and, after glancing down the hall to make sure his mom wasn’t near, swung the door closed.
Laurel stared at the closed door. She’d been in his bedroom before, but he’d never closed the door. She noticed for the first time that his doorknob didn’t have a lock. “Your mom wouldn’t, like, listen at the door, would she?” Laurel asked, feeling silly even as the question escaped her mouth.
David snorted. “Never. I’ve earned a lot of privacy by not asking why a lot of my mom’s dates don’t leave until morning. I stay out of Mom’s personal business; she stays out of mine.”
Laurel laughed, a bit of her nervousness melting away now that she was actually here.
David pointed her to the bed and pulled up a chair for himself. “So?” he said after a few seconds.
It was now or never. “Actually, I was hoping you might look at something under your microscope for me.”
Confusion flashed across David’s face. “My microscope?”
“You said you had a really good one.”
He recovered quickly. “Uh, OK. Yeah, sure.”
Laurel dug in her pocket and pulled out the tissue. “Could you tell me what this is?”
David took the tissue, unwrapped it carefully and looked down at the small white fragment. “It looks like a piece of a flower petal.”
Laurel forced herself not to roll her eyes. “Could you look at it under your microscope?”
“Sure.” He turned to a long table covered with various pieces of equipment - a few of which Laurel recognised from the bio lab. A very few. He pulled a grey cover off a shiny black microscope and grabbed a slide from a box of the small glass panes separated by sheets of thin tissue paper. “Can I cut this?” he asked, looking over at her.
Laurel shuddered, remembering cutting it off herself less than half an hour earlier, and nodded. “It’s all yours.”
David cut a tiny piece and laid it on a slide, added a yellow solution, and dropped a cover slip over the top. He clipped the slide under the lens and fiddled with the dials as he peered into the eyepiece. The minutes passed slowly as he adjusted more dials and moved the slide around, looking at it from different angles. Finally he leaned back. “All I can really tell you for certain is that it’s a piece of a plant and the cells are very active, which means it’s growing. Flowering, I assume from the colour.”
“A piece of a plant? Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” he said, looking back through the eyepiece.
“It’s not part of an…animal?”
“Uh-uh. No way.”
“How can you tell?”
He flipped through a few pre-prepared and labelled slides in another box. He selected one with a pinkish blob on it and went back through the process of focusing the microscope. “Come here,” he said, standing and gesturing to his chair.
She took his place and leaned tentatively forward over the microscope.
“It’s not going to bite you,” he said with laugh. “Lean in close.”
She did and opened her eyes to a pink world shot through with maroon lines and dots. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“I want you to look at the cells. They look pretty much like the pictures in our bio book. See how they’re round or irregularly shaped? They look like blobs all connected together.”
“OK.”
He slid the microscope back in front of him and switched in the yellowed slide he had prepared a few minutes before. After turning more dials, he scooted the microscope back to her. “Now look at this one.”
Laurel put her forehead back down towards the eyepiece, far more afraid of this slide than the other. She hoped David wouldn’t notice her hands shaking.
“Look at the cells now. They’re all pretty square and very uniform. Plant cells are orderly, not like animal cells. And they have thick cell walls that are square like the ones you see here. That’s not to say you never see squarish animal cells, but they wouldn’t be nearly this uniform, and the cell walls would be much thinner.”
Laurel sat back very slowly. This didn’t make sense at all.
She had an actual plant growing out of her back! A mutant, parasite flower! She was the freak of all freaks and, if anyone ever found out, she’d be poked and prodded for the rest of her life. Her head started to spin and she felt like all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. Her chest constricted and she couldn’t seem to draw in a big enough breath. “I gotta go,” she mumbled.
“Wait,” David said, holding on to her arm. “Don’t go. Not when you’re all freaked out like this.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she refused to look at him. “I’m really worried about you. Can’t you just tell me what’s wrong?”
She stared into his blue eyes. They were soft and earnest. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he could keep a secret; she was sure he would. She trusted him, she realised. She had to tell someone. Trying to muddle through on her own hadn’t worked. Really hadn’t worked.
Maybe he could understand. What did she have to lose?
She hesitated. “You won’t tell anyone? Ever?”
“Never.”
“Do you swear?”
He nodded solemnly.
“I need to hear you say it, David.”
“I swear.”
“There’s no expiration date on this promise. If I tell you” - her emphasis on the if was unmistakable - “you can’t ever tell anyone. Never. Not in ten years or twenty or fifty-”
“Laurel, stop! I promise I won’t tell anyone, ever. Not unless you tell me to.”
She stared at him. “It’s not a piece of a flower, David. It’s a piece of me.”
David looked at her for a long time. “What do you mean, it’s a piece of you?”
She’d passed the point of no return. “I got this lump on my back. That’s why I’ve been so weird. I thought I had cancer or a tumour or something. But this morning this…this flower thing bloomed out of my back. I have a flower growing out of my spine.” She sat back with her arms folded over her chest, daring him to accept her now.
David stared with his mouth slightly open. He stood, hands at his waist, lips pressed together. He turned and walked to his bed and sat down with his elbows on his knees. “I’m going to ask this once, because I have to - but I won’t ever ask again because I’ll believe your answer, OK?”
She nodded.
“Is this a joke, or do you really believe what you just said?”
She
