“Nope,” Mo said. She took my hand and pulled me out from behind the counter, scooting me toward the door. She untied my apron and took it off, tossing it to Mom. “I love you, but you need to get out of here and go do some teenager stuff.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She turned to Mom. “What do kids do these days?”

“Don’t ask me that like I’m old,” said Mom. “They like to Netflix and chill, right?”

“I’m leaving.” I grabbed one of the coffees and two croissants. “Please never say ‘Netflix and chill’ ever again.”

“Oh, they also like to make dance videos on TikTok,” said Mo. “What’s that one called? The Renegade?” She did some weird move with her arm, then grabbed her shoulder, wincing in pain. “I can do it, but the way my ligaments are set up—”

“I’ll never be able to unsee that, Mo,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You welcome, love.” She grinned.

While Mom and Mo laughed themselves to tears, I closed the door to the shop and took the stairs to the third floor of our building.

Mom bought almost every piece of furniture in our apartment from IKEA. Mo hated it because even though the products were solid, putting them together sometimes required a level of patience neither of them actually possessed. Still, Mom was obsessed with making the space feel more open, which was hard to do in less than eight hundred square feet.

I straightened the mismatched pillows on the couch and organized the unopened mail into a pile on the table before heading to my room. As I opened the door, the warm, damp air hit me in the face, fogging my glasses. Air conditioning was on an as-needed basis, and Mom had a sticky note taped to the switch that said, “You got A/C money?” I didn’t, so it stayed a balmy seventy-nine degrees. My posters and playbills that I’d tacked to the walls were curled at the edges. Everything was perpetually damp. The only plus was that my plants loved the tropical conditions.

The plants under my window turned toward me. The bluebells opened like tiny gramophones, and the bush of baby’s breath that had taken over an entire corner of my room looked like it was breathing. The marigolds and snapdragons all shifted toward me. These plants were quiet. Quiet plants might perk up around me, but they didn’t uproot themselves or destroy a fence to get close to me. They didn’t turn obscene shades of their natural colors when I was around.