“You scared the crap out of me,” Mom said to Mo.

“You sit there and breathe,” Mo said. “You look more shook up than Briseis.”

Mom shot her a pointed glance, then turned to me. “You sure you’re okay, baby?” I nodded. “Put a Band-Aid and some ointment on that.”

Mo came over and cupped my face in her hands. “I’m gonna get you a sign to put on your door that says Future Botanist At Work so I know not to walk up on you like that.”

I forced a quick smile.

“Love you,” she said.

She and Mom left. I disentangled myself from the ivy and bandaged my finger. I swept the plant parts and the bloody scalpel into a plastic bag, shoved the whole thing into an empty shoebox, and dropped it down the trash chute in the hallway.

I sat on the edge of my bed in a haze of confusion. Thirty minutes had gone by and . . . nothing.

I grabbed a book from the stack next to my bed and flipped to a page with an illustration of the water hemlock. Contact with the liquid in the root was deadly and it went right into my bloodstream through the cut. According to everything I knew about the plant, I should’ve been dying an agonizing death. The walls of my cells should’ve been disintegrating. My blood should’ve been unable to clot, running like water and spilling from every orifice. But with each passing moment, I breathed easier. The tingling had stopped altogether. Only a dull ache remained.

Hours passed. Mom closed up the shop, brought me pad Thai and a bottled water, then went to watch reruns of Penny Dreadful with Mo in the living room. I picked at my food but couldn’t stomach eating. I scrolled through my phone and found Gabby’s name in the contacts. I started to text her, changed my mind, and called instead.

“Hey, Bri. Long time no speak,” Gabby said, a slight edge to her voice. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I just wanted to call you.”

It had been a month since we last spoke. There were some texts in between, but hearing her voice brought up a bunch of mixed feelings I’d been avoiding.

Gabby knew some of what I could do but liked to pretend she didn’t. At junior prom, I’d been standing next to her when her boyfriend gave her a corsage that looked like he’d pulled it out of a dumpster. It had plumped right up and looked freshly cut after a few seconds in my presence. Gabby’s boyfriend was too busy lookin’ at her boobs to notice, but she’d seen it.

It became this unspoken thing between us. We didn’t talk about the grass literally being greener wherever I stood, or why the maple tree growing in front of our building stayed green so much longer than any of the other trees on our street, or how the flowers I’d given her mom when she graduated nursing school had lived for almost a year. I’d been tryna tell her the whole truth of what I could do for years, but it never seemed like the right time to go into more detail.