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“So, just to be clear,” I say, “You’ve been secretly visiting my dead cousin’s overgrown backyard all summer to scoop that mold,” I nod at the vial of fungus the kid is still holding in his hands, “off that tree? To ... cook with?”
“Y-es,” the kid winces. Just once. It’s honestly impressive, given how ludicrous the story is — if it were me, I’d either be throwing myself into the bushes in shame or howling in laughter by now. This kid was a straight up weirdo.
“You sure you’re not a druggie?” I ask, again, just in case. Even if he looks, like, twelve.
“Of course not,” the kid says, with the audacity to sound like grievously offended British royalty at the perfectly reasonable question.
Whatever. It’s none of my business what my cousin grew in her garden, or what this kid wants with it. Besides, with the state the house is in, might as well let someone get some use out of the overgrowth, because I’m certainly not.
“All right,” I say, belatedly realizing that the kid is still waiting for a response. Thief caught squatting behind a bush or not, he was pretty polite. “Fine. Take whatever you want. Just don’t get me in trouble."
The kid actually beams at me, with a dimpled, whole-face-scrunch kind of smile that makes my brain short-circuit for a moment. It’s just that. bloody. adorable.
“And,” I add hurriedly, pitching my voice a shade lower to disguise the sound of heart-melting-in-chest, “Lock the gate again when you leave. If that’s how you got in, I mean. And if you’re struck with the sudden desire to do some gardening with the rest of this," I gesture vaguely at the general situation of the backyard, “You’re welcome to it.”
“Thank you,” the kid says, painfully sincere.
A serendipitous knock on the front door saves me from witnessing another expression.
Bloody hell.
It occurs to me after he leaves that I should probably have shown more concern about an unsupervised twelve-year-old breaking into someone else’s backyard at sundown, in general, collecting strange fungus or not.
Whatever. Something to do if the kid drops by again. There are more urgent matters at the moment, such as figuring out how my cousin lived in a house not connected to electricity. At least the plumbing works, because what the hell.
I go out to sneak another peek at the fungus anyways. I don’t know what I expected, but — it’s literally a shovelful of slightly spongy orange-y slime. Not in the slightest bit appetising.
That kid had better be a good cook.
“Kid,” I say, after recovering from my near heart-attack upon opening my back door to find him squatting in the dirt, again. Except this time he was less scraping fungus off the tree and more prodding the tree with a foot-long stick, which has, incidentally, somehow? disappeared? in the last two instants.
“Yes?” the kid says, eyes wide and innocent and perfectly reminiscent of baby animals and great, now I’m the one feeling bad. This kid needs a career in acting. Or con artistry.
I sigh. I glance back inside at the pipes and wires dangling out of the ceiling like entrails at a butcher shop — not that I’ve ever been to a butcher shop, but that’s besides the point — then glance back at the kid.
“... What can I call you,” I say, eventually. I mean, I can’t just keep calling the kid the kid.
“..... Rigel,” the kid says, similarly hesitant, “You can call me Rigel.”
“Rigel,” I say, for lack of anything else to say. And then it is a very awkward moment or few before I add, “I know the rooms are a mess, but come in through the front door next time."
The kid’s eyes widen, fractionally. “I couldn’t possibly intrude upon-”
“You might’ve noticed,” I interrupt, “that there is a, um, intimidatingly high wall around the back yard. Which makes it pretty clear that it is my-" inherited, but anyway, “-property. If you cared that much about intruding, you wouldn’t be here. So, unless you’re coming at three in the bloody morning, come in through the front door. And knock," I add hastily, so the kid doesn’t just take it as an invitation to break in through the front door instead of the gate, “I’ll make tea.”
... Good job, me. How am I supposed to make tea in a house with no gas and no electricity and-
The kid is smiling now. Not a brain-melting con artist smile, but something small and simple and honestly kind of sweet. “Okay,” Rigel says.
“Okay,” I breathe. It’s fine. I’ll use a bloody blowtorch if I have to. “Great. Cool. Now I won’t feel irresponsible if you sneak in and somehow unearth a patch of, like, poison ivy and die.”
“I know what poison ivy looks like,” says Rigel, politely confused. “And it’s not native to Britain. You don’t have to worry.”
“I-” I sigh in great exasperation, “That’s good, Rigel. That’s good.”
He knocks, and even his knocks are polite. It’s around sunset, like before. The gas people have yet to locate all the leaks, so the stove is still non-functional, which serves as a perfectly adequate excuse to miss out on the tea, and a much saner plan than using a blowtorch.
I fully intend to bustle Rigel out of the back door so he can get to collecting his fungus, but he stops the door from closing at the last moment.
“Do you have any friends?” Rigel asks, so innocent that it takes me a moment to figure out the words.
And jeez. Ouch. The kid is cute and has an accent posher than the Queen’s, but that does not give him the right to attack me like that. And I do have friends, okay. We’re just all very busy with adulting. And life. So.
“Yes,” I say, with feeling.
