“What are you doing, Jamie?”

I hadn’t heard Ellen come up behind me. She’s a light-footed little thing, and she’s watching me with close interest, barefoot on Kent’s back lawn.

“One of your dad’s trees isn’t well,” I explain. “Here, you want to see?”

Ellen steps closer to the old cherry, and I move aside so that she can take a look.

“The leaves look burned,” she observes. “Like just the bones are left.”

I bend and hoist her up, settle her against my side so that she can get a better view of the lower branches. It used to be so easy to pick her up, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult. Soon I probably won’t be able to pick her up at all. Good thing we have Aiden around. He can pick me up.

Ellen folds her arms around my neck and leans closer to the tree.

“Funny you should say the leaves look like bones, El. You know what the bug that did this is called?”

“What?”

“A skeletonizer.”

“Skeletonizer!” Ellen laughs. “No.”

“Oh, yes.”

She reaches for one of the leaves, and I quickly step back.

“Ope - hang on a sec. We need to get you some gloves if you want to do that. You don’t want to get bug eggs on your skin, do you?”

“Bug eggs!” she shrieks, and I laugh.

“Yep. Look.” I set her down and point to the cardboard box at the base of the tree, half-filled with clippings. “That’s what I’m doing. Taking the larvae off of the leaves, and pruning out the badly damaged twigs. That’s step one.”

“What’s step two?” she asks, peering into the box. “Poison?”

“Nope. There are natural enemies of the skeletonizer. We can introduce some of them and let them finish cleaning this up. They’ll protect the other cherry trees around here, too. Use too many pesticides and you can disrupt the whole system the trees have in place.”

“The trees - have systems?”

“Trees have better systems than humans do.” I pause, looking down at her. “Hey, you’re not wearing your scrubs.”

I haven’t seen her in her normal clothes in a while. She’s been a veterinarian, and before that the sheriff, before that a mad scientist… You don’t often catch Ellen halfway interested in something. She’s up to her elbows in it, or she’s out.

She scowls, kicking a toe into the grass. Kent’s exact scowl. It’s very adorable on her.

“Kids were - saying stuff at school.”

“Oh.” The smile drops from my face, and I cast my mind around for a distraction. “Hey, you want to try snipping one of these bad twigs? You can borrow my gloves. They’re gonna be too big on you, but-”

She’s already reaching for them, so I pull them off and hand them over. I have some reservations about offering a nine-year-old my secateurs, so I move around behind her and guide her gloved hands with mine. We line up the blades at the base of a thin twig. She cuts it loose, and I immediately take back the sharp tool.

Ellen holds up her cutting, her eyes roving over the exposed veins of its leaves. She looks up at me and grins.

“Skeletonizer,” she says, like it’s the name of a badass supervillain. I laugh, and she does, too. She turns the twig over in her hands, clumsy through gloves that are far too big on her. “If trees have better systems than humans, why do they need you to help?”

“We all need help sometimes.”

“I saw…” Ellen breaks off, thinking. “I saw people with those hats, um. Those-” She makes a knocking gesture on her head.

“Hard hats?”

“Yes! People with hard hats by school, spray painting numbers onto the trees.”

“Oh.” My lips twist. “They were probably marking them to be cut down.”

“Yes! They said they were making a new road.”

“That sounds right.”

“I asked them why they were doing it.”

I smile again. Of course she did. Ellen always has questions.

“What’d they say?”

“The man called it something - the price of progress. That’s what he said to dad. But I don’t know what that means.”

Do any of us, honestly? I think, but don’t say.

“Did you ask him?”

“No.” Ellen closes her hands around the reddish-brown twig. “People - start getting mad, if I keep asking too many questions.”

I hesitate, not sure how to answer.

“I think… in this case, it’s good to ask questions, El. Not enough people ask. They don’t think to ask, not on behalf of the trees.”

“The man said that it was okay because trees don’t feel.”

“They don’t feel the way that we do, exactly. But they’re still living things, and… we humans often forget to look after the other members of our family. Like these.” I nod at the row of trees lining Kent’s backyard.

Ellen looks thoughtfully into the branches of the ailing cherry.

“Can it think?” she asks.

“It doesn’t think like a human does. But it’s intelligent, sure. Trees are smart.”

“How can trees be smart?”

“Well - they use wind to send seeds hundreds of miles away. They share food with each other. They keep track of their history, in their rings. They know not to grow too close to other trees, if they need a big space. The really old ones can grow bark up to a foot thick to protect themselves.”

Ellen listens closely, unblinking. She looks down at the twig in her hands again. She pinches a gloved finger into a leaf, watches the way its fragile, broken skin crumbles and blows away.

“Are you gonna save this one?” she asks, pointing to the cherry.

