Their relationship started on a bright almost-summer day when the air was warm, the grass wet, the trees a delicate sort of new green. It started below an old willow tree when the girl sat beside the boy on a worn blanket and realized how perfect his eyes were.
That's when their relationship started.
"Here," said the boy, pushing a small purple flower into the girl's hands. "I picked this for you."
The girl took it and stared at it for a moment. She liked how the inside of it was a darker shade of purple, liked how the petals fell in a way that was like the skirts of a fancy dress. She liked that it was soft and fuzzy, and liked especially that it'd been picked just for her. She gripped the stem tight in her fist and glanced at the boy, his earnest blue eyes searching desperately for her approval. "Francis," she began, "do you want to be my boyfriend?"
The boy could hardly believe his luck. That same day, while he'd been eating a bowl of his favorite cereal (Froot Loops drowning in milk), his big brother Bash had told him that girls liked it when you gave them flowers. Being an immense two years older, Bash naturally knew much more than the boy did. This was an easily accepted fact. The boy knew it, Bash knew it. Everyone knew it. Six years knows a lot more than four.
And this only reinforced that fact. Give a girl one flower and she's clamoring to be your girlfriend. The boy was sure his choice of flower must've also affected this decision. He'd spent a long time scouring the little patches of spring blossoms before he approached the girl with his gift. He'd wanted the chosen flower to be exactly perfect. The little star-shaped, whitish-blue flowers wouldn't suffice, no, nor would the fat little buttercups, much as both the boy and the girl loved playing with the golden blooms. The boy had come prepared with two, as a matter of fact. Just in case the girl had decided to accept his flower and, indeed, offered boyfriend status to the boy.
"Well," the girl asked again. "Do you?"
The boy nodded quickly. The girl smiled. "Okay. We have to kiss, then. That means we're really boyfriend and girlfriend."
And so the boy waited, sitting there on the blanket, not sure where this was going. He hadn't expected kissing; not this early on in the relationship. Bash had said kissing was a big moment; something he'd done only a handful of times. But that was what the girl wanted, and so he would make an effort.
She scooted closer to him, and he leaned in. He closed his eyes, opening one to see what she was doing. Her eyes were closed, as well. He shut his open eye quickly. He had to do everything right for this.
Their lips met with an odd coolness. The boy jumped back a bit, not prepared for contact. It was wetter than he'd thought kisses would be, and lasted a while longer (though, in reality, it only lasted about two seconds). The boy decided promptly in those two seconds that he didn't like kissing. But maybe the girl liked it. He promised to like it more when they kissed next time.
The girl pulled away, opening her honey-brown eyes. "Now we're boyfriend and girlfriend," she told him solemnly.
The boy nodded, resisting the urge to wipe his lips. "What do we do?"
The girl shrugged. The boy took this opportunity to show his two buttercups to her. "I brought these."
The girl poked one of the petals, her finger coming back stained a shining yellow. The boy watched quietly. "Know what we can do? We can rub them on our chins and see if they stick. My brother says if they stick, it means you're in love."
The girl eyed him dubiously. "How's your brother know?"
The boy straightened, proud that he could boast a brother who was so old. "He's six."
"Oh." Her voice was awed.
"Yeah. Here, try it."
And so buttercups were passed out and gripped in chubby hands, poised just below their chins. They waited. "Let's go at the same time," the girl suggested.
"Okay."
"Now," said the girl, thrusting her flower against her chin.
The boy followed suit, grinding the petals into his skin. Once he felt he had grinded every bit of the flower out, he held up his hands, eyes aching in a vain attempt to see if the buttercup had stayed on his chin. "Is it still there?"
"Yeah," the girl answered, grinning, her eyes wide and stretched as she tried to glimpse her own flower. "Is mine?"
The boy stared at her chin. His heart sank. A wrinkled buttercup lay on the blanket below the girl's face, its petals crumpled and no longer shiny with pollen. The girl's chin was smothered in yellow, but no buttercup. "No," he told her, unable to take his eyes off the fallen flower.
"Oh."
"It's okay. Maybe yours wasn't ready. Maybe it was just—"
"Yeah."
The boy's stomach felt weird. His buttercup drifted to the blanket. He didn't reach to pick it up.
The girl stood up abruptly, leaving the blanket and scattering the boy with loose dirt. "Where are you going?" the boy asked tentatively, willing her back to turn, for her to come back to him.
