Chapter 5
Ben
Ben McKittrick.
My ex–best friend and the originator of my curse—the gardener my aunt was so mysterious about. Now I know why. When Ben and I had our falling-out the summer before eighth grade, we weren’t quiet about it. Everyone in my family knew our friendship was over, but no one knew the truth.
I loved him, then he stole my boyfriend. And when they both left me, there wasn’t anyone I could tell. Ben had been the keeper of my secrets. That was the real ass-kicker of it all.
Now here he is, chumming around with my aunt and getting paid to do it.
Ro said it helped that the gardener loved Vero Roseto. I should’ve known what that meant. Ben adored this place—and me, at one point. We ran around these grounds for years, two little Nerf-gun-playing twerps.
But we’re not twerps anymore. I’m tall, he’s tall. I’ve got big arms, he’s got big arms. I smell like I haven’t changed my clothes since yesterday, and he smells like a hardworking gardener. Everything about him is different—defined. Bigger. Hairier. Jawline-ier. He’s so beautiful, I instantly recall everything about my body and face I don’t like: my soft waistline, my round, shiny cheeks that are in a constant skincare battle against acne. Things I like or don’t mind in other boys but despise in myself.
We’re the same age, but Ben McKittrick has become a man, while I’m still a boy. But young Ben—the boy I wrongly trusted—is in there somewhere, beneath the surface.
This hot guy in front of me I can deal with, but the boy and I have baggage.
“You’re back,” I say, more breathless than I meant to.
“You’re back, too,” he says, chugging more water (probably to show off his beautiful, stubbled throat again). He laughs as he wipes his lips with his forearm. “Is this gonna be awkward?”
A smile stiffens on my face. “Why would it be? I’m happy you’re here to help. The place really needs it.” Ben stares in silence as he circles his finger around the nozzle of his water bottle. Those feline eyes of his that never blink. I laugh, but it comes out agitated. “What?”
“I just think it would be better if we got shit out in the open,” Ben says.
“There’s nothing to get out! It was all a million years ago. It’s fine.”
“You’re not angry?”
“I’m not—what? No, I’m—” Ben tilts his head quizzically, and my body goes into lockdown. Short, quick breaths. That flushed, squeezed feeling, like being crushed by a garbage compactor. He’s doing this on purpose to get a rise out of me. “Whatever. What does it matter? I said I’m happy you’re here.”
He smirks. “Which is bullshit.”
“I’m being polite. That’s what adult human beings do, Benjamin!” With each second I speak to this boy, a new joint in my body freezes up.
Ben shrugs. “It’s all right to be angry.”
“No, it isn’t!” I blurt, but then my voice deflates. “It’s a bummer and no one likes it.” Ben sends me a look, like he can see right through me. “But I can’t hide it either, apparently, so…”
I’m a homosexual. Of course I have no idea what to do with my anger.
Even worse, now that I’m looking at him, the feeling shoots through me. I missed his face so much. That playful, almost mean look he has, like I never know what he’s going to say next. He’s as sharp as an axe, and sadly, I like it. I’ve spent the last five years dating boys who never surprised me, even when they were dumping me. But Ben always feels new.
What the hell am I supposed to do with any of this?
“Look,” I say, exhaling myself back to normal. “I’m glad you brought it up, but I really—”
Ben turns away, picking the hoe back up. “You’re not glad.”
There goes my normal.
“What do you want from me?” I ask, curling my hands into fists. “Want me to cuss you out? I’ve done that already, and it didn’t help. Are you trying to get me to kick your ass?”
Ben’s eyebrows lift pleasantly, like Hey, that’s an idea. “You probably could,” he says, surveying my body. “You got big, bro.”
An exasperated laugh slides out of me. “Well, bro, I design dresses now, so I don’t really do the kicking-someone’s-ass thing a whole lot, even if I wanted to.”
Ben crosses his arms over the hoe to lean against it. “You don’t want to kick my ass?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
“I’m not lying.”
“So, what do you want?”
“I want”—I take a giant step toward him, so we’re inches apart—“to offer you a cool beverage because you look like you need a break. Now can I get you a fucking iced tea or not?”
Ben smiles. “Sure.”
Minutes later, I return from the kitchen to the yard with two freezing cans of Brisk iced tea. Ro is the luckiest person in the world that she was nowhere to be found when I went back inside. Every room in the house transformed with my triggered memories of that last summer with Ben. The kitchen absorbed most of my anger. Every door got a hearty slam: the patio, the parlor, the fridge, the patio again.
Ben, no longer antagonizing, accepts the can and holds my eyes as he taps the lip of the can before opening it.
After a long gulp of tea, I snort, “Why do you always do that? That tap-tap-tap on the can.”
Shrugging, Ben sips. “Stops it from exploding in case the can got shook up.”
