I plopped down on my bed. The ivy I’d grown by the window snaked toward me, slithering across the floor and up the bedpost, sprouting new leaves and curled tendrils as it reached for me. Ivy wasn’t a quiet plant. It was reactive and loud. The only place I could keep it was in my room, where no one would see it but me and my parents.

Being wound up all the time, constantly watching my every move, and being careful not to provoke a response from a red oak or potted fern was exhausting. Ignoring them was the only thing that worked—and sometimes, that didn’t even help as much as I wanted it to. The worst part was that it felt wrong to ignore them, like I was denying something that was as much a part of me as the color of my eyes or the coil of my hair. But in the confines of my cramped bedroom, I could let go, and the relief that came with that was something I looked forward to more than anything else.

The sun slanted through my window, shining a large, sallow rectangle onto the wooden floor. The gauzy light saturated my room. I let the creeping vines encircle my fingertips, then wind their way up my arm. I always wondered why the plants preferred me to the sunlight when it was in a plant’s nature to reach for it. Mo told me once it was because I was the light. She was sentimental like that and I loved her for it, but I thought it might be something else, something I didn’t have an explanation for yet, which was the reason I’d applied to take a college-level botany course at City College over the summer.

Mom gave me a book on botany when I got into middle school. She thought if I became a scientist, I could figure out where my power came from and what exactly it was for. It seemed like a good idea when she first brought it up, but as I got older, the “how” became less important than the “why.” I wasn’t sure the answers I needed could be found in a textbook but I didn’t know where else to start.

I opened my laptop and logged into my school portal to check my email. A new message from my advisor sat in the inbox. During the regular school year, her messages were always one of two things: a reminder that I needed to work on getting my grades up if I wanted to graduate on time, or telling me I was excelling in environmental science and suggesting I apply that same energy to my other classes. But since school was out for the summer, this had to be about the botany class. My heart ticked up.

Hi Briseis,