Love & Other Carnivorous Plants Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Florence Gonsalves

  Cover illustration and design by Karina Granda.

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

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  First Edition: May 2018

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Quote on page vii excerpted from Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1993 Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Excerpts from DREAM WORK, copyright © 1986 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gonsalves, Florence, author.

  Title: Love and other carnivorous plants / Florence Gonsalves.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2018. | Summary: “Nineteen-year-old Danny returns home after a disastrous first semester of college as a pre-med student and struggles with first love, grief, identity, and self-destructive behavior” —Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017018094| ISBN 9780316436724 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316436694 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316436717 (library edition ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Identity— Fiction. | Eating disorders—Fiction. | Death—Fiction. | Sexual orientation— Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.G65219 Lov 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018094

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-43672-4 (hardcover), 978-0-316-43669-4 (ebook)

  E3-20180417-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Dandelion Theory

  A Note from the Author

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For H

  There is a crack in everything.

  That’s how the light gets in.

  —LEONARD COHEN

  PROLOGUE

  No one wants to be that girl who locks herself in the bathroom on her birthday like she’s on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but here I am, leaning my elbows on the toilet bowl, inhaling God knows how many private-part diseases, all in the hope of freeing myself of this birthday cake while freeing myself of my best friend’s wrath. It’s not that Sara’s anger toward me isn’t justified (I’m a Grade A asshole), but I thought maybe we could shelve that today, the one day of the year dedicated to my graceless exit from the womb.

  There’s a bang on the bathroom door so loud it reverberates off every building on campus. “Dandelion Berkowitz, if you don’t come out of the bathroom right now, I’m going to tell everyone that you’re a shit friend who breaks promises and tells lies the size of her head, which has gotten pretty freaking big since you got into Harvard.”

  I do my best impersonation of a toilet paper roll, forgetting that, though Sara is all sorts of formidable, even she can’t break a steel lock with drunken will alone. I’m about to weigh the pros and cons of unlocking the door when I hear a different voice.

  “Um, Danny? I think you should come out and put Sara to bed.”

  “But I don’t want to go to bed, Maaaaaark,” says Sara.

  “Stephen.” He sighs. “It’s Stephen, remember?”

  I do eventually come out, smelling like whatever concoction they clean the bathrooms with, and Stephen helps me herd Sara back to my dorm room. “I’ve got her from here,” I say, and tuck her in on the futon next to the trash can. When she’s snoring those drunk snores that make you think it’s gonna earthquake, I pretend none of this ever happened—not just Sara ruining my birthday, but the first few months of college altogether. I’m fantastic at putting things in a brain drawer and losing track of them entirely, so instead I pretend it’s ten months ago, on our high school graduation day in June, when Sara was in her kitchen making us her famous grilled cheeses. She’s not world-famous for them, just me-famous for them, but they can only be described as Hallelujah in the Mouth: three slices of bread, four types of cheese, truffle aioli, and caramelized onion. I have no idea what truffle aioli is, but whoa.

  “Tell me The Plan,” I’d said that day, and she launched right into it:

  “Okay, two overachievers meet in kindergarten: one sporty, one super nerdy.”

  I flicked an onion at her. “Hey, I lobbied hard to have that word replaced.”

  “Fine.” She peeled the onion off her forehead and corrected herself. “One super smart. At first they can’t get along, but soon they realize that unless they join forces, they’ll destroy each other. So they make a solemn pact to never leave each other. They grow up and go to college together—”

  “Which we’re about to do now!” I interrupted her.

  “One to be a professional tennis player, the other to be a surgeon. Then they marry their high school sweethearts—”

  “Shit.” I interrupted her again. “We totally didn’t get high school sweethearts.”

  “I mean, I have Dave,” she said, but by “have Dave” she meant she lost her virginity to him in his dad’s Escalade. Driver’s seat. Moonroof open.

  “True, you screw Dave,” I said, recalling that I got my SAT scores back that same weekend. They were good, excellent even. “I, on the other hand, am as romantic as a spatula.”

  “You’ve been too focused on schoolwork,” she said. “All that will change in
college.”

  I hoped she was right—that as soon as I stepped into a frat party or whatever, I’d immediately stop thinking boys were uninteresting and magically know what to do with them.