“It’s tea. It’s flat. There’s no carbonation.”
“It can still explode.”
“And your little tapping stops it? You’re living in a fantasy world.”
Ben blank-faces me as we descend into a thick silence. He doesn’t need to say anything, because he’s already in my head: Grant, this is what I’m talking about. You’re clearly angry. I’d rather you just slap me now than spend the whole summer snipping me to death.
Well, Ben-in-My-Head, you have a point, but this is how I choose to punish you.
“Want a tour of what I’ve got to fix around here?” he asks, breaking through the tension.
“Yeah.” Finally, a topic other than us.
Since I’ve seen the disaster that is Grandpa’s vegetable garden, Ben walks me farther down the lawn (making his hips extra swaggery on purpose) toward another graveyard: the sculpture garden. I’d already seen the chopped-up remains of the white trellis, stacked neatly in piles, but I wasn’t prepared for what a junkheap the rest of it would be.
The sculpture garden grounds used to have a chessboard-like tiling of light- and dark-shaded grass. In its prime, it was kept so neatly trimmed you could play golf on it. Now it’s so overgrown, you wouldn’t know there were different shades unless you were looking for it. Six large shrubs rise from the overgrowth like terrifying monoliths. They used to be trimmed into different animal shapes: a swan, a wolf, a hummingbird, etc. But those well-defined shapes are long gone.
“Bunch of shite, right?” Ben asks, disappointed.
“Awful,” I agree. “How long has it been nasty like this?”
Ben absentmindedly kicks a divot in the lawn. “Since everything got nasty between us, I think.” He nods. “After your grandparents died.”
We made it forty whole seconds without referencing our baggage. A record. Five years ago, not only did Ben and I fall out, my grandmother died, followed a few months later by my grandfather, and the joy of coming to Vero Roseto as a family sort of went away. Ro took over the business but just couldn’t hold it together alone.
“Ro wants me to dig up all the sculptures,” Ben says, rustling his hand over the bush that used to be a wolf.
“Why?” I ask, looking at the overgrown topiaries. “They’re historic.”
Ben nods and crushes his empty can. “Yeah, but she can only afford me, and I can’t make the animal shapes. You’re the artist, not me.”
Sweet as that observation is, I glance up at what used to be a swan with a heavy sigh. I can sew and sketch, but these sculptures need an actual topiary artist. Grandma was ours. Her mother, Mama Bianchi, taught her, but they didn’t pass that knowledge down any further.
“So they’ve all gotta go,” Ben says. “Gotta make this place spiffy in time for the Rose Festival. Two months isn’t a lot of time with just me working. Ro says this year’s festival could make or break Vero Roseto.”
“Make or break?” I ask, turning from the swan. “Like…we’re really in trouble?”
“Dunno. Don’t think she’d say it if it weren’t true.”
I laugh bitterly. Ro is very much at home exaggerating, so it can’t really be that bad…
Nursing my warming tea, I say, “I can’t believe Ro didn’t tell me you were here. She just said she got some cheap gardener.”
Ben snorts. “You know me, cheap and tawdry.”
Inside my head, I cackle so violently it calls down lightning. But I resist taking his bait. “I didn’t even know you gardened.”
“Oh yeah.” He slaps his empty can against his palm. “Picked it up from my stepdad in Scotland. Freshman year, I moved back with my mam.”
“Ah, I was going to say: welcome back, accent.”
So many lifetimes have passed in five years, I didn’t even realize Ben had been living in Scotland. Yet the soft rumble of his newly invigorated accent doesn’t lie. What else have I missed about him?
My insides roil as I hold back the questions I really want to ask, like “What about your boyfriend—aka my boyfriend—that you were so in love with? Did you ditch him, too, when you left?”
I’m glad Ben went to Scotland. When we were friends, his parents fought nonstop. Hanging out at Vero Roseto brought him some much-needed peace. I thought it would help when they finally divorced, but it ripped him up even more. Ben stayed with his dad while his mother left for Scotland. He missed her, and middle school—the era when you’re figuring out what a big homo you are—is no time to be left alone with a dad who isn’t good with feelings.
As I hold back my own feelings, I ask, “So, are you going back to Scotland for college, or…”
“That’s the plan.” Ben bites his lip. “I’ve been back over a year. My dad had a kinda serious health thing…”
“Oh.” My posture straightens. “I’m sorry—”
“He’s fine. It’s fine.” Ben exhales on a pained grunt. “All better. And it’s been nice, being around this old place again, but once it’s fixed up by the end of the summer, I’ll head back. There’s nothing really keeping me here.” He smiles, almost angrily. “So don’t worry, you’ll only have to deal with me for a little bit.”
I snort defensively. “I’m only here for a little bit, too.”
