The kids who kicked the ball come running in from the grassy field, screaming with delight.
Court looks at me for a moment, the coneflower stillimpossibly hanging on behind his ear. I freeze the image in my mind so I can remember it forever. Then he snaps his fingers toward the kids in the Ancients. “Hey, you guys want to play some ball?”
The kids bounce. A smile flickers over Court’s lips as he takes a last look at me. “Girls against boys. Let’s go!” He lets the ball drop, then kicks it long.
All the kids run after it, screaming loud enough to reach the soil engineers. Genius. With grim determination, I venture deeper into the now empty Ancient Garden. Most plants known from the fossil record—older than ten thousand years—are extinct, but the ones that survived evolved to form new species and adaptations. The scents envelope me with their low-frequency vibrations, which resonate in the nose far longer than other scents. They’re like Gregorian chants to the ear; the older the species, the more complex their scents. It’s the same way with people.
My heart still pounds, and my mind is a nest of randomly firing neurons. I hate working under pressure, but I have to get this done.
I run my nose through purple horsetail and ferns as ticklish as peacock feathers, hearing Mother’s voice in my head.Always inhale deeply in the presence of an Ancient; they’ve been around the longest and have many secrets to reveal.
Using my hand spade and clippers, I quickly harvest what I need, being careful not to bruise anything or snip more thanI absolutely need. Sometimes I have to take parts of the roots, which pains me because a root is harder for the plant to regenerate than a leaf or a flower. As I tug at the base of an exotic fern, I swear to sign up for the volunteer program to make amends.
There. Only one left from this place, Alice’s miso heart note, the problem one. I picked through every one of the Ancients and it’s not here. Still crouching, I swab my forehead with the grass-stained hem of my dress.
“I saw you!” cries a kid. I nearly fall over, too deep in my own thoughts to smell him coming. The kid with the Camp Snoopy T-shirt, sweaty brown hair matted to his head, points a finger at me. “Touch with your eyes, not with your hands.”
Well, isn’t that the corpse flower telling the skunk cabbage it stinks?
I put my fingers over my lips and try to shush him but he’s already sounding the alarm. “Ms. Jackson! There’s a girl cutting plants!”
In a mild panic now, I consider standing my ground. If only I weren’t clutching this heavy bag of damning evidence. With a groan, I step off the horseshoe path and let the ferns close up behind me. A branch knocks my beret off my head as I rush toward a wooded area, and I waste precious seconds stopping to snatch it back up.
“She went that way!” cries Camp Snoopy, his voice faint. Feeling ridiculous, I pick my way through the spiky ferns until I reach the edge of the forest, then sprint down a pathway linedwith bark shavings. I could hide inside one of the redwoods with a rotted-out trunk, but I have a better idea. One less obvious.
I sniff around for the eastern red cedar with the hollow spot just large enough for a person to squeeze through, where Mother and I once found a Cinderella’s slipper orchid growing on a high branch. The Cinderella traps bees into its “shoe,” where they get dusted with pollen until they manage to escape.
The dense needles scratch at my arms but I manage to duck inside just before the kids rush by like a pack of bloodhounds.
A chaperone hurries after them, blowing her whistle. “Hey, kids, come back here!”
Not long after the chaperone passes my tree, I smell Court.
“Court!” I hiss.
He puts on the brakes, and quickly finds the entrance. The tree shudders as it swallows him up.
He’s tied his sweater around his waist and the front of his polo shirt is soaked down the middle. Sweating magnifies a person’s scent by tenfold. His scent, a heady blend of evergreens and roasting hickory nuts, is so strong I can almost wind my fingers through it. It muscles out the Cinderella still flourishing inside the tree, and makes my insides flutter. I lose mass with everybump-bumpof my heart, and I’m thankful for the weight of my boots, anchoring me to the ground.
The kids’ voices grow louder again, and I go still as a pinecone. Our space is barely big enough to fit both of us, but we stillmanage not to touch. Court looks down at me, cheeks flushed from his game. A blanket of heat knits between us.
“Lost my flower,” he whispers.
“We can find you a new one.”
“I liked the old one.”
I take a deep breath to beat back the giddy feeling in my stomach. That’s when I catch it. Miso soup. I smell it. Alice’s missing note. It’s part of Court’s scentprint, though a thousand times less intense. Heart notes run in families.
My startled eyes take in his, brown, flecked with striations of gold and even green. A tiny mole dots his jaw, just like his mother’s. He’s my answer, right in front of me.
What did Mother say?Immerse yourself. Meditate on the scent. It will tell you where to go.
The kids run back past us to their teacher, brushing so close, our cedar sways. Court’s eyes, gazing at me, widen a fraction as our bristly capsule shakes. I grab onto a branch so I don’t accidentally fall into him.
I’m vaguely aware of an adult on a megaphone calling the children back to the buses. But like those bees that are seduced into Cinderella’s slippers, I am trapped, held captive while Court’s pollen flies around me. Only unlike those bees, I don’t want to escape.
The sound of children laughing diminishes completely.
