The substitute teacher stood against the class like a sandcastle against a rising tide. The collective consciousness of troublemakers and brats accessed her strength, searching for weak points, but she met their eyes with a zen-like calm.
“Hello everypony, my name is Cheerilee and I'll be filling in for your regular teacher for a few days while she's getting some well-deserved rest,” she said, causing the class to get caught in an uproar.
The foals began shouting questions or trading rumours, all in unison, creating a ruckus calculated to test the resolve of the young teacher. Cheerilee waved her hoof frantically in an attempt to get a word in edgeways.
“Now, now, there will be plenty of time for questions later, if you could all please be quiet that would...” she paused to dodge a paper airplane.
Her words had apparently fallen on deaf ears; if anything the ruckus was even worse than before. After shooting a bemused look towards the scene of ponies, she filled her lungs with air and began to yell:
“BE QUIET!”
The class instantly fell silent while Cheerilee cleared her throat somewhat apologetically.
“If anypony has anything they'd like to say, raise your hoof,” she added. One brave colt shot a hoof into the air.
“Yes?”
"Teacher, our regular teacher told us we can leave class ten minutes early, it's okay.” His pokerface was evidently not as good as he seemed to believe.
"Is that so?" Cheerilee replied with a sarcastic sing-song voice." That's not what she wrote in the curriculum that she gave to me before she left. She also had quite a few things to say about you, Thunderlane." Her piercing gazed caused the pegasus to slump back into his chair.
Somewhere on the far side of the middle-back row, not the far back reserved for the class clowns, or the front reserved for the knowledge sponges and particularly vicious troublemakers or the place by the window reserved for daydreamers sat the filly called Roseluck. She had no particular desire to join in with the game of annoying the substitute teacher and instead opened her desk to study its content.
Some of the early bloomers in the class had tucked notes into it, awkwardly phrased confessions of admiration among crudely drawn hearts. Blushing slightly, she buried the letters under her amethyst-studded notebook. Like most of her friends, she had more pens for it than was strictly necessary. Some wrote with ink, some with lead, some were ballpoint pen and a few were even scented. But all of them was tinted a shade of blue.
But it wasn't the embarrassing, if flattering, notes that caught her interest. She double-checked that she still had the seeds and she found them tucked away in the corner inside a clear plastic bag labelled “Blue Roses.” She had traded them from a friend of hers in exchange for the golden hair clip her mother had given her. Their conversation echoed in her mind.
Two fillies sat on the swing set a comfortable distance away from the noisy fights that masqueraded as play on the hoofball field. One of them, Roseluck, looked at the other with sceptical eyes.
A blue rose, Lily? But those don't exist!" she exclaimed.
"They do too!" Lily said in reply. "I picked them myself"
"Are you sure it was a rose and not a cornflower or something like that?"
"Yes, I'm sure it was a rose! It had one of those... y'know, spirally thing. When the petals go 'round and round." Roseluck did not look particularly convinced at this and shot her friend a cautious glance.
"You swear on Celestia it was a rose?"
"I swear on Celestia it was a rose,” Lily swore with untroubled ease. “And a really nice shade of blue too. So how about that hairpin?" Roseluck looked away in hesitation.
"I don't know, my mother said I looked best with hair decs. I don't wanna loose it... It was a gift!"
"Yes, but these are blue roses,” Lily bargained. “You won't find something like that anywhere else!"
Roseluck rocked idly back and forth on the swing a few time while weighing her options. Her garden had roses in just about any colour, red like the lipstick her mother liked to use, yellow like the sun that nourished her plants, and lavender, just like the flowers she'd grow to dry and put up over the windows to make the air smell nice. But she didn't have any blue roses.
She nagged her mother for some blue roses, but had been told they didn't exist. Normally, she'd cling to her mothers word like gospel, but in this case, ,hope won out. In her mind, she saw how wonderful her garden would look like with blue roses in it.
Every shade you could think of would be there: A patch of dour marine-blue ones for sad days, a patch of sky blue flowers for happy days and maybe a couple of teal ones for days that are just in-between. This image forced a smile on her face and caused her to make her mind up. Once the swing had stopped rocking, she turned to her friend.
