I look at the cells with a feeling of increasing worry. All perfectly regular, all with a well-defined cell wall. An easily visible vacuole, the nucleus a dark dot. I adjust the lenses and I can almost see the chloroplasts. My partner's trying to see, asking me to stop hogging the microscope. I don't want to move. Don't want her to see the iodine-stained slide. I hear her going to tell the teacher who comes over and asks me to move. So I do, swapping the slide for hers. She starts babbling about seeing it and how this is great. I just go and slip the slide in my pocket. I've a microscope at home and I need to look at the cells again.
I get back and don't even bother to get anything. Just look at the cells. I sit there for ten minutes before I reach over and get a fresh slide and a sterile swab. I run it round the inside of my mouth then smear it over the slide before dripping iodine on the slide. Glass cover on top then under the lens. And there it is again. The perfect cell walls and vacuole. My cells. I'm a plant. A living, moving plant. It's not even like that animal with chloroplasts. This is proper plant cells. I'm mutant. No other explanation other than being an alien which I'm pretty certain I'm not. I look round my room. Books, schoolbag, posters on the wall. A typical teenage bedroom. I love it here. I love my family. I have friends at school. But this area is the worst place for mutants. If they knew, I'd be lynched, my family forced out of town and my friends shunned. So I start packing. I take the bare essentials. Clothes, money and that's about it. But I end up packing my photo album. Just to show my family it's not them I'm running from. I finish and open the window. Then I stop, go over to the microscope and take the slide. A marker dates it and mentions where it comes from. So they understand. I leap from the window, landing in the tree. And suddenly feel that wind through my leaves, the nutrients in the soil. I am the tree and the tree is me. I pull my bare hands from the branch and the images stop. And my hands return to flesh from bark. I scrabble down, trying not to touch the plant. Then I run. I run and I know I'll never stop. I'm the plant girl. I'm a mutant. I'm running for my life to save my family. And I'm never going back.