A Kiss Is the Secret

by Amy Laurens

  (Also, I did have some sense of clubbing decorum, enough to know that it requisited rather a lot more skin.)

  I stepped through the doorway into a haze of smoke that didn’t smell entirely like cigarettes and wafted it impatiently from my face. A futile attempt, since there was ample more smoke waiting to take its place, but I felt the need to do it anyway in an attempt to delineate my personal space.

  Vincent was sitting at the bar on a stool, pale hair strobing from lilac to sky to viridian courtesy of the dance floor’s lighting, mid-conversation with the pretty brunette on his left.

  I couldn’t hear what they were saying until I was practically on top of them, such was the volume around me—some conversational chatter (I assumed), but largely the contribution of the over-enthusiastic bass line on the noise I supposed might generously pass for music.

  Honestly, the whole thing put me in a grouchy frame of mind, exacerbating the thing I’d been trying diligently to ignore since moving here: that in this city, at this university, out of the way of all things rural and most things green, my mood and mental health had been gradually declining.

  “So,” I said, taking the seat on Vincent’s other side without a care for the fact that I was interrupting his conversation. “Tell me why I’m here?”

  With a closing nod to his prior companion, Vincent swivelled to me and smiled. In this lighting, his eyes may as well have been black. “I brought you something,” he said.

  “Oh?” My eyebrow arched, and even I wasn’t sure if it was contempt or curiosity.

  He retrieved a brown paper bag that had been sitting at his feet, lifting it gently onto the bar.

  The brunette on his other side had gone back to her drink happily enough when I’d interrupted, but now she—like me, though I was loathe to admit it—leaned a little toward Vincent, the promise of mystery luring us in.

  With two careful hands, Vincent withdrew a plant from the bag.

  Brunette sniffed inaudibly in the noise and turned back to her vibrant blue cocktail.

  I, on the other hand, froze.

  He knew, of course, about my penchant for plants; we’d discussed the strange coincidence of our mothers’ both having spent time at the convent, had debated back and forth in the moonlight the meaning of our mothers’ tales of the nuns’ strange abilities.

  I’d never once, though, told him that I had inherited those abilities.

  And now he showed up, out of the infinite blue, in the last place I desired to be, with a potted aloe.

  My mouth wrinkled in disgust and I pushed the pot—lapis-glazed ceramic—back at him. “No,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He smiled gently. “You should take it,” he said. “I think it will help.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I don’t need help.”

  “Of course not,” he said, with that same gentle smile.

  Uncharacteristically, I had the urge to punch his face. I stood, attempting to siphon off some of my sudden excess of energy. My jaw twitched.

  Vincent leaned back casually, tipping his head to rest on his hand, elbow propped on the bar by the paper bag. “I still love you, you know.”

  The thump-thump-thump of the bass was suddenly and implausibly drowned out by my heartbeat. I snatched up the plant. “Thanks.”

  Aloe cradled in the crook of one arm, I strode from the den of smoke and stupidity, intending never to see him again.

  Fate, of course, had other plans—and other plants, for they began turning up in the dorm floor’s mailbox with alarming regularity, until the entire third floor knew me as Plant Girl, or, in their less generous moments, Pothead. Two months on with the year’s finals fast approaching, my little room was fairly overflowing with them—but no matter how much I railed against Vincent’s stubborn persistence, no matter how the rest of the student body snickered, I couldn’t bring myself to throw a single one away.

  It goes without saying that, in the dim, dry confines of my dorm room, the plants nonetheless flourished. A spider plant now larger than my head hung from the roof above the little desk, striated leaves casting long, slatted shadows on the floor. A collection of cacti covered the bookcase, hiding the spines of the books with their own dazzling array of spines and orange flowers. Air plants colonised the wall over my bed; a row of snake plants lined the splash back behind my tiny kitchenette sink; trailing philodendrons covered the small windowsill. The piece de resistance was a ficus tree in a pot larger than my desk chair, which had taken three students to haul from the mail area to my room. I didn’t know what to make of them.

