Lovely Polly – Part 2 of 2
Lovely Polly and the other students stared at Henrietta as she stood there with two clumps of flowers in her hands. “You cannot do things like this without it going wrong,” Henrietta announced. “It’s not how it’s meant to be.”
It wasn’t within Lovely Polly for her to get angry, so she thought she might be able to stop Henrietta by reaching into her bag and pulling out more seeds. She started throwing them back onto the ground in the places where Henrietta had pulled out some of the flowers.
By this stage, the teachers were getting the students back into class and Henrietta and Lovely Polly were asked to come back inside.
“Fine,” Henrietta said. “You can have your flowers, but don’t ask for help when it doesn’t work out.”
That morning, the students were very distracted by the flowers which had continued to grow throughout the school. It wasn’t so much the way the flowers looked that had caught their attention, but the fact it didn’t seem like the flowering plants were slowing down. The plants started to weave their way up the walls of some of the classrooms and, by the time the bell went for lunch, the students could no longer see their playground anymore.
Gradually, the plants and flowers were becoming more and more annoying for the students of Greenvale. There was very little room for them to play football, so some of the students were now arguing over what ground was left. There was nowhere for them to sit and eat their lunch as the flowers had started to weave their way up and around their lunch tables. This meant that students had to sit outside in the sun to eat their lunch, making them more and more restless. The students were starting to call Lovely Polly names again and were looking at her in very mean ways whenever they bumped into her. As Lovely Polly stood, staring at the beautiful flowers, seeing them now for what they were, Henrietta’s voice popped up behind her.
“Told you, didn’t I?” she said. “We can’t have too much of a good thing, ‘Lovely’ Polly.”
“I need your help to fix this,” said Lovely Polly.
Henrietta sighed. “Yes. Yes, you do.”
In fact, the two girls agreed that at the rate the flowers were growing they were going to need all of the help they could get. Henrietta started encouraging the students who she knew would be the most annoyed: the football players. She directed them to start pulling out the flowers from the oval and then told the hungry students to start pulling out flowers from around the eating areas. Soon, most of the students were pulling out flowers and throwing them in whatever bins they could find. While the flowers took most of the morning to grow, it only took a matter of minutes to destroy them.
Looking around the school, Lovely Polly realised that Henrietta had been right about there being too much of a good thing.
However, she didn’t completely throw out all of the flowers and, each morning before the school bell rang, Henrietta and Lovely Polly checked the garden bed behind the playground to make sure that the flowers they had left there were still growing, with both of them monitoring the flowers for two very different reasons. They took a moment to trim them, and Lovely Polly picked a fresh flower each morning to wear in her hair.
“How does it look?” Lovely Polly would sometimes ask Henrietta.
“Terrible,” would come Henrietta’s reply.
“No need to be such a grumpy pants all the time.”
“No need to be so lovely all the time.”
While it was never completely understood by the other students of Greenvale School, the two girls remained the oddest of friends for many school years to come.