Sweet Romance12 min read
The Goose, the Garden, and the Lollipop
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I know how ridiculous it sounds: a goose ate my watermelon and I cooked the goose. The whole thing should have stayed a stupid farmyard accident. Instead, it became the thing everyone on campus talked about for a week.
"It wasn't your fault," Norma said as I held the pot lid like a shield.
"It was my fault," I said. "I should've fenced the patch better."
Norma sniffed. "Dawn, you don't fence a stubborn goose. You bargain with it."
"I don't bargain with birds," I said. "Birds never keep deals."
"But it's done," she said. "You cooked dinner. Eat it and move on."
"I ate it and moved on," I said. "Then I found out."
"Found out what?" Norma put her hand on my shoulder.
"That the goose... belonged to Ethan Aldridge."
Norma made a sound halfway between a laugh and an intake of breath.
"Ethan? Ethan Aldridge? The Ethan Aldridge who wears wool scarves and reads in the greenhouse? The Ethan Aldridge who thinks dirt is a character in a play and writes sonnets about seeds?"
"That Ethan."
"He raised a goose for his research?" Norma's eyebrows shot up. "What research needs a goose?"
"Genetic behavior in large waterfowl," I said. "Or that's what his grant said."
Norma got very serious. "You cooked science."
"I didn't know."
"Of course you didn't know. You live in a dorm with a kettle and a string of fairy lights. Ethan lives in the research wing with labeled jars and an air of danger."
"He chased me for three blocks," I told her, trying to imitate his angry gait.
Norma giggled. "What did he say? Did he use big scientist words like 'miscalibrated' and 'irreplaceable'?"
"He called me names," I said. "He called me... He called me a 'rogue gardener.'"
"The horror," she said dramatically. "You should apologize."
"I tried. He almost—"
"He almost what? Punched you? Ate you? Shouted science at you?"
"All of the above," I said. "He hunt-argued me until my ears turned red."
Norma sighed. "You have a way of getting into trouble, Dawn."
"I have a way of getting everything eaten," I said. "First worms, now goose, next... grade point."
We were two seniors who had chosen the agriculture program for different reasons. Norma liked lists and schedules. I liked the feel of soil between my fingers. Ethan liked things done precisely and quietly. He was the sort of person who shut doors softly and left nothing to chance. I had been clumsy and loud since childhood. Somehow, we had grown up in the same town, and he knew my name longer than anyone else.
"You should tell him you'll make it right," Norma said. "Maybe fix the lab bench. Replace the goose."
"I can't replace his goose," I said. "I have a garden and three tomatoes and a conscience."
"Then bake him a pie. Everyone forgives a pie."
So I baked a pie. I wrapped it like a peace offering and went to the research wing.
"Ethan?" I called, knocking softly.
He opened the door, tall and a little undone, and took the box. He looked at the pie the way a scientist looks at a hypothesis.
"You ate my goose," he said.
"I cooked it after it ate my watermelon," I said.
"You cooked the goose I was using to test migratory patterns," he said.
"We never discussed migratory patterns," I said. "We discussed my watermelon and your inability to keep geese in line."
"Do you know how long I've been observing that goose?" he asked.
"Not long enough," I answered.
He sighed and his anger did something odd: it tightened around his words but left his face soft. "Dawn, that goose had three months of behavior logs."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know."
He looked at me like I had shown him a new kind of weather. "Don't be here," he said. "Don't be in my lab."
I left, and for a week the campus smelled like burnt offerings and rumors.
The rumor with the most teeth was that Ethan had called me a klutz in front of three professors and a poster of wheat. Another rumor said I had deliberately sabotaged his experiment. The truth was messier. I had been careless. He had been hurt. We both had pride.
A smartphone photo changed everything. Someone at the greenhouse took a picture. It was angled so wrong that it looked deliberate: Ethan had my back to a wall, his hand near my shoulder, and the caption on the confession board read "Ethan cornering Dawn." The campus ate the image like candy.
"Did you see the post?" Norma asked.
"I live it," I said. "And I didn't kiss him, okay? I never kissed anyone near a goose."
"Still, the comments..." Norma scrolled. "They all think you're a pair."