Rigel blinks consideringly at me. “Are you busy right now?” he asks, also innocently, like he didn’t just give me a personal crisis.
“... No.”
“Then can I teach you how to take better care of your garden? It’s a mess.”
Innocent, my arse. “Blame my cousin,” I say, petulantly.
“But it’s your house now, isn’t it?”
“And whose fault is that?”
Rigel rolls his eyes and nudges the door a little wider. I cast my eyes ceilingward.
“Do I need to, uh, prepare anything?” I’ve never gardened in my life.
The kid shrugs, then pats his shoulder bag, which, presumably, contains gardening tools. “Not really.”
“Okay,” I say, “Okay. Fine. All right.”
The kid dimples briefly at me before he turns, and I feel any resistance or vaguely negative sentiment in me whatsoever just ... melt. Christ, this kid is magic. I follow him out.
Issue #1։ The garden is significantly sparser than I remember. “This is significantly sparser than I remember,” I say.
Rigel shrugs again. “I got rid of everything too hard to maintain or not worth maintaining,” he says, “You said I was welcome to.”
I’m a bit miffed, but whatever. Issue #2: “It’s a bit dark out, isn’t it?”
Rigel responds to that by swiftly delivering a sharp kick to one of the walls, and, and, and holy mother of canned tuna. The ivy — or what I’d foolishly thought was ivy - starts to glow. Like, not even the weak, watery kind of glow from glowsticks you get at kids’ parties. It’s like there’s lightbulbs there.
At least, I realize faintly, under the mental gibberish my brain is spewing, it’s no longer dark out.
The kid just casually reaches up to flip over a leaf and starts explaining something like when I need to prune it, or whatever. I collapse on the ground to sit and listen.
That’s only the beginning.
The next time Rigel visits — which is the literal day after, mind you, how often can a kid need fungus — I usher him quickly through the house and out into the backyard.
I may be, slightly, still in shock.
The next, next time Rigel visits, I’ve mostly recovered (I mean, I knew my cousin was weird already, right? And the plants are probably just normally weird plants, right? Because I certainly don’t know anything about gardening.) but the gas hasn’t. I’m scratching my head and apologizing for both my rudeness last time and the continued lack of tea, when the kid tilts his head and is all like don’t you have a fireplace? And because I’m only mostly recovered, well. The kid is now boiling water on the fireplace.
One day I’m going to stop being surprised at things.
“Is this how you cook at home?” I ask, incredulous, “All double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble?”
Rigel turns to give me the strangest look, like quoting Shakespeare makes me even slightly as weird as he is. I huff.
I back up to the doorway to escape the heat. I don’t escape the room entirely because, y’know, it feels like there should be some sort of adult supervision present and — wow, did I really just consider myself adult supervision? Ha. Hahahaha.
Regardless, while I’m being very useful, the kid manages to boil the water and put out the fire without issue. He grabs a pair of oven mitts I didn’t even know my cousin had, and I make sure to get out of the way of the very hot kettle.
There’s a tea set on the table. I fetch a roll of jammie dodgers from the pantry.
“It’s not really cooking, by the way,” Rigel says, and it takes me a hot minute to realise what he’s replying to, “It’s more like ... making medicinal teas.”
Oh. Maybe that’s an explanation. Maybe my cousin’s garden was just full of weird medicinal herbs. Maybe the kid’s guardians are just herbal medicinists, and the kid just happened upon a sweet supply of ingredients. Herbal medicinists. Medics? Medical herbalists? Apothe-somethings. I’m getting distracted.
“I bet they taste awful,” I say, blowing lightly on the surface of my very lovely not-awful chrysanthemum tea.
Rigel giggles. “They do. It makes terrible tea.”
“Absolutely loathly liquid,” I reply, automatic.
“Disgusting draught,” he adds, delighted.
“Repugnant refreshment.”
“Displeasing drinks.”
“Sickening solution,” I say, “Though just figuratively sickening. I’m sure they’re literally very anti-sickening.”
Rigel laughs. I smile appreciatively.
My tea has cooled enough to drink from. I take a sip. “So,” I say, utterly unaware of what I’m about to set off, “What herbal tea properties does that fungus have, then?”
I have never seen a kid so awkwardly passionate about medicinal teas. It’s ridiculous.
“School starts in two days, doesn’t it?” I ask, suddenly realizing with a not insignificant amount of stress that the end of August is upon us, “Where do you go?”
“It’s a boarding school in Scotland,” Rigel says, picking a handful of berries. Apparently, he doesn’t just care about the fungus, since tonight he’s harvesting some of basically everything in the garden. “You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
“Boarding school, huh. Does that mean you won’t be breaking into my backyard during the school year?”
Rigel makes a face. “Unfortunately. But I’ll be back for Christmas, so you’d better take care of these plants.”
I raise my hands in mock surrender. “All right. I promise to try.”
He smiles at me. It’s the same bloody con-artist smile he pulled the first night. Honestly, how does anyone manage to deal with this kid.
I can’t help but smile back.