David took her arm and put his up beside it. “Check it out—if you look closely, our arms don’t look quite the same. See?” he said, pointing to veins that spidered along his arms. “Granted, veins usually stick out more on guys anyway, but with your light skin, you should at least be able to see pale streaks of blue. You don’t have any.”

Laurel studied her arm, then asked, “When did you notice that?”

He shrugged guiltily. “When I checked for your pulse, but you were so freaked out that I decided it could wait a while. Besides, I wanted to do some research first.”

“Thanks…I think.” She was quiet for a long time as thoughts rushed through her head. But she came back to the same conclusion again and again. “I really am a plant, aren’t I?”

David looked up at her, then nodded solemnly. “I think so.”

Laurel wasn’t sure why the tears came. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. But she’d never truly accepted it before. Now that she had, she felt an overwhelming combination of fear, relief, amazement, and a strange sadness.

David climbed up on the bed beside her. Without a word, he leaned back on his headboard and pulled her against his chest. She joined him easily, enjoying the safety she felt in his arms. His hands occasionally moved up and down her arms and back, carefully avoiding her petals.

She could hear his heart beating a regular rhythm that reminded her some things were still normal. Dependable.

The warmth from his body spread into her, warming her in a way that was strikingly similar to how the sun did. She smiled and snuggled a little closer.

“What are you doing next Saturday?” David asked, and his voice reverberated in his chest where her ear was pressed.

“I don’t know. What’re you doing?”

“That depends on you. I was thinking about what Tamani told you.”

She raised her head from his chest. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Why not? He was right about you being a plant. Maybe he was right about…about you being a faerie.”

“How can you even say that where your microscope can hear you, David?”

Laurel asked with a laugh, trying to keep the subject light. “It might stop working if it realizes its owner is so unscientific.”

“It’s pretty unscientific to have a friend who’s a plant,” David said, refusing to adopt her humorous tone.

Laurel sighed but let her head sink back down onto his chest. “Every little girl wishes she was actually a princess or a faerie or a mermaid or something.

Especially girls who don’t know who their real mothers are. But you lose that dream when you’re, like, six. No one still thinks that when they’re fifteen.” She set her jaw stubbornly. “There’s no such thing as faeries.”

“Maybe not, but you don’t necessarily have to be one for real.”

“What do you mean?”

David was staring at her blossom. “There’s a costume dance at school next Saturday. I thought maybe you could go as a faerie and try out the role. You know, get used to the idea as a costume before you try to tackle the idea that it’s real. Get comfortable with it.”

“What? Strap wings on and wear some funky dress?”

“Seems to me you already have wings,” David said, his voice serious.

His meaning slowly dawned on Laurel and she looked at him in disbelief. “You want me to go like this? With my blossom out for everyone to see? You must be crazy! No!”

“Just listen,” David said, sitting up. “I’ve thought about this. You know that tinsel garland stuff? If we wrapped that around the base of the flower and then looped it over your shoulders no one would know it wasn’t fake. They’d just think it was an awesome costume.”

“I couldn’t pass this off as a costume, David. It’s too good.”

David shrugged. “People generally believe what you tell them.” He grinned.

“And do you really think someone’s going to look at you and say, ‘Hmm, I think that girl’s a plant’?”

It really did sound absurd. Laurel’s mind drifted to the shimmery sky-blue formal she’d worn to her mother’s cousin’s wedding last summer. “I’ll think about it,”

she promised.

After school on Wednesday David had to work, so Laurel decided to go to the public library. She stepped up to the reference desk where the librarian was trying to explain the Dewey decimal system to a kid who clearly neither understood nor wanted to. After a couple of minutes, he shrugged and walked away.

With a frustrated sigh, the librarian turned to Laurel. “Yes?”

“Can I use the internet?” Laurel asked.

The librarian smiled, probably glad for a rational question. “That computer over there,” she said, pointing. “Log in with your library card number and you’ll have one hour.”

“Just one?”

The librarian leaned forward conspiratorially. “It’s a rule we had to make a couple of months back. Had a retired lady who would come in and play Internet Hearts all day.” She shrugged as she straightened again. “You know how it is; a couple of crazies ruin it for the rest of us. It’s high-speed though,” she added as she turned back to a stack of books she was scanning in.

Laurel headed over to the carrel that held the only internet-enabled computer.

Unlike the sprawling library Laurel and her dad had often visited in Eureka, the Crescent City library was hardly bigger than a regular house. It had one shelf of picture books and one shelf of adult fiction, and other than that, it was all old reference books. And not even very many of those.