Bloom Read online

  “Hey,” she said when he walked over.

  “Hi.”

  She sneezed and blew her nose, which was red at the end. A lot of her face was splotchy, because of the acne. He could tell she was self-conscious about it, because she kept resting her hand on her cheek, like she was trying to cover it up. He knew what it was like to feel different, to want to hide away some part of yourself. He liked how lively and intelligent her eyes were. He already knew she was smart. In math class, she answered more questions than almost anyone. He wondered why she’d come along today. Probably she just liked spending time with her dad.

  Maddox ambled over to greet her, and she dropped to her knees to pat the dog enthusiastically.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” she said, burying her hands in his fur. Maddox literally lapped up her praise, licking her face. Anaya grinned at Seth. “I’d love a dog, but—”

  As if on cue, she sneezed three times in a row.

  “Allergies,” he said.

  “Yep.” She stood and took a hit of her puffer, then looked out over the weed-infested fields. “Man, look at this stuff.”

  “You’re not alone,” Mr. Riggs was telling Mr. Antos. “I’ve had other calls. When did you first notice it?”

  Mr. Antos shrugged. “All this happened overnight.”

  Anaya’s father took a cloth measuring tape from his pocket and held it against one of the standing stalks of black grass. “Three foot four in, let’s say, twelve hours.” Mr. Riggs whistled softly.

  “That’s a lot, right?” Seth asked.

  “Sure is,” replied Mr. Riggs. “There are species of bamboo that grow three feet in twenty-four hours, but this is twice as fast.”

  “We have some in our yard that’s even taller,” Anaya said. “I saw it yesterday when I got home from school. This morning it was like we had a hedge.”

  “This isn’t something you’re familiar with?” Mr. Antos asked Mr. Riggs. “Something you’ve seen on your farm?”

  Anaya’s father shook his head. “I posted it on Plant ID this morning and I’m waiting to see if we get any matches.”

  Anaya grinned at Seth. “It’s a site for plant nerds. They post pictures of weird stuff from all over the world and ask if anyone knows what it is.”

  “People are usually pretty quick,” Mr. Riggs said. “Anyway, I’ll know more Monday when I talk to the Ministry.”

  Mr. Antos blew air from his cheeks and looked out at his fields. “Lucky I’ve got an extra hand.” He nodded at Seth.

  “Looks like you guys have got a good start on it,” Mr. Riggs commented. “You might want to spray.”

  “My customers expect herbicide-free,” Mr. Antos said.

  “I know it’s a tough call,” Mr. Riggs said, “but spraying could be your only chance. This stuff is aggressive. It might crowd out your entire crop.”

  Mr. Antos looked at Seth and said, “What do you think, Seth?”

  Seth blinked, wondering if Mr. Antos was seriously asking his opinion.

  “Well,” he began, “if it’s between something or nothing…”

  “A true pragmatist,” Mr. Antos said. “We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for coming by, Mike.”

  “No worries,” said Anaya’s father. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to take one of these guys back to the farm with me.”

  “Please, take it all,” Mr. Antos laughed. “But use my gloves. Seth already got cut.”

  “Here, I’ll do it,” said Seth. He grabbed it with both hands and yanked. It took two tries before the stalk ripped free, trailing soil-clumped roots like jellyfish tentacles. He handed it over to Mr. Riggs.

  “Thanks, Seth.”

  Mr. Riggs took hold of it carefully and gave it a shake. “Sheesh. Deep roots and a couple of rhizomes already coming off it.”

  “What are rhizomes?” Seth asked.

  Anaya explained: “Underground shoots the plant sends out to start a brand-new plant.”

  Seth heard Mr. Antos give a sigh. “Which means tomorrow we could have a whole new crop.”

  “See you Monday,” Anaya said to him with a backward wave as she returned to the truck.

  “Bye.”

