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On Monday morning, Rose found Lowell in the locker bay at school, and the first thing she did was take his hands in hers and check his palms for scars and scratches. But Lowell was ticklish and squirmed away. “Uh, hello to you, too,” he said. “Can I ask what you’re doing?”

Rose looked up at him, scanning his forehead, too, but there was nothing unusual about it. “I thought maybe she’d cut you or something,” she said.

“What?”

“Heather, in the hedge maze.”

Lowell shut his locker. “You thought she cut me? Wait, you saw us in the maze?”

The way he asked it made it sound like she was spying on him, and she dismissed the accusation with a flick of her wrist. “Briefly. I kinda got lost in there. It looked like she was doing something to you.”

“Doing something to me?” Lowell repeated, a sly smirk on his face.

Rose didn’t want to say it had looked like some freaky satanic ritual, not when he was already weirded out that she’d been spying on him.

“Hey, Lowell,” said a girl in the hall. Rose recognized her from one of her classes. Nice clothes, shiny black hair, pretty smile, and right now it was aimed at Lowell.

But the smile did not shoot him dead. In fact, Lowell took it in stride and lobbed one right back. “Hi, Natalie,” he said. He started heading toward his class, Rose beside him, and as they walked, she noticed that the random greeting from Natalie wasn’t an isolated incident. Lowell caught the glance of nearly everyone they passed.

“It’s so funny that you saw me and Heather together and your first thought was that she was mutilating me, and not that, I don’t know, maybe we were just making out.” He didn’t exactly say that he was offended. But it was implied. “You think it’s so impossible for a girl like Heather to be interested in a guy like me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Lowell stopped in the middle of the hallway to fully face Rose, blasting her with a disarming smile. “No, it’s okay, I used to think that, too,” he said. “But people change.”

He did not mean Heather. As Rose looked at Lowell now, it struck her, in a slow but then undeniable way, that maybe she was wrong about all this. Maybe Heather was interested in Lowell, because quite suddenly, and without Rose having realized what was happening, Lowell looked good.

Rose had been so busy looking for stupid demonic markings on him earlier that she’d failed to see what was right in front of her. Hills and craters had once crowded Lowell’s forehead, but now the mountainous terrain had been razed into a smooth plain. His hair bounced with fat curls, no longer weighed down with greasiness. And his jaw cut a defined line, centered by a chin much squarer than Rose remembered. Behind his glasses, the eyes that usually glazed over with a nervous anxiety now shone bright with confidence, with a zest for life she’d never seen in him before.

People did change. How could she not have noticed just how much?

Lowell took up his walk to class again, and there was no denying the pep in his step. The way he strutted down the halls now. “The workouts were bound to pay off sooner or later,” he said. “And they finally have. Which got Heather Hargrove to notice me. Which got the rest of the school to notice me.”

“Sounds like you got everything you ever wanted,” Rose said.

Lowell turned to her, grin at full wattage. “I never knew what it could be like, Rose. What life is like when you’re perfect.” He made a fist, flexing the muscles in his forearm like a physical exclamation point.

But Rose put a hand over his arm. He didn’t have to show off for her. “Lowell, you were always perfect.”

He pulled his arm away and scoffed. He still smiled, but for the first time today, the light behind his eyes seemed to dim. “You know that isn’t true,” he said.

The bell rang, which was just as well, because Lowell was already heading down the hall without Rose.

After school, Rose willfully ignored what her father had said about staying away from Hart by going straight to his house. She’d promised she’d help transplant the black-eyed Susans he was growing in his greenhouse to the Abundance Garden. But what she really wanted to do was explore another part of the garden. As she and Hart walked through the French doors of the Hargrove kitchen and down the stone terrace steps, she said, “I never asked you where you were, the morning after the party. You weren’t in your room when I woke up.”

“It’s always a mess after a party,” Hart said, slipping gardening gloves on. “I wanted to get a head start cleaning.”

Rose nodded, and treaded slowly into this next part. “When I couldn’t find you, I went looking for you in the hedge maze. I found Heather there.”

