Page 95 of Leaving the Station

Randall gave me his number so I could contact him while I was on-shift—“if you have any questions about the plants”—but I never used it.

There’s still service, so I steady myself, then tap his contact. I don’t bother leaving the observation car for the call, since there’s no one in here who’s anywhere close to being conscious, and I wouldn’t mind if they overheard this one anyway.

The phone rings and rings and rings. I almost hang up; I’m sure that he won’t answer.

Finally: “Hello?”

I can hear the greenhouse whirring in the background, its own contained ecosystem.

“Randall?” He has me on speaker, and there’s a stream of water that sounds dangerously close to the phone.

“Zoe?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Hi.”

“What’s going on?” he asks. “Are you all right?”

He’s the first person who’s asked me that in a long while, and it takes everything I have not to break down on the phone.

But I owe him so much more than that.

“How’s the greenhouse?”

Well, I have to ease into it first.

“Everything’s good,” he says. “But when you’re not here it’s obvious how much work you do.” A pipe hisses in the background and he curses at it.

“Oh yeah?” I’m smiling now, my face reflected back at me in the dark train window.

“I wanted to talk to you,” I say. “If that’s all right.”

“Of course,” he says, though the background noises would suggest otherwise. “Let me get to my office.”

I can tell when he’s there because he sighs as he sits in his desk chair.

“All right, what did you want to tell me?”

I don’t know how to start this conversation. It was almost easier with Alden, since I know that that phase of my life is in the past. But I don’twantthe greenhouse to be in the past. I want to keeptaking care of plants, to talk to them, to watch them grow like a proud parent.

“I’m not coming back,” I tell him finally. “After the break.”

“Hm.” He doesn’t speak for a moment. “I have to say that I’m surprised. Your work in the greenhouse has been impeccable.”

“I’m failing all my classes,” I tell him, and try hard to not imagine his face on the other end. “The only time I really left my dorm was to go to the greenhouse.”

“So that’s why you were available for so many shifts,” he says, and I laugh a little.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “That’s why.”

“Do you want to know something?” he asks. “I think theAmorphophallusmight bloom.”

And that’s what does it. That’s what pushes me over the edge from vague sadness to tears streaming down my face. I’ve been crying more on this train trip than I have since... maybe ever.

Taking care of that plant was the only thing I did with my whole heart all semester, and now he’s telling me that it may very well bloom while I’m on the other side of the country.

“That spike you were seeing?” Randall says. “That was the start of the flower. The spathe should appear early next year, and then it’ll bloom shortly thereafter.”

“I can’t believe I’m not going to see it,” I say quietly. “I spent every day with that plant.”