Just then Ethan called. I almost didn't pick up. "Dawn," he said.
"What?" I snapped.
"Don't call me," he said. "You're making my life social media fodder."
"You're the one who said my watermelon was consumable," I said.
He made a sound like a laugh that had been trained to be rarely used. "Come to the library. Five minutes."
"You're ordering me around like a dictator," I said.
He was quiet. "Five minutes," he repeated.
I went. He sat with a stack of sunflower seeds and a frown. "I saw the post. I thought you staged it."
"I did not," I said. "I told you what happened."
He blinked. "It's complicated."
"What is?"
"You keep choosing to be stupid where I am trying to be careful," he said. "You throw yourself into chaos."
"Sometimes chaos is where things grow," I said.
He didn't smile. Then he did something I remember exactly: he took my hand, palm to palm, like checking for a pulse.
"Stop being ridiculous," he said. "Let me help you fence your patch."
I laughed then, peeled my hand away, and felt the heat of my face. "Are you offering to build a fence for me?"
"I'm offering to do science in your favor," he said. "Let me try."
We did. In the evenings he taught me to mark lines and measure sunlight. I taught him how to plant seeds like you were tucking in a child for a nap.
"You have a strange way of being tender," I said once in the greenhouse.
He tilted his head. "You do not respect my caution."
"I respect your caution," I said. "I also respect my hands."
He reached and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. "My research does not include you," he said quietly. "But my patience does."
At the center of the semester came the theater-of-people event everyone loved: the campus game-night where the drama club and the literature crowd combined forces to play an over-the-top murder-mystery. Over tea, posters read: "Can you find the guilty?" I loved these nights because we could be anyone. Norma pushed me into it.
"You'll be fine," she said. "Just don't let Daisy Zhu near your clues."
Daisy Zhu—polite smile, sweet voice, and the exact kind of person who never missed a chance to make a small scene. She had a fan club and the kind of smile that sharpened when she aimed it. She liked Ethan, or so she said. She also liked the idea of being the center of a story.
"Of course not," I said.
The night of the game, the prop rooms smelled of old tea and costume glue. I was given a princess role, and Ethan—by the luckiest draw—became my husband in the script. The game was silly and electric. We had to answer riddles and accuse each other in the style of a court.
"Is it you, my husband?" Ethan whispered once during the game.
"Trust me," I said, reaching for his hand.
He pulled me into a playful scrape of a hug when the mission called for a vow. A small kiss grazed my lip and I felt my stomach flip. Later, in the hallway, he would tell me he used our private rhyme as a check to see if I was really me. "It was always you," he said, in some soft exhale.
We won the night with clues aligning like stars. Afterwards, everyone crowded around the winner's table. The props were piled, and the laughter was honest. Daisy clinked her glass.
"Let's play another game," she said. "Truth—what was real tonight?"
"Everything," I said.
"Really?" She turned a smile on me like a paper fan. "Did you ever consider that not everyone is honest?"
"That's a strange question," I answered.
She laughed. "I mean, someone who cooked a goose and a person who keeps geese—no one is without a story."
I remembered the pie and the goose and my watermelons. I remembered Ethan's furious pace and his soft hands.
The worst part was learning that Daisy had not only watched but also manufactured half of the social fireworks. Someone had paid a student with a camera to angle the greenhouse photo. Someone had quietly whispered rumors into the hallways. Daisy had her fingers on small knives disguised as smiles. I found out through a side chat thread where someone bragged about the pay.
"She set that up," Norma whispered. "Dawn, she set you up with Ethan's privacy and then sold it to the tabloids inside our school."
"Why?" I asked. "Why hurt me?"
"Because she likes Ethan," Norma said. "But she likes the attention more."
I resolved to confront her. I would ask one question: why, in front of witnesses.
We made a plan that was not clever. Norma pulled some favors with the student union who were staging a campus harvest fair. They agreed to give us five minutes during the awards segment. It was small, but it would be public. Norma was ready with a USB and a clear heart.
On the day, the auditorium smelled like frying oil and popcorn. Banners hung about research projects and poster boards lined the second floor. Students packed the aisles. I felt like a small bird in a room full of owls.