"Okay, it's a deal."
“No, you may not go to the bathroom,” Cheerilee scolded a young pony who in response emitted a whining sound in protest. “Why? Because you don't really need to go, don't you? You're just bored. You can go during the break.”
While her attention was focused on the colt at the front row, one of the troublemakers from the back took the opportunity to throw a paper air plane towards the substitute teacher. It hit her in the back of the head with a soft 'thump' and with barely concealed irritation she scanned the classroom to find any sign of the perpetrator. Her detective eyes analysed the fillies and colts, all sitting by their desk like lit candles, and she picked out the most likely suspects. Her gaze narrowed, hoping to catch any sign of combativeness that could give them away, and the whiny pony from before took the opportunity to sneak out of the classroom.
As the lesson once again ground to a halt, Roseluck got lost in a private daydream, traces of which escaped into her notebook via a shiny blue pen with ink that smelled of strawberries. Taking advantage of the lined paper, she drew the outlines of a step pyramid and filled each floor with flowers and bushes. Unsurprisingly enough, most of the doodles were of roses, she just really liked painting those little elegant swirls.
She knew that this wasn't really how roses looked, of course, she had seen her mother paint roses that looked like you could reach into the canvas and pick them. But when she drew roses, she liked to let her pen run wild. For the record, she never intended for the roses to be blue, that just happened to be the colour that the ink got once it dried.
When the bell rang, it was like a starting shot for the big race back home and Roseluck joined the other kid in galloping towards the door. On her way out, she met up with Daisy, her friend from the parallel class.
Daisy was like herself reflected in a fun house mirror, pastel green where she was dark red and outgoing when she was reserved, yet they both shared the same headspace filled with flowers, fountains and adventure fiction. Daisy smiled at her and before she had opened her mouth, Roseluck knew what she was going to say:
“The wheathermare just called,” Daisy said.
“Yes, and it will be a lovely morning,” Roseluck replied with a giggle.
They were both entering the awkward phase where phrases like “you wanna come over and play?” sounded dangerously childish, yet they still had little reference for social interaction beyond the grade-school mould and it left them with bothersome gaps in their vocabulary. Roseluck and Daisy had chosen to fill it with the spy-speak that had amused them in a story from the magazine Four-legged Tales for reasons that had since gotten lost in the mists of time.
In their vernacular. It simply meant: “Want to walk home together?” “Yes, sure!” But at this point, it could just as well be replaced by a quick nod and a smile.
“I was wondering about something,” Daisy asked as they began walking trough the road lined with cheerful houses made out of straw and clay.
“Yes, what is it?”
“How is it like being rich?”
Roseluck gave her a bewildered look, but Daisy sounded genuinely curious.
“Rich? What do you mean? I don't live in a castle or anything.”
“Yeah, but you got your own garden, how many other ponies have that? I wish I had my own garden!”
“You'd just fill it with wildflowers anyway,” Roseluck replied with a smirk.
“Well, yeah, I just think they look so pretty. Also, its much more fun when you get to look for them, y'know?”
Their small talk continued until they reached the fork in the road by an old gnarly tree where they parted ways, but Roseluck couldn't stop thinking about that question.
Yes, her house was larger than most, if not quite like the Silver Mansion or Filthy Rich's enormous home, and yes, her mother did give Roseluck her own wagon for her birthday, something most fillies had to save up for years to buy, but somehow she just never connected the dots before. She thought the reason most fillies didn't have a garden for their own was because they didn't like gardening, the idea that some ponies may not actually afford to devote so much space only to flowers or other plants that just look pretty had completely escaped her.
Once she reached her house, she went straight to the garden without even greeting her mother. Behind the short rose-bush she had her own flower bed, which was rapidly running out of space. She circled around the bed until she found an unoccupied spot where she could plant the mysterious seeds. The cold earth made her hooves dirty and without thinking, she cleaned them off on her flank, further muddying her coat. She placed the five seeds in the hole and went indoors, leaving a trail of mud behind her.
