rom-com roots

BY JORDAN STAGGS

er mama had always said their family’s roots in the South ran as deep as the Mississippi. Still, Hendrix never had the heart to point out that the average depth of the Mighty Mississip’ was about nine feet and that the Congo, the Amazon, and the Nile all had it beat for the varying titles of “world’s best.” Nevertheless, the youngest daughter of the Cassidy family understood what her mother was getting at.

The family’s legacy might be more aptly equated to having roots as deep as the Appalachians, whose ancient, metamorphic layers run for miles underground, shaped by time and heat and water—especially the limestone. Its surfaces start to look more like the moon than Earth once the dripping, pooling, and running of rain takes the gentlest chisel to it over time.

Hendrix always loved the caves just a few miles from the Cassidy family estate in Tennessee, where she and her siblings and cousins played as kids, pretending to be pirates or explorers or dragons—whatever sparked their imagination that day. Sometimes the stories picked up where they left off from adventures the week before; other times, they morphed from medieval knights to moon landings in the course of an hour, and that was okay too.

It was the fairy tales that fueled her imagination the most, no matter how much her father had hoped giving her a name like Florence Hendrix Cassidy would produce a country music or rock and roll star, not a writer. The love of oldies and storytelling genes she got, but the vocal range, not so much. So, after college, Hendrix pulled up her Southern roots and dyed her natural blonde ones to a cinnamon red (both these decisions had her mama clutching her family-heirloom pearls). Then she did the unimaginable for any proper Southern belle: she moved to New York City.

She was thinking about those old caves and playing pirates and mermaids with her favorite cousins while squashed between two people on the subway. The not-so-gentle rocking of the train car was nothing like a pirate ship, and the white tiles coming into blurred view outside the window were nothing like caps on deep ocean waves, but she always had a knack for pretending things were something more than what they were.

“You’re a million miles away right now, aren’t you?” Beckett Barnes looked at her with clear amusement lighting up his hazel eyes. Beckett Barnes. A man destined for success, Hendrix thought. Even his name seemed practically made to have ‘best-selling author’ in print right beneath it. He was well on his way to that, too, if the things he’d read at the literary cohort where they’d met were any indication. In five months of attending workshops together, Beckett just got better and better, while Hendrix got stuck and stucker.

“I was looking for buried treasure,” she told him, shrugging in an offhand way that made the woman on her right shift in annoyance when their arms brushed a little too much, even for a crowded subway bench. Hendrix shot the lady an apologetic glance and leaned more into her—boyfriend? (the terms are still unclear)—on her left instead. She still hadn’t fully embraced how cramped people were on this island.

Beckett smiled, shaking his head at her as he set his hand on her knee. “Beneath Bleecker?” he asked, pretending to be appalled. “Hate to break it to you, Cassidy, but any buried treasure in these tunnels was claimed by the rats and the lizardfolk a long time ago.”

She shot him an unamused look as the train began screeching to its halt, and he stood before it even did that last, backward-moving lurch before the doors opened. Beckett didn’t even grab anything for balance; his designer sneakers were perfectly sturdy on the grunge-covered floor. That’s just how he was. Never thrown off. Easy, breezy, frustratingly charming, and talented to boot. He grew up in Manhattan, and although he was still there, he always gave the impression he could pick up and move at any time, could be just as affable in LA or London or Reykjavik, for crying out loud.

As far as Hendrix knew, the man had no roots holding him to this city. She supposed it was hard to put them down when the ground beneath you is concrete and even harder when no one’s around to make sure they grow. Now she wasn’t even sure it was possible for the guy to get attached to anything, let alone anyone. Despite her best efforts, not even the tiniest sprout of a root seemed to have formed these last few months, and she knew she was a poor gardener, but damn. This was a supremely stubborn plant if she ever saw one.

‘Are you referring to your not-boyfriend as a houseplant again?’ She could practically hear her roommate, Leia, criticizing her in her head. ‘The man is not a fiddle-leaf fig, Hendrix,’ she would probably say. ‘I’m begging you, get on a few dating apps like the rest of us and let Bestseller Barnes go and live his perfect, fairy-tale life alone, just like he wants to. Your time is too precious to waste on that.’

Leia could be harsh, but maybe she wasn’t totally wrong. Still, in this fictional conversation with her (very real but not currently present) roommate, Hendrix retorted, ‘Don’t you have a galaxy to go save?’

There was the problem, though, as plain as day in that hypothetical criticism inside her mind. The fairy-tale life. The unattainable root of every human’s insecurities over finding the perfect partner, living Happily Ever After, and all those Disney-hawked clichés. The most devastating part, Hendrix was painfully aware, was that for some people, it actually happens.

That was also the root of her writing problem lately. How does one avoid the tropes and the overdone fairy-tale romance in literature when it still seems to be what people dream about in real life? Was it such a bad thing to want to be swept off one’s feet? To feel those metaphorical fireworks during a first kiss? To hold hands when stepping off a subway car with the handsome, talented, fun guy who shares similar hobbies and interests?

Well, okay, Hendrix did get her wish on that last one. Beckett took her hand and laced their fingers together while they walked toward the exit of the steamy, noisy downtown station.

And maybe the rats and lizardfolk had pilfered the city’s maze-like caves clean of buried pirate treasure, but she could still swear not all the magic was lost during this underground expedition. If she wasn’t mistaken, it even seemed like the tendril of a root might be forming from Beckett’s palm as it pressed against her own, and she intended to help it grow.