"Ethan," I said to him, tugging his sleeve. He looked like he had just been plucked from a storm: tidy hair, shirt a little rumpled from running between lectures, eyes a little more open than usual. "You don't have to—"
"No," he said softly. "You asked for witnesses. I will give you them."
We took the stage after the dean finished speaking about sustainable practices. My palms were damp. I saw Daisy in the crowd, smiling like thin ice.
Norma stepped forward with the USB and the student union president gave her the mic. The auditorium quieted.
"Everyone," Norma said. "We are about to show how rumors can hurt. We will show raw footage and messages. We want to be clear: we are not witch-hunting. We are asking for truth and responsibility."
Daisy's smile faltered. She mouthed something to Cooper, who stood by the back with his usual indifferent scowl. He had been the one who dared people to joke with me in earlier classes. On stage, Norma insisted on neutrality, which made her more terrifying.
The file began. The footage was simple and small: a cropped video of a student arranging a phone, a whisper of payment, a clip of Daisy speaking on the phone arranging the timing. There were messages arranged in a folder: a text from Daisy to a student that read plainly, "Make sure is angle, caption 'Ethan cornering Dawn,' two-hundred cash." Another message: "Make it better. Post by tonight."
The auditorium murmured. I felt the ground drop a little. Daisy had the quick, frigid expression of someone who thinks their world is built of glass. Her face altered—first mild confusion, then a flash of anger, then something like worry. She stood up.
"This is fake," she said sharply.
"Do you deny you paid someone?" Norma asked into the microphone.
"I did not—" Daisy began.
"You arranged and approved this," the video showed. There was a short clip of her voice: "They'll take the wall shot, and make it look like he's forcing her." Everyone heard it. The sound echoed in the rafters.
"That's doctored!" Daisy shouted. "They're framing me!"
"Who would frame you?" someone called out. "You?"
The dean leaned forward. "Ms. Zhu, please explain."
She blinked and tried to recover air. "I wanted to help Ethan," she said in a voice that cracked. "I thought if people saw him more with Dawn, he would—" She stopped and looked down. The auditorium hummed with a thousand small judgments.
Ethan walked to the edge of the stage. "You did this to get him out of reach and to get me in the middle," he said, his voice controlled and low. "Why, Daisy? Why did you think breaking someone's life was the way to get what you wanted?"
Daisy's face collapsed in tiny increments. Her grip on performance slipped. "I—" she started. "I thought—"
"You thought you could make me jealous," she spat at Norma. "I thought a scandal would make people choose a side. I thought if everyone saw Dawn and Ethan together, people would believe in us and step aside."
"That sounds like you believed in pain," Norma said.
Daisy laughed, a brittle, half-sob. "I did this because I wanted—"
"Because you wanted Ethan," I said quietly. "Because you wanted to be the main character."
"Yes!" she shouted suddenly. "Yes, I wanted him. I wanted him and the applause and the story. So I filmed things, I paid students, I doctored captions."
Her voice fell into shame. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone this much."
The room was a pressure-cooker of reactions. Some people hissed. Others whispered. A group of friends stood up and started a chant I didn't expect: "Responsibility! Responsibility!" It was not cruel. It was a demand.
Daisy's expression moved through stages: bravado, anger, deflection, then the first twitch of real fear. "You're making a scene," she said, voice thin. "You're humiliating me in front of everyone."
"No," Norma said. "You started a scene. We're exposing it so you can't hurt anyone else."
I watched Daisy try to step back, as if movement could erase pixels. She looked smaller than anyone I knew who had been this loud. Her eyes darted to Cooper, who had slipped near the exit. He avoided meeting our gaze. Behind him, a cluster of students recorded on their phones. Some were silent; some were relieved that the truth had light.
Daisy's breathing grew ragged. She reached for a defense more practiced than regret. "I was lonely!" she cried. "I am lonely and I wanted people to notice me and I thought—"
She clutched at the mic stand like it was a raft. At first the crowd reacted with hisses and a few sympathetic murmurs. Then, watching her unravel, I saw faces change. This was the "then" moment: people who had been entertained realized they'd been complicit. The woman who had smiled with Daisy for months lowered her head. The friends who had laughed at the photo looked away. A professor in the front row stood and shook his head. "We will not reward cruelty," he said softly, so everyone could hear.
