Wallflower marveled at how perfect Maud's makeup was, as if Maud wasn’t breaking a sweat on this hike at all. Which was true, for all Wallflower knew. Unlike Wallflower, who was perhaps cursed for some reason to always be out of shape? She tried not to let it show that she did find this pace a bit less than comfortable, despite them already being so far behind the other students.
Maud glanced at Wallflower to make eye contact in a way that signaled an intent to speak, and Wallflower knew the routine. An introduction and an apology for having shared various classes with her for more than three years now but somehow still not knowing her name. Except, well, Maud didn’t say anything, and looked back at the trail with that same expressionless face. A minute later, she did the exact same thing again, and Wallflower was dreading having to be the one to say something first when Maud spoke.
“You’re Wallflower. The president of the Gardening Club.”
That threw her for multiple reasons, but not for Maud saying it like a statement rather than a question. That seemed like the most natural thing in the world, somehow.
“Uh, yeah. You know about it?”
Did she say that too dismissively?
“I mean, you know, because no one ever comes to our things.“
Was that passive-aggressive? Self-pitying? Ugh, why couldn’t she–
“I know what that’s like. I’m the president and only member of the school’s Geology Club. It's a shame the other students have such little interest in these topics.”
Wallflower didn’t even know the school had a Geology Club. And even if she had, she would never have thought to go, if she were being honest with herself. Was she part of the problem?
Further ahead of them on the trail, Wallflower could see the mass of other students, a gaggle of bobbing backs and heads. A laugh roared out through the crowd, though she couldn’t hear what it was in response to.
“You know, it’s nice being back here. Don’t have to be around so many of the other students. I find it difficult to relate to them sometimes.”
“Uh, yeah?” Wallflower laughed nervously. “Guess I’m ruining that, huh?”
“No.”
Wallflower didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing, and ignored that feeling in her that she really should say something to that. It was like this until Maud said something.
“You’re like that too, aren’t you? On school trips like this.”
“Uh, yeah. At some point I’d find out that the entire class had, like, gone on to the next thing without noticing I wasn't with them? That happened a lot, actually.”
Maud said nothing to that right away, instead slowly blinking, lowering and raising those curtains of perfectly applied purple.
“I can relate.”
They walked in silence for a bit more. when suddenly, Wallflower noticed that Maud was no longer walking next to her. She turned to see Maud a few paces back, squatting next to a scraggly, green shrub and observing it with a curious expression. Well, observing it at least.
“Come here. Look at this.”
Wallflower squatted down next to her as Maud scraped away at the ground with her fingertips, not seeming to care about the red dirt caking on top of her lavender nail polish.
Then, without warning, Maud took her wrist and guided her hand to the spot where she'd been scraping. How were hands that were just digging in the dirt so soft?
“Here, feel. That’s bedrock. Hardly an inch below. It’s leptosol. You know about that, right?”
Oh, of course Maud expected her to actually know about plants. The president of the Gardening Club was clearly supposed to have a lot more to do with plants than just knowing how to barely keep them alive and really, really liking them.
“Uh huh. Leptosol. Yeah. I know all about that for sure.”
Maud blinked at her slowly again.
“The soil up on mountain ranges like this get eroded away by wind very quickly, so there’s really not much depth to them at all. But hardy shrubs found a way to survive and spread up here all the same. Isn’t that amazing?”
Wallflower couldn’t help but mimic Maud's expressionless voice as she averted eye contact and panicked at the awkwardness of how Maud’s fingers were interlacing with hers now and tried not to think about how that felt.
“Yeah, that really is amazing,” she strained.
When she did manage to glance at Maud again, Maud was staring directly at her with that lack of expression, which was undoubtedly what she’d been doing the entire time.
“I usually prefer rocks to the organisms living on top of them, but I do make an exception to that sometimes.“
After a bit more panicked silence from Wallflower, Maud finally let go of her hand, to Wallflower's relief.
“It was nice talking about the properties of soil with you. Maybe I could come to the next Gardening Club meeting and we could do this again.“
Wallflower cringed at the thought of Maud slowly realizing how out of her depth Wallflower was, even after Maud kindly taking an interest in her interests.
“Oh yeah, but you know. You shouldn’t feel obligated to or anything. I mean, I don’t want you to feel like you have to just because of what I said earlier about nobody ever coming.“
Maud blinked at her slowly.
“Oh. Okay, then.”
She stood up, and Wallflower awkwardly did the same. Maud turned to look further along the trail.
“We should get going. We don’t want to fall behind them any more than we are.”
For the rest of the hike, the two somehow managed to never say a single word more to each other. Wallflower agonized over this inside the entire time. Maud’s face was as expressionless as ever throughout.
Years later, on one of her rumination cycles, Wallflower would revisit this moment in her mind, and she would scream.
