As her emotions tumbled around like a hurricane, her thoughts suddenly centered on David. Maybe David could help her make sense of this. There had to be a scientific explanation. He had a microscope—a really good one, from what he said. Maybe he could look at a piece of this weird flower. He might be able to tell her what it was. And even if he told her he had no idea, she’d be no worse off than she was now.
She wrapped her scarf around the flower again and hurried into the house, almost running into her dad as he lumbered into the kitchen.
“Dad!” she said in surprise. Her nerves—already at the breaking point—stretched farther.
He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “Morning, beautiful.” He laid an arm across her shoulders, and Laurel sucked in a nervous breath and hoped he couldn’t feel the petals through her shirt.
But then, her father rarely noticed anything before his second cup of coffee.
“Why are you up?” she asked, a slight quaver in her voice.
He groaned. “I have to go open the store. Maddie needed the day off.”
“Sure,” Laurel said absently, trying not to see this change in the normal routine as some kind of bad omen.
He started to pull his arm away, then stopped and sniffed the air by her shoulder. Laurel froze. “You smell nice. You should wear that perfume more often.”
Laurel nodded, praying her eyes weren’t popping out of her head, and unwound herself from her dad’s embrace. She hurried to pick up the cordless phone and then headed up the stairs.
In her room, she stared at the phone for a long time before her fingers managed to dial David’s number. He picked up after the first ring. “Hello?”
“Hey,” she said quickly, forcing herself not to hang up.
“Laurel. Hey! What’s up?”
The seconds stretched into silence.
“Laurel?”
“Yeah?”
“You did call me.”
More silence.
“Can I come over?” she blurted.
“Um, sure. When?”
“Right now?”
SIX
A FEW MINUTES LATER, LAUREL HAD HER CHAIR WEDGED under the doorknob again. She lifted the front of her shirt and pulled the end of one of the long white-and-blue strips free from the pink scarf. It looked so harmless, sitting there in her hand. She could almost forget it was attached to her back. She picked up her mother’s nail scissors and studied the end of the petal. She probably didn’t need too big of a piece. She eyed it again and selected a small curve at the ruffled tip.
She braced herself as she moved the shiny scissors into position. She wanted to close her eyes, but she was afraid she’d do even more damage that way. She counted silently. One, two, three!…I meant to count to five. After mentally calling herself a wimp, she positioned the scissors again. One, two, three, four, five! She pressed down and the scissors cut cleanly, flipping a small piece of white onto her bedspread. Laurel gasped and hopped up and down for a few seconds until the sting eased and she looked down at the cut edge. It wasn’t bleeding, but it oozed a little bit of clear liquid. Laurel blotted the liquid away with a towel before smoothing the end back into the scarf. Then she wrapped the small white piece in a tissue and tucked it carefully into her pocket.
She bounced down the stairs trying to look as casual as possible. As she breezed by her mom and dad sitting at the table eating breakfast she said, “I’m going to David’s.”
“Hold it,” her dad said.
Laurel stopped walking, but she didn’t turn around.
“How about, ‘May I go to David’s?’”
Laurel turned with a forced smile on her face. “May I go to David’s?”
His eyes didn’t even leave the paper as he lifted his coffee to his mouth. “Sure. Have fun.”
Laurel made her feet walk at a normal pace to the door, but as soon as it shut behind her, she ran to her bike and kicked off on her way. It was only a few blocks to David’s, and soon Laurel was leaning her bike up against his garage. She stood on his door-mat, focused on the bright red front door, and rang the doorbell before she could convince herself to turn tail and run home. She held her breath as she heard footsteps and the door opened.
It was David’s mother. Laurel tried to hide the surprise on her face—after all, it was Saturday, and Laurel should have expected her to be home. But it was only the second time Laurel had met her. She was wearing a cute red tank top and jeans and her long, almost-black hair was loose and tumbling down her back in waves. She was the most unmotherly mom Laurel had ever met. In a good way.
“Laurel, how nice to see you.”
“Hi,” Laurel said nervously, then just stood there.
Luckily David came around the corner. “Hey,” he said with a broad smile. “Come on back.” He gestured Laurel down the hall. “Laurel needs a little help with some biology homework,” he explained to his mother. “We’ll just be in my room.”
David’s mom smiled at them both. “Do you need anything? A snack or something?”
He shook his head. “Just some quiet. It’s a pretty intense assignment.”
“I’ll leave you alone, then.”
The forest-green door to David’s bedroom stood ajar; with a sweep of his arm, David ushered Laurel in. He bent down to pull out his biology binder and, after glancing down the hall to make sure his mom wasn’t near, swung the door closed.
Laurel stared at the closed door. She’d been in his bedroom before, but he’d never closed the door. She noticed for the first time that his doorknob didn’t have a lock. “Your mom wouldn’t, like, listen at the door, would she?” Laurel asked, feeling silly even as the question escaped her mouth.
