But then, her father rarely noticed anything before his second cup of coffee.
“Why are you up?” she asked, a slight quaver in her voice.
He groaned. “I have to go open the store. Maddie needed the day off.”
“Sure,” Laurel said absently, trying not to see this change in the normal routine as some kind of bad omen.
He started to pull his arm away, then stopped and sniffed the air by her shoulder. Laurel froze. “You smell nice. You should wear that perfume more often.”
Laurel nodded, praying her eyes weren’t popping out of her head, and unwound herself from her dad’s embrace. She hurried to pick up the cordless phone and then headed up the stairs.
In her room, she stared at the phone for a long time before her fingers managed to dial David’s number. He picked up after the first ring. “Hello?”
“Hey,” she said quickly, forcing herself not to hang up.
“Laurel. Hey! What’s up?”
The seconds stretched into silence.
“Laurel?”
“Yeah?”
“You did call me.”
More silence.
“Can I come over?” she blurted.
“Um, sure. When?”
“Right now?”
SIX
A FEW MINUTES LATER, LAUREL HAD HER CHAIR WEDGED under the doorknob again. She lifted the front of her shirt and pulled the end of one of the long white-and-blue strips free from the pink scarf. It looked so harmless, sitting there in her hand. She could almost forget it was attached to her back. She picked up her mother’s nail scissors and studied the end of the petal. She probably didn’t need too big of a piece. She eyed it again and selected a small curve at the ruffled tip.
She braced herself as she moved the shiny scissors into position. She wanted to close her eyes, but she was afraid she’d do even more damage that way. She counted silently. One, two, three!..I meant to count to five. After mentally calling herself a wimp, she positioned the scissors again. One, two, three, four, five! She pressed down and the scissors cut cleanly, flipping a small piece of white onto her bedspread. Laurel gasped and hopped up and down for a few seconds until the sting eased and she looked down at the cut edge. It wasn’t bleeding, but it oozed a little bit of clear liquid. Laurel blotted the liquid away with a towel before smoothing the end back into the scarf. Then she wrapped the small white piece in a tissue and tucked it carefully into her pocket.
She bounced down the stairs trying to look as casual as possible. As she breezed by her mom and dad sitting at the table eating breakfast she said, “I’m going to David’s.”
“Hold it,” her dad said.
Laurel stopped walking, but she didn’t turn around.
“How about, ‘May I go to David’s?’”
Laurel turned with a forced smile on her face. “May I go to David’s?”
His eyes didn’t even leave the paper as he lifted his coffee to his mouth. “Sure. Have fun.”
Laurel made her feet walk at a normal pace to the door, but as soon as it shut behind her, she ran to her bike and kicked off on her way. It was only a few blocks to David’s, and soon Laurel was leaning her bike up against his garage. She stood on his door-mat, focused on the bright red front door, and rang the doorbell before she could convince herself to turn tail and run home. She held her breath as she heard footsteps and the door opened.
It was David’s mother. Laurel tried to hide the surprise on her face — after all, it was Saturday, and Laurel should have expected her to be home. But it was only the second time Laurel had met her. She was wearing a cute red tank top and jeans and her long, almost-black hair was loose and tumbling down her back in waves. She was the most unmotherly mom Laurel had ever met. In a good way.
“Laurel, how nice to see you.”
“Hi,” Laurel said nervously, then just stood there.
Luckily David came around the corner. “Hey,” he said with a broad smile. “Come on back.” He gestured Laurel down the hall. “Laurel needs a little help with some biology homework,” he explained to his mother. “We’ll just be in my room.”
David’s mom smiled at them both. “Do you need anything? A snack or something?”
He shook his head. “Just some quiet. It’s a pretty intense assignment.”
“I’ll leave you alone, then.”
The forest-green door to David’s bedroom stood ajar; with a sweep of his arm, David ushered Laurel in. He bent down to pull out his biology binder and, after glancing down the hall to make sure his mom wasn’t near, swung the door closed.
Laurel stared at the closed door. She’d been in his bedroom before, but he’d never closed the door. She noticed for the first time that his doorknob didn’t have a lock. “Your mom wouldn’t, like, listen at the door, would she?” Laurel asked, feeling silly even as the question escaped her mouth.
David snorted. “Never. I’ve earned a lot of privacy by not asking why a lot of my mom’s dates don’t leave until morning. I stay out of Mom’s personal business; she stays out of mine.”
Laurel laughed, a bit of her nervousness melting away now that she was actually here.
David pointed her to the bed and pulled up a chair for himself. “So?” he said after a few seconds.
It was now or never. “Actually, I was hoping you might look at something under your microscope for me.”
Confusion flashed across David’s face. “My microscope?”
“You said you had a really good one.”
He recovered quickly. “Uh, okay. Yeah, sure.”
Laurel dug in her pocket and pulled out the tissue. “Could you tell me what this is?”
He took the tissue, unwrapped it carefully, and looked down at the small white fragment. “It looks like a piece of a flower petal.”
Laurel forced herself not to roll her eyes. “Could you look at it under your microscope?”
“Sure.” He turned to a long table covered with various pieces of equipment — a few of which Laurel recognized from the bio lab. A very few. He pulled a gray cover off a shiny black microscope and grabbed a slide from a box of the small glass panes separated by sheets of thin tissue paper. “Can I cut this?” he asked, looking over at her.
Laurel shuddered, remembering cutting it off of herself less than half an hour earlier, and nodded. “It’s all yours.”
David cut a tiny piece and laid it on a slide, added a yellow solution, and dropped a cover slip over the top. He clipped the slide under the lens and fiddled with the dials as he peered into the eyepiece. The minutes passed slowly as he adjusted more dials and moved the slide around, looking at it from different angles. Finally he leaned back. “All I can really tell you for certain is that it’s a piece of a plant and the cells are very active, which means it’s growing. Flowering, I assume from the color.”
“A piece of a plant? Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” he said, looking back through the eyepiece.
“It’s not part of an…animal?”
“Uh-uh. No way.”
“How can you tell?”
He flipped through a few preprepared and labeled slides in another box. He selected one with a pinkish blob on it and went back through the process of focusing the microscope. “Come here,” he said, standing and gesturing to his chair.
She took his place and leaned tentatively forward over the microscope.
“It’s not going to bite you,” he said with laugh. “Lean in close.”
She did and opened her eyes to a pink world shot through with maroon lines and dots. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”