Short Story Week: Yellow, Part 2

Part 1

Thanks so much for all of the sweet comments you guys. You're really making me smile. Here's part 2 of my short story Yellow!


Upstairs in her room, Lacey rummaged through her closet for an old fleece sweater to throw over her t-shirt. She found a knit pair of socks her grandmother had made, and pulled out a single pair of sweatpants that she had once borrowed from Simon after a concert.


“Where did this rose come from?” her grandmother asked, letting it roll across the palm of her hand. She sat on Lacey’s bed, waiting to approve of whether her outfit was warm enough to ward off pneumonia and other such ailments she fretted over when it rained.

“I don’t know,” Lacey said. “I found it on the porch when I came in. Someone left it there for me.”

“But Simon knows you hate the color yellow.”

“I know…” Lacey admitted. “I don’t think it was him.”

“A secret admirer perhaps?” she winked.

Lacey shrugged, pulling the fleece sweater down in place. “He’s not a very good admirer then, he should know how much I hate the color.”

“You know, you used to like it once, until…” Her voice trailed off.

“Until?” Lacey asked. She could not recall a time in her life that she had enjoyed that abhorrent color.

“Oh no never mind dear. I was thinking of one of your cousins.” Her grandmother stood up from the bed, gently laying the yellow rose across Lacey’s pillow case and exited the room without saying another word.

Lacey forgot all about the yellow rose the next day at school. Simon dropped her off at the house as usual, the rain from the previous day had continued. But when Lacey walked up to her porch, there were three yellow roses laying there, each one holding a piece of cardstock. When Lacey put the three together, it read,

To Lacey, my love

Who is beautiful,

And true.

Well these were certainly not from Simon, she realized. He would be completely incapable of uttering something like that, much less writing it down.

Aaron rode his bike up the path to her doorway. “Hey, how’s it going, Lacey?” he asked. He had pulled back the hood of his green raincoat, but Lacey was still happy no one could see her talking to him, as superficial as she knew that seemed.

“I’m fine,” she said. “You?”

“Oh yeah, me? I’m great. Really good. Whatcha got there?”

“I don’t know, Aaron. Someone keeps leaving these yellow roses for me. I don’t know who it is.”

“That’s really sweet though, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess, but I hate the color yellow. Like really hate it. It makes me angry when I see it.”

“You get angry when you see the color?” Aaron sounded disappointed. Then his face brightened. “That’s right I remember. You wrote that poem in fourth grade about how much you thought the color yellow stinks and then you had to read it in front of the whole school at the end of year assembly.”

“Oh no, you remember that?”

Aaron pushed his orange boots back and forth across his bike pedal. “Yeah, I remember everything about you. I mean…photographic memory and all. How else would I balance my 4.3 GPA?”

Lacey laughed at this.“I’ll see you later Aaron.” And she was inside her house before he could say, “bye.”

Her grandmother was waiting for her by the door this time, standing directly in front of Lacey’s mother’s picture. “More?” she cried. “But who…why?” She looked uncomfortable with their presence in the house.

“Grandma, how should I know?” she retorted, then retreated up to her room to do her homework.

The next day Lacey was greeted at home by six roses, and then by nine. A week went by and then another, and the yellow roses never stopped coming, always arriving, in greater increments of three. Lacey’s room was becoming full of them. She still felt angry every time she saw them or saw the color yellow for that matter. But something about the roses drew her to them, and she began to look forward to their arrival everyday after school. This strange unexplainable anticipation, followed by hot anger at seeing the only thing Lacey had ever consciously hated.