“I know, I know.” Yasmin put her hands up. “It doesn’t sound that cool, but trust me, it is. Mosses and ferns are some of the unspoken heroes of the forest.”
I smiled, my stomach relaxing for the first time since I’d arrived at Evergreen Academy.
“Mr. Rhodes didn’t have time to give you the full tour, so I’ve asked Ms. Ortega to take over,” Professor East said.
I blinked, realizing that Rhodes must be Callan’s last name. The knot in my stomach that had been nagging me loosened at the thought of touring the school with Yasmin. Since I knew her from my art class at SCC, her presence made things feel more normal. As normal as was possible under the circumstances, anyway. I eyed her ruby earrings with a new appreciation and glanced down at my emerald ring.
Professor East said goodbye and slipped into a glass elevator behind the stairs, presumably returning to his office.
Yasmin looped an arm through mine. “So, you’ve already seen the entrance atrium when you came in and Professor East’s office upstairs. We call this area down here the central vein because it connects everything else in the building. Like a leaf.”
She turned us toward an open archway made of the same white stone that comprised the rest of the building. “This is research lab one. The first floor has most of the research labs, plus the teahouse. Most of the classrooms are on the secondfloor or outside. The dorms and the library are on the third floor. Don’t worry about remembering all this. You’ll get the hang of it when you start classes.”
Start classes. The idea was dizzying. My brain snagged on another thing she’d said. “Teahouse?”
“Our affectionate little term for the cafeteria.”
Yasmin tugged me from room to room on the first floor, and we poked our heads in to see a handful of students in each lab room. The rooms were an odd mix of modern scientific equipment and materials that looked like they were from an earlier century. Mortar and pestles were common, as were glass bottles, test tubes, and vials. And everywhere I looked, bits of plant material were scattered on the tables.
“What kind of research do people do here?”
“Oh, all kinds of things. It can really be up to you, depending on what your interests and affinities are. Most of the research happens during the second-year or third-year internships. The first year, we just do our foundational classes and our affinity studies.”
We popped our heads into the last research room on the first floor, and I spotted Callan peering through a microscope while simultaneously scribbling something in a notebook. He lifted his gaze when we looked in, nodded at us, then got back to work.
“So, Callan is a second-year, then?” I asked Yasmin once we’d left the room.
“Oh no. He’s a first-year. But he’s very advanced. Are you ready to see the classes upstairs? Most people are still at lunch, so they should be fairly empty.”
We went up the curved stone staircase again, and Yasminshowed me each of the classrooms on the second level. Some were similar to the lecture halls and lab rooms on the SCC campus, except each room was connected to the exterior of the building, so one wall was always made entirely of glass. The clear windows were scattered with the plants that climbed inside and out.
“And now for the third floor,” Yasmin said. “I’ll show you my dorm room in a minute. But first, the library.”
My breath caught as we walked into the massive room. The walls that weren’t glass were lined from floor to ceiling with books, and the entire roof overhead was glass, as if we were inside a human-sized terrarium. Cozy alcoves of cushioned chairs and even some hammocks were scattered around the corners of the room. Tables with books, pens, and what I dared to hope were art supplies were stationed at the tables. Plants poured out of every nook and cranny, vines and flowers snaking across the fronts of the books and along their shelves.
But the showstopper was the towering tree in the center of the room, its gnarled trunk somehow both living and hollowed out, opening to a miniature reading room inside it. The soft glow of tea lights flickered invitingly. The remainder of the tree ran upward through the library, the top somehow flowing seamlessly out of the glass so that no gaps existed.
“Spectacular, right?”
“I never want to leave,” I admitted. I let my eyes roam over the oil paintings that covered the few open areas of the walls. There were paintings of leaves, flowers, roots, and portraits of a few people who looked like they were from a much earlier century.
“You can spend as much time as you’d like here when you’re not in classes,” Yasmin said. “Ready to see the dorms?”
“Does everyone live on campus?”
“Almost everyone. I do know of at least one student who lives off campus. Does this mean you’ll be moving in?”
I blinked, mind racing. Professor East hadn’t mentioned anything about moving on to campus. “I don’t think so. I live locally with my aunt a few streets from the SCC campus,” I offered.
“That’s cool. So you’ll be one of the rare ones who lives off campus. I think most people like to live here so they can work on their research at any time, and we have social events that span evenings and weekends. But sometimes I wonder if there isn’t a benefit to living off campus and interacting with the real world instead of just magical botanists all the time.” She winked, and I smiled.
“There are two wings: men’s and women’s. Men are to the left of the staircase from the library, and women to the right. My room is right”—she turned the knob to a door we’d just approached and pushed it open—“here.”
My eyes widened, and a grin spread across my face. It was like I had stepped into a storybook home. “No way.”
“Yep, I feel like I live in a tree house sometimes.”
The window in this room was curved and rounded, popping her room slightly out into the forest. Outside, a massive tree was sprawled in front of us, its branches and bright green leaves extending toward the window.
