The Secret of a Heart Note

by Stacey Lee

  “What are you doing here, Mimosa?” The way she says my name with the fake Spanish accent grates my nerves.

  I shrug. “Just taking a walk.” This is a mistake, but my other option, pretending I’ve lost my hearing, isn’t much better. The strap of my messenger bag pulls my sundress in an indecent direction, and I shift and twist to get it back in alignment.

  Vicky clicks her nails together. “Why would you be taking a walk in the smelly old parking lot? There aren’t any flowers here.” She doesn’t lose her smile, and neither do I. Maybe we can smile each other to death. She puts her finger on her chin. “Are you meeting someone?”

  I squeeze the ball so hard it nearly pops.

  “Wh-who would I be meeting?” I lift my nose and try to act superior.

  “I don’t know. A boy?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Of course you don’t. Love witches can’t have boyfriends. It wouldn’t exactly be fair, would it? I mean, you could use your potions. No one’s boyfriend would be safe.”

  The girl with the purple-highlighted black hair from Whit’s table yesterday leans into the safety of her boyfriend’s shoulder and gives me the stink eye. Those candy grams. Even if I could fumigate the whole world, Vicky could still run me out of town with a single rumor.

  Vicky tilts her blunt chin. “Or girlfriend.”

  If I had any reservation over fixing Vicky with Drew’s elixir, it disappears like a snowflake on a radiator. I smile thinly. “Believe me, if I could use potions like that, I would get Tyson Badland to take me to the homecoming dance.”

  A few people chuckle and Vicky’s smirk weakens. Her knees lock, and she twists a gold cuff around her wrist. She’s so focused on her prey, me, she doesn’t notice when Court and his best buddy, Whit Wu, appear from behind her. Whit grins when he sees me with the ball.

  “So how can you be a love witch if you’ve never experienced el amor?” She purrs out the Spanish word so that it sounds dirty.

  Everyone watches me squirm. The bummer about blackmail is that it always gets worse. The blackmailer keeps testing limits, never stopping until the thing valued no longer seems worth it. But she hasn’t cornered me yet.

  Court and Whit close the distance, and Vicky’s spidery lashes flick toward them. Whit holds his hands up for the ball, but I don’t throw it to him.

  Court frowns. “Vick, stop—”

  I toss back my head, thankful my beret doesn’t go flying off. “The same way I don’t have to be a sanitation engineer to recognize garbage.” This time, a few people laugh. Time to go. I hurry by Vicky and deposit the ball into Court’s hands, at the same time slipping him his keys. “The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play,” I murmur.

  He lowers his eyelids and cocks an ear toward me. But that’s the only line from The Cat in the Hat that I remember, and I hope it’s enough to lead him to Dr. Seuss’s hat, the windsock on the other side of the building. I beat a hasty retreat back toward the school. The scent of Vicky’s anger stays in my nose long after I’ve left the parking lot, foul as burning rubber.

  THIRTEEN

  “WE ARE EACH A RAINBOW. EVERY RANK ONE OF US.”

  —Gladys, Aromateur, 1855

  ON THE FAR side of the stadium field, a break in the shrubs leads to the main street. The red-and-white windsock fronting the school points east. It’s been there so long, no one notices it anymore, much less uses it, even though the wind can tell a lot about the weather. It strikes me that windsocks are like most people’s noses, outdated sources of information, more seen than used.

  Near the windsock, Court waits in his Jeep. I slide into the leather seat. There’s a sports magazine on the floor along with a box of number-two pencils. A soccer ball medallion swings from the mirror. How many girls would pay to be in my shoes? How many girls have been in my shoes?

  I sniff. The synthetic scents almost always overpower the natural ones and can stick around for months. I count seven different perfumes billowing around me, trapped and ripened in the closed car. One of them is Vicky’s Poison Apple. Though the scent’s months old, my stomach tightens. I also detect potato chips, a whiff of marijuana, and sand mingling with Court’s own scent.

  We swing onto northbound 101. Court merges, waving in his mirror to the guy who let us in.