  “Watch, this is an easy fix.” Sara cleared her throat. “Then they marry their college sweethearts—two brothers, lawyers, who love them stupidly—and when they end up widows they get a little house together with a big wall for all their accomplishments. Then they make grilled cheeses every night for dinner because there’s no one to tell them there’s such a thing as too much butter.”

  “There isn’t such a thing as too much butter,” I’d said, finishing my sandwich and sighing. Graduating high school was looking pretty good that day, before I knew we’d have to leave the safety of being in each other’s corner.

  For a few more hours at least the future wasn’t the future, it was our future. Right up until I opened the letter that, in seven hundred words, ruined everything.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ten godforsaken weeks after the worst birthday in history according to an informal survey done by HBS (Harvard Bathroom Stalls)

  “Well, Danny, at least we know you’ve been eating!” my dad says as I get out of the car.

  It isn’t the warm welcome I was anticipating after being banished to a treatment center where my own father didn’t visit me. Not once. Like, really, Dad? As oblivious as you are, can’t you see how wildly insulting that’d be?

  “So much for your smock idea, Mom.” I grimace, checking out my reflection in the car door. I had asked her to bring me something “roomy, yet flattering,” but what she brought was missing the second, more important component, so I’m now the proud owner of the same ugly tentlike dress in eight different shades of Mom. And I’m going to have to wear them all summer. Well, I could wear my jean shorts if I don’t button or zip them. But I’d also need to cut slits in the sides so my legs can circulate enough blood not to turn blue. It sounds like a fun DIY project and all, but I’m not the artsy-fartsy type.

  “You look beautiful,” my mom says. “We’re so relieved you’re home and safe and feeling better.” Then she starts crying. Crying. While she blows her nose, my dad whips out my Harvard acceptance letter to remind me of “all the things I’ve accomplished,” then tells me that per our deal, he and my mom had a great conference call with my doctors, therapists, and deans, and as long as I keep going to therapy this summer I’ll be able to redo my second semester and return to Harvard in the fall. He points to the letterhead proudly as he says this, and I try not to let on that looking at the letter is making me feel sick. I would never elect to have my parents in on my craziness, but since they pay my tuition, I can’t really be an asshole about it.

  “Okay, I love you guys, but I can’t be with you right now.” I take the letter from my dad and fold it up. “We have all summer to hammer out these details, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to charge my cell phone, turn it back on, and make myself available to the world for the first time since April. Unless it’s died of malnourishment.”

  My parents shoot me a standard horrified-parent look.

  “Oh, come on,” I say cheerfully. “Eating disorder jokes are funny for cell phones because texting is their nourishment. And they’re getting plenty of that.”

  They don’t laugh, but it’s fine. I’m my most important audience member.

  On my way into the house I trip on one of the plastic geese my dad puts around the garden, lest we forget he’s an ornithology professor. When I put it upright again I think of a poem someone gave me when I first got to treatment, not that I like poetry or that “someone” who gave it to me, but some things have a way of staying with you.

  “Wild Geese,” I start, then cut myself off. What happens in treatment stays in treatment. I brush the soil off my hands, but the garden goose stares at me until I’m inside.

  Even after two months of neglect my cell phone turns on immediately, no questions asked, which is how all friends should be. I ignore the 132 unread texts from people I probably don’t want to talk to and call the only number I’ve ever memorized besides mine. And Papa John’s, because come on.

  After a few rings she yells, “Dandelion!” and I say, “Sara, how the hell are ya?”

  “I’m good, kid, how the hell are you?”

  We always greet each other in this over-the-top way, like two old gangsters reuniting for the first time since the baptism of their eighth child with their fifth wife. Then she drops her grandiose voice because we can only go on like that for a few seconds and says, “Are you finally home? Where are you? What are you doing? I can’t believe you turned your phone off and finals kept you until June. It’s practically a crime against summer.”

  I haven’t exactly told her about my stint in treatment, so I’m like, “I’m a free woman now. Let’s tango.” To be clear, tango isn’t a word I usually use, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a normal, nonfacilitated conversation.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” she says.

