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“TONIGHT?” ALICE’S VOICE goes near supersonic in my ear.

“Yeahhhh,” I say as I stroll through campus. It’s a gorgeous day, and I navigate the brick pathways with a smile on my face. On Wednesday it was surreal to walk among thousands of Carolina students who had no idea what really went on at their school. Now it’s Friday and that secret feels like nothing at all.

Reality sure does change after a kiss like that.

After he’d walked me home yesterday morning, Nick and I’d been texting each other constantly. I pretty much wore a perma-grin the entire day. This morning he sent a text asking me to go out with him and the other Legendborn tonight. I’d said yes, and then, like any good best friend, texted Alice. She’d called me back right away. I only have a few minutes to talk before I meet with Patricia, but I have to agree with Alice—melting on the phone with my best friend about any Nick-plus-lips topics is worth a quick phone call.

“Where?”

“Some bar downtown? A beer garden? I’m not sure.”

She laughs. “You mean you don’t care.”

“Not really.” I don’t. I’m buzzing and eager to see Nick again.

“Okay, so is this a date?”

I turn down a narrow walkway while I think about her question. “Is it a date if there are like twenty other people around?”

“Wellll,” Alice starts. In the background I can hear the murmur of voices and the shhhhh sound of wind; she’s on her way to class somewhere near mid-campus. “I think it is if you act like it is. If it feels like it’s just the two of you, then it’s a date, no matter who else is around.”

“Um, how are you this wise?”

“I read a lot of books. Next question: What are you gonna wear?”

“Um…” Patricia waves at me from where she’s sitting against one of the campus’s ubiquitous low stone walls. I wave back and hope she doesn’t misinterpret the blanket of terror that has just taken over my expression. I hadn’t even thought about what to wear on a date.

“Bree!” Alice cries.

I’m a few feet from Patricia now, and not a second too soon. “Gotta go, Alice.”

“No! My parents are picking me up this afternoon, so I won’t be there to be your glam squad. Do I need to call Charlotte? She’s got cute clo—”

“Bye, Alice!” She grumbles but says goodbye. It’s a bummer that she won’t be around tonight. I make a mental note to at least text her a selfie before I go.

“Sorry about that,” I say to Patricia, and tuck my phone into my messenger bag.

“No need to apologize.” Patricia beams. Her burgundy lipstick matches today’s shawl. “Thank you for meeting me here.”

I look past her to take in our meeting location for the first time. I hadn’t thought much of the cemetery during the campus tour; it was common for old towns in former colony states like North Carolina to have historic graveyards in the middle of a modern development. I certainly hadn’t imagined I’d visit it during what was supposed to be a therapy appointment. “I did kinda wonder why you’d bring me here, not gonna lie.”

“I’d be worried if you hadn’t. No quizzes this time,” she says, tugging her shawl tighter. “I brought you here because I’ve decided that I’d like to help you, and I believe this is the best place to start.” Without waiting for my response, she starts toward the entrance of the cemetery, which is really just an open gap in the low wall.

“A graveyard?”

Her pace is surprisingly quick, considering how much shorter her legs are than mine. I have to take a few quick steps to catch up.

“Indeed.”

The sky is a bright Carolina blue overhead, and the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, part green lawn, part wooded preserve, is probably the most beautiful graveyard ever. It feels like a hidden park, a respite away from the throngs of students bent over their phones on the way to class, professors chatting on the way to the campus coffee shop.

Bits and pieces from the campus tour come back to me as we walk: When UNC was founded in the late eighteenth century, it began with one building—my dorm, Old East. Only a few years after it opened, a student died unexpectedly and was buried on an empty tract of land not far from the then center of the campus. As the campus expanded, the university marked the perimeter of the cemetery with informational placards and a low rock wall built sometime in the early 1800s to separate it from the rest of the grounds.

“So this is how you’re going to help me understand my mother?”

