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.

“It’s been a weird day,” I said.

“Every day is a weird day for you, Bri.”

That hurt. I wanted to tell her about the hemlock. I guess this wasn’t the right time either. I decided to tell her the version that left any mention of my strange ability out. “Mo scared me while I was dissecting a plant. I almost cut my finger off.”

“Damn,” she said, laughing. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Hold up. What are you doin’ dissecting plants on summer vacation?”

“It’s kind of my thing.”

“It doesn’t have to be, you know,” she said. “You could do something that doesn’t have to do with plants at all. Have you ever tried, you know . . . not being weird around plants?”

There was an awkward silence. I thought about cussin’ her out. She would’ve gave it right back to me, then I’d be mad at her instead of just disappointed.

“My parents own a flower shop,” I said. “I can’t exactly get away from them—from the plants, I mean.”

Gabby huffed. “So does that mean you’re working there for the summer?”

“That was the plan, but Mom and Mo want me to take a break.”

“I wish my mom would let me take a break,” she said. “She said I gotta pay for my own phone this summer, so I’m babysitting for the people upstairs.”

“Babysitting? I mean, I guess that’s pretty low-key. Easy money, right?”

“Nope. That kid is a whole demon. He told his grandma to shut up the other day and nobody said anything. He’s mad disrespectful. My grandma would’ve snatched my soul right out my body.”

I wondered if I could survive telling my grandma to shut up. Probably not, but I’d never chance it. “Oh hell no. You better watch out.”

“He better watch out. I’ll put his little ass in the cozy corner.”

“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.”