  Mostly, I ignored the plants. Tried to pretend that they were there by my invitation, that their presence was meaningless apart from some air-purifying decoration that made my room seem less like a prison cell and more like a place of residence. Tried to pretend that my correlative boost in mood and health was coincidence, a result of my becoming more comfortable and familiar with my new place of study.

  Never once did I attempt to help their growth. It simply wasn’t worth the risk.

  They did keep growing though, and despite periods of neglect—particularly when the exams did roll around again—not a one of them ever sickened, let alone died.

  It was the last day of the schooling year that things changed. I had finally come to terms with the fact that I would be required to pack up my room and take everything home for the holidays, but had yet to devise a means both plausible and practical of transporting my miniature forest home. The little gardenia bush, the most recent addition, was flowering away on my desk, perfuming the air with its light, sweet floral fragrance, and between the greenery and my suitcases it appeared for all the world as though I’d decided to take a jaunty holiday in a rainforest.

  But I had to catch the train home, and there was simply no feasible way to manage bringing all the plants with me.

  I tried to pretend it didn’t matter—but as I collected my diary with the train tickets off my desk and prepared to leave, my gaze fell on the ridiculous ad for the club opening that Vincent had sent me a couple of months ago, tucked into the frame of the corkboard above the desk. The magenta lips were as lurid as ever, a beacon in the dim lighting of the room with its insufficient lightbulb.

  I sighed. It did matter, and I would miss the little plants he had sent me more than I cared to say.

  Luck, however, was on my side, for at that precise moment, there was a gentle knock at the door.

  I placed my diary back down on the desk, dropped the suitcase, and headed to the door, gently but absently brushing back the fronds of the pothos plant that were threatening to encroach on the door space.

  “Hello?”

  The woman who stood in front of me was barely familiar, another student from my biology classes whose curly bleached hair and ready smile saw her often in the centre of friendly, admiring attention.

  Clee-something. Cleotha, that was it.

  “Hi.” Cleotha flashed me her smile, and I pretended to regard her with something other than detachment. “How are you getting home?”

  “Train,” I said simply, which bothered her not in the slightest, for everyone on my floor was well acquainted by now with my verbal brevity.

  “How are you managing the pots?”

  I shrugged a shoulder. “Uncertain at present.”

  Her smile broadened to a grin. Briefly, I wondered what such an expression might look like on me. “I’ll take them,” she said.

  I raised my eyebrows, leaning against the wooden doorframe.

  “You live in West Caymare, right?”

  I nodded.

  “My boyfriend is in Langbrinx, and I’m heading there for Christmas. I can bring your plants.”

  I scrutinised her face for any sign of teasing—but there was none to be found. The offer, as far as I could tell, was genuine. I smiled back. “Thank you,” I said. “I would appreciate that. A lot.”

  Cleotha grinned again, teeth white against the brown of her skin. “Just leave your room unlocked when you go,” she
said. “I’ll come get them when Kingston gets here.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  She threw me a joyful little wave over her shoulder as she retreated down the hall.

  I closed the door. I leaned against it.

  The bed had been stripped bare, the kitchenette emptied of all personal items. The desk was clear, and the bookcase held only dust and pots.

  But the room was still full, lush and green and smelling of sap and leaves and potting mix and a little hint of fertiliser.

  And I wouldn’t have to leave my plants behind. I wouldn’t, some small part of me piped up, have to leave Vincent behind.

  I sniffed and pushed that thought aside, retrieving my diary once more from the desk, my suitcase once more from the floor.

  I turned back to the door.

  Deep breath. Now was not the time for sentimentality.

  Still. I smiled at the pothos with its glossy, heart-shaped leaves as I shuffled my diary under my arm and reached for the door. The pothos tickled my face, and impulsively, I raised my chin to it, allowing it to brush my cheeks.

