Dandelion Queens

I watched her as she picked through the sunny flowers spread out before her on the rain warped wood. Her fingers caressed the individual petals of one flower head before moving onto the next. She had the most beautiful, dark skin. Her black hair, twisting and curling, had a halo of light around it from the sun. Her name was Daisy Williams, after Daisy Bates, and she wore sleeveless dresses in summer.

I wanted to wear sleeveless dresses in the summer too.

She lifted a flower to her face, twirling its stem as she did. Bright yellow glow lines appeared on her face, the flower reflected back at her. She scrunched up her nose and put the flower back down. She lay it gently on the bed of grass its fellows rested on, the flower head on a slightly elevated part of it.

We were in my treehouse on the edge of the woods. My father spent long hours building it, the sweat pouring down his back, his muscles rippling as he struck the logs of wood in half. I held the boards as he hammered them in place. He let me hammer in the last nail. The vibrations travelled up through my arms, my fingers too small to wrap around its shaft. 

“No, mi niñito, like this,” he said with a laugh, and his hand was large around mine as he guided me to strike the nail.

After we finished, and the sun was setting around us, Daisy made us both necklaces of dandelions, and my father carried us back, fast asleep in his arms.

My fingers dragged along the wood as I picked up the dandelion she put back and pressed it to my nose. It smelled sweet and sticky, like caramel drizzled on top of ice cream cones, and I breathed in its scent. 

"Did you know," I said, my voice disturbing the hazy humid air, "dandelions are weeds?"

"No, they aren't," Daisy said, making a face. Green, fibrous stalks twisted in her hands. "They're beautiful."

"They are so," I protested, sitting up straight. The dandelion was crushed under my hand. "Rachel told me so."

Rachel was a year older than us, and hated me. There wasn't a recess or lunch time where she left me alone. Whether it was trying to steal my lunch money, or destroying my homework, Rachel never quit. Ever since we turned ten, she cut her blonde hair into a bob and wore frilly, expensive shirts and flowing skirts with ballet flats. In her eyes, this made her better than my shorts, t-shirt, hoodie, and sneakers ensemble I always wore. More feminine.

Whiter.

“Why don’t you just go back where you came from?” Rachel spat at me, wiping her palm on my shirt. 

My blood stained the blue a diluted purple. I felt a burst of shame and pressed my cap further down my face to hide my tears. My lip was swollen and blood trickled down my chin. I sniffed, and Rachel laughed.

“Aw, are you going to cry?” she taunted. “Good. Maybe then you and your family will go back to Mexico.”

“I’m not even Mexican!” I shouted, balling my hands into fists. “I’m Cuban!”

“Whatever, it’s all the same thing. It just means you don’t belong here,” Rachel said, and venom dripped from her words. 

In her upturned nose, her rage-thin lips, and the hands on her hips, I could see her father yelling at mine.

“You’re a foreigner, and you should just leave, Chayo!” Rachel screamed, and I snapped.

We went down in a flurry of limbs, my hands on her shoulders as I straddled her and shoved her back into the dirt. She stared up at me with rage and fear, and as I raised my fist, I could hear shouting in the background. I looked up and saw Daisy, clutching a pile of dandelions and white clovers to her chest. Her eyes were bright, and she gave me the biggest smile I ever saw.

Then hands pulled me off of Rachel, who was now crying crocodile tears, clutching the pants leg of her father. He shouted at me, his words slurring together until they became one long sound of hatred. His white face was crimson and purple, swimming in my unshed tears.

I moved my hand, and looked down at the crushed dandelion. Its petals were wilted, and I could see the thin, milky liquid inside the stem. It was sticky on the bony side of my thumb, and I wiped it on my shirt. The fabric was wet, but it remained blue.

“I’m sorry about your dumb weed,” I muttered, and she frowned at me. Guilt washed over me like a tidal wave, and I blinked away tears. “I’m going to try to fix it.”

“If anyone could, Chayo, it would be you.”

She smiled at me and returned to her twisting and twining, tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration. 

If only she knew how much being called Chayo hurt me.

Her dandelion crown grew as I fumbled with the injured flower. I pushed at its sides, trying to contain it, and it fell back as soon as I moved my fingers away. I sat back and stared at it, my eyebrows knitting together. Frustration sparked in me, and I grabbed it at the point where the flower head met the stalk. It popped off in my hand, and I held it, watching its petals try to reform and extend towards the sky.

“Oh,” Daisy said, and crawled over to me, heedless of her dress or any splinters.

She was brave like that.

“I tried,” I said, eyes watering suddenly. “I wanted to save it.”

Daisy closed my hand around it. “It knows,” she said, and grinned. “You’re always trying to save others, Chayo. I really like that about you.”

I blushed. She tucked the unbroken dandelion behind my ear and kissed my cheek. Her lips were soft, like velvet, and my cheek tingled when she pulled away. I put my hand there, and my eyes must have been wide, because Daisy laughed.

There was another kid I knew. He called himself Toi. He, Daisy, and I would always sit under the biggest tree in the field. While Daisy tried to climb to the top, and I did cartwheels, Toi told us the meaning of his name. Since then, whenever Ms. Bradley called his birth name during roll call, Daisy and I covered our ears.

He was younger than both of us - seven or eight. He used to sit alone, with a pink lunchbox and a bright dress that had so many ruffles. His hair was long, pulled back in a ponytail, and his eyes were always filled with tears. One time I sat with him, and we traded sandwiches and talked about our parents. He liked my sneakers and my t-shirts, and I liked his dresses and ballet flats. We switched clothes, and he wore my old shorts and shirt until his parents saw and snatched them away.