David snorted. “Never. I’ve earned a lot of privacy by not asking why a lot of my mom’s dates don’t leave until morning. I stay out of Mom’s personal business; she stays out of mine.”
Laurel laughed, a bit of her nervousness melting away now that she was actually here.
David pointed her to the bed and pulled up a chair for himself. “So?” he said after a few seconds.
It was now or never. “Actually, I was hoping you might look at something under your microscope for me.”
Confusion flashed across David’s face. “My microscope?”
“You said you had a really good one.”
He recovered quickly. “Uh, okay. Yeah, sure.”
Laurel dug in her pocket and pulled out the tissue. “Could you tell me what this is?”
He took the tissue, unwrapped it carefully, and looked down at the small white fragment. “It looks like a piece of a flower petal.”
Laurel forced herself not to roll her eyes. “Could you look at it under your microscope?”
“Sure.” He turned to a long table covered with various pieces of equipment—a few of which Laurel recognized from the bio lab. A very few. He pulled a gray cover off a shiny black microscope and grabbed a slide from a box of the small glass panes separated by sheets of thin tissue paper. “Can I cut this?” he asked, looking over at her.
Laurel shuddered, remembering cutting it off of herself less than half an hour earlier, and nodded. “It’s all yours.”
David cut a tiny piece and laid it on a slide, added a yellow solution, and dropped a cover slip over the top. He clipped the slide under the lens and fiddled with the dials as he peered into the eyepiece. The minutes passed slowly as he adjusted more dials and moved the slide around, looking at it from different angles. Finally he leaned back. “All I can really tell you for certain is that it’s a piece of a plant and the cells are very active, which means it’s growing. Flowering, I assume from the color.”
“A piece of a plant? Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” he said, looking back through the eyepiece.
“It’s not part of an…animal?”
“Uh-uh. No way.”
“How can you tell?”
He flipped through a few preprepared and labeled slides in another box. He selected one wit
h a pinkish blob on it and went back through the process of focusing the microscope. “Come here,” he said, standing and gesturing to his chair.
She took his place and leaned tentatively forward over the microscope.
“It’s not going to bite you,” he said with laugh. “Lean in close.”
She did and opened her eyes to a pink world shot through with maroon lines and dots. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“I want you to look at the cells. They look pretty much like the pictures in our bio book. See how they’re round or irregularly shaped? They look like blobs all connected together.”
“Okay.”
He slid the microscope back in front of him and switched in the yellowed slide he had prepared a few minutes before. After turning more dials, he scooted the microscope back to her. “Now look at this one.”
Laurel put her forehead back down toward the eyepiece, far more afraid of this slide than the other. She hoped David wouldn’t notice her hands shaking.
“Look at the cells now. They’re all pretty square and very uniform. Plant cells are orderly, not like animal cells. And they have thick cell walls that are square like the ones you see here. That’s not to say you never see squarish animal cells, but they wouldn’t be nearly this uniform, and the cell walls would be much thinner.”
Laurel sat back very slowly. This didn’t make sense at all.
She had an actual plant growing out of her back! A mutant, parasite flower! She was the freak of all freaks, and if anyone ever found out, she’d be poked and prodded for the rest of her life. Her head started to spin and she felt like all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. Her chest constricted and she couldn’t seem to draw in a big enough breath. “I gotta go,” she mumbled.
“Wait,” David said, holding on to her arm. “Don’t go. Not when you’re all freaked out like this.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she refused to look at him. “I’m really worried about you. Can’t you just tell me?”
She stared into his blue eyes. They were soft and earnest. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he could keep a secret; she was sure he would. She trusted him, she realized. She had to tell someone. Trying to muddle through on her own hadn’t worked. Really hadn’t worked.
Maybe he could understand. What did she have to lose?
She hesitated. “You won’t tell anyone? Ever?”
“Never.”
“Do you swear?”
He nodded solemnly.
“I need to hear you say it, David.”
“I swear.”
“There’s no expiration date on this promise. If I tell you”—her emphasis on the if was unmistakable—“you can’t ever tell anyone. Ever. Not in ten years or twenty or fifty—”
“Laurel, stop! I promise I won’t tell anyone. Not unless you tell me to.”
She stared at him. “It’s not a piece of a flower, David. It’s a piece of me.”
David looked at her for a long time. “What do you mean, it’s a piece of you?”
She’d passed the point of no return. “I got this lump on my back. That’s why I’ve been so weird. I thought I had cancer or a tumor or something. But this morning this…this flower-thing bloomed out of my back. I have a flower growing out of my spine.” She sat back with her arms folded over her chest, daring him to accept her now.
David stared with his mouth slightly open. He stood, hands at his waist, lips pressed together. He turned and walked to his bed and sat down with his elbows on his knees. “I’m going to ask this once, because I have to—but I won’t ever ask again because I’ll believe your answer, okay?”
She nodded.
“Is this a joke, or do you really believe what you just said?”
She shot to her feet and headed toward the door. It had been a mistake to come to him. A huge mistake. But before she could turn the doorknob, David stepped in front of her, blocking her way.
