marigold joined Raoul’s in her hand, and I knew things would always be okay between us, but never the same.