Hate Notes
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Zainab Sambo
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725K
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48
Chapter 1
IRIS
Hydrangeas are needy little divas.
Too much water? They sulk. Too little? They faint. Today they squeak against my palm like they want to talk to the manager. I bully a rose open with my thumb and pretend it’s the only thing in my life that needs fixing.
The bell over the door to Davis Florals chimes, dinging like a polite throat clear to alert me to a new customer.
“Be right with you,” I say, continuing what I’m doing. There’s a right way to build a low arrangement: face open, weight balanced, nothing screaming for attention. A skill I wish transferred to people.
Footsteps. The sweet musk of a girl who thinks Bath & Body Works is a personality.
“I’m picking up my sample. For my engagement party,” she chirps, phone already in her hand, camera pointed at me like I’m a zoo exhibit. Her sweater says BRIDE across her chest. Subtle.
“Back table,” I say, pointing behind me. “Don’t mess with it. Bring it back exactly how you found it, or I’ll break your fingers and bill you for the joy.”
She giggles like I’m hilarious and wanders off. I finish the bouquet. It’s pretty. Too pretty for the world we live in. I wipe the counter and reach for my phone to contact the customer.
Fourteen notifications pop up like a chorus line.
X: nine new.
Instagram: three.
Texts: Mom, Mom, Mom, Jason, Kelly.
My stomach does a little oh no flip that has nothing to do with caffeine.
I open X. Because I’m stupid.
The first post is a screenshot.
The words are familiar and make my blood run cold.
I hate that you ruin every room you enter. I hate that you breathe like air belongs to only you. I hate that I still look for you when you leave.
My handwriting. My hate note. From…I don’t know. Five years ago? Ten? Who cares. It’s mine. It was mine. It’s currently not mine.
WTF?
I scroll.
Post after post. Screenshots. Cropped edges. A hundred versions of my worst thoughts with my worst honesty in my worst handwriting.
I hate that my mother says your name like a prayer.
I hate that you own gravity in my house.
I hate that my body knows what your voice means.
My mouth goes dry. My palms go damp. The room tilts, and I steady myself on the counter, fingers white around the edge.
“Um,” Bride Girl says, face glowing white-blue in the reflection from her phone. “Is this you?”
I look up. She’s holding her phone out. The top post is my sentence under the trending hashtags #HateNotesLoveStory and #IrisDavis. There’s a photo under it of Jesse Ellison, dripping sweat in some stadium tunnel, grinning like the world is a scoreboard and he’s winning.
A noise leaves my throat that might be a laugh and might be a choke. “No,” I say. “It’s the other Iris. The one who spells it with a Y.”
She doesn’t get sarcasm. None of them do.
She backs away from the counter like I started speaking Latin. “Should I…come back? My fiancé, he loves Jesse. We posted your mood board earlier, and now everyone’s…like…commenting. Maybe we should, like, wait until this blows over.”
“Yeah,” I say, “circle back when hell freezes over. I’ll be here making centerpieces for penguins.”
The bell over the door trills as she scurries out. The arrangement forgotten, sitting there like a punchline.
My hands shake. I tap open Instagram. My business account has a DM pileup that looks like a piñata exploded.
Brides canceling. A mother of the bride telling me she “cannot in good conscience hire someone so negative in a season of joy.” A college roommate I hadn’t talked to since freshman year asking if I’m “okay, babe,” like she didn’t steal my laundry quarters in 2013.
I bite the bullet and switch to my texts.
Mom
We need to talk. Tonight. 6. Don’t be late.
Mom
Please tell me you didn’t write those.
Before I can reply, another text lights up my phone.
Jason
LMAO you went feral. Mom’s pacing like that will help. Also, Jesse called.
My skin goes tight. “Of course he did,” I tell the empty shop, because talking to my own doom is apparently my brand.
I switch back to X and scroll, because I’m stupid twice.
Some guy: “Who is THIS girl and why is she spitting bars about my QB? #HateNotesLoveStory.” GIF of a trash can on fire.
A sports blog: “Mystery woman writes hate letters to Jesse Ellison for a decade. Are we shipping?”
A girl with a check mark: “We’ve all written messy drafts about exes. We just didn’t have the bad judgment to hoard them like a raccoon.”
My hands go colder. My face feels hot. I type “close” into the register, because I can’t do people, and my shop doesn’t deserve to see me collapse.
The bell chimes before I can flip the sign. A guy in a fleece vest sticks his head in, looks around with bright eyes and a camera-ready smile. “Iris Davis?”
“Closed,” I say. “Forever.”
He ignores it like men do. “I’m with”—he says the name of a sports site with the unearned confidence of a man with a podcast. “We want to get your side—”
“My side,” I repeat. “Of my private notes that someone turned into a trending topic?”
He lights up. “So, they are yours.”
I stare at him long enough to make him sweat. “Get. Out.”
He retreats out the door. The phone in my hand buzzes like a beehive.
