Zack peered through the ages, and found a memory. In the theater of his mind, he saw it held in its hands like a crystal, singing with light as it led him back to his childhood. 

Across the field of emerald green, the Nygaard siblings ran at breakneck speed. Zack’s eight year old legs pushed hard against the ground, trampling shamrocks and clovers alike beneath his sneakers. He held the front of the pack, but Monica was gaining. Couldn’t let her catch up, let alone overtake him- he wasn’t about to get outrun by a six year old. Still, it didn’t help that she was so. Freaking. Fast. 

A hundred yards across from them, Nick… Nicole… gave chase. He… She (was she a girl back then, too? Probably, that was what all the websites said anyway) was clearly slowing down for their benefit, and she’d even worn sandals while they all played tag together. There was no way an eleven-year-old, someone who’d be starting at the academy’s Middle School that fall, could be slower than two kids in their single digits. 

The late June day was cast in bright golden radiance by the noon sun. The circular field was surrounded on all sides by forest, their house up on a high hill overlooking it all. Nicole was a hundred yards behind them, but Monica was only five yards behind Zack. Four, three, two, one-

Through the memories, Zack winced. 

He shoved Monica to the ground as she began to pass him. She tumbled, fell on her side and rolled through the shamrocks, and erupted into tears. 

Zack skidded to a halt, upturning twin patches of dirt beneath his white shoes in the process. Before he even knew it, Nicole was widening her stride, amping up her pace. She closed the gap and rushed over to Monica. “Are you okay?” she asked in a panicked tone. 

Monica, through her tears, choked out, “Yes, but Zack pushed me!”

“Yeah, I saw,” Nicole said.

“He ruined my dress- look how dirty it is!” Monica sobbed. 

It was true: Monica’s peach-colored dress now had a massive grass-stain on the side and was otherwise covered in dirt. Anger bubbled to the top of Zack’s eight-year-old brain. “Who cares? It’s just a dress. Dresses are stupid,” he said, folding his arms and scowling. 

Through the ages, Zack felt the heat of his child-self’s anger once more, but now… Now he saw it was stained with just as much green as little Monica’s dress was. 

Nicole turned her anxious gaze to Zack. She grabbed him by the shoulders, and tears fell from her eyes. “Don’t ever do that again! Ever! Do you understand me?!”

Zack gulped, and soon found himself crying as well. It was just a dress, it didn’t matter, it… 

… It hadn’t mattered. But now he’d worn one, and he’d seen how… How… How PRETTY he’d looked. 

Fear frayed the edges of Zack’s conscious mind, and he gripped his bed sheets tight. He breathed, and he went back into the memory. 

“Apologize,” Nicole said. “Now.”

Zack gulped again. Guilt gnawed his stomach, but he looked at his little sister and said, “I’m sorry, Monica.”

“For?” Nicole said. 

“I’m sorry for pushing you, and for ruining your dress. It was… It was mean,” Zack said. It was shitty, Zack thought. Shitty shitty shitty fucking shitty you shitty little kid, you little brat can’t stop being an asshole, could never stop, not even when you were a little kid. 

“I forgive you, Zack,” Monica said. 

I don’t deserve it, Zack thought, in both the past and the present. 

They kept walking after that. Mom was busy working today, and she’d made it clear they all needed to stay outside and enjoy this beautiful summer day together while she took conference calls and cleaned the house and cooked dinner. They went through another patch of forest, robins and blue jays fluttering between maple branches and singing their birdsongs. 

“Is you hating dresses the reason you didn’t like seeing Nick wear one?” Monica asked, her missing baby teeth showing through her healing smile, her blonde twin-tail braids bouncing on her sides. There was no way she’d actually said that, no way she’d asked that in real life. That had to be his brain playing tricks on him, had to be… 

Had to be his own shame. His memory of Monica was just giving it a voice. Made sense- she’d never once hesitated to tell him when he’d fucked up. 

