The doctor concluded that I hadn’t ingested as many berries as Tabitha. Technically, that was true. I’d eaten exactly one less than her. But I should have had the same symptoms. I should have felt something.

The incident stuck with me. I thought of it every time I handled anything even slightly toxic—ragweed, poison ivy, jimsonweed. They all made me feel like I’d stuck my hand under a cool tap, and a similar cold feeling had spread from my stomach the day I ate those yewberries in second grade. I hadn’t explored every aspect of this strange gift yet, but that piece was always at the back of my mind—the poison plants.

A burst of excitement rippled through me as the memory swirled in my mind. That was the only other thing I had to look forward to this summer—tending to a very specific, very toxic plant. I grabbed my bag, went down to the shop, and stuck my head in the door.

“I’m going to the park for a while,” I said.

Mom’s face grew tight. “The park?”

The fear in her voice was too subtle for anyone but me to recognize. For her, being in a place as green as the park with all its open fields and trees and wildflowers was too much of a temptation, or maybe a threat. She worried that I’d push myself too far and make something happen that couldn’t be ignored or fixed. Mo wasn’t sure I needed to be so careful all the time. She and Mom bumped heads over it. They both wanted me to be safe, but there was always fear—of what might happen, of what the limits of this power might be, of where it came from. They didn’t have answers and neither did I. Not yet.

“Got your phone?” Mo asked as she wrapped a dozen parrot tulips in gold foil paper.

“Yup,” I said.

“See you at dinner then.”

CHAPTER 2

I stood in front of the Marquis de Lafayette memorial outside Prospect Park working up the courage to go in. A man in a safari hat positioned his kids in front of the statue and snapped pictures as they grinned. Tourists buzzed around the park entrance taking selfies, being generally annoying and completely unaware of how much danger they were in by being so close to me. I stared at my sneakers and the brickwork of the path beneath them.

Stay focused. Keep my head low. Go straight to the Ravine.

I marched around the Lafayette statue and into the park. The grass was laid out like a wide green carpet, dotted with softball fields and outcroppings of trees. I took a trail that cut through the Long Meadow, the expanse of green space where people were already doing the absolute most. I understood why people did yoga, went for a jog, or bird-watched in the park, but I had to shake my head over a group of Park Slope parents staked out with cardboard signs, ready to run off the ice cream and gelato vendors so their kids wouldn’t be tempted by dairy-based treats.

I stopped at the tree line on the opposite side of the meadow where the Ravine began. It was Brooklyn’s only forest, and it was the one place secluded enough to test some of my more dangerous theories about what I was capable of.

I ducked onto the main trail and kept moving. The place I was going wasn’t on the marked path, and my heartbeat kicked up as I got closer.

Keep it together.

The trees flanking the path shook themselves like they’d been roused from a sound sleep. Their thick, leafy canopies knitted together high above my head. I ignored the groan of their branches as they reached for me.

Keeping my eyes down, I took a sharp left off the marked trail through a thick patch of bracken that nobody other than me would have bothered to walk through.

When I reached my destination, the tree I stood in front of was just as ordinary looking as it had been the last time I was there. The towering elm looked identical to dozens of others standing nearby, but that was the point. I didn’t want anyone to come across what I was hiding. Not gelato-less children in search of sweets, not dogs off their leashes. There wasn’t anyone or anything that deserved the kind of painful death my secret would bring. I shouldn’t have been growing it at all. Going into the park was a risk, but I couldn’t keep the plant at home, where Mom and Mo would realize what it was and make me get rid of it. The shadowy, untraveled, unmarked trails of the Ravine were my only option.

At the base of the nondescript elm, far enough from the main path, through enough underbrush that even the most curious wanderer wouldn’t have come close, I knelt and parted the tall grass, revealing a small bush dotted with white umbrellalike flowers. The parasols reminded me of lace. They looked like the kind of flower I might add to a bride’s bouquet back at the shop.

But only if I wanted to kill the bride.

The previous two days of rain had turned the dirt to a muddy soup, but the plant was hanging in there. I took pictures of it with my phone, adding them to a Google Doc I’d created called Water Hemlock. I kept track of its growth, what it looked like through the different stages of its development, what conditions made it grow better, and noting what didn’t work.

I’d been growing the water hemlock for a month and trying different variables. Damp, sandy loam worked better than rocky dry soil, and when I dug my fingers into the earth near its roots, the bush would grow fuller, taller. If I concentrated hard enough, new blooms sprouted, though not as easily as they did in plants that weren’t poisonous. It took a lot more effort to grow the water hemlock, and I had to concentrate harder to make sure nothing went wrong. The exhaustion and dizziness that came after was so much more intense. That should’ve been enough to make me abandon the treacherous work, but I couldn’t. I was drawn to it.

My phone buzzed. A text from Mo hung at the top of the screen.

Mo: We’re getting takeout later. You want pad Thai?

Bri: Sounds good. Veggies only please!

I slipped my phone into my pocket and took a plastic grocery bag from my backpack. This was what my month of work had come to. I was going to harvest one of the smaller stalks and take it home to study. I’d only keep it long enough to take some notes, write down my observations, and then I’d get rid of it. A few hours. That was all I needed to do the research.

Running my hand down one of the stems, a cool, tingling sensation blossomed in my trembling fingertips. The petals and leaves stretched toward me with an urgency I didn’t see in other plants. It was as if the water hemlock couldn’t wait to make contact with my skin. I plucked the entire thing out of the ground, being careful not to touch the root, and placed it in the bag.