An Instagram Live video pops up. Jesse. The caption: talking about it.
I shouldn’t tap it. But I do anyway.
There’s cinderblock behind him, and he’s lit by the fluorescent hum of money. He’s damp and flushed and stupidly pretty in the way people who get paid to be gods are. The comments fly like confetti.
@footballwife83: Say her name, king.
@ellisonsgirl: I’ll write you love notes that don’t hate, sir.
His mouth tips, like he’s both reading them and not. “Guys,” he says, voice low, amused. “Y’all got creative today.”
God, his voice. It hasn’t changed. It’s a trigger, and I hate that my body knows the safety of it by heart.
He continues: “I don’t have much to say about poetry.” Wink. “I respect a woman who can write a complete sentence.”
The comment section loses its mind. The back of my neck heats like I’m under lights. I’m not. I’m under the same tired bulb I put in last month with a ladder that wanted to kill me.
Jesse looks offscreen. “I’ll be in town tomorrow,” he tells someone we can’t see, then remembers a camera is on him and adds for the feed: “Family time. Stay hydrated.”
I end the video. My heart is a fish, and this shop is a boat, and somebody just ripped a hole in the hull.
The bell chimes again. This time it actually is a customer I know, Mr. Han from the produce truck. His eyebrows pinch when he sees my face. He puts two ugly tomatoes on the counter like an offering. “You look like you need July.”
“I need a coma,” I say. “And a time machine. And a different personality.”
He nods, sets a hand over mine for exactly one second, the way old men do when they want to give you courage without making it a thing. “Tomatoes,” he says, and leaves.
I lock the door behind him and flip the sign. Everyone on the internet saw my insides, and I just turned a piece of laminated plastic like it matters.
I go to the back of the shop, to the beaten-up desk in the corner. The drawer sticks. It always sticks. The wood swelled last spring, and I didn’t sand it down because I like pain I can control.
Inside: rubber bands, a box cutter, receipts that smell like dust, cheap printer paper. My handwriting in stacks. My spine on a shelf.
For a second, I think I’ll set a match to the whole drawer and call it holy. But I’m not that theatrical. I pull out a sheet, my hands shaking, and sit on the stool like I’m taking an exam I didn’t study for.
Dear—
I snort. Right. Not dear. Not anymore.
Asshole is closer. Dear Manipulative Pro Athlete Who Should Choke is wordy.
I press the pen down until my fingers hurt.
I hate that you made me interesting to people who hate reading.
I hate that I still know what your mouth looks like when you’re lying.
My hand crams the letters tighter together. Ink streaks where my fingers shake.
My phone vibrates on the counter. Family thread going off.
Mom
Have you called Jesse?
Mom
Iris.
Mom
Iris.
Jason
Do not bring a knife.
Kelly
Bring a knife if you need to. I’ll hide it when your mom walks in.
Mom
Kelly.
I huff a laugh that turns into a glottal emergency. Tears sting, and I blink hard enough to hurt.
Another text. Unknown number. I shouldn’t touch it. I touch it.
Unknown
You okay
No punctuation. No name. Like my body needs a signature.
I delete it. My hands don’t stop shaking.
I walk into the tiny bathroom and splash water on my face. The mirror is unkind and honest. My eyes are red. My mouth is a line. I look like the kind of woman the internet loves to hate until they need her to sell their candles.
I grab my keys. Purse. Pride. What’s left of it.
Outside, the world is too bright for my mood. Two teenagers ride by on bikes, faces lit up with gossip. “That’s her,” one says, not even whispering. “The girl who hates Jesse.”
My car feels like a raft. I sit in the driver’s seat and put my forehead on the steering wheel, because today can bite me.
My phone buzzes again. I’m going to throw it into traffic.
X notification. Trending.
I shouldn’t look. I can’t not.
The screen lights up with a white box and a lie: Top Trends: #1—IRIS DAVIS HATE NOTES.
My name.
Number one.
Worldwide.
Like I did something worth applause and not this.
My throat tightens around something ugly and sharp. I screenshot it, because my brain is sick, apparently. The little camera sound clicks, and it sounds like a nail in a coffin.
I text a single word to the family thread because I am a coward, and because if I don’t say something, my mother will blow up my apartment building.
Iris
Coming.
The phone buzzes one more time, like it has anything else left to take.
Unknown
See you soon
No punctuation. No name.
Like a coin dropped in the back of my throat.
I put the car in gear and pull out anyway, because the only way out is through, and because if I sit here much longer, I’ll end up on a livestream crying in a Honda, and I didn’t wake up this morning to become a meme.
The tomatoes roll on the passenger seat like a joke about July. I grip the wheel and stare straight ahead and don’t check mirrors, because I don’t want to see if I already have a tail.
The whole world is looking at me, and I don’t know what I’m going to do when I walk into my mother’s kitchen and find him sitting at her table like he belongs there.
Spoiler: I might set the hydrangeas on fire.