  It wouldn’t hurt to say goodbye, I thought.

  Perhaps they do understand after all.

  So before I opened the door, I reached up and took a pothos leaf in hand. It was thick and glossy, smooth and shiny. “Goodbye,” I whispered to it. “Thank you for cleaning my air.”

  I kissed the leaf of the plant.

  I left.

  A week later, Cleotha appeared on my home doorstep, and somewhat uncharacteristically for me, I was pleased to see her. Vincent, it seemed, had given up on me at last, for although he had to know I’d gone home for the holidays, there’d been no plants, no junk mail summons—and no phone calls.

  It surprised me, the morning I realised I’d been expecting one. He hadn’t called in months; why should he start now?

  I tried to put the idea from my mind, but with naught but the goat and the cows and my taciturn father, there was little for it to do but grow. And so I welcomed Cleotha perhaps more heartily than I might have otherwise done.

  She simply laughed when I embraced her, hugging me back with simple, unconstrained warmth, then led me around to the grey gravel drive where her boyfriend waited in the car—an SUV, thank goodness, with ample room in the back seat to stand my ficus tree.

  In my relief at seeing the ficus upright and in good health, I failed to notice what should have at once been apparent: that the car was fairly overflowing with plants, with barely room for the driver and his passenger at all.

  I blinked. “How did you even drive?”

  Cleotha laughed. “I don’t know what you were feeding that one,” she said, pointing to the long, trailing tendrils of pothos invading the front of the car, “but I swear it’s grown about three feet since we loaded it in the car this morning.”

  Something inside me twisted. I said no more, but instead hurried to help them unload the plants onto the front verandah.

  “Thank you,” I said, pulling a twenty from my pocket and offering it.

  Cleotha laughed it away. “Honestly,” she said. “It’s no trouble at all. I always thought I’d like to be your friend.”

  I regarded her for a fraction too long before realising she was serious. I smiled. “Thank you,” I said again. “I’d like that.”

  She nodded. “It’s not good to isolate yourself so much, you know?”

  I nodded back as though I agreed, and they pulled out of the drive and away, and I walked back to the verandah alone.

  I could call Vincent.

  I shook my head. I’d put him aside long ago, and one silly encounter with a woman doing me a favour oughtn’t to change that.

  There was the matter of the pothos, though. While all the other plants seemed healthy enough despite our one-week separation, the pothos had done more than survived: it had flourished.

  Cleotha had barely been exaggerating: the plant was well over-growing its pot, easily four times the size it had been when I’d seen it last.

  My stomach twisted. Something deep in my chest twanged.

  There was only one thing that the pothos had received that the others had not.

  Pulse pitter-pattering, I bent toward it. The earthy smell of its potting soil enveloped me—and I pressed my lips to a leaf.

  As I did, adrenalin sparked through me—and into the plant. It was a familiar feeling, one I’d felt several times before: the feeling of that magic, whatever it was, leaving my body—and passing into the pothos.

  Its tendrils grew three inches.

  I forgot how to breathe.

  I’d made it grow. I’d made it grow, and it hadn’t died, hadn’t disintegrated into dust, hadn’t wilted and wasted and given up on its life in the world.

  A kiss, Mother had said, is the secret.

  I sat on the front step, the concrete cold through my thin cotton skirt, and rummaged through my memories.

  I’d resented being in the garden that day with my mother. I’d been terrified the time I’d tried to impress the boy. Grieving when I’d burned the oak to ash. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember a single instance of using my gift where I’d been happy enough to use it—where I’d been clear-headed and joyful-hearted, thinking only of the plant and its needs as I tried to help it grow.

  A kiss. A kiss was indeed the secret. My mother, bless her, had been right.

  I leaned over and caught up the aloe that had been Vincent’s first gift. I ran a finger carefully down one leaf, for I knew that although humans appreciated the tactile experience of touch, it could stunt a plant so easily.

