In Halls

Wilted

Not dead. Just profoundly unhappy.

I stared at the plants. There was a part of me that felt that I should have expected this. I wasn't born to be able to take care of living things. It wasn't in my bloodline. I'd inherited the disposition to neglect things under my care, to abuse them, to destroy them. I'd created a reasonable façade for a few years, but sooner or later this was always going to happen for me.

I shook myself. That kind of thinking was a, what was it called? A cognitive distortion? It was one of the reasons I'd got interested in Biology. Understanding how traits were really passed down, nature versus nurture. If I couldn't look after a houseplant, it was my own incompetence I had to blame, not my genes.

I pulled the plants out of the box one by one, starting with the spider plant. That was the first houseplant Sophie ever got for me, over three years ago now. It was just after I started working at the Garden Centre on Saturday mornings, and I'd been going on to her about the wonders of greenery.

"Anyone could look after a spider plant," my Mum had said, then. She was optimistic as always.

Anyone except me, apparently.

It was dry and limp today, the leaves crispy at the ends, but it had looked worse. That little beast had lived through the first year of 'Ellen learns how to care for another living thing.' It had even produced generations of offspring that were now growing up with my parents, my brother, Sophie herself and anyone else who had remotely expressed an interest. So the spider plant wasn't too much of a worry. There would be a way to get it back if it didn't pull through.

The cyclamen looked awful. That hardly surprised me. It was the easiest plant in the world to piss off. It was supposed to have a froth of frilly pink flowers, but they hadn't made much of a show in two years. On the other hand, my ornamental chilli had had some colourful little chillies on it when I packed it up. Well, not any more. And my sundew, my sticky tentacle monster, as I liked to think of it, was a shrivelled and wilted mess. It was a carnivorous plant, good at catching tiny flies on its hairy leaves, but right now it didn't look very threatening.

That left my last and most treasured plant, my miniature bonsai. It had come right out of its pot. I pushed it gently back in, desperate to make it balance again. It basically looked like a twig stuck in a ball of soil. How could I have forgotten my bonsai baby? At home, I'd been fettling with it almost every day, studying beginners' guides to bonsai online to help me. I knew it had been the most expensive of Sophie's gifts. It had been a special one, for my eighteenth birthday, so small it wasn't technically called a bonsai anymore, but a 'mame.'

At the bottom of the shoe box were the cards Sophie had given me with each plant. In each one, with Sophie's usual gift with the written word, jokes comparing me to plant life blended into informational paragraphs, notes on the scientific interest of each plant. Sophie wasn't into that kind of thing, and she'd straight up told me the websites she copied from, but the point was that she did it because she knew I'd appreciate it.

And I'd just left her plants in a box to die.

I lined the plants up on my desk, then leaned against it, staring out of the window. I had to think of a way to fix my plants, and when I'd done that, I had to tell Sophie how useless I'd been, so she'd know not to waste money on plants for me again. I'd have to stick to the greenery growing outside instead for my plant life fix.

My room overlooked the front of the building and I could see down to the street, which wasn't exactly overflowing with foliage. A guy with a bag of supermarket shopping was wandering along it. In fact, as far as I could tell it was Christopher.

I'd said to Elizabeth this morning that he was hot, and she'd seemed to agree, but I realised looking down at him that it was not so much an appearance thing but a personality thing. Objectively, Ed was hotter. But having his face plastered onto a different girl's every night spoiled the charm somewhat. Christopher, on the other hand, still just seemed like a decent person. And decency was attractive in itself. Besides, he was far from ugly. Tall, cute and dependable, despite his takeaway food habit.

So I'd started avoiding him around the flat. I was self-conscious about finding him attractive, and I didn't want him to read my blushes with his beautiful sea-green eyes. Honestly, it should be illegal to have brown hair and green eyes. The combination made me melt. Like fucking Derek again, but nicer.

But we lived together. And that made Christopher's attractiveness a problem. I'd heard horror stories from Jason and his friends about couples getting together in Halls and then breaking up, forced to live inches from a hated ex for months on end. I did not want to be the pathetic dumpee in that situation. Even the imagined image made me wilt.

The way I saw it, there were three options. Option one was to no longer find him attractive and be a perfectly normal human about it. Not likely. Option two was to miraculously persuade him that I was the girl of his dreams, so that we got together and didn't break up at least until the year was out. As if. Which left option three. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Option three it is then.

Christopher disappeared beneath the window frame as he approached the door to the building. I refocused on my poor, dilapidated plants. I would have to keep them on the desk for now, so that I couldn't forget about them, and pay them as much attention as I could to make up for my neglect. With a small water bottle filled from my tap, I began gently soaking the soil for each plant. Then I found a small pair of scissors and embarked on surgery, cutting off any leaves that were entirely wilted for fear of spreading infection through the plant.

It was as I was operating on my sundew that I was interrupted by a knock on the door. My mind jumped to Christopher. Maybe he'd seen me ogling him through the window and was coming to ask me to back off.

Not likely, I reasoned. It would be Elizabeth, finally off the phone with Julia. I balanced my plant and scissors in one hand as I opened the door.

It wasn't either of them. It was Ed.

I was thinking of adding pictures of what Ellen's plants are supposed to look like, let me know if you think that would be a good idea!