  “Absolutely not.” I’m standing in the mirror trying to find a stance that makes me look more like how I used to look and less like how I look now. Success rate: zero percent. “I know your metabolism is run by do-gooding fairies, but you’re going to have to take pity on those of us who fell victim to the freshman fifteen and then some.”

  “We won’t swim, we’ll walk.”

  I sigh and give up. Mirrors will have to be added to the list of things to avoid.

  “Hey, Danny?”

  I hold my breath because I can tell she’s gonna bring up something unsavory. “Yeah?”

  “We’re fine, right? I know your birthday a couple of months ago was bad, but—”

  I make the executive decision to cut her off. “It’s water under the bridge.” I even think I mean it.

  “Is that one of those intellectual sayings you learned at Haaaarvaaaard?”

  “No, I didn’t learn it at Haaaaarvaaaard.”

  Everyone knows the water under the bridge saying, but the last thing I need to do is get Sara back into the mindset that I now think I’m better than everyone because of Haaaarvaaaard.

  “I’m just teasing you,” she says. “I’ll pick you up in ten.”

  I catch an unfortunate final glimpse of myself in the mirror and tell the voice of body-loving reason to block its ears. “If you don’t see me, look for the girl who looks like she ate the girl once known as Danny.”

  Fifty-three minutes later (Sara has her own world clock), a black Range Rover pulls into the driveway blasting country music. I run to her car door and Sara jumps out to give me a hug. She’s taller than I am, so when she wraps her arms around me my ear smooshes into her neck and I eat a little bit of her hair, not because I’m hungry, but just by mistake.

  “Ahh! I missed you so much!” she says. Immediately, everything from the birthday fiasco to the last two months of silence dissolves between us. She’s wearing a white summer dress that shows off all the freckles on her shoulders, and I’m smiling because she seems to have gotten more beautiful since the last time I saw her, but probably I just forgot what she looked like. That happens, you know, no matter how beautiful you are, which is why I try not to get so hung up on beauty. It’s the same thing as being ugly: You look at it long enough and it doesn’t look like anything.

  “How are you? Your hair is gorgeous! I like the highlights,” she says.

  I didn’t get highlights, but whatever. “I’m so happy to see you. You’re so beautiful that if we weren’t already friends we definitely couldn’t be.”

  She rolls her eyes, which is her signature move. “Stop, I feel like a mess. I just left Ethan’s house.” She leans in when she says it, and I can tell his name tastes good in her mouth.

  “Who’s Ethan?”

  “Some guy I met at school. I’ll tell you about him sometime, but right now we have way more important things to catch up on.”

  We get in her car and I hope she intends on doing most of the catching up for us
. In addition to being emotionally exhausting, my last two months in treatment have been kept entirely secret, even from Sara, who thinks I was undergoing a grueling second semester instead. “How were finals for you?” she asks. “I finished a month ago and I’ve been partying nonstop since. I need to sweat out hella toxins later.”

  “Since when do you say ‘hella’? And since when do you party nonstop?” I try to see through her sunglasses if her eyes are actually her eyes. “Doesn’t that mess with your game?”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” she says quickly. “Besides, I don’t have training for a couple more weeks. And my tennis season went so well I deserve a break.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I look out the window at the strip malls and coffee franchises growing over our town like weeds. I guess that’s what happens when you leave a place alone. It goes to shit without you.

  “Did I tell you my coach wants to make me captain next year?” she continues. “I was so shocked, but of course it’d be great for me. I love it there, Danny. The only thing that’s missing is you.”

  A heavy silence follows.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to reopen old wounds,” she says quickly, and I wish we would get to the beach already. “I just meant I miss you and it would have been fun to go to college together. But I’m so happy for you, really.”

  “It’s fine,” I mumble into the seat belt crossing my chest. “So who is Sir Ethan?”

  It’s probably not fair to distract Sara with her love of boys, but it’s also not fair for vultures to eat a deer that isn’t fully dead yet. I guess at the end of the day it’s not about “fair”; it’s about survival.

  “Get comfortable. The Ethan story is a long one. Wait, no. Let me start with my sorority. Wait, no, tennis. Yes, tennis, okay, so…”

  While Sara describes the most perfect freshman year of college, I take my sandals off and put my feet up on the dashboard. My toenails are chipped black from the last time I painted them, when I thought my choice in polish ought to reflect my soul.