Daisy sobbed then, shoulders shaking. She staggered from the stage and the students parted. She walked through a corridor of quiet glances. Some people muttered "karma" under their breath. Others said nothing. No one applauded.
After she left, the dean addressed the hall. "There will be sanctions," he said. "We have a code of conduct about privacy and paid posts. The student union will handle disciplinary measures. But more than that, we will hold a workshop about ethics."
"But what about me?" I said aloud before I even thought.
Ethan reached for my hand. "No one can unpick what happened," he said. "But people watching now will understand you didn't arrange to ruin my work. You made a mistake. You apologized. That's different."
Daisy's punishment, public and personal, was not a theatrical downfall that ended the story in one dramatic sentence. It was a slow, public unmasking. She had been proud and smiling and sharp in private messages. The unmasking showed a person who had believed in her own stories more than in other people's rights. She went from triumphant to undone in front of everyone.
The crowd's reaction had three distinct layers. First came the shock: students exchanged looks, processing that what they had enjoyed as drama had been manufactured cruelty. Then came anger: near me a group of girls whispered that Daisy had "played with people's lives." Then came a quieter, colder tone—disappointment. People who had wanted to like Daisy now saw the cost of her choices.
Daisy's reaction changed too. She moved from denial to frantic attempts at excuse. "They doctored it," she kept saying. Then she denied, then she sobbed. At the end she came with an apology that was less about clearing her name and more about asking for forgiveness in a way that made it pitiful and real. Some people muttered and tossed candy wrappers at the stage—small, childish symbols of the loss of trust.
The event left marks. Daisy was disciplined by the union: a public reprimand, mandatory community service, and a note on her student record for misuse of campus media. Cooper received a warning for harassing students. The students who filmed were instructed on consent. Most importantly, the campus conversation shifted. People began to ask: how much of our entertainment is manufactured? Who profits when we make someone's life a drama?
After everything, I stood outside the auditorium with Norma.
"That was public enough?" she asked.
"Public enough," I said. "It hurt to watch, but I don't think she deserved to be made smaller for the rest of her life."
Norma nodded. "Consequences are not the same as exile."
Ethan joined us with a bag of sunflower seeds. He rolled one between his fingers and handed it to me.
"You did something brave," he said.
"I didn't do anything brave," I said. "I got cooked goose, eaten watermelon, and a public apology."
He smiled like a boy in trouble and a man who had learned a new word.
"Still," he said, "you stood up."
We walked out together, the fair lights bouncing on the pavement. People clustered in groups, speculating. Someone in the crowd offered a small round of applause for the dean's decision to hold a workshop. It felt like a beginning: a campus promising to learn.
Over the next weeks, normal life returned with a new knot tied into it. Daisy kept her distance. People still whispered sometimes, but the worst of the cruelty faded into the background of finals and planting season. Ethan and I found ourselves together in quiet places: fixing a fence, testing soil pH, stealing moments between lectures.
One late night, months later, I stood under the lab's humming light. Ethan came up behind me and handed me a tiny wrapped thing.
"For you," he said.
I opened it. Inside was a lollipop, sticky wrapper, a bright red heart. "A lollipop?" I asked.
He shrugged. "You told me once you celebrated your first kiss with a candy. You said you might not remember everything, but you remembered that stick."
I laughed. "You kept that?"
"You kept everything I ever said," he said. "You were right about one thing: some memories taste like sugar."
I leaned into him. "Promise me one small thing," I said.
"What?"
"That if I ever cook your experimental goose again... you will at least let me fence my garden."
He kissed my forehead. "Deal. And next time, tell me first."
I shoved my face into his shirt and breathed in the smell of sun and soil and him.
Years later, at a small ceremony after we published a paper on sustainable planting and citizen science, I set the lollipop into a frame on my desk. It was silly, but it fit—our story had started with a garden, a goose, and a bad photograph.
"Do you remember the lollipop?" I asked Ethan that morning.
He watched the light hit the candy and smiled like a secret. "Always," he said.
But this time it didn't feel like an ending. It felt like a mark—one tiny, sticky, sweet thing that told me exactly where we had been and how we had gotten here.
The End
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