The next day Lily wouldn't talk to her. At first it seemed to be just a coincidence, and she didn't pay it much attention. She had Daisy to play with, after all, but she wasn't in the same class as her and only occasionally had breaks at the same time. She had a couple of friends from her class, a pegasus who wouldn't stop flaunting her ability to fly, a unicorn that talked too much and had a habit of breaking sandcastles with her magic. She didn't like either of them very much; apart from Daisy, Lily was the only one who cared about flowers as much as she did.
Eventually, however, it became obvious that Lily was avoiding her. When Cheerilee gave up trying to teach the class and decided to give them an assignment so that the ponies who wanted to could teach themselves while she hid out in the teachers lounge for a moment to rethink her carrier choice, Roseluck naturally approached Lily with a half-baked idea for a presentation on wild strawberries brewing in her head.
But as Roseluck neared her, Lily inched away visibly as her eyes darted around for anypony else to work with. Eventually, she settled for a spindly colt with rather unflattering dental braces whom even the nerds would sometimes tease.
“Filthy? Do you wanna work with me on this presentation?” Lily asked him and the colt practically shone as he perked up.
“Do I ever!” he replied and the two ponies left for the library under the snout of Roseluck, who looked on, forlorn and confused.
Roseluck made a few half-hearted attempts to start the assignment on her own, using the reading material available in the now near-empty classroom. When the bell rang, it was mostly a formality, most ponies had emigrated to the library anyway. Roseluck left the abandoned classroom and out into the school yard.
Roseluck eyes narrowed as she saw Lily standing idly by the hoofball field. When the filly heard her resolute hoofstep, she began trotting away from her. Roseluck picked up the phase, trotting as fast as she could without breaking out into full gallop and eventually she cornered her on the far end of the schoolyard, behind a brick wall that was evidently intended to have been part of a larger structure that had never been built.
She looked a little like a rabbit caught in headlights, seeing no way out of this confrontation without breaking their bonds of friendship. Roseluck gave her a questioning look, she didn't understand why her friend was acting this strange.
"H-have the flowers grown yet?" Lily asked, shivering slightly.
"A little, but they haven’t budded yet,” Roseluck said. This made Lily relax a bit.
"Okay, but I can't give you the hairpin back if you want I... I lost it, okay?"
This stung to hear, since it was a really nice hairpin, plated with gold and decorated by a trilliant-cut ruby. Roseluck swallowed, but let it go with a polite smile.
"It's allright,” Roseluck replied. “You wanna play?" Lily looked even more relived and echoed her smile awkwardly.
"Sure, let's play explorers,” she announced.
“Where's your hairpin dear?” her mother asked Roseluck as she came trough the door, trailing dirt behind her.
“I lost it,” she confessed and her mother wrinkled her brow.
“Too bad, it looked good on you. Gotta be more careful, dear. You know what I've told you...” She paused and looked at her daughter more carefully, noticing her muddy hooves. "Have you been in the garden dear?"
"Yes, I just wanted to see how my new flowers was coming along, and I found these weeds...”
"That's good dear,” her mother interrupted her with a disinterest tone. “But by Celestia, please wash your hooves!"
“I swear, keeping this class in order is about as impossible as a blue rose!” Cheerilee lamented to herself while standing in front of the classroom, not caring who heard it. To her surprise, a hoof shot up from the ocean of chaos.
“Yes, what is it, Roseluck?”
"But blue roses is not impossible, teacher! I have some of them growing in my garden"
The entire class laughed at her and Lily made herself small by her desk at the window. Cheerilee was taken aback by this strange comment but tried to be diplomatic.
“Maybe they look blue, but they are probably just really, really purple. But pure blue roses are actually impossible,” she commented before continuing with her lecture
Roseluck huffed and promised herself that she'd prove them all wrong in due time. As school ended for the day, she went straight home, possibly even trotting past Daisy, and she went up to her garden. The bed was a multicoloured patchwork of roses, and it took her some time to find the place where she had planted the seeds.
Her knees suddenly felt very weak and she fell down by the patch. A hoarse sound fought her way out of her throat as she began to sob uncontrollably. Greeting her was no blue roses at all, simply a row of small cornflowers, waving their stalks at her mockingly.