  The tan leather of the backseat has been worn shiny. I sniff out of habit, and the human smells from that part of the car bring a blush to my cheeks. I have to stop snooping with my nose. Just because it’s second nature doesn’t mean it’s right, like unlocking every door you encounter just because you own a skeleton key.

  Court glances at me sitting stiffly in my seat, my cheeks baking. “Is everything okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m sorry about that back there.” His face is somber, and so is his smell—yarrow with undertones of barn dust, like opening an old photo album.

  “You don’t need to apologize for Vicky.” I weigh whether to tell him of the blackmail. No. He would confront her, and she’d know we ratted on her.

  I could swear him to secrecy before I told him, but if he thought I was keeping things from him, the fragile threads of our temporary alliance could break. Besides, secrets have a way of untying on their own, though I cringe to think of my own secrets.

  Court presses his fingers into the bones at the base of his neck, glancing at me uncertainly. “I’m also sorry about yesterday. I was kind of a jerk.”

  “That’s okay. I would be angry, too.”

  “Well, I’m not mad anymore. I’m more—I don’t know how I feel.”

  I sniff, though his mood scents are as loud to my nose as the trio of Harley-Davidson motorcycles rumbling by. “You smell sad—”

  He blinks, but when he notices me watching him, he shrugs. “Go on.”

  Awkwardly, I nose on. “I also smell guilt, which smells like cough syrup, mixed with loneliness—baby’s tears.”

  “Baby’s tears?”

  “It’s a kind of moss. There’s also rabbit litter. Er, that means insecurity.”

  “I smell like rabbit litter.” His face has acquired a pinched look. Clearly I’ve gone too far. He glances at me biting my lip. “Please continue. I’m enjoying this.”

  I clear my throat. “On the bright side, there’s a healthy dose of excitement”—I falter, hoping that didn’t come out wrong—“which smells like the strawberry tree, and, well—nervousness.”

  He swallows, then produces a queasy grin. “And what does that smell like?”

  “Soap bubbles.”

  “Ah. You’d be a hard person to hide from.”

  “Yes—” I cough to prevent more words from slipping out.

  An awkward silence follows. The accelerator nudges to seventy-five miles per hour, but then noticing it, Court eases up on the gas. I study the toe prints on the window in front of me. I could’ve admitted that I also smell like soap bubbles.

  Or I could just change the subject. “Was your coach okay with you missing practice?”

  He seems happy for the switch, and one hand releases the steering wheel. “I promised him a Kill Drill tomorrow at lunch.”

  “Kill Drill?”

  “We scrimmage for forty-five minutes, no breaks.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “We could use the practice.” He flashes me a smile. “So the plants you need, will they just let you take them?”

  “Ordinarily. The master gardener lets us clip what we want in exchange for cuttings from our garden. But I didn’t arrange a visit because I don’t want Mother to find out.”

  “How will we do it?”

  I pull out my garden pruners, freshly oiled and sharpened. “Garden variety theft.”

  He whistles.

  “You have any better ideas?”

  “Would they sell them to us? I went to the ATM this morning.”

  “The common ones, maybe. But definitely not the rares. And we need several of those.”

  “Bribery?”

 
Is he serious? He’s not smiling. Bribery would never have occurred to me, mostly because it’s never been an option. But I’d feel weird using his money, even though it is for his mother. Plus, if the bribery didn’t work, they’d toss us out for sure, maybe even call the cops. “Thanks, but no. My way is less risky. The squirrels do it all the time.”

  Conversation stalls the rest of the way to the garden, and it’s hard to know exactly what he’s thinking. Thoughts, unlike feelings, cannot be smelled. On the other hand, the soap bubble notes don’t dissipate as Court concentrates on the driving and I concentrate on what’s going on outside the car, instead of who’s in it. I don’t do a very good job.

  FOURTEEN

  “EVERY SMELL IS A KEY, UNLOCKING MEMORIES HIDDEN IN

  THE CHAMBERS OF THE SOUL.”

  —Irisa, Aromateur, 1801

  RUTH MEYER WAS the only daughter of a toothpick manufacturer, who believed that the souls of all the trees her father felled were conspiring to kill her. As penance, she built the largest botanical garden this side of the Mississippi. At the time of her death, she owned a hundred acres of prime real estate in the heart of San Francisco, not to mention the cleanest gums in the state.