  After the Riggses left, Seth finished hoeing with Mr. Antos, then went upstairs to take a shower. Water steamed around him. It felt good hitting his skin. He soaped his face, his chest, his long, skinny arms. He counted the small pink scars, which started at his wrists and were spaced every inch or so, all the way up the side of his arms to his shoulders. Twenty on each arm.

  Soon you’ll forget you ever had them.

  That’s what the surgeon had said, after the operation. He’d smiled when he said it, trying to be kind. Seth remembered that smile, those words.

  And the doctor was wrong.

  Seth had never forgotten them.

  * * *

  DRIVING TO THE experimental farm with Dad, Anaya saw the black grass everywhere. Growing from ditches alongside the road, stabbing up from lawns. Some people were already out with their mowers and Weedwhackers.

  “Sheesh,” said Dad, “this stuff is speedy.”

  Dad said a lot of things like sheesh, and wow, and hoo boy! He was a pretty quiet guy, but when he talked about plants, he got very excited and talked like everyone in the world was just as enthusiastic. Sometimes he referred to plants as “guys” or “dudes” and used words like sly or wondrous when describing them.

  Anaya kept glancing at the rearview mirror. In the bed of the pickup, the black grass slid around, its roots waving in the breeze like they were alive.

  “This is what you’d call an invasive species, right?” Anaya asked.

  “Oh yeah. I have a feeling this scoundrel’s going to cause a lot of grief on the island.”

  Anaya couldn’t help smiling. Scoundrel.

  “Seth seems like a nice kid,” Dad said.

  “Yeah.” On the way over to the Antos farm, she’d told her father about how she’d met Seth yesterday at school, and seen those scars on his wrists. She’d come because she liked helping out Dad, but also because she wanted to see Seth again. She didn’t have a crush on him or anything like that. For some reason, she just found him intriguing. “He seemed pretty happy, actually.”

  Maybe it was just seeing him outside with a hoe, instead of hunched up in a dark stairwell. And she got the feeling he was glad to see her, too, which was nice.

  Dad nodded. “He’s ended up in a good place. I like the Antoses.”

  The parking lot of the experimental farm was deserted when they pulled in. Dad grabbed the plant from the back of the truck, and they walked past the humble collection of buildings and greenhouses to the fields.

  “Well, I certainly don’t need to plant a trial plot,” Dad said.

  Everywhere Anaya looked, the black grass was already bristling up.

  “The good news,” Dad added with a chuckle, “is at least I found something that outcompetes that rotter over there.”

  He pointed. Anaya looked at a plot where small, boring green weeds were now impaled by the black grass.

  “What was in there?” she asked.

  “It was a bit like garlic mustard. Grows like crazy, and releases allomones.”

  “Allomones?” Sometimes Dad forgot that not everyone knew all the special plant words he did.

  “Yeah, it’s like chemical weapons. The garlic mustard wages warfare in the soil. It releases chemicals from its roots to keep anything else from growing. Basically, it poisons the soil for other plants.”

  “But not the black grass,” Anaya said.

  “No. Seemingly, the black stuff’s immune. It just outbullied the bully. One tough customer. Want to help me spray?”

  One of the things she liked best about hanging out with Dad was that he let her help. Even after she became allergic to everything, he didn�
��t treat her any differently.

  Still, whenever she worked outside with him, she always made sure she had her puffer and EpiPen handy, and that she wore sunglasses, and that she took her pills—a double dose of antihistamines today because the pollen count always spiked after a big rain. So far, she wasn’t doing too badly.

  She helped Dad stake out four separate plots of black grass. They sprayed the first plot with Roundup, the second with fluroxypyr, and the third with triclopyr, which Dad said killed pretty much everything. The last plot they left alone, so they could see how tall the grass would grow naturally.

  Afterward they went inside the laboratory and cleared space on a table for the black grass they’d taken from the Antos farm.

  “So, let’s take a good look at our friend here,” Dad said, adjusting a flex lamp.

  “What d’you think it is?” Anaya asked.

  “My guess is a species of phragmites.”

