Hesitant to step on the glass, I lingered in the doorway.
Professor Lemna spotted me. “Yes?” she asked.
This professor couldn’t have been more different from the two professors I’d met yesterday, despite my guessing that they were around the same age. She was taller and thinner than Professor Tenella, with short shoulder-length blond-and-gray hair that was fashionably cut. Her eyes were coated with asparkly blue eye shadow and mascara of deep ocher. When she looked at me, her irises were a piercing bright blue.
I cleared my throat. “I’m here for affinity testing, Professor Lemna. My name is Briar Whelan.”
She frowned. “No one told me I had an affinity test today. And I prefer Dr. Lemna.”
“Sorry, Dr. Lemna,” I said quickly. “Today is my second day of testing. I did the floral, harvester, and grasses tests yesterday and was told this was next.”
“And?” She arched an eyebrow at me, though the rest of her body language seemed uninterested.
“Excuse me?” I asked, unsure of what she was asking and starting to get nervous about the whole interaction.
“And what were the results of those tests?”
“Oh. No affinity.Non par.”
“Well, I guess I’ll have to make time for you.” Dr. Lemna let out a sigh as she cut across the glass floor in my direction. “Luckily, I have a few chemicals prepared already.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I decided to stay silent. Unlike Professors Tenella and Variegata, who’d given me warm feelings, this instructor had my shoulders tensing.
Dr. Lemna stepped back into the main greenhouse room and indicated that I should follow her lead. We made our way to her office, which was enclosed with the same glass that made up the walls of the greenhouse. She reached into a wooden box and began to pull out small glass vials of various shapes, each containing some type of liquid.
Once she’d placed about a dozen vials into the portable container, she opened a door from her office that led outside. “This way,” she said primly.
I hurried to follow her.
At the edge of the pond, Dr. Lemna knelt and opened the container she had just packed. She handed me a mason jar.
“Collect a sample of the pond water.”
I took the jar, knelt, and pushed some water hyacinth out of the way to dip the container into the water. The water was cool as it pooled over my fingers.
“You’re going to be running a series of chemical tests on the water.”
I looked up at Dr. Lemna in confusion. Wasn’t this test supposed to determine if I had an affinity toward water plants, not water chemistry? I steeled myself for whatever was coming, remembering how challenging Chemistry had been in high school. My mind went to my course list for the year, which indicated that I’d be taking Chemistry of Plants in the winter, and realized that Dr. Lemna was likely to be my instructor. A knot of dread formed in my stomach.
“Flip to the Chemistry of Plants section in your journal. There are some reference sheets there, and the first one is for a series of water quality tests. You’ll be learning how to conduct these with much greater accuracy in the class, but for today, the basics will do. Follow the steps for dissolved oxygen, nitrate, and phosphate levels.”
I took a deep breath and began to read the instructions in the notebook. I’d long ago learned to read through all the steps before attempting step one of a new process, especially when it involved chemicals. Dr. Lemna stood a few feet away, watching.
Twenty minutes later, I’d fumbled through all three tests, and I turned to Dr. Lemna for my next instruction. Instead of saying anything, she took the mason jar from my hand andstudied the water. A few moments later, she looked at the values I’d recorded in my journal. She pursed her small lips together.
“There were a couple steps that weren’t executed well in the testing, but as I said, you’ll get practice with that in Chemistry. The main area of interest for the affinity evaluation is how the water reacts when you’re studying it. When someone has this affinity, the water bubbles during the dissolved oxygen test, turns slightly green during the nitrate tests, and whips into a small whirlpool during the phosphate test.”
My eyes went to the mason jar. The water had remained calm as I’d performed the various tests. “So I’m assuming I don’t have the affinity?”
“Not a strong one, anyway. But some have weak affinities.Infirmi par. Let’s go back into the greenhouse.”
I followed her into the glass building, and we returned to the place where I’d first found her, in the room covered with a glass floor. “Walk out on the glass,” Dr. Lemna prodded.
Tentatively, I stepped a foot onto the see-through floor. When nothing strange happened, I stepped out with my other foot and walked a few paces across the glass.
“Walk slowly back this way.”
I took a few slow steps back to Dr. Lemna, who shook her head. “None of the plants floated over in response to you.” She reached out a hand for my journal, and as she flipped to the page for my affinities, I knew what was coming. She wroteNon parin straight, even lettering.