She turned. "They're calling for us," she said, pointing to Ms. Carter, who was waving her hands and using her outside voice to say, "Snack time! Snack time! Inside, everybody! Let's go inside!"
The girl beckoned the boy with an impatient hand. "Come on."
As the boy got to his feet slowly and followed the girl, she held out a hand, glancing down as he reached to take it. They walked down, away from the old willow tree, hands clasped together as they wondered what they would be offered at snack time, wondered at the warm hand they grasped and wondered even more at the person to whom the hand belonged.
As it turned out, snack was a handful of pretzel sticks and several small cups of creamy peanut butter. These were washed down with frothing chocolate milk and shared among friends. Or, for the boy and the girl, shared among significant others. They sat together on a large beanbag chair, taking turns dipping pretzel sticks in their communal container of peanut butter. Double dipping was allowed. The boy, especially, rejoiced in this. He was sick of having to get a really good scoop of peanut butter on his first try. He wanted peanut butter on every bite of his pretzel. Such was the benefit of having a girlfriend.
The boy decided that he liked this part of dating, this easy silence and trust that there would be enough peanut butter for each of them. And when they'd finished their pretzel sticks and there was only one left, the boy glanced at it and, instead of hastily scooping it up and eating it before anyone else could, he offered it reverently to the girl. She stared at it (this immense gesture was not lost on her) and accepted it gingerly, carefully breaking it in half. She held out one piece to the boy, who took it from her with a grin. (What he didn't know was that she'd taken the bigger half. But such things were of small importance. As long as they shared the peanut butter.)
Cleanup was done together. The two worked as a team to drag the beanbag chair back into its original place and shared any of the dropped pretzel sticks they found on the floor. They were praised by Ms. Carter for working so diligently and so well together and were allowed to choose a prize from her drawer. After much pondering, the girl chose a small bottle of bubbles, the boy a plastic frog that would jump when someone pressed on its nub of a tail.
The whole herd of preschoolers was once again released outside, and the boy and the girl rushed to the swings to play with and compare their new toys. The boy was fast; his legs were much longer than the girl's. He was able to snag a swing. But the girl was not, and she watched, standing there with her too short legs, as the boy gripped the chain of the swing hesitantly. He glanced from the swing to the girl and back again. "You can have the swing, Mary," he said graciously.
She beamed and ran to it, promising the boy a go on her bubbles. He grinned as she clambered onto the swing and kicked out with her skinny legs. Soon she was far above him; so far he had to tip back his head to see her. Her dark hair whipped around her, shining mahogany as the sun hit it. The boy imagined she was flying, flying higher and higher and always coming back down to him. He flashed her a huge smile and waved, laughing. She laughed back, keeping her grip on the chains, and he wondered if she was scared of falling. She never seemed scared of anything.
When she was tired of pumping with her legs and her head was dizzy, she slowed the swing and hopped off, walking toward the boy. He sat and watched her; absentmindedly pressing the tail of his frog and making it jump around.
"Want to try the bubbles?" she asked, setting the jar by his hand.
"Okay."
She took the wand, dipping it into the bubbles carefully. When she lifted the wand to her lips, she blew a gentle stream through, bubbles erupting and swirling around in the air. The boy stared, amazed, as the bubbles flew around his nose. The colors were always changing; always rolling and floating from greens to yellows to pinks to purples while never really being a color at all. He reached out to pop one, leaping to his feet, lunging after a particularly large bubble. He glanced back at the girl, who was busy lifting another round of bubbles to her mouth. "Can I try?"
She shrugged and handed him the wand, eyeing the teardrop shaped dribbles that fell from the circle of it. "Don't waste the bubbles."
"I know," the boy said. He blew fiercely into the wand and was rewarded with a meager number of bubbles.
The girl laughed and took the stick from him. "You're blowing too hard," she told him. "Like this."
And she demonstrated and the boy watched intently and noted the faint spraying of freckles across her nose and understood that he liked the freckles. He noted her long, dark eyelashes (longer even than Bash's, who claimed to have the longest eyelashes in the world). He noted her pale pink lips, and noted that he had a shade of pink crayon at home that was the exact same color. He noted the careful movements she made as she brought the bubble blower to her lips and noted the flock of bubbles she coaxed from the wand, smiling triumphantly as she watched them.
And so they sat on the not-quite-grown grass and blew bubbles (the girl was best at blowing the most bubbles in one go, and the boy was better at blowing the biggest single bubble. He felt he now knew what his mother meant when she wore out her "Quality, not quantity" mantra) until they'd run their bubble supply dry. Then they turned to the boy's frog and proceeded to hold a series of contests (who could make the frog jump the highest, who could make it jump the farthest).