Hart kept pulling his glove on, even though his fingers couldn’t go any deeper. “Where?” he asked.

“In the maze.”

“Where in the maze?”

“By the center. I think it’s the center. There was a door.”

Though they were nearly at the greenhouse, Hart stopped and turned to Rose. “You went through the door?”

Rose opened her mouth to respond, but ended up just staring at him for a beat. He wasn’t angry, hadn’t said anything in an aggressive way, and yet she could tell he was agitated. “ No ,” she said pointedly. “I don’t know what Heather was doing, but she looked pretty upset. And before she noticed me there… it sounded like she was praying.”

A crease wedged itself between Hart’s eyebrows, and he rubbed a thumb into the spot to smooth it out. “What did you hear her say?”

“She said she wanted to forget.” Rose watched Hart closely, seeing if she could gauge anything from his reaction. If this made any more sense to him than it did to her.

But he looked genuinely baffled. “You sure she said forget ?”

“Yes,” Rose answered. “Do you know what she was talking about?”

“I have no idea.” Hart took a step toward the greenhouse and yanked the door open. And though it seemed like he was done with the conversation, Rose could see the tension all over him. He seemed confused by what Heather had been doing, but not in the same way Rose was.

It hit her, suddenly, that Hart was keeping something from her. She saw it in how his shoulder blades stiffened as he bent over the seed tray of black-eyed Susans on his workbench. But then Rose realized that if Hart was tense, it wasn’t because of what they’d just been talking about. It was due to what he was looking at. There was something wrong. Rose didn’t spot it at first, but then, she didn’t have the green thumb that Hart did. He saw it immediately.

He zeroed in on a single leaf sprouting from a seedling in the center of the tray. He caressed it, his eyebrows knitting together, and then he plucked the leaf off. He handed it to Rose, and then she felt it herself: Its texture was all wrong—tough and crisp when it should have been soft as skin. And it’d started to curl along the edge. Hart didn’t say anything, but Rose could sense his agitation, his whole body tensing as he bent closer to inspect the rest of the plants. “How did this happen?” he whispered.

Now that Rose looked closer, she could see what he was talking about. The discoloration close to the base of some of the stems, a yellowing sallowness, on the verge of turning brown. Rot.

“I did everything right,” Hart said.

It was only when Rose looked away from the seedlings and at Hart’s face that she saw how glassy his eyes had become. She reached to touch his arm, but he twisted away, raking a hand through his hair. “The temperature was right, the soil—I mixed it perfectly.”

“It’s okay, Hart.”

He made a fist around one of the stems and snatched it, ripping all the soil out of the tray with it. Rose could practically see his stomach drop. “Look at the roots,” he said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s okay,” Rose said again.

“No, it’s not. I was supposed to put them in the ground today. There’s an order to this. You get the soil right and you get the water right and you get the temperature right and you’re supposed to get the right results—that’s the promise. That’s the cycle. But look at these.” He wrung another seedling out of the tray. Rose had never seen him handle the plants so indelicately. “They’re diseased.” His voice caught on the word, making it come out choked and high-pitched.

“Hart,” Rose said, trying to make her own voice comforting, a balm. But it didn’t seem to soothe him at all. He grabbed the whole tray and breezed through the door, Rose following him around the back of the greenhouse. Hart pulled each seedling out of the tray and tossed them into the garbage bin.

He repeated the same words after tossing each seedling. “I did everything right,” he said. “I did everything right.” When the tray was empty, he tossed it on the pile too, and he looked down at the useless heap, defeated. “They weren’t supposed to die,” he said. He didn’t look at Rose when he said it. It almost seemed like he couldn’t meet her eyes at all, and it made Rose’s stomach twist, seeing him so upset. She drew Hart into a hug and he finally let her, burying his face in the crook of her neck. “They weren’t supposed to die, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Rose rubbed his back. She didn’t know what else to do.

“They weren’t supposed to die.”

“I know,” Rose said. She had a view of the pool from here, and she could see Heather on a chaise, lowering her sunglasses to watch them.