“I don’t want to get in trouble! I can’t afford to lose everything I’ve built. I have no other choice but this.” Hayden spoke stern despite feeling squirmish.

Lacey ignored her and picked yet another tulip from the campus courtyard. There were more than twelve stolen flowers in her hand from all around campus. This was stealing, and Hayden was not okay with it, maybe if it had just been one, but Lacy just kept at it, flower after flower. What kept Hayden from just walking away was loneliness, she had no one really and was trying to enjoy time with Lacy.

Hayden has scholarships keeping her place in the university, and if the public safety caught on she imagined the worse. Perhaps they make her pack her bags and be sent home, never to return again. Hayden knew that was a bit overkill, but her scholarship functioned by no legal records of stealing. If they counted this as theft, she would lose all she was riding on to escape the life she once had.

Then what would she say to herself if she failed? Something she had always heard.

“You couldn’t do it, you never were meant to, this little black girl was never supposed to amount to anything.”

She was never even supposed to make it this far, but she had.

Lacey didn’t understand, she thought it was an innocent opportunity for a bouquet that’d die in a few days. She came from wealth. She didn’t really even want to be at school, but it was something the majority of her family encouraged and had accomplished.

Hayden constantly concerns herself with her dreams, her future, and every decision she makes counts in the journey. She was the first in her family to pursue higher education and a better life than one of poverty and addiction.

Even if Hayden did not get in legal trouble, she recognized something about Lacey, in the way she had kept picking the flowers, despite Haydens groans and discomfort. Something that would appear small, such as this, felt so heavy, weighing down on Hayden deep to the core.

“I have to get going” Hayden said with a sigh. She recognized what the real danger here was and it wouldn’t be stolen flowers.

On her solo walk home, Hayden pondered, which had died first after Lacey’s next new find? The life of the picked flower or the continuation of her and Lacy’s friendship?

Hayden knew to make it, she didn’t have to surround herself with people that had the same story as her own, but rather on her journey she had to fill her life with people whose desired fragrance would be that of prudence and propitious regard.