V I O L E T

[viola odorata] ➳ chance.

THE VIDEO WAS BLURRY so I played it full-screen, trying to absorb every detail.

It had clearly been taken with a dash cam, and the car it belonged to was parked on the side of the road. Suburban houses lined the pavement, and evergreen trees marked the end of each driveway.

Nothing happened in the first fifteen seconds of the video. Then, from the left side of the screen, a tall, t-shirt-wearing figure shot across the street. He was too far ahead for the camera to capture his face, but his height and red bike were dead giveaways.

Isaac ducked behind another car and dropped his bike on the sidewalk. He crouched there, and his backpack skimmed the side of the car as he turned back and forth, studying one house in particular.

Then he stood and crept closer to its front yard.

Most houses in Newberry were palely painted and slightly run-down. This one was no exception, but it at least had neatly-trimmed grass around the white signpost stuck into the ground. The sign itself read FOR SALE next to Doug Merritt's smiling face and his realty office's phone number.

I watched Isaac pry the sign from the post with his hands. It was wider than his body, but he quickly unfastened the little metal hooks that kept it secured, then dropped the sign onto his bent knee.

He turned it sideways and stuck it into his backpack. It didn't go all the way in, but that didn't matter. For lack of a getaway driver, he hopped on his bike and sped off, the giant piece of cardboard sticking out the top of his bag as he became a dot on the horizon. Shortly after that, the video cut off.

For the fiftieth time that morning, I hit replay, scowling at my reflection in the laptop's screen as I did.

Most of my anger was directed at Doug Merritt, who had every right to be upset, but not to ruin a kid's life over a sign. Still, I couldn't believe Isaac had done something so reckless — and had the audacity to call it something other than burglarizing.

"It's not burglary unless you actually break into and enter the location," he'd argued. Sure enough, his feet stayed on the sidewalk for the duration of the clip, never once straying onto private property. In my head, that was why the police had never bothered to come after him for the crime.

Of course, that didn't make it any less of a fatal mistake. The video had racked up more than ten thousand views in a year and a half, which was a lot for a poorly-recorded incident that meant nothing outside of our small town. There were a few comments, mostly from high schoolers who said lol and concerned parents who called our education system brutal.

But most damning of all was the video's description. It was only a few sentences, but it mentioned Isaac by his full name, and included a link to Doug's professional website. Once the video replay ended, I clicked on the site and browsed lifelessly through the houses he was trying to sell.

When my alarm went off, I closed my laptop and climbed out of bed. I'd lost an hour of sleep to watching the video and dedicating myself to internalized rage. The last thing I wanted to do was go to school, especially when the weather was dreary. Still, I got dressed to the ambience of the pattering rain.

I cleaned up, pulled a sweatshirt over my head and took one last look at my dark-eye circles in the mirror. Trudging out of my room, I realized I badly needed some of my parent's coffee, or a jolt of adrenaline through my veins.

I expected to get the former, not the latter, but at the bottom of the stairs, my heart kicked into overdrive. After seeing him look picture-perfect on my computer screen, it was terrifying to find Doug Merritt in real life, his hairless head and wrinkled hands taking up far too much space in the living room.

"Morning, Ren."

"Morning," I forced out, my eyes darting to the window. It was pouring outside, which meant I would have to endure a ride to school in his car — the same car that had taken the video.

"Did you sleep well?" My dad squeezed my shoulder and shuffled past me with a steaming cup of coffee. Doug chuckled when I nearly tripped over thin air and had to grip the edge of the couch for support.

My insides sizzled with indignation.

"Someone's jumpy this morning," he remarked, glancing at his watch.

I sucked in my breath. The past hour had reduced my tolerance for him tenfold, and seeing Jackie didn't help. She sat on the couch next to her father, her elbow on the armrest and her eyes closed. Her backpack lay crumpled and open at her feet, accentuating her disheveled appearance.

The end of the school year was really taking a toll on her. 

"I think everyone's tired today," I said flatly, answering both of them at once. Dad lifted an eyebrow, but didn't say anything back. I helped myself to the last of the coffee in the brewer and dumped several spoonfuls of sugar into my mug before taking a long drink.

Soon, Dad and Doug busied themselves with needless conversation. I heard the words goalie and playoffs as I choked down my breakfast, along with plenty of hockey jargon I was sure my father didn't know. Rolling my eyes, I realized I didn't want my parents' friends in the house in the morning; I wanted Isaac. Even every frustrating part of him — his foul mouth, his boring outfits, his mindless thieving — was better than this.

"Time to go," Doug declared, his sports-announcer voice ushering everyone out of the house.

