“That.”
The flower I pinned to the wall is growing. Even after what I’ve seen the last few days in the closets, it’s alarming to watch a small white tulip grow to the size of my entire body in under five minutes.
“I came in here with one earlier,” Astrid says. Usually I am the one who sneaks into her room, not the other way around. I like being on this side of things. “Nothing. And now you’re here. And look at what happens. It’s you. You do this.”
“I bet there is some special power to us being together. When the girls get back, we’ll see how much bigger it can get.”
“I bet you can do even more,” Astrid says.
I touch the stem, and the whole thing shivers and more petals sprout so that the bloom widens, becomes more spectacular. Astrid smiles and touches the tulip, but it does nothing under her hand. It stays large and changed from the closet, but nothing extra happens.
Maybe it is me.
Maybe.
“It’s okay to have something the rest of us don’t have,” Astrid says. “We may look surprised, but we’re not.” She doesn’t seem defeated like Marla did earlier or angry like Eleanor. She is Astrid—gentle and distracted by beautiful things and wise but totally unaware of it.
But the thing is, even though I think maybe she’s right, I don’t feel powerful at all. I feel the opposite. Small. Awed. Drowning in awesomeness. I touch the stem of the huge tulip and it twists like a corkscrew. It grows like a vine all over the room, more and more tulips shooting out of the one stem.
I want to tell her about Marla and the magic she found in Astrid’s closet, but I know I’m not supposed to. Keeping Marla’s secret is the least I can do for her right now.
Astrid puts her palm over my hand and holds it to one of the flowers. The petals all open and close in unison. Something like a song comes out. Like a music box or the handbells that they use in church.
It’s so incredible that I cry. Choking tears that Astrid tries to squeeze out of me with a massive bear hug, but I can’t stop. It’s so astonishing my body can’t handle it.
It feels like we are inside a flower. Inside a singing flower that I am somehow in charge of, that I made sing.
“How’d you come up with that?” Astrid says. She’s crying too. It must be too pretty for either of us to manage.
“I didn’t.”
“You have a spark,” Astrid says, all wise and serious, and I think someday she’ll be one of those people who sits on mountaintops with their legs crossed and tells everyone else the secrets of life. “Eleanor knows it too,” she says. She looks at me hard, like she’s trying to outstare the part of me that thinks Eleanor hates me, finds me insignificant, wishes I weren’t her sister. “It’s hard for her,” she concludes, and that’s all she’s going to say on the subject.
The petals grow larger, thicker, the song a little louder, and for a moment I feel a ping of terror that they could suffocate us, but Astrid’s body doesn’t hiccup with fear, and I know if there were a reason to be scared, she’d let me know.
I like the feeling of the petals. They are sturdy and soft at the same time. I wrap myself in one of them, and Astrid does the same. I feel safe and protected for the first time ever in the New Hampshire house.
“Can we stay in here all day?” I say. “What else can we bring in here?”
“It’s better than the world out there,” Astrid says.
“It is.” I unwrap myself and grab another silky-smooth curved triangle. Decide to hoist myself up, up, up, and see what happens. The petal smells perfect.
The song shifts a little, quiets and complicates itself, the different blooms singing different notes.
I grab on to one of the lower-hanging petals. It’s hard to climb. It swings a little when I shimmy. Every inch I travel, the farther away all our problems are. If I climb to the top, maybe I’ll be more like LilyLee—small and light and kind of clueless. I wouldn’t mind not knowing some things, come to think of it.
All that time wanting to know all the secrets, and now I wish I knew less.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Astrid calls out. She’s laughing, and I tell her to grab on and climb up with me. I wait while she tries, but she can’t seem to get a grip. When I grab the petals they help me, but when she does, they reject her.
“It’s not hard,” I say, swinging a few petals farther up.