Page 12 of Under Story

“Huh.” Laurel set this fact beside the other things she knew about Eli: the science project, the talent show. He was the only student in school with a Jewish last name. “Why?”

Riordan considered this. “I get the sense that he isn’t…happy here.”

“Here,” said Laurel, “as in on Earth?”

It was such a preposterous idea—and such a preposterous solution—that they both started to laugh. Laurel and Riordan had grown up with Midwestern mores. Satisfaction was to be found in their parents’ values: home, hard work, neighborly community.

Riordan shrugged. “He doesn’t seem very happy in his own house.” His tone had become confiding; Laurel suspected that he wouldn’t say this to another boy. “I mean, his parents are nice, and they’re obviously smart. I just don’t know if they ever, like, hug him.”

“Really?” asked Laurel, stricken. If she lived with Eli, she would never stop hugging him.

On the night of graduation, the senior class gathered for a bonfire, but Eli didn’t come. Maisie went home with Noah Takahashi; Laurel kissed a pole vaulter named Kurt. They didn’t have much to talk about, but talking was not the point. That summer, they swam at Devil’s Lake and drove through cornfields, Pearl Jam flying out the windows. It was Laurel who suggested they have sex, an event she did not find pleasurable so much as intriguing: the unfamiliar pressure, two shapes fit suddenly together.

One Friday in August, she took her father’s pickup truck to McFarland High. Ms. Guillard, the art teacher, had organized a summer exhibition for senior students. Now it was time for Laurel to retrieve her project.

Laurel and Maisie idolized Ms. Guillard, who had arrived from Paris in September with her accent and rakish short hair, her penchant for the surrealists. Sometimes they stayed after school to work on their projects, and Ms. Guillard told them the story of Hilma af Klint, who held séances in Stockholm with four other female artists. They had called themselves the Five. It was the turn of the twentieth century: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s X-rays had allowed physicians to peer inside the human body, and Marie Curie had discovered a substance so radioactive it glowed in the dark. The Five used a psychograph to contact spirit guides and practiced automatic drawing, emptying their minds of thought to access the subconscious realm below. In 1906, a spirit ordered af Klint to begin a series called The Paintings for the Temple, meant to be shown in a space of her own design: a round building with three levels, linked by a spiral staircase.

“The Five counseled her against it. They worried that such effort would drive af Klint to madness,” said Ms. Guillard, one gloomy afternoon in February. Snow obscured the windows, and the radiator clanked: her retelling felt like a séance itself. “But she insisted.”

Af Klint’s temple was never built, but she held the shape in her mind for decades. Ms. Guillard lent Laurel and Maisie the catalogue from her only American show, a group exhibit at the LA County Museum of Art. Laurel paged through it for hours, convinced that if she only looked longer, harder, she might receive the cosmic knowledge that the paintings seemed to promise. Intersecting orbs hung, suspended, in shafts of color; circles opened into letters, and coils vibrated with energy. In Dove, No. 3, a fizzing prism shuddered against darkness, as if a piece of the universe were being forged.

When it came time to choose her project, Laurel experimented. She made collages like Max Ernst with paper cut from Jane magazine; she painted two Laurels, like Kahlo’s The Two Fridas. But af Klint’s Tree of Knowledge, which unfolded in two directions, recalled a memory from childhood: weeding in her mother’s flower garden. Like the dandelions she’d pulled—stems above, roots below—Tree of Knowledge was an asymmetric mirror image.

Now Laurel parked in the student lot and walked through empty corridors. She found Ms. Guillard in the art room.

“Ah! It’s you.” The teacher hopped down from the counter, where she had been scrubbing at a mulish patch of paint. “Come, come.”

The remaining senior projects stood against the wall, forlorn as unattended luggage. The last was a young white ash tree from Lower Orchard. Laurel had unearthed and suspended it, from branches to roots, in an open shadow box.

“You will bring it to college, yes?” asked Ms. Guillard as Laurel picked it up.

Laurel couldn’t tell whether Ms. Guillard was joking. “I don’t think I’ll have space.”

The teacher crossed her arms. “And will you take art classes?”

“Not this semester,” Laurel admitted; she had filled her schedule with general education requirements. “Maybe next.”

Ms. Guillard huffed as she walked Laurel to the school’s entrance. “You say this, but soon you will be focused on friends and boys and all your classes for the plants”—this was how she referred to Laurel’s intended botany major—“and you will forget about Remedios Varo; you’ll forget the cup and saucer that Meret Oppenheim covered with fur. The imagination is a muscle, Laurel. You must exercise it.”

But Laurel was distracted. Through the window behind Ms. Guillard’s head, she saw Eli on his skateboard—or, rather, she saw him stop skateboarding. He had propped it up on one end, and he was looking at her.

Ms. Guillard followed her eyes. “What did I tell you?” she said. But she winked before Laurel walked out of the door.

Gentle heat, cutting breeze, sky the blue and pink of cotton candy: it was a perfect summer evening. She and Eli were the only people in sight.

“Hi,” Laurel said, slowing down.

“Hey,” said Eli.

He didn’t introduce himself, and neither did she. It seemed a given that they each knew exactly who the other was, despite never having interacted.

“I wondered who made that one.” Eli nodded at her project. “How did you do it?”

“I found the tree on my family’s apple orchard.” Laurel set the box down. When she crouched, Eli joined her. “I put paper around the base and marked the shadows of the branches—age-old technique to figure out how far the roots extend, or so my dad claims.”

“Your family has an orchard?” Eli asked. His eyes were very green.

Laurel flushed with pleasure at his curiosity. “Since before I was born.”