“What’s a cozy corner?”

“Girl, it’s a corner of his room with pillows and blankets where he gets sent to think about his behavior. It’s like bougie time-out.”

“Does it work?”

“No. He just thinks about how he’s gonna be even more terrible when he gets up.”

We both laughed. I looked at the cut on my thumb. It throbbed, but it wasn’t too bad.

“Hey, Briseis?”

“Yeah?”

She sighed. “I don’t know, Bri. Maybe listen to your moms. Try to have some fun this summer? You don’t have to grow bean sprouts or potatoes or whatever. At least not all the time. That’s not what most people are doing anyway. We can go to a show or a concert or something. I know you’ve seen everything already, but still.”

I didn’t grow potatoes or bean sprouts. I liked to grow flowers, vines, and the occasional deadly bush of hemlock. The words to tell her were on the tip of my tongue. I could lay it all out and maybe—just maybe—she would finally understand.

Gabby laughed. “If you can tear yourself away from your weeds—”

No. Nothing had changed. That’s exactly why we didn’t talk the way we used to.

“Have you talked to Marlon lately?” I asked.

“Yesterday,” said Gabby. “You?”

“It’s been a minute.”

Marlon moved to Staten Island with their grandma over spring break and we talked less and less. But with Gabby, our friendship had hit a rough patch that didn’t have anything to do with distance. It felt like the whole school year had been a countdown to the end of something. Like we were about to get off a roller coaster we’d been on since fifth grade when we’d met and become best friends. We damn sure weren’t best friends anymore and we were slowly becoming something that looked less like friendship and more like people who didn’t even halfway like each other.

I lay back on my pillow, watching the baby’s breath in the corner of the room expand and contract. For a minute, I tried to forget about my thumb and the water hemlock. I tried to pretend that what I could do hadn’t pushed its way into every corner of my life like an invasive weed. I wanted to get ahold of whatever this thing was, help my parents in the shop, and maybe have friends who understood me better. It didn’t feel like too much to ask.

“We could find something to get into,” I said, trying desperately to hold back a wave of sadness. “The library or the museum? Someplace quiet.”

“And without any plants,” Gabby added.

I sighed into the phone. That was a dig and she knew it.