My fears are quickly allayed when Brodie’s face brightens. “Can I help?”
Richard looks between the two of us. “Sure. Aria, show him the chanterelles.”
The more I look at the forest floor, the more chanterelles I find, bright yellow-orange screws coming out of the ground. Richard points out the poisonous lookalikes—jack’o lantern mushrooms— and tells us they even glow in the dark. Brodie’s familiar metallic sweaty tang blooms next to me as we pick the forest’s fruits. In my head, the scent is called “Outside Brodie.”
Birds flit around us, unafraid. Richard talks to them like they’re old friends, and it almost seems like they talk back.
Like it so often does when I go into the woods, my day goes from disastrous to magical.
After we havean overflowing basket of mushrooms, Richard invites Brodie and me to come to his house. Brodie and I conference between ourselves. “We’re not supposed to go into strangers’ houses,” I say. “Stranger danger.”
Brodie shrugs. “He goes to church? I don’t know. If we go together, nothing will happen.”
We trudge along behind Richard to his house at the edge of the woods. Stepping inside, I note its homey touches: a granny square blanket over the back of the worn plaid couch, an easy chair, painted hardwood floors, a few pictures of a woman I assume is his wife. Cluttered but clean.
“You kids like juice?”
Brodie and I exchange a look. “Sure.”
Richard gets down three small glasses and pours orange juice for all of us. He speaks to no one in particular. “I think we should cook up some chanterelle pasta. It’s about as fancy as any restaurant in Paris.”
“France?!” I ask, thinking of a cool book I used to read about a little girl who walked in two straight lines in Paris. He just chuckles, setting the juice in front of us. I take a sip. It has pulp in it, the kind that makes me gag when Gramps gets the wrong kind. But I want to be cool, so I drink it anyway.
Richard shows us how to clean and cut the mushrooms, shocking them in ice water to get any hidden bugs to crawl out. The thought makes Brodie and me make a face at each other, but we don’t make a peep. It wouldn’t be adventurous of us to object to a little bug.
Richard puts a pot of water on the stove to boil while Brodie and I prep the mushrooms. The weight of Richard’s gaze presses down on me. “Well, Miss Aria, where were you headed with that pack on your back?”
He’s calling me out, and it makes my cheeks heat. It’s hard to imagine my emotional turmoil now that I’m on this amazing adventure.
“I was going to live in the woods, sir.”
Brodie tosses out a hand. “You could sleep at my house. You don’t have to sleep in the woods.”
“We’re not allowed to have boy/girl sleepovers anymore,” I remind him. “We’re too old.”
He shrugs. “You could say you’re staying with Skye.” Skye is his older sister, a whole four years older than me. It just wouldn’t be plausible. Also, she is mean and scary, and I don’t know how long I could pretend to be her friend before she shuns me with her cruelty.
Richard pushes past our grousing. “Why didn’t you want to stay home?”
I focus on my hands, making careful cuts into the chanterelles. “Granny threw out my leaf collection.”
Mr. Hines just shakes his head and chuckles. “That Mrs. Johnson’s a mean old thing, isn’t she?”
Finally, someone gets it. He stirs the pot on the stove and turns to lean against his counter, scrubbing a hand over the white stubble peeking out of his otherwise deep brown chin.
“What kinds of leaves did you have in there?”
Relief floods my veins. This guygetsme. I rattle off all the species I so carefully collected, sometimes going very deep into the woods to find them.
Richard surveys me, thinking. He presses his lips into a line and sucks in a breath.
“Tell you what, honey. If you go home tonight, you can come back tomorrow and we’ll start your collection over. If you still want to run when you’re older, the door’s always open. But for tonight, I think you should go back to your granny’s.”
ONE
ARIA
AGE 28
