[RF] Here's a story I'm writing about a young Puerto Rican girl named Valentina Morales. It's a work in progress.
The afternoon sun beat down on the raised beds of the community garden in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Tomato vines climbed their cages, basil and peppers grew thick under the shadow of a chain-link fence decorated with Puerto Rican flags and murals of coqui frogs. Eight-year-old Valentina Morales knelt in the dirt between the rows, her curly dark hair in two messy pigtails, knees black with soil. Her yellow “¡Boricua hasta la muerte!” tank top was already streaked with brown.
She patted damp soil around a young tomato plant with both hands.
“Shh, you’re gonna be okay, papi,” she whispered, half in English, half in the Spanish she spoke with her abuela at home. “Grow big and sweet. I’ll tell Mami to make salsa with you later.” She spotted a little yellow wildflower poking up between the peppers, plucked it gently, and twirled it between her fingers, giggling. “And you’re my princesa flower today.”
That’s when the yelling started.
“HEY! STOP! You’re hurting them!”
Valentina startled so hard she dropped the flower. A red-haired girl—nine or ten, freckles across her nose, wearing a neat green “Protect Our Planet” T-shirt and clean khaki shorts—came marching between the beds like she was on a mission.
“Plants have feelings! Every time you pull stuff or dig like that they release stress chemicals. You’re basically torturing them!”
Valentina blinked up at her, mouth open. For a second she just stared, heart racing from the sudden shout. Then she pushed herself up, brushing dirt onto her shorts.
“¿Qué? I wasn’t torturing anything! I was helping the tomatoes!”
The red-haired girl put her hands on her hips. “Helping? You yanked that flower right out of the ground! That’s plant abuse. My teacher says we have to respect all living things, even vegetables.”
Valentina’s face shifted from shocked to full \*boricua\* attitude in record time. Eyebrows up, one hand on her hip, the other waving the little yellow flower like evidence in court.
“¡Ay, por favor! Who are you, the garden cop? This is my abuela’s plot—she lets me come here after school. The plants like when I talk to them. My abuela’s been growing stuff since before your teacher was born!”
The redhead stepped closer, cheeks turning pink. “Science says they scream on the inside when you damage them. You’re stressing the whole garden!”
Valentina’s cheeks burned. She glanced down at the tomato plant, then at the flower in her dirty fingers. Her lip wobbled for half a second—maybe she \*had\* pulled too hard?—but the fire came roaring back.
“Well maybe your science is stupid!” she fired back, slipping into fast Spanglish the way she did when she got mad on the playground. “My abuela says plants get happy when kids play with them. They like the company! Not like you yelling at random kids like a loca.”
She puffed out her chest, curls bouncing. “And stop screaming, you scaring the pigeons and probably the abuelas trying to rest over there!”
The red-haired girl opened and closed her mouth. “I wasn’t yelling, I was ADVOCATING! There’s a difference.”
Valentina rolled her eyes so dramatically her whole head tilted. “Advocating? You sound like those TikTok videos my cousin watches. Here—” She thrust the yellow flower toward the girl. “If you care so much, fix it. Put it back if you can, Miss Save-the-Earth.”
The two girls stood locked in a standoff in the middle of the Brooklyn garden: dark curls and proud attitude versus fiery red hair and self-righteous outrage. A breeze carried the smell of sofrito from someone’s open window nearby and the distant honk of traffic on Broadway. A pigeon cooed from the fence.
Valentina lifted her chin, stubborn as ever. “You gonna help me water them instead of yelling, or you just here to be the boss of plants?”
The red-haired girl hesitated, glancing at the drooping flower in her hand… then at Valentina’s dirt-covered, unapologetic grin.