The Night Garden by Lisa van Allen

friends pairing off and breaking up and pairing offagain in bursts of vivid drama, but Sam and Olivia had banded together in their platonic friendship and scorned other kids their age for being silly, shallow, or just plain dumb. Who needs a boyfriend? Olivia would say, even as she wondered about what it would be like if Sam offered to be hers. Often, Sam seemed more interested in pursuing the secretive little mushrooms in Chickadee Woods than in pursuing girls—and Olivia made sure he knew she loved that about him. But even if he had wanted a girlfriend, he might have had trouble finding one: He’d been a skinny kid, with features that seemed too large for his face, an unflattering haircut, and worst of all—a widely known interest in fungus. He’d also had allergies—so many allergies that he was regarded as a kind of irritant himself. He was allergic to foods that triggered him to break out in ugly hives and to flowers that made him dissolve into wet sniffles and sneezes. He was also violently allergic to bee stings, which gave him a reputation for being a wimp. Students pointed down their throats to mime gagging at him, and even the teachers would say Oh Sam with more annoyance than compassion when he sneezed. Olivia didn’t care if the other girls whispered that he was gross. His sensitivities had never once stopped him from climbing a tree, or trekking through the woods, or eating foods from her fields right off stalks and vines. As for Olivia, boys became increasingly interested in her, but it was difficult to muster any feelings of interest toward them. None could hold a candle to Sam.
    In a way, Olivia and Sam had paired off, cut out the possibility of seeing other people, even without knowing it. And so, one September evening when Olivia was fifteen, they decided that since it seemed like everyone was so far ahead in the relationship race, it only made sense that they should conduct an experiment of their own. Sam, who’d always had an empirical mind, had taken the lead, telling Olivia to meet him at the tripod rock after dinner, saying they would do it there. And Olivia had beenmore nervous than she’d ever been before, agonizing. Should she chew a piece of gum beforehand, or would the taste of mint be too obvious? Should she put on perfume, pull back her hair that sometimes caught on her own lips if she was wearing Chapstick and might also catch on Sam’s?
    In the end, she’d decided to do nothing she wouldn’t normally do. She chewed a mint leaf from her mother’s old herb garden. She wore her hair long and messy down her back. She didn’t let herself change into prettier clothes. She told her father she was leaving—he never asked where she was going or when she planned to be back—and she marched into Chickadee Woods toward the pile of stones they called the tripod. In a shady glen, an enormous boulder balanced on three smaller, nearly uniform ones—dazzling and preposterous in its arrangement. Occasionally, people liked to sneak onto the Pennywort property to visit the tripod: Alien enthusiasts came to see the signpost that they believed had been left by an ancient civilization of visitors from outer space; geologists came because it was an incredible freak show of glacial erratics; new-age types came because they believed it was a sacred worshipping space. To Olivia, it would always be the place where Sam first kissed her.
    They’d settled themselves beneath the monolith as if they were hiding under a table in the farmhouse, and they’d attempted a bit of stilted conversation. We’ll just look at it as practicing, Sam said, so that we know what we’re doing when we do find other people to date. And then he’d gone on to talk about the benefits of study and practice and applying yourself until Olivia could stand the suspense no more and she leaned in. The first moments of their kiss were awkward: His lips felt so foreign against hers. Olivia thought, This is it? What’s the big deal? But