“Sage and I hadn't been here together since that first day of the school vacation, the morning after Ellen jumped from the car, and it was as if nature had reclaimed it, the laurel and rhododendron pushing farther into the space, erasing our time here together. I stood up and tried to break off the branches with the cigarette just hanging from my mouth, the smoke wafting into my eyes. I sat down and kept smoking. It made me feel sick and light-headed. Sage had started buying Marlboro Lights. Menthol, she said, was for old ladies. I reminded her of this when she continued to steal Charlotte's menthols and smoke them. The stick sap from the rhododendron on my fingers had grubbed the cigarette paper, and I wondered if it was poison to inhale. The nectar of the rhododendron, laurel, and azalea are all toxic. I smoked anyway, even when the sapped paper sizzled against the ember tip.
The rhododendron blossoms around me were dead and hung in bowed clusters, their vibrant purple faded, pale in death. Seven or eight pods hung from the tips of threadlike stalks. Each pod, I'd read, contained over five hundred seeds. I tried to calculate what that meant per cluster and for every bush. millions. I looked at the petals all around me on the forest floor; I was sitting on the possibility of billions of future rhododendrons.”