Last August, she swallowed apple seeds behind the shower block and didn’t deny it when she was caught.
She was obsessed with HTML colour codes called hex triplets, and we rolled those across our tongues to try and taste the witchcraft. Soil up to our elbows, creating earth angels in the dust, listing our favourite colours.
They say that when you grow up you shouldn’t have things like favourite colours because there are more important things in life. But that is bullshit. Lily and I had competitions, reciting shades off by heart: Light Sea Green #20B2AA
Medium Orchid #BA55D3
Olive Drab #6B8E23
Thistle #D8BFD8
Seashell #FFF5EE
Burly Wood #DEB887
Tomato #FF6347
Ghost White #F8F8FF
We spat colours into the woods so the trees could swallow them.
We planned to paint the world.
And now we don’t know where she’s gone.
We look for her in the undergrowth, and down by the stream. We scan the newspaper she used to love, in case she’s somehow made the headlines. While flicking through, the ink staining our fingertips, I remember the times we’d press flowers between the pages of a book of fables, trying to guess the type of tree it was made from. Pressing ourselves between the stories.
Ivy steals Madame Honey’s mobile phone and we try to find Lily on the Internet, but we don’t know her last name, and time and time again search engines simply show us the flowers she is named after.
But Lily isn’t just a flower. Lily is our friend.
If Jack had taken those magic beans and planted them inside himself, he could have become one of us. He could have found himself in the headlines for different reasons, plastered to the side of Lily’s tent, where she used to stick all the important news.
A doctor in Beijing has found a dandelion growing inside the ear canal of a sixteen-month-old girl. It had partially flowered, and was said to be very itchy. A Russian man, suspected of having cancer, was found to have a small fir tree growing inside his left lung. When they took it out, he took it home.
These are our people.
Once, in Spain, a lily was found growing from the heart of a boy who couldn’t read.
We have always tumbled out of newspapers and myth.
Hyacinths flowered from the blood of Apollo.
Carnations bloomed from the tears of Mary.
Snowdrops are said to be the hands of the dead.
You have to find us between the lines.
How strange they think we are.
Madame Honey passes out chalk, crayons and felt-tip pens.
‘I want you all to sit and draw for thirty minutes,’ she says.
‘Draw what?’ Clover scowls, her hair now peppered with flowers.
‘Whatever comes to mind,’ Madame Honey beams. ‘No conferring.’
So, we pick up some colours and we all draw Lily.
Sleeping Lily.
Dancing Lily.
Shouting Lily.
Tiger Lily.
Lily climbing up a beanstalk, her hair blending with the clouds.
Lily locked up in a tower.
Lily talking with the trees.
Lily once told me that trees communicate underground. That they share food via symbiosis and don’t tell humans that they’re doing it.
‘You just think you’re looking at a forest, when you look at a forest,’ Lily said. ‘But that’s not it, not really. The trees are talking. You can’t see it, but they’re talking. Forests aren’t terrifying places. They just speak a different language.’
Forest Green #228B22
‘Come on, Fern,’ Jasmine nudges me. ‘You’re the storyteller. Where do you think Lily is?’
Well. Once upon a time, a king and queen were trying to have a baby. They tried for a long time, but each time the baby died. Then, many years later, the queen fell pregnant again. This time, she felt sure that things were different. She craved food she’d never tasted before: pickled seaweed, sour radishes, honeycomb and even flowers. One of the flowers the queen loved to eat was called the Rampion Bellflower, also known as the Rapunzel. It didn’t grow anywhere inside the palace grounds. It grew just beyond, in a secluded patch of earth, over the palace walls.
Every night, the queen begged the king to climb over the wall at the edge of the garden, to pick the Rapunzel flowers glowing under the moon. So he did. He carried them home piled on top of his crown. The queen chewed them as the sun rose, and brewed some petals in her tea.
One night, when the king was out collecting the flowers, a fairy appeared.
‘Those are my flowers,’ said the fairy.
‘But I am the king,’ said the king. ‘And I own everything in this land. Besides, my pregnant wife craves them.’
‘Then you may take the flowers but, in exchange, you must give me a gift.’
‘What sort of gift?’
‘You must give me your child.’
‘Ha!’ snorted the king. ‘Come and collect her when she’s born, if you think you’re brave enough.’
So the fairy did. And the king discovered he was bound by magic to give her his child. The child was named Rapunzel, and the fairy locked her in a tower, for she was jealous of her hair. It grew long like vine and she braided it with bracken. She hung it out of the high windows for everyone to see. Her genes mixed with the flowers her mother had consumed. Part girl. Part plant. Raised up above the world …
‘Are you saying that Lily has been stolen by a fairy?’ Poppy asks, sipping Miracle-Gro.
‘There’s no such thing as fairies,’ Ivy spits. ‘Don’t be stupid. The government’s probably taken her away. I bet they’ve put her in isolation. For experiments.’
‘We don’t know that!’
‘Oh, yeah? Well, where do you think she’s gone then, huh? Where exactly did she go?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps she ran away.’
Lily was not a wallflower.
I always thought of her as a waterwheel plant, a carnivorous green that could breathe underwater, propelled through the waves. A water lily. A plant like the Aldrovanda, which doesn’t have roots. It’s free-floating and traps whatever gets in its way, like a Venus Flytrap.
Lily was like that. Lily took no shit.
At the end of each summer, when the first leaves would fall, and they’d come at us with pliers for cuttings, Lily never went quietly.
‘It’s not OK, Fern,’ she yelled, as they grabbed her by the wrists. ‘It’s not OK for them to do this. It’s not OK, it’s not OK, it’s not OK.’
The first few weeks at Camp are always the easiest. We catch up, we let them measure us. We accept the Miracle-Gro and drink as much water as they put in front of us, and we let ourselves blossom in the sun. Here, we don’t have to hide. No one’s pointing at us in the street; no one’s refusing to serve us at the supermarket. Here our differences can be prized, noticed and admired.
Ivy, all six foot seven of her.
Poppy and her hypnotic eyes.
Rose with her plants flowering in her throat.
Clover with her good luck vines sprouting out from her chest.
Jasmine with her sea-green skin that doesn’t fade in winter.
And Heath, who embraces his pale-pink flowers. They go by the name of Erica. He calls them the other half of his soul.