Reluctantly, I quit staring into space. By then, Doug and Jackie were already gone, and Dad was on his way to the front door. I rinsed my cup under the sink, then doubled back into the living room to grab my backpack off the floor. Though I was already holding everybody up, something on the couch caught my eye.

Doug's phone.

It was sleek and white with a translucent case, and lay in the crack between two seats. I hovered over it, expecting it to light up with a notification and shock me out of my daze. But the device's screen stayed black, and I couldn't stop thinking about what Isaac would have done under these circumstances — the decision he would've made in a split second.

Outside, Doug's car coughed its way to life, and inside my chest my pulse kept thrumming, pumping bad ideas through my brain.

A moment later, I bolted out the front door with a plan, a guilty conscience and a phone that didn't belong to me burning a hole at the bottom of my backpack.

HALFWAY THROUGH LUNCH, I realized I wasn't breathing.

I had never done anything like this before, and I couldn't stop thinking what ifs. Doug hated Isaac because he stole a sign; what would he do to me if he found out I'd taken his phone?

"He'd kill you," Isaac said, "with his head. Not his intelligence. I mean literally, with his head. It's a smooth, polished weapon and no one would ever suspect it."

"Shut up," I hissed, shuddering deeper into my seat.

We'd traded our usual cafeteria table for the north stairwell again. The bottom step of the empty stairway had become our favourite hiding place, the place where we too-often shared our secrets. We sat huddled with our knees close together, Doug's phone resting on Isaac's lap.

My math notebook lay open in front of me, though we weren't discussing equations anymore. Instead, we'd become detectives, and filled an entire page with possible pattern-lock combinations. Based on the swipe marks on the phone's screen and the fact that Doug was right-handed, we'd ranked all the patterns and tested five of them so far.

None of them had been right, and Doug's phone had been decidedly offended by our failed attempts. Now we had to wait five minutes before it would let us try to unlock it again.

Which meant I had five minutes to teach my lungs how to breathe.

I wasn't the only one having an existentialist crisis, though. Beside me, Isaac dropped his head into his hands and scuffed up his hair. A frustrated sound tore out of his throat and he kept his eyes trained on the ground. "This is my fault," he groaned. "I planted this idea into your head."

Honestly, I wasn't sure whose idea this was. But it wasn't an entirely bad one.

Because with any luck, Doug would be logged into his Youtube account, and I'd be able to delete the video. Then we'd send a mass message to everyone he knew, vindicating Isaac of his falsified crimes, or something like that. I'd taken a chance and now an opportunity was perfectly in reach. Except —

"This is wrong," Isaac continued, still refusing to look at me. "Everything about it is. I'm corrupting you."

I took in a strangled breath, nodding, unable to do anything but concede. All morning, a wave of hysteria had threatened me from the horizon, but it was only now that my anxiety looked like a full-blown tsunami. I hid half of my face behind a curtain of hair, trying not to feel as though I'd just completely screwed myself over.

What if this didn't work? What if the phone was programmed to delete everything after a set number of tries? What if we carried out the whole plan, only to play right into Doug's hands? What if this only made things worse?

"Five minutes are up," I blurted out. 

The pattern we'd chosen for attempt number six was an S shape. Slowly, I drew it on the touch screen with the pad of my thumb. When yet another error message came up, I just stared dumbfounded at it, leaving Isaac to read our penalty aloud.

"Please wait seven minutes and try again." He tipped his head back, dragging his eyes to the ceiling. "Fuck."

Silence settled into the stairwell again as misery ensnared us both. The tension in the room was tangible. Despite that his gaze teetered only between the ceiling and the floor, I could feel his uneasiness; it was as obvious as the looks he gave me through his peripheral vision.

"Isaac," I murmured. "We can't just sit here for seven minutes." Especially not in silence.

My insides were hollowed up, and a sickly feeling oscillated through them as his eyes appraised me full-on. "I don't know what to say," he began. "This was such a bad idea, Ren. I feel like the worst person on Earth. Maybe you did it, but it was my fault."

"It's not your fault. I came up with this plan on my own accord. You can leave if you want." When his eyebrows shot up, I added, "Seriously, it's fine."

"I'm not leaving," he exclaimed. "You don't know anything about being a criminal. You need me."

He glowered at me, or at least he tried to, with his puppy-dog eyes and pink-dusted cheeks.

I lowered my face into my hands. Only a minute had gone by. Seconds were beginning to feel like eternities, and I couldn't believe Isaac and I were having trouble passing the time. "Turns out being a criminal," I said, "is a very boring job."

