Day 4 of Writing Prompt Week? Why not!

As usual, the wife (who wouldn't allow me to share), AM and Butchered Paper gave their take on yesterday's prompts. Todays?

Write a story about friendship with a high school student as the main character and a fountain as the key object. Set your story in a flower shop.

The flower shop on the east side of New Ashford had been the go-to hang out for Lindsay Schuller since she was a little girl. It seemed that while other girls had gone to the playground and, later in life, the mall, Linday Schuller had always gone to the flower shop on Hudson avenue.

The shop had first opened in 1961 under Vivian DuSable, and while Vivian could arrange a bouquet of peonies like no one else in town she wasn't the most creative woman; she named the flower shop Vivian's. The flower shop was a gem in the tiny Massachusetts town of New Ashford. Ivy crawled along the inside walls and clung to the tin ceiling. The small attached green house in the back kept the inside consistently humid and warm, a slight dew coating the counters and windows year-long. And in the center of the shop stood an elegant four foot ceramic fountain, installed in 1944 when the building was still the office and showroom for the green house and not yet just a flower shop. The fountain ran every day and worked without fail until one late summer day in 1974 when, for no particular reason, it stopped working. In a strange turn of events Richard Nixon was impeached from office just one day before the fountain let out it's last drop of water. The day after the fountain stopped working Lindsay Schuller was born.

In 1978 Vivian sold the shop to Janet Schuller, one of her longtime employees, and moved to Florida to be with a man named Arnold who lived in Boca Raton. Janet Schuller, long known as Vivian's right hand gal, could create a gift basket like no one else in town and she believed (erroneously) that this also meant she was creative in other ways. After taking over Vivian's she renamed the flower shop The Big Bloom.

Janet's Schuller's niece, Lindsay, had first come into her aunt's shop when she was four, and in one way or another had never left. At age six she found the spot near the shop's front windows an ideal place for tea parties with her best friend Alicia and her stuffed animals. At age 12 she was coming after school to help fulfill orders, water plants and make deliveries. When Lindsay started her junior year in high school most of the other girls in her class were doing their best to master eyeliner and were listening to Madonna (or if they were particularly tortured sixteen year olds, Sinead O'Connor), but Lindsay Schuller spent every free moment she had at The Big Bloom.

"You need to do more things with girls your own age," Janet Schuller told her niece one fall afternoon, half of her attention occupied with filling out an order form. "But I'm just starting a new project," Lindsay said, rearranging several pots along the east wall of the shop. Janet looked up at her. "Project?" Lindsay nodded, tucking her hair behind her ears, walking a few steps over to the fountain and kicking it.

Janet Schuller rolled her eyes. "You're not going to fix that fountain," she said, looking back down at her order form and walking off into the back room. In Janet's defense, many in the past had tried to fix the fountain and many had failed. But Janet didn't know her niece's plan, and that it involved a boy who went to school with Lindsay by the name of Jonathan Bright.

Jonathan Bright kept to himself almost as much as Lindsay did, but everyone in town knew his predisposition towards plumbing, if not because he had tagged along with his father on his house calls, because of his science fair project entitled "Pipes!" that had won him a 2nd place ribbon. Lindsay Schuller knew that if anyone could fix The Big Bloom's fountain, it would be Jonathan Bright.