Fuchsia left the Christmas tree farm because Grandpa said she had to throw away her jeans with the diamonds on the pockets. “Those are not for children,” he said. “Diamonds and jewels are for harlots and hussies!”

She tried to tell him: in the Book of Revelation, the walls of New Jerusalem were made of jasper and amber. Precious stones! He didn’t care. When he spoke, spittle flew out from between the few teeth he had left, and the little arthritic knobs on his fingers stung when he hit her.

He wasn’t really her Grandpa. He was an old man who owned a Christmas tree farm in Minnesota, and whose own children hated him so much that he was forced to take in foster kids to help him tend to it. Fuchsia didn’t mind the trees so much. They smelled good. They were kind; you could tell because rabbits made little homes down around their roots. In the summer, birds built hairy nests in them.

Working on the farm wasn’t so bad either. She had a pair of winter boots with yellow laces that kept her feet dry, and at Christmas time, she coveted the job of making hot apple cider for the families. It filled the little shed where they sold the trees with a perfume of cinnamon, cloves, and crisp fall apples. Once, a woman walked in, inhaled, and said, “Don’t you think heaven smells like this?” Fuchsia did.

She liked loading the tree-shaker, too. The little kids thought it was the coolest. They watched the machine in awe as the tree rattled around inside. “Does it hurt the tree?” one child asked her, his mother’s mittened hand holding his tight. She smiled at him. “No,” she said, but secretly, she wondered if it did. Did the trees miss their little needles? She imagined if she laid her hands on their trunks or their boughs, they would forgive her.

But Grandpa was a mean old man. He gave her so many chores that she didn’t have any time for her schoolwork or church on Sundays. Her mittens had holes in them, and she couldn’t stay warm in the winter. The other kids at school laughed at her raggedy clothes, which was why she had been so lucky to find the sparkly jeans, abandoned in a gym locker. They fit her perfectly. When Grandpa said she couldn’t wear them anymore, well – that was the last straw. In the Bible, it said to take the log out of your own eye before removing the speck from your neighbor’s, and she was going to give him a log.

He always kept a handkerchief in his breast pocket, neatly folded. He took pride in his handkerchiefs. His mother had made them for him out of fabric from his sisters’ old dresses: calico, plaid, polka-dot, paisley. His family was dead now, except for the children who’d left him. “The rotten eggs,” he called them. He blew his nose into the handkerchiefs and sneezed his hay fever into them before he made Fuchsia hand-wash them. She had to hand-wash everything at the farm. Grandpa believed in tree shaking machines but not washing machines.

Fuchsia cut class the next day. From her school, it was a mile’s walk to the corner store. It hadn’t snowed yet this winter, so the sidewalks were water-stained and sad, the grass brown and ugly.

“Doing some bedazzling?” the cheerful woman with the perm asked when Fuchsia put the hot glue gun and bag of tiny rhinestones on the counter. She had never heard such a stupid word.

“No,” she said. “I’m doing some divine justice.”

The woman just shrugged and popped a stick of cinnamon gum into her mouth. “I love those jeans, by the way,” she said. “So sparkly!”

“Thank you,” Fuchsia said. “They’re my favorite pair.”

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Fuchsia,” she replied. “It’s a color. Sort of like magenta.”

The woman smiled. “It’s a flower, too, you know,” she said, and put Fuchsia’s items into a little paper bag. She gave the top a smart crease and passed it over the counter. “Pretty name.”

On Saturday night, Grandpa gave Fuchsia the handkerchiefs to wash. She washed them, hung them to dry, pressed them. Then, when he was asleep, she hot-glue-gunned them. It took nearly all night, but silver moonlight lit her work through her bedroom window. The burning acid smell didn’t wake Grandpa. When she was finished, she had a collection of triangle-shaped burns on her fingertips, and a glittering stack of handkerchiefs. Neat rows of rhinestones were planted across the fabric like the rows of white pines on the farm. She folded them neatly, and left them on the ironing board.

In the morning, Fuchsia woke up early to make the pot of hot apple cider. She added extra cinnamon and cloves and said a little prayer that the families would enjoy it. She took up her one possession, her mother’s Bible, and hugged it to her chest. Fuchsia, a flower, she reminded herself. A rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.

She set out to find highway 65 as a fresh snow began to fall.