But if she had said it, what would he have said in response? That he’d seen the world through green lenses, that all of his memories were now burning with the verdant flame of envy? That he hadn’t been able to recognize it before?

No, no, stop it, Zack said. 

His younger self answered for him: “No, it’s because you didn’t ask me to play too!”

Nicole, or at least his memory of Nicole said, “Would you have even said yes if we’d asked you?”

“No,” Zack’s memory of himself said, his shaggy blonde hair hanging in front of his face. 

“No,” Zack whispered as he laid on his back, staring up at Amy’s ceiling. He tugged a strand of his sandy hair- it had been blond when he was a kid but had gotten darker with age. And now it was… 

Zack went back into the memory. The tree line parted on both sides like a door swinging open, revealing another field. This one was big and wide and rectangular, almost like a football field. But all that stretched out before them were irises, stems tall and petals a vibrant blue. 

Monica’s eyes went wide as she ran into the field of flowers, diving in head-first. “They’re so pretty!” Monica squealed. Her voice so was very high and cute, and she looked like a princess as her wide blue eyes drank in all the flowers. Her eyes weren’t quite the same shade of blue as the irises though- they were lighter, an almost icy shade. Nicole’s were closer in hue, but looked more like the ocean on a clear day. 

Nicole stepped over and started picking flowers, a contented smile on her face that made sense to Zack now but had made him angry and confused at the time. Nicole was usually so cool, so tough, so stoic, but around cute things, pretty things, girly things… 

Another side of her showed. And that wasn’t how things were supposed to be. Wasn’t how Zack’s big ‘brother’ was supposed to be, wasn’t what ‘he’ was supposed to like, how ‘he’ was supposed to act. And neither was Zack. People… Looked at him weird when cooed over baby animals, when he sang along with a girly pop song on the radio, when he mentioned liking girl-superheroes. 

And that made him angry. Angry angry just angry all the time. The furnace of your temper is always going full-blast, you fucking redneck asshole-

Nicole started putting flowers in Monica’s hair, one behind each ear. Monica squealed again, always doing that, always so happy. People only let her be that happy because she was a girl. If she was a boy like Zack then… 

… Then they’d tell her to be tough, to not show anything. That was what the other boys in his class were always telling him, what his basketball coaches and scoutmasters were constantly yammering about, what Mom told him when he got too emotional: be a man. 

Nicole held two flowers in her hands and then put them behind her ears as well. Zack wasn’t sure if that had actually happened or not, but it seemed like something she’d have done, even back then. 

Zack kicked Nicole in the shin. Or at least, he tried to- Nicole stepped out of the way, and Zack lost his balance and fell on his face. 

Monica cackled as she ran around him at the edge of the field of flowers. 

“What was that about?” Nicole asked. 

“I… I… You’re not supposed to be doing that!” Zack whined.

“Okay, fine,” Nicole grimaced and took the flowers out of her hair. That part made sense too- she would’ve done that back then. “But you promised me you wouldn’t do anything like that again. And Mom put me in charge, so I get to decide your punishment.”

“What? No fair!”

“How’s that not fair?” Monica said. “That seems pretty fair to me.” Little smartass. 

Zack grinded his teeth together, jammed his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts, and said, “Fine. What’s my punishment?”

Nicole smirked. This part had definitely happened. Zack had never been able to forget it, no matter how hard he tried. “Hold still,” she said, as she reached down and put the irises in Zack’s hair. Then two more, and two more, and two more. 

By the end of it, Zack’s hair was filled with flowers. 

“Perfect,” Nicole said, with a happy smile that Zack had known even back then was genuine. “They look lovely. They’re the same color as your eyes.”

Zack stared intensely at the ground, shuffling his feet back and forth. 

Then Nicole whipped out her phone and snapped a picture of him. She turned it over and showed it to him. He looked… The flowers looked… 

Pretty, Zack thought. They looked pretty. And they were the exact same shade of blue as my eyes.