She nods and smiles. “Yep. It’s still here somehow. Survived the tornado.”
I turn it over in my hands. “Geez. Memory lane.”
Aria looks pained, closing the front door behind us. I hold up my basket as if in a cheers. “To new memories.”
Her smile is soft as she taps her basket to mine. “To new memories.”
We walk toward the woods, and I’m desperate to make conversation. “Why do we use baskets again? Why not plastic bags or something?”
“Good question,” she says. “The holes in the baskets let spores fall back to the forest floor.”
“Like seeds?” I ask.
“Like seeds,” she agrees. She stops at a tree at the edge of the property, tracing a gentle hand over the flaky bark. “Remember these?”
A grin curves my lips. “Turkey tail.”
Aria’s approving nod feels better than any good grade I got in school. She breaks one of the colorful paper-like mushrooms off the tree. Together we look at the bands of color. These have an extra dose of blue. “You’re right.Trametes versicolor. I’d even find these in New York. They’re just about everywhere.”
“You lived in New York?” I ask.
She tosses the mushroom in my basket. “Yep. Undergrad at NYU so I could apprentice under the mycologist at the botanical garden.”
“That’s so cool.” I look over at her walking beside me. “I’m really proud of you, you know. I’m sorry we lost touch.”
She grimaces. “Me too.”
I notice something on my side of the path. “Ooh! What’s this one?”
Aria crouches and I follow suit. “Oh, that’sLeucopholiota decorosa.”
“And in English?”
She shrugs. “That’s it. That’s what it is. Just a pretty little mushroom.”
“Can you eat it?”
“It’s what we call ‘edible, not incredible.’ If you want to pick it, I can show you some stuff with the spores under the microscope.”
“I mean, I don’t want to waste valuable microscope time. I want my money’s worth. I want to see this magical mycelium that drew you back to town.”
Aria wrinkles her nose. “How do you know about that?”
“I may have watched your videos. Especially after you got mad at me for making too much noise in your background.”
She doesn’t face me when she says, “I may have watched yours too.”
“And?”
“And . . .” She rolls her lips between her teeth.
“Just say it. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not!” she objects. “It’s really not. You’ve always had this ‘you’re smart, I’m stupid’ story about us, but it’s not true. At least, it’s not true for me. It’s fine that we’re good at different things.”
I didn’t know I needed to hear it until she said it. It’s one of my greatest insecurities, though. Being the big, pretty dumbass. My jaw tightens to stave off how hard her statement hits me. I move back to my previous point. “Then what’s the problem?”
Ari tosses her head from side to side. “It was weird to see all those people thirsting on you.”