They would've sat together until their parents came to take them home, if not for Ms. Carter interrupting with a shout of, "Francis, did you put on sunscreen?"
He stood sullenly because, no, he had not put on sunscreen, and how could he think of coming outside without protection on, young man? His mother would be very disappointed in him, Ms. Carter was sure. So he skulked inside, followed by Ms. Carter, who was holding a sinister tube of SPF 55 Banana Boat. He was relatively agreeable as the woman wiped the sunscreen on his face and mostly cooperative while he waited for the eternal lathering of his legs and arms to stop. Mostly.
"There," Ms. Carter announced, wiping her hands on a towel. "You're done. You can go outside."
He ducked away, running for the door. Ms. Carter caught him with an amused smile. "And don't even think of going outside without sunscreen on ever again. Okay? Okay."
With a knowing, annoying grin that was apparently owned by all adults (the boy's mother had definitely gotten her money's worth of it), she released him into the playground. He ran to the spot on the grass where he and the girl had been blowing bubbles, but found no girl with dark hair and skinny legs and long eyelashes and pale pink lips and freckles. He checked the swings. Not there. Under the tree? No. Not there, either.
The boy turned to the slide, crawling up its ladder slowly. From his heightened perch at the top of the slide, he could see a dark-haired girl sitting on a bench with a dark-haired boy, a scrawny ash tree mostly shading them from the sun. Without even looking at her face, the boy knew who was sitting with the dark-haired boy. The girl. Dark hair, skinny legs, freckles, pale pink lips, long eyelashes. His girl.
He slithered down the slide (Ms. Carter had been enthusiastic about the sunscreen) and stopped in front of the bench. The girl and the dark-haired boy had stood, holding hands. They turned to see the boy gaping at them.
The boy noted with a flopping stomach the buttercups that hung from both chins. He noted that the girl had a star-shaped flower tucked into her dark hair. He noted that the dark-haired boy used his unoccupied hand to wipe his lips. He noted that the girl glanced at her hand—her hand gripped in the dark-haired boy's hand (also something the boy noted)—and back to the boy. "You left this," she told him quietly, not quite meeting his eyes, and held out a plastic jumping frog.
The boy took it numbly and noted that there was a shriveled purple flower balanced on top of the frog. And then he turned around and walked away and noted the feel of two pairs of eyes burning into his back. He would not turn and meet their eyes. He would not say anything. He would not cry. Instead, he made his way to the old willow tree and sat beneath it, on the worn blanket where their relationship had started. He took out his frog and made it jump, and noted how much more fun it was when two people played with it.
The frog leapt into a wild jump as the boy pressed too hard on its tail. As he crawled to retrieve it, his eyes caught on a clump of shiny golden buttercups. He plucked one, holding it up higher to inspect it, and brought it to his chin, rubbing furiously. When he dropped his arms, he did not strain to look at his chin. He knew instinctively where he would find it.
Even as he stood to run past the drifting tendrils of the willow, even as he skipped back down to the swings, it did not fall.
Their relationship ended on a bright almost-summer day when the air was warm, the grass wet, the trees a delicate sort of new green. It ended under a young ash tree when the girl sat beside another boy on a worn bench and realized how perfect dark hair and dark curls and dark eyes and boys named Thomas were.
That's when their relationship ended.
The buttercups, the little children's dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
Robert Browning (Home-Thoughts, from Abroad).
Note: If you thought the narration of the fic was too sophisticated for four-year-olds, great. Message received. I wrote it a bit overdramatic and mature on purpose; for slight ironic humor and to point out that kids are a hell of a lot more intelligent than adults give us credit for.
Inspirational credit for calling Mary/Francis the boy/the girl to kayeberrie on tumblr. I honestly cannot write a Frary kid fic any other way after reading her amazing fic The Girl.
Also, the buttercup-on-the-chin game that is mentioned throughout is something we always did when I was in preschool. This fic was sort of supposed to be a "Oh, they 'dated' for about two hours when they were in preschool; you know how little kids are." But then it got a little deeper, I guess? Whether you interpret it as real romantic love or childhood curiosity is completely up to you. However, I did write it more with the latter in mind.
Disclaimer: Yes, the title is taken from The Foundations' song "Build Me Up Buttercup." And, obviously, I don't own that. Or anything, really.