Page 8

“Ah, you must be Sydney,” the teacher says to me in a gregarious voice, clapping his hands together. “Better late than never. I’m Professor Tilden, but you can call me Nick.”

I raise my hand shyly, giving him an awkward smile.

Kill me now.

“Don’t worry,” he goes on, “I won’t make you stand up here and tell the class three interesting things about yourself.”

Thank fuck.

“I’ll do it instead,” he adds.

Cripes.

My face immediately heats up. “Everyone, this is Sydney Denik,” he speaks slowly, saying my name like I’m hard of hearing. “Sydney is from Stanford University. She likes to play the tuba. And her favorite fungus is the ghost mushroom.”

I snort, shaking my head.

“What?” he asks. “Not true?”

“I’ve never played the tuba in my life,” I tell him, giving the class a bewildered look. I expect them to laugh, because of course they know he’s joking, but they all stare at me with a strange look on their faces, as if they’re concerned. They’re probably just embarrassed for me.

“Oh, I see I got my wires crossed,” Nick says. “Sydney here classified the phylum for a previously unknown dark fungus.” He looks at me, brows raised. “Right?”

I nod, giving him a look that sayswill you please shut the fuck up?

“Alright, I’ll stop torturing you,” Nick says with a laugh.

Everly squeezes my arm. “I’m going to go, but it was lovely to show you around. I’ll see you later, Syd.”

Then she leaves, and suddenly, I feel completely unmoored. I wish Amani was here so there was at least another familiar face.

Luckily, a girl sitting near the end of the table pulls out the empty chair beside her, giving me a welcoming nod.

I scurry over there and sit down beside her.

“Thanks,” I say, trying to keep my voice low as Nick starts talking about the generator output of the solar farm. Something about how the power to the lodges gets turned off from time to time to ensure electricity is always flowing to the labs, which is apparently why we have an arsenal of flashlights and candles in our rooms.

“I’m Lauren,” the girl says. She’s pretty and long-limbed with chin-length blonde hair a couple shades lighter than my own.

“Sydney,” I say, even though she already knows that.

“Yes, the tuba player,” she says seriously, then grins, her smile wide.

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “That was hella embarrassing.”

“Oh, don’t worry. He made us all do that,” she says. “One by one. Like the first day of camp. Which I suppose it is.”

“That does make me feel a little better,” I admit. Already, Lauren seems easy to be around. “What else did I miss?”

“Just a tour of the grounds,” she says. “We then came back here, and he’s just explaining how the lodge works in more detail.”

“Oh, okay. Everly showed me around,” I say.

She gives me an impressed look, and I realize I may have come off as bragging. But Lauren smiles. “Well, if there was a private tour, I would have opted for that one. But I guess you don’t know three things about every person in this room now, do you? For instance.” She points at a white guy with close-cropped brown hair at the front. “That’s Albert. He’s obsessed with sea urchins. And see that Japanese guy over there? That’s Toshio, and he designed a video game with his friend that got bought out by Microsoft or something. That girl with the long dark hair sitting on the pillow? That’s Natasha, and she has three pugs back at home, and she already misses them. And the guy at the end of this table? His name is Munawar, and he said he’s only packed shirts with fungi puns on them.”

“Hello, I’m Munawar Khatun from Bangladesh,” the man says with a wave, leaning forward at the end of the table. “I’m wearing such a shirt today. It says ‘I’m a real fungi.’ Get it?”

He points to his shirt.