Patricia huffs a bit as the path winds upward past an enormous crape myrtle. “I don’t know very much about your mother, Bree, so understanding is a tall order. But I know about root.”

“So the cemetery is where you’ll teach me about root?”

“It’s the starting point,” she repeats enigmatically. “The root of root, if you will.” She chuckles at her own joke, and I give up on pressing her.

The carved headstones we pass at the edge of the cemetery were made of polished, reflective granite. The engravings look freshly cut, even though they are ten, twenty, thirty years old. Some of them even have fresh flowers. Most grave markers are simple, flat stone squares with metal nameplates. Some are taller, solid rectangles atop stone slabs. There’s even a courtyard of mausoleums, for some rich family, probably. But as we get closer to the middle, the markers are getting older, changing shapes. Mildew-stained obelisks, thinner tombstones with two and three sets of names on them. Long names, births and deaths in the early 1900s and late 1800s.

Patricia walks us past older gray headstones onto a narrow path that leads to another section of graves. “The cemetery is managed by the town, and everyone buried here was associated with the university or town in one way or another.”

“Like deans and professors?”

“Mhm-hm,” she hums. “Originally, it was used to bury students who died while enrolled, and faculty. That’s the oldest section. The first was a young DiPhi boy buried in the late 1700s. Five more sections were added after that. A mix of faculty and staff, town philanthropists and donors, famous alumni and the like.”

We come to a stop at an ancient-looking stone wall that runs the width of the cemetery.

“Notice anything?”

“I thought you said no quizzes.” She tilts her head, her mouth folded in a secret smile, and it reminds me that Patricia holds all the cards here. And they’re cards I want.

I scan the way we’ve come. We’ve been walking on dirt paths, pounded flat and hard and made smooth over time by many feet. They serve a dual purpose: they silently direct visitors to avoid walking directly on any of the graves, but they also separate sections of the cemetery. Beyond the boundaries of the cemetery, cars whoosh by toward the football stadium, but other than that, the only sounds are birds and wind. The Bell Tower erupts in Westminster Quarters. When it ends, a lone bell tells us it’s two fifteen.

I stare at her, confused, but take another look at where we’ve stopped walking. On the other side over the stone wall is a grove. “There’s only a few stone markers here.” I point to a back corner, shaded by a low tree. “A few tombstones over there. It’s barely filled.”

“Oh, it’s filled. This wall marks where the segregation begins. All the Black folks are buried in these two sections.” She tips her head toward the grass beyond the wall.

My stomach twists at her words. This is not what I imagined therapy to be. This is not what anyone’s therapy looks like, I’m fairly positive. She wraps her shoulders in the shawl and continues.

“Some were enslaved folk owned by faculty and kept on campus to help build and maintain the school. Some were servants or freed folk after slavery ended in this part of the Confederacy.” She sighs, nodding her head at the grass over the wall. “That memorial over at the Arboretum is the pretty acknowledgment, the polite one. But the blood? The blood’s buried here.”

“Why aren’t there any…” I swallow, suddenly wanting nothing else but to run from this place—this place that feels too close to home, too horrifying.

“Almost all are unmarked. People used fieldstones or wooden crosses, whatever someone could afford, or was deemed worthy. Some graves still have a bit of yucca or periwinkle, or a tree you can tell was planted deliberately,” she says, pointing at plants scattered throughout the grass. “Families and community members did that, I suspect. In the eighties, folks used this section for football game parking, so who knows what was destroyed then. They did a preservation study not long ago using radar of some sort. Found almost five hundred unmarked graves in the ground in these two sections and the one on the other side of the wall, but a Medium could have told them that.” She smiles, a bit of canny mischief sparking in her eyes. She walks through an opening in the wall and steps gingerly into the grass, turning when she realizes that I’m not following. I’m staring at the earth beneath our feet.

“Five hundred?”

“Yep.”

I swallow. “Do I really have to walk on the grass? I could be walking right over someone’s grave.”