  A kiss, though?

  I leaned down, the lapis-blue pot cradled in my lap.

  I inhaled the aloe scent, the sharp bite of fertiliser. I touched my lips, feather light, to the plant. I do love you.

  The plant grew, leaves lengthening, a tiny baby aloe sprouting into existence at the base of the plant.

  I smiled.

  “I knew you’d come around.”

  I startled upright, meeting Vincent’s eyes with a heart that beat too wildly for words.

  I swallowed, fingers clutching the smooth, comforting weight of the aloe pot. “I hoped you would.”

  Gently, he took the aloe from me, and set it on the step. “I told you I wouldn’t give up,” he said.

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  He smiled—and we kissed. It was a very good kiss, and suddenly I regretted all the kisses we might have had in all the months since I’d left, had I not been so stubborn, and so foolish.

  “So,” he said as he pulled away. “Are you ready to marry me and pay my bills yet?”

  “I am twenty years old,” I told him sternly with a frown. “And I’m not naïve.”

  Vincent laughed. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll wait. But I hope this time you’ll let me wait with you.”

  I regarded him, his dark blue eyes dancing, his pale hair curling around his ears. “I think,” I said, “that I would like that very much.”

  He hugged me tight. “I’m glad.”

  “Thank you for the plants.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “I’m glad you figured it out.”

  I leaned back from him and frowned again. “What do you mean?”

  He laughed again, bent down, and kissed the aloe. A stalk sprouted from its middle, blossoming into a head of red, bell-shaped flowers.

  I took him by the hand, his fingers laced in mine. “Come on,” I said. “I want to show you the garden.”

  The Making Of A Kiss Is The Secret

  This story took a long time to birth. While the opening arrived easily enough, I put it away for over two years before the rest of the story deigned to follow.

  All I knew from the start was that the kiss wouldn’t be a traditional romantic kiss. That, and that the plants were slightly magical in some way.

  Everything else I unearthed laboriously, one sentence at a time, never quite getting a glimpse of the entirety of the story until it was actually done. Every
time I thought I’d had a breakthrough (going, “Ah ha! NOW we are nearly at the end of the story! The kiss will surely happen soon and we will be DONE!”), the story fooled me and twisted aside, shying away from that kiss that I was desperate to untangle, to uncover, to understand.

  So I guess, in a lot of ways, the process of writing this story actually mimicked the experiences of the protagonist: she too spent years getting close to answers and then falling away again, nearly understanding before having it slip through her fingers like water, before finally, finally, stumbling in a quiet, accidental moment on the answer.

  Does art mimic life, or does life mimic art?

  A silly question, of course, because the answer is: both.

  (Also, can I please have some magic plants?)

  Read more by Amy Laurens!

  DREAMING OF FORESTS

  There was a forest. that was the simple fact of the matter: there was a forest now, and there hadn’t been before. Deena let the tent flap drop closed in front of her, inhaled steadily, and tried again.

  Nope, still forest. She bit her lip, debating: go out and explore, or hide in the tent?

  In the end, exploration won for the simple, practical reason that nature, as it were, was calling.

  So she caterpillared her way out of her downy sleeping bag, pulled her hiking shorts on over the black, fleecy leggings she’d slept in, zipped up her polar fleece jumper, crammed her grandmother’s knitted beanie over her brown hair, and pushed her way outside.

  The other tent was gone. For a moment, that made her pulse race—but then the reality of her surroundings overtook her senses. The air inside the tent had been warm, musty. The air outside yesterday had smelled of the sea, a salty tang with just a hint of rotting seaweed.

  Today, the air smelled like sap, and living things, a green smell she associated with her grandmother’s garden thanks to that summer she’d spent there when she was twelve, when they’d spent hours of days of weeks pruning and twining and tending, returning to the house only for meals and sleep, hands crusty with black dirt her grandmother called gold, under-nails caked with the stuff, elbows and knees stained black—and green.