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By Root 1175 0

to Sage Messner’s to see the greenhouse. Sage and Clary had been fussing over her and Hallie for over an hour, giving them lemonade with chlorophyll—the greenest beverage she had ever seen in her life, but it turned out to be pretty good—and chocolate brownies. Then Sage had shown them the guest bedrooms in the house, where she told them they could stay whenever they wanted. When she had shared the bedrooms with them, it was like when Mom and Dad had taken them last summer to Mount Vernon in Virginia, where George Washington had lived, and they had been shown his bedroom: Sage’s enthusiasm was just about off-the-charts crazy as she went on and on about some amazing herbalist who had lived in the house before her. Garnet had half-expected the bedroom doorway to have a red velvet rope in front of it. Consequently, she had been a little relieved when Reseda had taken just her and her sister out here to the greenhouse, leaving Sage in the kitchen to make them yet another snack.

“And this is memoria,” Reseda was saying, running the tips of her fingers gently along the purplish leaves of the plant. The memoria was about five inches high, the leaves the size of her thumb and roughly the shape of the spade on a playing card. There were seven of the plants side by side in small terra-cotta vases.

“Feel the leaves,” she added, and so Garnet did and then Hallie followed.

“It feels like puppy fur,” Hallie said, and Garnet thought this was the perfect description. Indeed, there was a light down on the leaves that felt like it should have been the coat on a cute little animal, not a plant. Garnet was wearing a small silver bracelet that resembled ivy around her wrist—Reseda had given it to her a few minutes ago—and Garnet noticed it once more when she gazed down at her fingertips against the memoria. She loved the bracelet as much as she had loved any jewelry she’d ever been given—even more, she realized, than the unicorn choker her parents had gotten her at Disney World just about two years ago now. It felt like a more adult piece of jewelry. Hallie had been given a bracelet, too, also silver, though the design on hers looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Garnet could tell that Hallie appreciated her gift as well.

“What do you do with it?” Garnet asked Reseda, referring to the memoria.

“It’s a healing herb. Medicinal.”

“What does it cure?” her sister wondered.

Reseda smiled at the two of them. She was wearing a suede duster, unbuttoned and open, that fell below her knees and blue jeans that clung to her legs. She really didn’t need the coat because the greenhouse was heated and there were steamers hard at work in two of the corners. The glass there had filmed over with droplets of water. But it wasn’t a very heavy jacket, and she looked elegant in it: Garnet liked the way it billowed around her like a sail as she walked. “Bad dreams,” she said simply and then, after a moment, added, “And bad memories.” Then she walked beside the long table and paused at another plant, beckoning for the twins to follow. “This one is despairium,” she said, and for a second Garnet presumed the long tendrils were dead because they were as black as the moldering coal that sat in a dank corner of their basement. But apparently they weren’t. “I don’t want you to touch it,” Reseda said. “But have you ever felt shrimp? The stems here feel just like cooked shrimp, except they leave a resin on your skin that is a bit like poison ivy. Only worse. It lasts considerably longer. That’s why you shouldn’t touch it with your bare hands.”

“Then why does Mrs. Messner grow it?” Hallie asked.

“If you know how to harvest a pinch and steep it in tea—with a little honey and a little lemon—it can give a person a new perspective on life. It can cause a person to see things, well, differently. And some of us like to bake with it. Anise, for example, uses it.”

“Anise is always baking us stuff.”

“Is she now?”

“Uh-huh. She even labels the treats. Puts our names on them.”

Reseda nodded, a little pensive. “She just arrived.”

“You mean here at Mrs. Messner’s?”

“That’s right.