"I haven't got any idea what you're talking about, Miss Elphaba," Galinda said, quietly, continuing her rummage through the wardrobe.
"Well, Miss Galinda, if it's not you that's putting flowers in my bed every time I leave for class, then do tell me who it is and why it is that you keep letting them into our room."
"Really," Glinda huffed at her, removing her nose from the curtain of dresses. "Don't be ridiculous. I don't know of anyone that would be giving you so many flowers."
"You haven't got to be so jealous, you know. It's not ladylike."
Galinda narrowed her eyes at her roommate and turned back to the wardrobe.
"It really isn't all that great to go to sleep with bugs between your sheets," Elphaba told her, more gently.
"I don't want anyone planting a load of flowers in my bed, Elphaba!"
Elphaba didn't respond. She didn't make jokes about stems in her backside at night, she didn't demand more explanations, she didn't ask Galinda why she kept searching through her dresses when she'd already been ready for an hour. She turned and left the room.
Galinda sighed and leaned her forehead against the soft smell of wood and perfumed clothes. She wished that Elphaba would come back. She looked over her shoulder at the door and willed her to come back. The door stayed as it was, and, instead, a lily fell softly from the ceiling and tumbled onto her roommate's pillow.
"Oh, just stop already!" she cried, marching across the room and glaring up at the ceiling. She looked down at the bed and touched her fingers to the flower's stem. Two more fell down beside it.
"I give up," she said.
I'm sorry about the flowers she scrawled across the back of her history notes, then laid them on the pillow and left the room.
She couldn't concentrate in sorcery class. She leaned her head into her hands. It had started with a few per day. Two, three. But lately there were more. Hundreds. One lily for every time she'd wished that Elphaba was there.
"Galinda," Morrible croaked. The girl looked up from the lacquered desktop.
"Yes?"
"Galinda, I was just asking the class for a volunteer demonstration of our charms, and, judging from the lack of attention you've been paying, I'm sure that you must have yours all figured out by now."
Right. The project. A charm that they were to have taken and changed, worked around to suit them, to represent themselves and their talents.
The class had turned to look at her expectantly.
"I can't," she said. A lily swam across the sunlight in a dorm across the campus.
"And why is that, Miss Galinda?"
The class snickered.
"It's not done yet," she offered.
She hardly noticed a single thing on her way back to the dorm; she couldn't remember walking there, but had suddenly found herself opening the door.
Elphaba was standing beside her bed, nonplussed.
"I just can't understand," she said. A small hill of lilies had formed.
"I—" Galinda said, advancing into the room. Elphaba didn't look up at her. Her long green fingers reached out toward the barely-visible corner of Galinda's notes sticking out from under the mound of petals and stems.
The room was still as Elphaba read. It smelled of flowers.
"What does this mean, Galinda?"
"I don't know," Galinda moaned, sinking to the floor. "I can't understand." She looked down at her hands. "Every time I think of you, they're there."
Elphaba gazed at the bed for a long moment, and then turned back to look at Glinda before looking toward the bed again. "You've thought of me this many times in the past two hours?"
Galinda blushed furiously. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
If anyone ventured out to Kiamo Ko now, they wouldn't be able to navigate the halls. They were too covered in lilies, in petals and dying leaves.
No one lays a lily on their grave.