“Right, right. You’ve got more important things to do than deal with us. Very good of you to spare some time.”
We fall silent.
I had no idea Ben was as angry with me as I am with him. His resentment gets my blood riled, like, what does he have to resent? I’m the one who got screwed over, not him.
But when Ben talks like this, he sounds so weighed down, it almost makes me want to forgive him. It sounds like we both got our asses kicked last year. Five years doesn’t feel like a long time, but here we are, two radically different people from the last time we stood in this garden.
The tour continues back up the lawn, as Ben knows to skip the Wishing Rose garden altogether. Besides fixing that and demolishing the sculpture and veggie gardens, he’ll have to resod this entire sprawling lawn of God-knows-how-many acres. “And that’s just the gardening,” he says as we circle around the filthy, empty pool. “Deck’s gotta be rebuilt, the pool’s a mess, and they’re redoing the West Wing guest rooms.”
“Is that the most necessary thing right now?” I ask. “I mean, the deck’s in pieces. This place is a hazard. Seems weird to put remodeling first.”
Ben just snickers as he throws open the patio door. “You’ll see.”
Upstairs in the West Wing, past the curtains of contractor plastic, I do finally see. Room after room of the ugliest moth-eaten rooms I’ve ever laid eyes on. Every pipe is rusted through and has stained the wall a yellowish black. Speaking of stains, large brown ponds of filth cover the low-pile rose-patterned carpets. The sofas and comforters on the bed are littered with dozens of feather-spewing moth bites.
“What’s that smell?” I say, pinching the dust respirator mask Ben made me wear.
“Sewage backup,” he says through his own mask. “Over the winter, the old pipes corroded. It all let loose at once. Ro couldn’t pay to fix everything, so she just stopped the leaks. That had a domino effect. The stains. Mildew set in. Moths.” He shakes his head in amazement. “I’ve seen shithouses in Edinburgh that are more sanitary.”
“Ro…” I whisper. She really is on her last leg.
Construction equipment and ladders sit abandoned while the workers have lunch downstairs, but I don’t even know where you’d begin on something like this.
“Do you think it can get fixed?” I ask Ben.
With masks covering everything but our eyes, his gaze seems kinder. “We’ve been working on it, don’t worry.”
Down in the entrance hall, underneath Mama Bianchi’s portrait, I snap off my mask and finally breathe fresh air again. Ben returns from the kitchen with two more ice-cold Brisks.
“So that’s Vero Roseto today,” he says, winking as he knowingly tap-tap-taps his can again, which gets a small laugh out of me. “And allegedly, it all needs to get fixed before the Rose Festival—or we close for good.”
“We have to get all that done in two months, huh?” I ask, drowning the West Wing’s foul stench from my nostrils as I drink.
Ben smirks. “We? I know what me and the contractors are up to. What are you here to do?”
This boy was born to push my buttons.
I don’t take his bait, and I certainly don’t say “To copyedit a social media ad.”
What I do instead is go for the throat.
“How’s Hutch?” I ask pointedly, sounding angrier than I meant to.
His brow furrows. He didn’t miss my tone. “Hutch?”
I could crush my can of iced tea in a single squeeze! I know he’s not going to look me in the eyes, Mama Bianchi as our witness, and lie that he does not remember Hutch, the boy he stole from me. But I just smile and ask, “Your boyfriend?”
Ben’s lips curl into a mean grin, the way they always would when he was about to rag me. “My…eighth-grade boyfriend?” He snorts. “Yeah, that didn’t work out.”
Heat boils under my cheeks. Why did I have to go bringing up Hutch? I was trying to play it cool, but now I just brought up his thirteen-year-old boyfriend like I was inquiring about the missus. Of course they’re over. Of course all that carnage was for nothing.
Ben shrugs those huge, freckled shoulders, and I’m annoyed all over again at how hot he’s become after all this time. No way I’m winning the “who got hotter?” contest.
“I don’t really do ‘boyfriends’ anymore,” he says. “I mean, I’d like to be romantic. Had a few in Scotland, but none that lasted more than a few weeks.”
“Sounds familiar.”
Has Ben really had as impossible of a time finding love as I have? Getting dumped again and again? Mad as I am, it’s nice to not be the lone loser in the house.
After downing his drink, Ben adds, “Yeah, when it starts getting hard, I just lose interest and cut ’em loose.”
Aaaaaaaand never mind—I’m still the loser here.
“Ever feel that way?” he asks, so innocently, as if he were wondering if I ever thought about murder. “Ever feel like no matter what you do, a new guy’s just gonna end the same way?”
“Like you’re cursed,” I say through gritted teeth. “Sometimes.”
Two boys, two curses. Mine, to be always dumped. Ben’s, to always do the dumping. I guess we cursed each other.