  As the town oddball with the big garden, sometimes I worry that I’m destined for a lonely existence similar to Ruth’s. She probably talked to her plants, too.

  We park, and I empty out my messenger bag so I have room for the contraband. Then we make our way to the stone entrance of the Meyer Botanical Garden, past yellow school buses parked side by side like bakery loaves.

  I notice a thin black case clipped onto Court’s belt. Must be his EpiPen. “I guess gardens aren’t your thing. You don’t have to come in. I do tend to attract bees.”

  “As long as you don’t mind sticking me, I don’t mind being stuck by them,” he jokes.

  We pass the ticket office and go right to the gated entrance where I show my lifetime pass, which allows entry for me and a guest. The man studies it long enough to make me worry that he senses my evil designs. I sniff, but the winds are blowing his scents into the garden.

  Finally, he hands back my pass. “You should get a new picture.”

  I laugh nervously. “Right, I’ll do that.” The picture on the pass was taken when I was eleven. “Have a nice day.”

  Once inside, I take in the millions of scents around me. I filter out all the animal odors and focus on the plants, which resonate at higher frequencies in my nose.

  Court opens a brochure with a garden map, spreading it out before him like a tourist. The garden is divided into seven pie-shaped sections, one for each continent, with specialty gardens sprinkled throughout. The Children’s Garden sits in the middle of the pizza, boasting a grassy field for running around, trees for climbing, and edible plants. I point at a small patch at the top of the Children’s Garden labeled Ancient Plants. “This one. Follow me.”

  We travel down a gravelly path shaded by flowering dogwood that has a powdery fragrance, like a baby’s nursery. Court, still looking at the brochure, whistles. “Mesozoic epoch? So my mom smells like dinosaurs?”

  I chuckle. “Not quite. The plants here are like living fossils. They’re resilient to pollutants, meaning they contain the truest core of scent. We all have a touch of the ancients in us.”

  I don’t tell him that much of what we know about plants, especially the Ancients, is due to the effort of aromateurs, who believed that plants should be studied for themselves, not just for medicinal uses. It would sound like bragging. The textbooks say that Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, founded what we call botany, but aromateurs had been categorizing plants for thousands of years before he was even born.

  The amused animal cracker smell drifts from Court. “I had no idea plants could be so . . . cool.”

  A zing of nervous energy travels through me at the possibility that he could be talking about me, and not the plants. I laugh nervously and walk faster. The banksia gives way to bitter cherry trees. The leaves could substitute for two of Alice’s notes. I stare up at the branches. Just out of arm’s reach.

  Court glances back at me. He stretches up for a branch. I jerk my thumb up. Higher. He lifts his heels and touches a slim branch, heavy with dark leaves. I nod.

  He checks that nobody’s watching then plucks off a handful. I stuff them into my bag.

  “Why do I feel guilty about that?” he whispers.

  “I heard it gets easier.”

  As we travel farther into the garden, we see more people, mostly senior citizens and kids on field trips. I let my nose guide us to Australia where I harvest kangaroo paw.

  We cross a bridge lined on either side with planters of purple coneflowers. I stick my nose in the planters then quickly jerk away from its cloying grape scent.

  Court notices my reaction, and carefully sniffs at the coneflowers. “Something wrong with them?”

  “No, they just remind me of this time when I was five and ate through a whole quart of Mother’s preserves. She was so mad, she cracked a spoon on the counter.”

  Emotional memories love to piggyback onto smells. Aromateurs have a saying, “Do not linger in the garden of memories, for there are many traps.”

  “I did that with my mom’s lemon bars once. But that was only a month ago.” He flashes me a grin, rousing one out of me. Then, with a mischievous quirk of his eyebrow, he tucks the flower behind his ear. “If I wear this all day, maybe you won’t feel so bad next time you smell it.”

  His goofy gesture melts me like cocoa butter in the sun. Even my bones feel gooey and I pour myself, rather than walk, down the grassy pathway.