“Wait. I said I had to ask once. And I meant it. You swear to me that this isn’t a joke, and I’ll believe you.”
She met his eyes and studied them carefully. What she saw there surprised her. It wasn’t disbelief; it was uncertainty. He just didn’t want to be the victim of a stupid prank. She wanted to prove she wouldn’t do that—not to him.
“I’ll show you,” she said, but it sounded more like a question.
“Okay.” His voice was tentative too.
She turned her back and fiddled with the knot in the scarf. As she released the enormous petals, she pushed her shirt up in the back so they could slowly rise to their normal position.
David gaped, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open. “But how—you can’t—they’re—what the hell?”
Laurel gave him a tight-lipped grimace. “Yeah.”
“Can I…can I look closer?” Laurel nodded and David stepped forward hesitantly.
“I won’t bite,” she said, but her tone was humorless.
“I know, it’s just…” His face reddened. “Never mind.” He stepped close behind her and stroked his fingers along the long, smooth surfaces. “Is this okay?” he asked.
Laurel nodded.
David prodded very gently all around the base where her skin melded into the small, green leaves. “There’s not even a seam here. They flow right into your skin. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
Laurel looked down at the floor, unsure of what to say.
“I can understand why you’ve been a little weird this week.”
“You have no idea,” Laurel said as she sat down on his bed and turned her back to the window so the sun could shine on the petals. The sunlight was strangely comforting.
David stared at her, his eyes full of questions. But he said nothing. He sat across the room from her, his eyes darting from her face to the tips of the petals sticking up over her shoulders, and back again. “Do you…?” But he stopped.
After a minute he stood and paced a few times. “Could it…?” He stopped speaking again and continued pacing.
Laurel rubbed her temples. “Please don’t pace—it drives me nuts.”
David immediately dropped into a chair. “Sorry.” He studied her again. “You know this is impossible, right?”
“Trust me, I’m aware.”
“I just…I know, seeing is believing, but I feel like if I blink a couple of times, I’ll wake up…or my vision will suddenly clear or something.”
“It’s okay,” Laurel said, focusing on her hands in her lap. “I’m still waiting to wake up too.” She reached over her shoulder, grabbed a long petal, and studied it for a few seconds before letting it go. It bounced right back up to float beside her face.
“You’re not going to tie them up again?” David asked.
“They feel better if I leave them loose.”
“They feel better? You can feel them?”
Laurel nodded.
He looked over at the remaining bit she had cut off. “Did that hurt?”
“It stung pretty good.”
“Can you…move them?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“Well, if you can feel them, they might be more a part of you than just a…growth. Maybe it’s not really flower petals, maybe they’re more like—well, wings.” He laughed. “Sounds really weird, huh?”
Laurel giggled. “Weirder than the fact that they’re growing out of my back in the first place?”
“You’ve got a point.” He let out a sigh as his eyes drifted back to the petals shimmering in the sun. “So…do you have to water it…them?”
“I don’t know.” Laurel snorted. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Then I’d have an easy way to make it die.”
David muttered something under his breath.
“What?”
David shrugged. “I think it’s pretty, that’s all.”
Laurel glanced over her shoulders at the blue-tinged ruffly edges that spanned out on each side of her. “Do you?”
“Sure. If you went to school like that, I bet half the gir
ls there would be insanely jealous.”
“And the other half would be staring at me like I was a freak of nature. No, thank you.”
“So what are you going to do?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what I can do. Nothing, I guess.” She laughed humorlessly. “Wait for it to take over my body and kill me?”
“Maybe it will go away.”
“Right, that’s what I kept telling myself about the bump.”
David hesitated. “Have you…told your parents?”
Laurel shook her head.
“Are you going to?”
She shook her head again.
“I think you should.”
Laurel swallowed hard. “I’ve been thinking about that since I woke up.” She turned to look at him. “If you were a parent and your kid told you she had a giant flower growing out of her back, what would you do?”
David started to say something, then looked down at the ground.
“You would do the responsible thing. You’d take her to the hospital; she’d get poked and prodded and become a medical freak. That’s what would happen to me. I don’t want to be that kid, David.”
“Maybe your mom could make something to help,” David suggested halfheartedly.
“We both know this is way bigger than anything my mom could fix.” She clasped her fingers in front of her. “Honestly, if this thing is going to kill me, I’d rather it did it in private. And if it goes away,” she said with a shrug, spreading her hands out in front of her, “then it’s better that no one else knew.”
“Okay,” David finally said. “But I think you need to reconsider if anything else happens.”
“What else could happen?” Laurel asked.
“It could get bigger. Or spread.”
“Spread?” She hadn’t considered that.
“Yeah, like if leaves started growing across your back—or you got flowers…some other place.”
She was quiet for a long time. “I’ll think about it.”
He chuckled dryly. “I guess I see now why you can’t come to the beach today.”
“Oh, shoot. I’m so sorry. I completely forgot.”