“You will be.” Patricia turns away with a smile. “But we’ll acknowledge them. Thank them.”

I huff and let loose a long breath, then follow her footsteps, imagining that maybe she knows where the graves are and has avoided them for us both. We stop at an unmarked section of grass.

“This is where two of my ancestors are buried,” Patricia says simply, as if she were just sharing where one could find a glass in a cupboard. This is where the cups are. Here’s where to find the mugs. She sits down cross-legged in her long skirt.

I instinctively step back, but she regards me with a raised brow. “Sit.”

I kneel carefully. The freshly mowed grass is warm and spiky on my bare legs. I sit cross-legged in front of her as she opens the velvet pouch she’d been carrying and sets out a few stones on the ground between us: a bright green one shaped like a small, gnarled fist; a purple-and-white stone with a few rocky points—amethyst, I think; and a smoky quartz. To my surprise, Patricia arranges a few other items in front of us, items I’d never thought to bring to a grave: a smaller pouch with a bit of fruit in it, a plate with cornbread, and an empty mug that she fills with tea.

“I don’t know who my ancestors are, past my great-grandmother anyway.”

Patricia shrugs. “Lots of Black folks in the States don’t know their people more than four, five generations back, don’t know names before the late 1800s—and why would they? We didn’t exactly inherit detailed family records when we were freed.” She keeps arranging her offerings, not looking in my direction as she does.

I’m filled with a sour sense of betrayal, akin to the feeling I felt looking up at the Order’s Wall. “I never even met my grandmother.”

Patricia’s head tilts toward me, her expression curious. “You never met your grandmother?”

I bristle. “No.”

“She died before you were born?”

“Yes.”

“No aunts on her side of the family? Great-aunts?”

“No.” Frustration sparks in me, like a match has struck my insides, turned them to fire. Suddenly, my skin feels too tight all over my body. The fine hairs on the back of my neck lift. My vision blurs. I don’t need to be reminded how alone I am. How lost.

“Bree, breathe.” She speaks softly, but her order is firm. “Take slow breaths in through your nose.” I hear Patricia speak, but her voice arrives from far away.

I do as she says until my heart slows down, but my throat is still the size of a straw. I have to clear it twice to get any words out. “So, what are we doing here?”

She smiles. “Do you trust me?”

I blink. “That’s usually what someone says when they’re about to do something weird to somebody else.”

She grins. “I can handle weird if you can.”

I think about all that’s happened in the last week of my life. “I can handle real weird.”

“Then we’ll proceed.” She draws herself up tall and folds her hands in her lap. “As you know, there is an invisible energy all around us, everywhere in the world, that only some people know about. Some of those people call it magic, some call it aether, some call it spirit, and we call it root. There is no single school of thought about this energy. Is it an element? A natural resource? I think it is both, but a practitioner in India or Nigeria or Ireland may not agree. The only universal truth about root is who—or what—can access it and how. The dead have the most access to root, and supernatural creatures have the next closest connection, but the living? The living must borrow, bargain for, or steal the ability to access and use this energy. Our people—Rootcrafters—borrow root temporarily, because we believe that energy is not for us to own.” She waves a hand over her stones and food. “We make offerings to our ancestors so that they will share root with us for a time. And then, after it’s returned, we thank them for being a bridge to its power. This is the unifying philosophy of our practice. Beyond that, families have their own variations, their own flavors, if you will. So it has always been, and so it is.”

“You said you don’t know how my family practiced.”

“I don’t. In your circumstance, it seems your family’s way is gone. All I can do is introduce you to the craft as my family understands it, using my way of sharing its truths.”

It makes sense, but… “What do you do with root?”

As Patricia looks at me, a soft, fuzzy warmth falls across my cheeks and nose, like sunlight uncovered. “Take my hands, and I’ll show you.”

Once I take her hands, there’s a heartbeat of sensation—her skin is warm, dry, and soft—before the world around us twists, then disappears.