"Even with the free entertainment?"

"If you mean your lectures, then yes."

"You always lecture me," he accused. "That was the first time I've lectured you, ever."

"I know." I smiled, though nervousness was still wiggling into my heart. The rest of me dangled between complete terror, and gratefulness that Isaac was beside me. "I think you need some practice. You weren't very convincing."

He released a breath, reminding me to take a deep one in. "Whatever. I'm not going to let you teach me how to lecture you."

"I'm not going to let you teach me how to steal from people, either."

"Okay," he said, turning his knees so that he sat facing me. "Deal. No lectures, no stealing, no nothing."

I nodded, but stopped short of giving him my agreement out loud. "It's not that simple, is it?" I asked, referring to the fact that he, too, would have to refrain from stealing things if we made this promise to each other. Based on our conversation at the graveyard, I had deduced that stealing was his baseline, his natural impulse. 

A coping mechanism.

"No, of course not. But it's a starting place."

"Right," I concurred, then repeated his words. "No lectures, no stealing, no nothing."

Now it was his turn to laugh. The sound sent a tingle of emotion up my spine, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. Not thinking, I leaned in, placed my hands on his shoulder and dotted a kiss on his cheek.

His lips quirked, that tiny bit of amusement finding a niche beneath the glimmer of a smile still sailing through his eyes. "No 'nothing', huh?"

"I don't know," I said, hesitating. "I... I was just saying whatever you said."

Trying to maintain my composure, I leaned my elbow against my knee, taking care not to drop Doug's phone from my lap. But even though nothing had changed, I felt slightly better about having it, because now I knew for certain that this was a one-off; a one-time adventure. Isaac would have my back if anything went wrong, and we'd make things right in the end, I was sure.

I suddenly trusted that everything would be okay tomorrow.

But on the off chance that the world ended tonight, there was something I had been thinking about for a long time. And somewhere between wondering about nothings and feeling the weight of everything we were doing, I heard Isaac haul in a shaky breath as he tethered his heavy-lidded gaze to my wide eyes.

In his delay, I studied the shapes of the shadows running over his face, imagining them being cast by low-hanging clouds a second before his lips met mine.

Isaac kissed me slowly, and when he cupped my face and ran his thumb gently over my cheek, it sent a quiver of butterflies into my tummy. He smelled both like pine trees and like he'd walked to school without an umbrella. I couldn't help but smile into his lips, a tiny giggle from my throat threatening to erupt in the midst of our kiss like confetti. 

I withdrew to take a breath — a task that had become both easier and more difficult. All my lungs wanted to do was match the erratic pace of my heart. It didn't surprise me that when I leaned in again, our noses collided. Isaac chuckled softly, and tilted his head a quarter of an inch to the side before dipping down towards me, both of us learning all the ways we could meet each other in the middle much quicker than we'd ever learned a single rule in math.

I eased closer to him, succumbing to the gravity between us, understanding with newfound clarity why flowers turned towards the sun.

"Renata," he mumbled reluctantly. By then, his fingers had tangled themselves into my hair. "Seven minutes are up."

I sighed, resting my chin at the base of his neck. I felt his muscles tense, which I took to mean he was grinning. "Can you believe," he added, "that I've gone from taking you to 7-Eleven to spending seven minutes in heaven with you?"

There was no way I was dignifying that with a response, so I lifted myself off his shoulder and removed Doug's phone from my lap. Isaac picked up my notebook, scanning it for the next pattern in line.

It was an M shape. Isaac had argued that this should've been our number one pick, seeing as most people picked passwords with either their name or the name of a loved one, and Doug seemed conceited enough to pick the first letter of his own surname. But I had been convinced that Doug was too smart for something like that, and so the M had dropped to position seven on our list.

"Here goes nothing," said Isaac, and I traced the shape of the letter with my finger.

The phone unlocked.

"Shit." Isaac caught the phone when I dropped it into his hands. Before I even comprehended what was happening, he tapped on several app icons, opening them all in turn before he clicked on the messages app last and waited for it to load up. 

My heart thudded loudly. Would we find the confidential discussions he'd held with his clients? Mindless banter he'd shared with his wife? Questions and answers he'd exchanged with his daughter? I was terrified that we would find him talking to someone, anyone, about Isaac. I had no idea how I would react to that.

But when the app finally finished loading, there were only four conversations on the screen.

"Doug and Jason," Isaac read, and I recognized the name of the Merritt's oldest son. "Doug and Mom. Doug and Leo. Doug and... you."

"Oh, no," I said. 

This wasn't Doug's phone at all.