“Oh, they also like to make dance videos on TikTok,” said Mo. “What’s that one called? The Renegade?” She did some weird move with her arm, then grabbed her shoulder, wincing in pain. “I can do it, but the way my ligaments are set up—”

“I’ll never be able to unsee that, Mo,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You welcome, love.” She grinned.

While Mom and Mo laughed themselves to tears, I closed the door to the shop and took the stairs to the third floor of our building.

Mom bought almost every piece of furniture in our apartment from IKEA. Mo hated it because even though the products were solid, putting them together sometimes required a level of patience neither of them actually possessed. Still, Mom was obsessed with making the space feel more open, which was hard to do in less than eight hundred square feet.

I straightened the mismatched pillows on the couch and organized the unopened mail into a pile on the table before heading to my room. As I opened the door, the warm, damp air hit me in the face, fogging my glasses. Air conditioning was on an as-needed basis, and Mom had a sticky note taped to the switch that said, “You got A/C money?” I didn’t, so it stayed a balmy seventy-nine degrees. My posters and playbills that I’d tacked to the walls were curled at the edges. Everything was perpetually damp. The only plus was that my plants loved the tropical conditions.

The plants under my window turned toward me. The bluebells opened like tiny gramophones, and the bush of baby’s breath that had taken over an entire corner of my room looked like it was breathing. The marigolds and snapdragons all shifted toward me. These plants were quiet. Quiet plants might perk up around me, but they didn’t uproot themselves or destroy a fence to get close to me. They didn’t turn obscene shades of their natural colors when I was around.

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,

I hope you are having a wonderful summer. I received your request to enroll in City College’s Introductory Botany class, but unfortunately, the class requires participants have a GPA of 3.0 or better. It’s a college-level course for college credit. Your GPA was 2.70 at the end of the semester, so I’m afraid you don’t qualify. However, you are a wonderful environmental science student, so let’s make a plan to raise your GPA so that you can take this class at a later date. Please don’t give up hope, Briseis. Keep pushing. You’re going to do great your senior year.

Best,

Cassandra Rodriguez

Academic Counselor

Millennium Brooklyn High School

I closed my computer and shoved it across my bed, biting back tears. The baby’s breath puffed up, the snapdragons twisted around, and the ivy gripped the metal frame of my bed so hard it groaned in protest. I took a deep breath and the plants settled.

Nothing went right this past school year. Being really good at environmental science and botany workshops didn’t get me out of PE. I tried to convince Mom and Mo that running laps and playing badminton was a form of torture, but I still had to dress out and be within smelling distance of dudes who thought wearing deodorant was optional. But PE was the least of my issues with school. The fear that I carried around with me that someone would discover what I could do—or worse, that I’d lose control and get someone hurt—was heavy.

I glanced at my desk, which was little more than a wooden shelf propped on top of some plastic crates Mo had found at a thrift shop. My microscope sat there with my research journals and notepads, colorful Post-it notes sticking from between the pages. The botany book Mom had given me lay open, its pages worn and dog-eared, entire passages highlighted and underlined. I didn’t want to make a career out of being a scientist. I just wanted to understand myself better, and something I’d come across in my research struck me in a way nothing else had—raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

Near the back of the botany book was a section labeled Poisonist—a subdiscipline of botany that involved the study of poison plants. It piqued my curiosity and stirred something deep in the pit of my stomach—a mixture of fear and excitement.

When I was eight, a girl named Tabitha Douglass dared me to eat five bright red berries off a low-hanging tree behind our elementary school. The fruit was sour and stained my lips and tongue, but I did it. I ate all five. Tabitha ate six just to one-up me. By the time our teacher came to bring us back to class, Tabitha was curled in a ball, screaming in agony, puking her guts up. We were both rushed to the hospital. Mom burst into the emergency room like somebody told her I was at death’s door, hollering and crying with Mo at her side, but I was fine. No stomach cramps, no headache, no irregular heartbeat. Tabitha had uncontrollable diarrhea for a week and couldn’t eat anything other than soup and Jell-O.