Page 4

Chapter Four

T he following day, I took up my friend Maci on an invite for a lake day, deciding it might help me unwind from the previous day’s events.

I lay on my stomach on a flower-print towel, flipping through a biography on Renaissance painters. The discovery that I was related to Leonardo da Vinci at the end of last school year was a bombshell that I hadn’t fully processed.

But my eyes glossed over the words on the page as I thought about the encounter with Callan the night before.

I had never been more desperate to figure out the secret of the leaf messages, if only to prove to him I could do it.

I’d taken Calculus to impress him, and now this.

He brought out an ambitious side of me I hadn’t leaned into before I met him.

Beside me on a purple polka-dot towel, Maci was toned and svelte in her yellow swimsuit, her Laotian skin always a lovely tan.

Meanwhile, I was rubbing sunscreen on my arms and legs every few hours, wishing that the fern students at Evergreen Academy had already finished developing the plant-based sunscreen pill they’d been working on last year.

“You’ve been on the same page for ten minutes,” Maci said casually. “Why are you reading a biography anyway? Is it for one of your summer classes?”

I snapped the book shut. “Yep, and my brain is not processing it right now. Want to swim?”

She nodded, and we stood and raced each other into the water. Lake Siskiyou was beautiful on clear days like this. Mount Shasta, the fourteen-thousand-foot mountain, loomed nearby like a steadfast friend, its brilliant reflection cast across the deep blue water.

As we swam farther into the lake, my awareness of the aquatic plants below my feet grew. I could feel them performing gas exchange and swaying as their roots clung to the soil. But I pushed the allure of them away, trying to focus on my nonmagical friend.

The intrusion of plant sensations had increased over the summer, as if urging me to notice them and get more practice in. I’d been reluctant to do so outside of my visits to the Wildflower Trail, nervous about causing something irreversible.

Last winter, I cast a Floracantus on my aunt’s poinsettia to make it bloom longer, and it had worked so well that I’d had to secretly whisk it away in May and tell my aunt that it had finally died. Now, I didn’t dare experiment on the flowers on Aunt Vera’s balcony.

“How are things going with Alex?” I asked, flipping onto my back and gently kicking my feet.

“I’m not really sure.” Maci’s voice was hesitant, and I instantly tensed.

“Did something happen?”

“Not really. He’s just kind of gone MIA. We’ve texted a few times, but part of me wonders if he has a summer fling going on back home or something.”

“Hmm.” I wasn’t sure what to say. It sounded like red flag behavior, but Alex had been a little hard to pin down from the start. He was extremely friendly and likeable, but then he would do something that signaled things weren’t what you thought they were. Is that what he was doing to Maci ?

“Yeah, I’m really not sure what to think. We’ll see what happens when he gets back for the school year.”

My friendship with Alex had fizzled out after an awkward kind-of date at a Halloween party. It had been a surprise when he and Maci had begun to pick up a relationship, but my feelings for him—whatever they’d been—were long over.

“Well, you’re smart. Trust your intuition, and go from there. And if you need me to play detective, I’m in.” I let my hand glaze along the surface of the water as we floated along a buoy line, trying to push the strange feeling about Alex out of my mind to examine later.

“How about you? Any word from your handsome tutor?”

I rolled my eyes but laughed. “We’re just friends, Maci.”

I was unable to explain the dynamics that seemed to be plaguing us to my nonmagical friend.

Things had been so strange between me and Callan’s mom when she had shown up for my art gala at the end of the spring semester.

It was clear that, if his parents had their way, he was destined to end up with another founder’s descendant as a romantic partner.

But despite all that, he was in my head more often than not.

And how had he seriously gotten more handsome these past few weeks?

“If you say so,” Maci said knowingly, flipping onto her back to float. “Is he going to tutor you again this year?”

I thought about it with a sinking sensation that felt like there was a stone in my stomach trying to drag me down to the bottom of the lake. Without the ability to do magic on campus, it seemed unlikely that our tutoring relationship could go on like it had last year.

But the thought of a school year without studies with Callan in the treehouses felt wrong. “I’m not sure. I hope so,” I said, deciding to be completely truthful.

“You could always tutor him with kissing lessons,” Maci said, throwing me a devilish smile.

I coughed out a laugh and splashed water at her. “Maci! ”

“What? I’m sure you’d both enjoy it.”

No. Nope . I could not let thoughts of kissing Callan get into my head right now. I had enough things on my plate without letting that take over all my thoughts.

If I was going to be successful at Evergreen Academy this year, I would need a clear head to balance my courses and the field studies we’d be assigned as second-year students. Plus, Professor East wanted me to dig more into my heritage and the unusual way in which my magic had been passed to me.

Kissing anyone, let alone Callan, was a distraction I most definitely did not need.

Still, there was a little bubble of warmth in my stomach at the idea, and instead of confronting that revelation, I plugged my nose and ducked underneath the water, letting the awareness of the aquatic plants below draw my attention from a certain dark-haired boy with a tree affinity.