“I don’t know.” She turned to Mom. “What do kids do these days?”
“Don’t ask me that like I’m old,” said Mom. “They like to Netflix and chill, right?”
“I’m leaving.” I grabbed one of the coffees and two croissants. “Please never say ‘Netflix and chill’ ever again.”
“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.