They appeared on our doorstep, Toi - wearing a dress again - in between them, my cap clutched in their hands. His mother pushed it at my father and spoke to him in low, quiet tones in the living room. Toi and I played with my toy swords until his parents came and took him home.

The wood was rough underneath my palms as I placed them on the ground and stared up at the ceiling. There were a few boards that looked like they were slipping from the nails that held them together. My dad would have to come back soon and fix them. 

He could fix anything, even broken hearts and bodies that were wrong.

My father came down the stairs of our house, the house he spent so many hours trying to earn, Toi’s old dress in his hands, a look of love and light on his face. “Chayo,” he said, and I looked up at him, my lower lip quivering at the sadness in his voice. “No. Mi niñita, mi pequeña heroína. You are so little, you cannot do everything. Sometimes, you have to trust me.”

“I trust you, Papa,” I said, and the tears running down my face weren’t all grief.

He took out his cell phone and stepped out of the room. When I went to school the next day, Toi was missing. Before long, Rachel spread a rumour that he was dead. Only Daisy and I knew the truth, and we kept quiet. No one else deserved to know where he was. Not until he could come and tell them himself.

A few weeks later, Toi came back. He wore baggy jean shorts, and a shirt several sizes too big. He had the cap I gave him on his head, and his face was beaming. In his hands were a lunchbox, Buzz Lightyear in the centre. All he could talk about was how amazing his new family was, and how they bought him the best toys, and took him on a shopping spree to pick out a whole new wardrobe. He showed Daisy and I photos of the three of them - two men, beaming, with Toi in between them. Their cheeks were all squished together, and the love the three of them shared radiated from the screen.

Before we left for the summer, Toi ran up to me and hugged me. “Thank you,” he whispered in my ear.

Dust danced through the sunbeams as a shaft of light broke through a small hole and illuminated Daisy, making her glow like the dandelions in her hands. She looked at them with love, tickling the petals of one before tying it to another.

"You know, Chayo, any plant can become a weed," she said. “Weeds are just flowers that no one wants. And I want dandelions, so they aren’t weeds.”

“Who told you that?” I asked, scoffing. 

“Ms. Bradley,” Daisy said, taking the victim of my carelessness and stroking its petals before burying it in the pile of leaves and grass. “So it has to be true.”

I agreed. Ms. Bradley was our teacher last year, and she was beautiful. Half of her head was shaved, but she always wore her hair to hide it. She showed Daisy and I after Rachel called Daisy a dyke. Ms. Bradley wore electric blue lipstick and drove a motorcycle. On her desk was a framed photograph of her with her arm around another woman. When I asked about her, Ms. Bradley smiled and winked.

“That’s my wife, Kiana,” she said, and smiled broadly. “We got married in 2015.”

“Is being a woman nice?” I asked, swinging my legs. My shoes were small, but I hated them. I saw my father’s muddy work boots, and how big they were, and knew that one day, my shoes would be that big. I would have a beard, and a mustache, and wear paint stained jeans and button down shirts with the sleeves rolled up. 

Ms. Bradley looked me up and down. “Would you like to know something about Kiana, Chayo?”

I blinked. “Sure,” I said.

“When she was born, everyone thought she was a boy,” Ms. Bradley said, chewing on her inner cheek. “She knew she was a girl, and soon, so did the rest of the world.”

“But she married you,” I said, and Ms. Bradley tilted her head, an unspoken question hovering between us. I hesitated before the truth came tumbling from my mouth, the words cutting my heart to shreds on the way out. “Don’t you have to choose between being a woman and loving a woman?”

“Let me tell you something, Chayo Gonzalez,” Ms. Bradley said. “You don’t ever have to choose between who you are and who you love.”

Her smile was ear to ear, the most joyous thing in the world.

“Kiana taught me that.”

A crow cawed somewhere in the distance. The sky was beginning to darken, the glorious fire sky softening to warm pinks and purples. The sun peeked through the pine trees around us, bright, blinding shafts of light that burned my eyes if I stared. 

Daisy stood and looked out of the treehouse. Her white reflected the colours of the sky, making her look like the twilight. My heart stuttered, and a blush broke out on my cheeks as all of the blood rushed to my head. I thought about holding Daisy’s hand as we ran to the swings. I thought about watching Daisy climb the tallest tree in the field and stand on it, brown smudges on her cheeks from the tree, grinning wide. I thought of trying on makeup together, and dresses, and my heart swelled as the future spread out in front of me like the forest.

Daisy looked back at me now. “It’s almost time to go home,” she said. “My mum is making us something special tonight. She wouldn’t say what it was.”

I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “I bet it’ll be great,” I heard myself say. 

Daisy returned to her dandelions and fussed with them. They sat in a circle, golden yellow. I walked over and crouched next to her, taking the flower from behind my ear and placing it behind hers. She touched it and grinned, revealing the gap between her two front teeth that I always found myself enchanted by. 

She made trumpeting noises as she placed the dandelion crown on my head. “Presenting to the kingdom of Wilgol, King Chayo!”

I touched it and saw myself reflected in her eyes. My cheeks were tinged pink, and my shirt hung loose around me. My once white sneakers were covered in grime, and there was a smear of dirt from the floor of the treehouse on my cheek. My heart pounded as I lowered my hand from my crown and took a deep breath.

“ Queen Rosario,” I said. I took Daisy’s hand in mine. “And Queen Daisy.”

Daisy considered this, a range of emotions going through her brown eyes, like the ever shifting colours of the sky behind her, before she grinned. She was framed by the purples and blues of twilight as she held my hand in hers - gentle, like I was one of her dandelions.

“Queen Rosario and Queen Daisy,” she agreed. “The Dandelion Queens.”