  Anaya heard it as Frag-mighties. “It sounds like some kind of superhero.”

  “Just about. There’s a strain that’s gotten into Ontario, wild grass, stuff grows ten feet high, almost impossible to get rid of. So what do you notice about this guy?”

  She liked the way he asked for her opinions. “Really thick, lots of roots. Those spikes are wicked. And the black color. There’s no other plant that color, is there?”

  “There’s stuff called black mondo grass—but it’s more purply. No, this stuff is truly black. Which means it can photosynthesize any wavelength of light. Which is pretty cool, right? This guy’s adaptable.”

  “So, if it’s not black mondo, or phragmites, what is this?”

  “No idea. It’s probably always been around; we’ve just never noticed it. But I think I’ll send this guy out for genetic testing.” He got up and started to prepare a specimen bag. “Someone else on Plant ID might’ve seen this by now. You mind opening up my laptop? I’m still logged in.”

  “Sure.”

  Dad had shown her the site plenty of times, and every time she was amazed how many freaky plants there were out there. She flipped open the laptop, and swallowed.

  “Dad?”

  He was labeling the bag. “Uh-huh?”

  “You’ve got over two hundred messages.”

  Before she could even start reading, three new messages scrolled onto the screen. Dad dropped the bag and sat down in his chair. He rolled the messages back to the beginning and clicked the first one. A picture of the black grass popped up.

  Seen it. Not Black Mondo grass. No idea what it is.

  “That’s from Vancouver,” Anaya said, reading over Dad’s shoulder.

  Click after click: more pictures of the black grass, more bewildered comments.

  “Portland, Oregon,” Dad murmured. “Little Rock, Arkansas.”

  Already four feet tall in my barley. Anyone else?

  Click.

  “New Orleans,” said Anaya, reading the locations. “Saint Lucia.”

  Click.

  Photos of black grass jutting up among banana plants.

  Click.

  Black grass rising from people’s gutters in Finland.

  Click.

  Black grass reaching skyward alongside the Great Wall of China.

  PETRA WOKE UP, EAGER to wash her face.

  During the big rain, she’d collected enough water to fill three plastic bottles. One and a half liters total. She kept them in the medicine cabinet, carefully labeled so no one would throw them out by accident.

  On her way to the bathroom, Petra glanced out the window at their front lawn, overgrown again with black grass. In the three days since it appeared, they’d mown it down a bunch of times, but it always came back. People couldn’t keep up with it. It killed lawn-mower blades. You needed a chain saw if it got too tall.

  Pretty much all anyone talked about now was the black grass. How it was crowding out the crops, how nothing killed it. You couldn’t go on your phone or turn on the TV without people talking about how it was showing up everywhere, and what was this stuff, anyway? So far, lots of guesses and no answers.

  In the bathroom, she stood in front of the mirror. Morning and night she’d been washing her face with the rainwater—just a little bit on a cotton ball. She didn’t want to waste it.

  It was stupid, but every time she put some on her skin, she felt like it was cleansing her, going into her pores and changing her for the better. Sometimes she even took a little sip. Just to let it sit in her mouth against her tongue, tasting it, and feeling the wetness of it, before swallowing. Like some magical elixir that would cure her.

  She’d asked her father if he could get it analyzed at the hospital, and he’d promised to send it to a lab in Vancouver. Petra hadn’t wanted to part with even the fifty milliliters in the specimen bottle. But whatever it was in that water, she wanted more.

  If they could make it, maybe she could get a lifetime supply! And it would change her life—maybe even save it.

  She opened the medicine cabinet and reached for one of her bottles. Her hand stopped halfway.

  “What the…”

  Squinting, she leaned closer.

  “Did you guys do anything to my water?” she shouted into the hallway.

  Mom showed up first, already in her RCMP uniform. “What is it?”

  “Look!”

  Petra pulled out one of the bottles and held it out to her. “There’s all this crud floating around.”