“I’m going to try, yeah. But if it doesn’t work out, I can show you how to plant a new one.”

“No,” she says, resolute. “Save this one.”

“Oh, okay. Yes ma’am.”

She laughs, and I tap her nose with my finger.

“Hi there,” someone says, and we both turn around. It's Aiden, in his work clothes, his bag on his shoulder. He’s got this little smile on his face that makes me wonder how long he’s been standing there. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“Hi, Aiden!”

“Hey, El. Kent wants you to come in and finish your homework.”

Ellen’s expression sours instantly.

“Noo! It’s so boring.”

“I get it, but you’ve gotta. Sorry, bud.”

Ellen tugs off my gloves and sullenly hands them back to me. Aiden waits until the door shuts behind her, then joins me by the cherry.

“Hi.” I lean up to kiss him.

“Hi.” He kisses me back, one finger under my chin.

“How was work?”

“Good.” He releases me, and I pull my gloves back on. “Teaching environmental science, are we?”

“Oh, yeah right,” I snort, turning back to the tree and rolling another leaf for larvae. “Don’t think I’m qualified for that.” I hesitate. “You know, Aiden… I don’t see what Ellen’s teachers see. I mean, I wasn’t teaching her anything, but I was talking, and she was listening. She asked a lot of questions, but they were all good questions. Like… questions more people should ask.”

“I know. I heard.”

“How long were you standing there?”

He smiles, watching me work.

“Sorry. I just like listening to you talk about this stuff.”

My heart flutters, and I look at him over my shoulder, matching his smile.

“No, you - you’re fine. Anyways, I’m just saying - what goes on in those classrooms, that Ellen doing that turns into something so…?”

“Contentious?”

“Yes!”

“Yeah, I don’t know.”

Aiden smooths a hand over my back, putting in gentle pressure with his thumb. It’s nice to get an unexpected little massage through my flannel; it’s cold out here, and I’ve been standing for a long time. I’m tempted to take these gloves off and nuzzle up against Aiden like a contented cat, but - Ellen has given me my marching orders. Don’t let the tree die.

I keep working.

“Can I help?” Aiden asks, after a moment.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Oh.” Sweet thing. “Yeah, if you want to. Kent has gloves you could borrow. Check the closet in the hallway.”

Aiden returns a few minutes later, changed out of his work clothes and holding Kent’s spare gloves.

“Look at you, in your jeans!” I call, as he crosses the lawn. He pauses in the slow-falling darkness, looking down at himself.

“Well - yeah, it’s cold out here. Do they look bad?”

Quite the opposite.

“I just thought you might be one of those guys who wears knee-length athletic shorts year-round, regardless of temperature.”

“No,” he says, stopping at my side. “I’m not straight.”

I let out a startled laugh, and Aiden brushes a kiss onto my mouth, smiling.

“So, what do I do?”

“Okay, here.” I hand him the secateurs. “Find the twigs that have the burnt-looking leaves on them. Cut them away, put them in the box. But don’t cut any that look healthy, or you can spread the bugs by accident.”

“Sounds doable.” Aiden easily pulls down a damaged area I definitely couldn’t have reached on my own. “I thought you’d be more squeamish about bugs.”

“Some, yeah, but not these. What about you, afraid of little pests?”

“No. Otherwise I wouldn’t hang out with you all day.”

I laugh again and slap at his arm. He dodges it, grinning. We work in silence for a few minutes, picking up speed. We’re losing light.

“So… did you decide when you’re going to talk to your aunt?”

Aiden glances over at me, biting the inside of his cheek.

“Soon.”

“Are you nervous?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are.”

“How do you-?”

“I can tell.”

Aiden sighs, tossing a clipping into the box.

“Okay, man, yes. I’m a little stressed out at the prospect of admitting that I’ve spilled our family’s longest-running secret.”

“What, you’re not concerned at all about the other part? Telling her that you’re bi, and that we’re together?”

“I think she might already know about that. Or - she at least has an idea.”

I stop and look at him, surprised.

“Really?”

There’s a silence. I get the distinct impression that Aiden is deciding how much he wants to say.

“I let something slip, once. It was like, the only time I ever asked her a question about you while I was gone, but… I think that was enough.”

I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t, and I don’t push him.

“Do you want me to be there when you talk to her?”

Now Aiden stops, twisting to look at me.

“Seriously, you’d go with me?”

Anywhere. Always.

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Oh.” Aiden bites his lip, and we smile at each other through the tree boughs. “I… I think I want to talk to her about it alone, but if you could be there, just like, at the house... having you close by, it would help me concentrate on what I want to say.”

I don’t totally know what he means, but if it’ll help him get through this...

“Of course. No problem.”

Something warm and bright moves behind Aiden’s blue eyes. His jaw works for a moment, and I think he’s about to say something, but -

“Hey, what are you guys doing?”

