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“Is Papa home?” I ask her on the walk to the range.
“Yes. But we only have an hour lesson today, so stay focused.”
“I will.”
We’re almost to the French doors that lead out to our garden and archery range when one of our housekeepers, Adria, walks past with a round glass bowl full of yellow roses.
“Let me see,” my mother says.
Adria stops and holds out the arrangement. “Aren’t they beautiful, ma’am?”
My mother scans every bloom before nodding. “Make sure there are roses in our bedroom. Mr. Martin likes the smell.”
“Already done, ma’am. I put some lovely pale-pink ones on your bedside tables.”
With another nod, my mother keeps walking, and I follow. Sometimes I wish she could just enjoy the beauty in things, like the flowers, instead of only judging their perfection.
The roses Adria carried were at the perfect stage of bloom, the petals unfurled but not a hint of brown on any of them. I love roses most when they’re right on the edge of blooming. It feels like they’re saying, “Just watch, I’m about to wow you.”
“Evening, ladies,” Sebastian says when we reach the range.
He’s in his fifties, and he was a member of multiple US Olympic men’s archery teams. Now he does private coaching, and I’ve been working with him for three years.
“We’re going to review some video before we start.”
I don’t want to watch video. I don’t want him correcting my form over and over. I love taking what I already know and shooting arrows alone, but I’m not allowed to. Practicing with bad form is worse than not practicing at all, according to my mother.
Sebastian lets me shoot on my own for ten minutes at the end of our lessons, and then we review the video at the start of the next one. So even when he’s supposedly not watching me, he’s still watching me.
“Mira.”
At the sound of my father’s deep, warm voice, I turn. He’s approaching me, his dark suit jacket rumpled from travel and his tie loosened at his neck.
“Papa.” I grin and run into his arms.
“I missed my beautiful girl.” He hugs me, kisses the top of my head and then stands back to look down at me, cupping my cheeks. “You got even more beautiful when I was gone.”
I smile because it’s a lie. I have a pimple on my forehead that wasn’t there nine days ago. But the way my mother seems to only see my flaws, my father only sees the good in me.
“Can we go to Baghdad Street tonight?” I ask.
I can feel my mother hoping he’ll say no—that I have to study and practice violin. But she’d never argue with him in front of me and Sebastian. She believes couples should always support each other in public and handle disagreements in private. And when it comes to me, my father doesn’t ask for a lot, and he nearly always gets what he wants.
He glances at my mother and grins. “Baghdad Street tonight, love?”
She nods, and excitement swirls around in my stomach. Lots of families in Heliopolis walk on Baghdad in the evenings. It’s one of my only opportunities to see cute guys, and we always stop at an ice cream shop for a scoop before coming home.
“I’ll watch your lesson with your mother,” he says.
I nod, no longer dreading the video review with Sebastian. It’s rare for my father to have time to watch me shoot, and even though I’m sore from yesterday’s training, I want to do my best.
When I land every arrow exactly where Sebastian wanted them later in the lesson, my gaze moves past my smiling father’s face to my mother. Her lips are tilted up just slightly in the corners, and she gives me a small nod.
And as much as I wish it didn’t mean everything to me, it does.
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“You girls are the blossoms that will bear the fruit of our next generation, and you will always be treasured and protected.” – excerpt from an address by New America President Soren Whitman to students at The Academy of Eve
