Dead Beautiful

“It’s been out of use for ages,” Eleanor said. “I think like a hundred years ago Gottfried was a religious school, but then the chapel was abandoned. It’s supposedly under renovations from some fire a while back, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone working on it.”

We approached the tall riveted doors and attempted to open them, but they were locked. Eleanor and I looked at each other, confused. I jiggled the handles a few times and pounded on the door in frustration, but it was no use.

“I guess it’s canceled,” Eleanor said happily. “We should probably go back to the dorm.”

I was about to agree with her when we heard voices coming from behind the building. The entire class was standing in what looked like an overgrown graveyard. It was a small class: me, Eleanor, a pair of twins named April and Allison, who lived on our floor, a few guys I had never seen before, and a cute boy who looked uncannily similar to Wes. Eleanor and I joined them.

Professor Betty Mumm was a tiny birdlike woman. She had a weathered, wrinkled face from too many days in the sun, and short brown hair cut like a boy’s. She stood in the grass in front of us, wearing tall rubber boots, gardening gloves, and a sun hat.

“Welcome to Horticulture,” she said, and pulled out a bag of flower bulbs from a burlap sack on the ground. “Today we’re going to be learning the basics of soil.”

She passed out the bulbs, a set of trowels, boxes of matches, and gardening gloves. She was surprisingly nimble considering she looked older than my grandfather.

“The first thing you need to know about horticulture is that without the appropriate bed for the appropriate plant, you will never succeed in growing anything. There are dozens of varieties of soil, each with its own unique characteristics. Fortunately for us, all of them can be found in this very garden, due to the fact that the ground in this particular area of campus has been dug up and replaced over the course of the last two centuries.”

As Professor Mumm discussed the five most common kinds of soil, I glanced around the graveyard. The grass was speckled with wildflowers that grew up to the middle of my shins. They were moist with dew. Nestled beneath the weeds were barely visible fragments of chipped gravestones, centuries old. When I’d first seen Horticulture on my schedule, I hadn’t known what to expect, and I would be lying if I said I’d been excited about the class. I’d assumed we’d be learning about plant biology, not digging around in an abandoned graveyard.

“Isn’t this a little morbid?” I said to Eleanor, keeping my eyes on the professor, who was demonstrating how to hold a trowel correctly.

“What makes you say that?” a deep voice replied.

Startled, I turned around. Eleanor had moved closer to the chapel, and was now whispering to one of the twins. Standing in her place was the cute Wes impersonator.

“I’m Brett,” he said with a grin.

Suddenly I felt very shy. “Renée.”

Brett was tall and athletic, and looked like he had just come from playing rugby. His features seemed exaggerated, giving him a dashing and overly masculine look, which I had only attributed to characters in fairy tales.

“So who did you mean to talk to before I so rudely interrupted?”

“My friend Annie. I mean Eleanor. My roommate Eleanor.”

“Annie, Eleanor, which is it?”

“Eleanor. Eleanor Bell.” I pointed to where she was standing. “Sorry, my friend Annie is from California. I mean ...that’s where I’m from too. I just moved here. I’m still trying to keep everything straight.”

“A California girl. Aren’t you supposed to be blond?” He flipped a lock of my brown hair with his fingers.

I could feel myself starting to blush, and tucked my hair behind my ear. Brett seemed like the kind of guy who could get any girl; who plays Frisbee with his shirt off and his pants cuffed at the ankle, whose sweat actually smells good; the kind of guy who I never imagined would talk to me. Just like Wes. Yet here he was, standing next to me, doing what I could only identify as flirting.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Maine.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a bearded farmer?”

Brett laughed. “So that’s what you thought it’d be like here? It must have been a huge disappointment.”

“Devastating,” I replied, and we both fixed our attention on Professor Mumm, who was motioning for us to follow her into the “garden.”

“Each of you has a different kind of flower bulb—woodland, climbing, perennial, annual, or arboreal. Now, what I want you to do is find the most suitable soil for planting your particular bulb, and shovel it into one of these bags,” she said, holding up a handful of cloth satchels.

One of the twins raised her hand. “But we don’t know what kind of bulb we have. How are we supposed to know what kind of soil is best if we don’t know what our bulb is?”

Professor Mumm gave her a wise smile. “Intuition. That is the first rule of horticulture. Intuition. Follow your gut!” she said, clicking her heels together. “And remember what we recited. H-E-R-B-S: Handle, Eat, Rub, Burn, Smell. Now, don your gloves and man your trowels!”

Brett and I parted ways as everyone in the class started wandering aimlessly around the graveyard. Eleanor found her way to me and pinched my arm from behind. “Hey,” she said, the twins beside her.

I jumped. “A graveyard is not the place to creep up on people!”

Eleanor laughed. “It’s broad daylight! Besides, I wasn’t the only one who crept up on you.” She glanced at Brett.

April butted in. “He does that with all the girls,” she said. Her sister Allison nodded in confirmation.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t look,” Eleanor replied.

We all watched him bend over to pick up his trowel. As he stood up, he turned to us and smiled. Embarrassed, I looked away. Eleanor, on the other hand, responded by giving him a coy wave.

“I think I’m going to go ‘test the soil’ closer to Brett,” she said. “I never get tired of his dimples.”

I laughed as Eleanor skipped away, trying to inconspicuously follow Brett to the left side of the “garden.” Around me, dozens of gravestones peeked out of the grass, their faces so faded that I couldn’t read the inscriptions. My parents were like these people now, reduced to epitaphs, tombstones, coffins. Shaking the thought from my head, I picked up my bulb and turned it around in my palm. It was brown and bulbous like a ginger root. I held it up to my nose, but it just smelled like dry dirt. Intuition, I thought, and began to walk.