  The sound of children laughing and yelling intensifies as we draw closer to the Ancients. A Frisbee whizzes one way, while a soccer ball flies in another direction. There must be at least fifty kids in the Children’s Garden today, smelling like grubby hands and sock lint. Many of them are wandering from the grassy field into the Ancients. I pause by a statue of a half-naked woman and survey the under-five-foot crowd. Court shoots me a quizzical glance.

  “Maybe they’ll leave soon,” I say, scratching my elbows.

  He bends close to my ear. “How many more plants do you need?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Are they all in the Ancients?”

  “I hope so.”

  Below an engraved wooden sign that reads, “Ancient Plant Garden, Welcome to the Past,” a group of eight- or nine-year-old boys cluster around a rare hellebore shrub, watching a kid in a Camp Snoopy T-shirt pluck off the delicate pink sepals. Children are often attracted to hellebores because of their primitive glands containing sugar that give off a taffy-like note.

  I drift closer and sniff. “That one’s a match for one of your mom’s heart notes,” I tell Court.

  Out of nowhere, a soccer ball careens toward us like a meteorite. I gasp as something gray streaks past me.

  Court traps the ball with his chest, letting it thump down against his thigh, then roll to his foot. Behind him, the hellebores remain unscathed, save for a few missing petals.

  The kids who kicked the ball come running in from the grassy field, screaming with delight.

  Court looks at me for a moment, the coneflower still impossibly hanging on behind his ear. I freeze the image in my mind so I can remember it forever. Then he snaps his fingers toward the kids in the Ancients. “Hey, you guys want to play some ball?”

  The kids bounce. A smile flickers over Court’s lips as he takes a last look at me. “Girls against boys. Let’s go!” He lets the ball drop, then kicks it long.

  All the kids run after it, screaming loud enough to reach the soil engineers. Genius. With grim determination, I venture deeper into the now empty Ancient Garden. Most plants known from the fossil record—older than ten thousand years—are extinct, but the ones that survived evolved to form new species and adaptations. The scents envelope me with their low-frequency vibrations, which resonate in the nose far longer than other scents. They’re like Gregorian chants to the e
ar; the older the species, the more complex their scents. It’s the same way with people.

  My heart still pounds, and my mind is a nest of randomly firing neurons. I hate working under pressure, but I have to get this done.

  I run my nose through purple horsetail and ferns as ticklish as peacock feathers, hearing Mother’s voice in my head. Always inhale deeply in the presence of an Ancient; they’ve been around the longest and have many secrets to reveal.

  Using my hand spade and clippers, I quickly harvest what I need, being careful not to bruise anything or snip more than I absolutely need. Sometimes I have to take parts of the roots, which pains me because a root is harder for the plant to regenerate than a leaf or a flower. As I tug at the base of an exotic fern, I swear to sign up for the volunteer program to make amends.

  There. Only one left from this place, Alice’s miso heart note, the problem one. I picked through every one of the Ancients and it’s not here. Still crouching, I swab my forehead with the grass-stained hem of my dress.

  “I saw you!” cries a kid. I nearly fall over, too deep in my own thoughts to smell him coming. The kid with the Camp Snoopy T-shirt, sweaty brown hair matted to his head, points a finger at me. “Touch with your eyes, not with your hands.”

  Well, isn’t that the corpse flower telling the skunk cabbage it stinks?

  I put my fingers over my lips and try to shush him but he’s already sounding the alarm. “Ms. Jackson! There’s a girl cutting plants!”

  In a mild panic now, I consider standing my ground. If only I weren’t clutching this heavy bag of damning evidence. With a groan, I step off the horseshoe path and let the ferns close up behind me. A branch knocks my beret off my head as I rush toward a wooded area, and I waste precious seconds stopping to snatch it back up.

  “She went that way!” cries Camp Snoopy, his voice faint. Feeling ridiculous, I pick my way through the spiky ferns until I reach the edge of the forest, then sprint down a pathway lined with bark shavings. I could hide inside one of the redwoods with a rotted-out trunk, but I have a better idea. One less obvious.

  I sniff around for the eastern red cedar with the hollow spot just large enough for a person to squeeze through, where Mother and I once found a Cinderella’s slipper orchid growing on a high branch. The Cinderella traps bees into its “shoe,” where they get dusted with pollen until they manage to escape.