Fruiting Bodies

Fruiting Bodies

Kathryn Harlan

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

For Kit

Without you, this book could not have been written Nor could I have become the person who wrote it.

Contents

Algal Bloom

Hunting the Viper-King

The Changeling

Take Only What Belongs to You

Fiddler, Fool Pair

Is This You?

Fruiting Bodies

Endangered Animals

Acknowledgments

Fruiting Bodies

Algal Bloom

That summer, Vienna ran up the driveway to our cabin and the first thing she said to me was, “The water is full of poison.”

When I went, “What?” she stepped back, and scraped her eyes over me instead of answering, a clear appraisal.

“You got a little taller,” she said.

She was much taller. The year since we’d seen each other last had stretched her out to a cornstalk leanness. Her blond hair was newly short, gathered up in a stubby paintbrush at the back of her skull. The difference between twelve and thirteen rested on her with a sunlit gravity and I remember that made me nervous. Vienna had the kind of sleek runner’s body that I would never have. “What about the water?”

“There’s an algal bloom in the lake.” She bent down to pull a bur off her sock. “And my grandpa said it spits out poison. So”—she flicked the bur into the dirt—“we can’t go swimming.”

“I missed you,” I said, and then worried that she would not also have missed me. “Have you seen it? The lake?”

She nodded as she straightened up, and I saw, already coiling in her, that restless interest in the forbidden. “Yeah. It’s really beautiful.”

I was a few months from thirteen, and Vienna was my best friend in a very localized way. Our families owned neighboring cabins on the mountain, both of us benefiting from the generosity of grandparents, both of us vanishing from our regular lives for a few weeks out of the year. We spent our summers in the Sierra combing up and down thickly wooded hillsides, poking at spiders that lived under the shutters, and burning little curls of our hair at campfires. I lived wild, or as wild as one could be with a warm living room to return to. I let my hair tangle in clots on my shoulders, avoided showers until my grandmother said, “Julie, you stink,” and pushed me in the direction of the bathroom, patting my butt like that of a well-loved dog. I swam in the lake in my dirty clothes and lay out on the granite to dry, sticky-hot, scratching up the lichen with my fingernails. My body was animal to me then. I still thought of it as something made to do what I wanted, belonging to me only.

The rest of the year, I had other people, other concerns, other versions of myself. At school, my best friend was a tyrannical girl with the glorious Viking name of Ingrid. I was occupied with science class and a business I wanted to start, building birdhouses. I had decided I should become interested in boys. When I returned to these things, my time in the Sierra would fall away, and Vienna with it. But she was always there the next summer, and so was the part of me that loved her.