Renata Santos doesn't expect her heart to flutter when she catches a boy stealing flowers out of her backyard. But as she unravels his reputation, she realizes puppy-eyed delinquent Isaac Marshall may just be the sunshine she needs to turn her life...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
V I O L E T
[viola odorata] ➳ chance.
THE VIDEO WAS BLURRY so I played it full-screen, trying to absorb every detail.
It had clearly been taken with a dash cam, and the car it belonged to was parked on the side of the road. Suburban houses lined the pavement, and evergreen trees marked the end of each driveway.
Nothing happened in the first fifteen seconds of the video. Then, from the left side of the screen, a tall, t-shirt-wearing figure shot across the street. He was too far ahead for the camera to capture his face, but his height and red bike were dead giveaways.
Isaac ducked behind another car and dropped his bike on the sidewalk. He crouched there, and his backpack skimmed the side of the car as he turned back and forth, studying one house in particular.
Then he stood and crept closer to its front yard.
Most houses in Newberry were palely painted and slightly run-down. This one was no exception, but it at least had neatly-trimmed grass around the white signpost stuck into the ground. The sign itself read FOR SALE next to Doug Merritt's smiling face and his realty office's phone number.
I watched Isaac pry the sign from the post with his hands. It was wider than his body, but he quickly unfastened the little metal hooks that kept it secured, then dropped the sign onto his bent knee.
He turned it sideways and stuck it into his backpack. It didn't go all the way in, but that didn't matter. For lack of a getaway driver, he hopped on his bike and sped off, the giant piece of cardboard sticking out the top of his bag as he became a dot on the horizon. Shortly after that, the video cut off.
For the fiftieth time that morning, I hit replay, scowling at my reflection in the laptop's screen as I did.
Most of my anger was directed at Doug Merritt, who had every right to be upset, but not to ruin a kid's life over a sign. Still, I couldn't believe Isaac had done something so reckless — and had the audacity to call it something other than burglarizing.
"It's not burglary unless you actually break into and enter the location," he'd argued. Sure enough, his feet stayed on the sidewalk for the duration of the clip, never once straying onto private property. In my head, that was why the police had never bothered to come after him for the crime.
Of course, that didn't make it any less of a fatal mistake. The video had racked up more than ten thousand views in a year and a half, which was a lot for a poorly-recorded incident that meant nothing outside of our small town. There were a few comments, mostly from high schoolers who said lol and concerned parents who called our education system brutal.
But most damning of all was the video's description. It was only a few sentences, but it mentioned Isaac by his full name, and included a link to Doug's professional website. Once the video replay ended, I clicked on the site and browsed lifelessly through the houses he was trying to sell.
