“And suddenly it smelled like someone forgot to turn on the gravity. The air was so fresh and light you could practically float on it. Flowers were everywhere, all of them bursting with color.”

“Inside, the air smelled so fragile you could break it with a sneeze.”

“I watched her shuffle around, reading tags and smelling flowers, laughing every time or smiling nice—what flowers were supposed to make you do.”

“The church smelled like leftover tears. Sadness was tucked into corners and hidden under beams and pasted so thick on the walls that it was hard to breathe.”

“At the door, I looked back at all those people I didn’t know and thought about how small your heart is but how big of a space it takes up. And how, even though you can’t see it, that heart space grows so quietly across a room or up some stairs into someone else’s living room, that even if you never step foot in it again, the air in there is changed forever.”

“But what are you supposed to do now? I mean, how are you supposed to act normal?” Mike looked at me, his blueberry eyes searching. “I don’t know, Apron,” he said. “I was hoping you could tell me.” And then, just like that, I understood what my real job was this summer, and it had nothing to do with flowers.”

“I didn’t want them to be gay anymore. I didn’t want people like Mrs. Perry to make a face and step away from them; I didn’t want Mike to shuffle his feet and clear frogs out of his throat whenever he talked to my dad; and I didn’t want Chad to go around making fun of himself so nobody else could. And most of all, I didn’t want them to have AIDS.”