We both turn to see Kent crossing the yard towards us.

“You asked me to look at the cherry!” I call back. “Or - did my brain short out? Did you not say that?”

“Jamie!” Kent comes to a stop before the tree, staring up into its branches. “I asked you to take a look at it, I didn’t know you were going to do - all this! You’ve got this thing almost clean already!”

“Yeah, I think we’re done with cutting, at least for tonight. It’s getting dark, and we don’t want Aiden to lose a finger.”

“Uh, yeah, please no,” Aiden says, throwing the last clipping into the box.

“You guys - that’s really - thank you.” Kent smiles at us, folding his arms over his chest. “Appreciate that. Especially after like an hour of putting Ellen in front of her homework, leaving for five minutes, then coming back to find her gone. I guess she doesn’t like biology.”

I remember how curious Ellen’s eyes were earlier, glued to the damaged leaves she’d cut from the cherry.

“Are you sure, Kent? I get the impression she’s interested.”

“Really?” Kent raises an eyebrow. “It’s not showing up in her grades. I’m trying to get her to memorize all this shit, mitochondrion, ribosomes, lysosome… I’m making her do all the readings, all the flashcards, the worksheets, but she could care less, I swear.”

“Well, maybe that’s just not the way she learns.”

“She needs to learn this way, though.” Kent runs a tired hand over his beard. “This is how they teach everything, all the way through high school. I will admit, trying to convince her that she needs to memorize all this stuff so that she can instantly forget it when she doesn’t need it for a test… It sounds stupid even to me. But it doesn’t matter. She won’t get into college if she can’t figure it out.”

“Kent,” Aiden says, pulling off the spare gloves, “She doesn’t have to go to college, if that’s not where she’d do well. That doesn’t have to be the end goal.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” I put in. “You didn’t go, Kent, and you run your own business. Noah didn’t, but the lights are on at City Hall because of him. Raj didn’t, and he’s rebuilt an entire house.”

“I did a certificate program, and that got me where I needed to be,” Aiden adds. “And Jamie didn’t go to college, either, and he’s like - saving your tree, right now.”

Kent nods slowly.

“Yeah, I… I understand that. But I want her to be able to go, if that’s what she decides, and she won’t even have the option if she doesn’t start performing well.”

“Seems like bullshit that what you do as a nine-year-old decides stuff like this,” I grumble, and Kent lets out a humorless laugh.

“Tell me about it.”

I put a hand on his shoulder, and he shakes his head like he’s clearing a cloud away.

“It’ll all work out, Kent,” Aiden says earnestly. “Ellen will be fine. It’s not the end of the world to forget what a lypso- a Lysol-?”

“Lysosome,” Kent laugh-groans, rubbing his temple.

“Yeah, it’s not the end of the world to forget what a lysosome is.”

“Hmm.” Kent smiles at Aiden, then at me. “Thanks, you two. And thanks again for working on the tree. Let’s hope it hangs in there.”

~~~~

“Did you look yet?” I ask Aiden, a few minutes later. He turns and sees me touching a finger to the folded up map on his desk. “With the headstone chip, and the graveyard dirt?”

“Nope. Saving that for this weekend, when we finally have time to go to the Ghost Office. I’m surprised that Kasey hasn’t complained about the holdup.”

“She knows that we’ve both been busy with work, and she’s busy planning some sort of experiment to do with Will. She wants our help.”

“Okay?”

“I’m supposed to ask if you’re free tomorrow. Like, very late at night.”

“Um… what is she planning?”

“I don’t know, she won’t - oh, hang on. Noah is calling me.” I accept the call and put it on speakerphone. “Hey, Noah. What’s up?”

“Did you do this?”

I hesitate, taken aback. Aiden and I exchange a puzzled glance. Noah sounds the way he did the night that Grant blocked his number. Jittery, sharp. Off-kilter.

“Did I do what?”

“Jamie, seriously. I need you to tell me if it was you. Or Aiden.”

I mouth a question at Aiden: is he in danger? Aiden closes his eyes, listens to everything I can’t hear, then shakes his head no. Instant relief, but only for a second, because clearly something is wrong. Aiden grabs the phone.

“Noosh. We don’t know what you’re talking about. Clarification, please.”

“So it wasn’t you guys.”

“What wasn’t us?”

I’m met with a dial tone. I stare at my phone, then look up at Aiden.

Once again, we don’t need words. He grabs my keys from the desk and tosses them to me. I catch them and seize my jacket. Noah may not be in danger, but...

Something in his voice sent a chill down my spine.

“Ralph?” I ask, as we run for the stairs.

“He wouldn’t dare.” Aiden says it so firmly that I believe him at once.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go find out.”