  Suspended in the now-murky water were three shriveled black peas, each with a tiny sprout curling out of it.

  “Huh,” Mom said.

  “Did you put anything inside?”

  “Of course not! When’s the last time you saw them?”

  “Last night! When I washed my face! And there was nothing in them. Look at this one!”

  Inside the second bottle was a skinny stem with two black leaves that looked like bat wings.

  “What’s going on?” Dad asked, appearing in the doorway in his bathrobe, hair still damp from the shower.

  “Her rainwater,” Mom said, showing him the two bottles.

  Dad shrugged. “Some seeds must’ve blown in when you were collecting it, Petra. They just germinated in the bottles.”

  “Overnight?”

  She saw Dad blink. “This happened in one night?”

  “Yeah. Nothing normal grows that fast!”

  Her thoughts started coming fast and blurry, like animals on a dark carousel. Her skin crawled. She’d been washing her face with this stuff—she’d even drunk a little of it! She grabbed the last bottle from the cabinet and looked closely. Inside bobbed two prickly black stalks, with wispy roots.

  She swallowed and turned to her parents. “This stuff looks exactly like the black grass.”

  * * *

  “SEE THAT, GROWING at the very top?” Mr. Antos said, pointing.

  Seth looked up. The grass was about eleven feet high now, and from the top grew a slightly thinner stem. From its branchlets dangled small, spiky black buds.

  “Those have got to be the flowers,” Mr. Antos told him. “Once they open, the wind spreads the pollen everywhere….” He shook his head. “A million seeds hit the soil, and that’ll finish the growing season for us.”

  “Are you going to try herbicide?” Seth asked.

  Mr. Antos shook his head. “No point. I was talking to the Drakes and Johannsens and they said none of the herbicides are working for them, not even the heavy-duty stuff.” He turned his face in all directions. “Wind’s nice and light today. I think I’ll burn it all down.”

  Seth blinked. “Are you allowed?”

  Mr. Antos raised an eyebrow and in a James Bond accent said, “I have a license to burn.”

  Seth laughed.

  “No, seriously,” Mr. Antos said. “I have a license for
my property. After the burn, we’ll overseed like crazy and see if we can crowd out the weeds that way. And then we might be able to get a late crop.” He turned to Seth with a grin. “So. You want to burn this stuff down with me?”

  “Yeah!”

  It was Wednesday after school, and he’d had a good day, mainly because Anaya had talked to him. He hadn’t known if she would, with other people around, but she’d actually sat with him on the stairs during morning break. He still wasn’t much of a talker, but she made up for it. They talked about the black grass a bit, and she told him about a book she was reading. He wondered if he’d made his first friend. He turned his face to the sun and closed his eyes.

  The day was still warm and Seth decided to take off his hoodie. It was the first time in a long time that he’d worn just a T-shirt in front of anyone. Mr. Antos’s eyes flicked to the scars lining his long, pale arms, but he didn’t look at Seth questioningly, just nodded at his overgrown field and said, “All right, let’s get to it.”

  The black grass was everywhere on the island now—except a few places, including the school playing field. Down by the marina, the big plot where they held the weekend market was okay, and the playground, too. Mr. Antos had said there were a few farms and grazing pastures that were untouched, no rhyme or reason to it.

  From the shed, Mr. Antos brought out two drip torches. They looked like small fire extinguishers, only they were filled with a mix of diesel and gasoline. He showed Seth how to hold and tilt one so fuel squirted out in a small, precise stream. Then he let Seth light the wick. Seth held the torch in his hand nervously.

  “It’s pretty straightforward,” Mr. Antos said. “We’ll start here and work in opposite directions around the whole perimeter. We’ll meet up at the far side. Just keep moving, laying down a line at the base of the grass. Nice steady pace.”

  Seth nodded and started walking. He wasn’t sure the black grass was catching at all. When he glanced back, he only saw little licks of flame, and some smoke, curling from the base of the stalks.