My Friend Turns into A Tree

"Now, Xinyue. You thrust out the weapon like that and -"

Knock. Knock.

"- you hook the hilt onto the enemy's -"

Knockknockknock.

My mother frowned.

"Who'd be knocking on our door now?" I asked, curious, as a series of frantic rapping thudded against the door, as if someone is about to break in.

"Lets go check."

I followed mom upstairs. I tapped the jade embedded in the hilt of my sword three times, and it turned back into a necklace. Handy trick, I thought. Even if I still wasn't sure about how it worked, I was glad that I could have a weapon that would not send the metal detectors screaming whenever I visited a museum.

We reached the door. I extended out my hand, reaching for the door handle. The second I opened it, a green blur tackled me with a hug.

"XINYUE! I was so worried about you!"

It was Willow. A wave of guilt overwhelmed me. I had spent such a long time without a real friend that I had forgotten how it was like to have a friend like Willow. She had stayed by me every time I needed someone. She had accompanied me around, even tried to defend me against Madison and her gang. All the while I had even practicing swordplay with my mother, I had not even thought about her, and how worried she must have felt. Hell, I hadn't even tried to call her and tell her about moving away. What had been wrong with me?

But how did she know what had happened?

"I'm sorry, Willow, I forgot to tell you."

"Its okay!" She gave me a broad, warm smile. "I was just worried about an attack."

My heart swelled. "So you know about the weird things that happened?"

"Well... um..."

Willow dropped her gaze and started fiddling with her fingers. Then, she looked at my mom, pointedly avoiding my gaze. My heart fell. It was clear she was hiding something. When had everyone started keeping secrets from me? Or perhaps she was just shy?

"What's wrong?"

"I - uh - nothing!"

I frowned. Definitely suspicious.

"Mom, can I talk with Willow in private for a sec?" I asked my mom. I guessed Willow didn't want to tell me anything with her around.

"Sure! I'll make you guys some food!" My mom smiled, and slipped into the kitchen.

"Soo... whats going on?" I put on a cheery voice and asked Willow when I was sure that my mom was out of earshot. Maybe now my friend would tell me what she needed to.

I wanted her to tell me everything: how it all began, what these things meant, basically everything that my mother was so secretive about. But instead, she said the last thing I wanted to hear.

"Um... I don't know if its safe to tell you."

Anger flared inside me. Right, so now even she did not think it appropriate to at least tell me something? I clenched my fists, trying to control myself. I wanted to know things. I needed to know things. Its part of my personality! Now, it was as if everyone knew exactly what was going on, all except me, as if it was all a huge joke at my expense. First, my own mother had refused me information, and now, my best friend was keeping me in the dark. Did they not understand? It was I who had to face down the Fury, I who had been put through the terror of a poison-spitting hydra. I, not any one of them! After being through all this, they still did not think I have a right to know what was happening?

"Willow, a poison-spitting hydra and my former English teacher both just attacked me and you STILL THINK ITS NOT SAFE TO TELL ME?"

My voice rose to a shrill yell. Willow shrank back and fixed her gaze on the floor, fidgeting her feet. An amalgam of emotions danced across her face: guilt, concern, awkwardness, confusion, and even fear.

I stood there, glaring at her. I knew I should be more controlled, but at that moment, I didn't care. After what felt like an eternity, she finally spoke.

"I'm... well... I'm not sure your mom would be happy to have you know before its time."

"Don't tell me it's the August 18th thing again."

"How did you know?" A spring of surprise leapt in Willow's voice.

"My mom told me something about a war ending. What's that about? Please tell me! And did you and mom discuss about this already? What are you two on about?" Ha, I thought. Even if I didn't notice weird things about my mom before, I could still read people this much.

"Err..."

I hid my smirk. Yup, caught her. Just a little bit more, and she might just start telling me everything.

"Please, Willow?" I usually didn't beg, but not knowing anything is killing me!

"Um..." She shuffled around, picking at her fingernails, still looking hesitant.

"Tell me as much as you can!"

As soon as I said it, I mentally cursed. That was stupid. What if she told me she couldn't tell me anything? I crossed my fingers hard and bit the insides of my cheeks.

"Well..." Whenever Willow got nervous, she kind of turned green. I usually thought that it was because she was very pale. Suddenly, a thought struck me out of nowhere. It seemed crazy, but I had been through so much crazy stuff already that it did not seem to matter. Besides, if hydras existed, then...

"Willow?"

"Huh?"

"Are you a willow tree?"

The look on her face was priceless. She jumped so badly she almost leapt out of her skin.

"How did you know?"

"Deductive reasoning."

I shrugged. After my teacher had turned into a bat and attacked me with talons, I was ready for a lot more surprises. My friend being a tree? Well, that was not as bad as what could have happened. At least she was not a monster of some sort. Trees weren't bad. Thinking about this, I suddenly had to suppress a desire to laugh. A week ago, if someone had told me that I would be attacked by teachers who were secretly Furies, or make friends with a tree, I would have stared at them like they were insane. But here I am, calmly accepting the fact that my best friend is not human, not even freaking out about it. I guess that all the weird things that had happened - like exploding buses, magical mothers, learning weird things - as well as just being here, living in America, getting kicked out of a school - I never got in big trouble in school back in China! - had really changed me.

Somehow, without me even realizing it, I had shrugged out of the Chinese girl who had a perfect record and reasoned with logic, and squeezed into someone who did not even mind the fact that she had gotten expelled from school.

Wow.

I tried not to show my emotions.

"Let me guess, you are a nymph." I was getting the hang of guessing now.

"Dryad, but why are you so good at guessing?"

I smiled.

"Just because."

Then my mother's voice rang down the corridor.

"Xinyue and Willow! Do you guys want cake?"

That distracted me. I loved cakes, even if I was hopeless at trying to make them. After one's last few baking experiments had turned out disastrous, one simply learned to give up.

"Of course!"

"Then you have to help!"

"No!" I moaned. After making a tray of charred cookies, mushy cheesecake and burnt cupcakes, I was not willing to start cooking again.

My mom threw me a playful smirk.

"Wow the perfect Xinyue can't cook!"

I cursed silently. Was she really twenty years older than me? By the way she talked sometimes, you would have thought she was much younger. Even so, her words fired me up. I did not want to back down from a competition, even if my mom's sweets belong to a five-star bakery.

"Fine..." I relented. "What do you want me to do?"

My mother grinned at me.

"I'm glad you asked!"

She winked at me and smiled her mwahaha-I'm-gonna-make-you-suffer smile. Uh oh. I wondered what she was going to make me do.

Five minutes later, Willow and I were squashed against one side of the marble kitchen counter, covered in cake batter yet still getting nowhere with anything, stopping every now and then to lick the buttery mixture of our hands. It tasted delicious, perhaps even better than actual baker cake. I wondered why we couldn't we just eat it like this? Meanwhile, my mom was happily beating up the batter of more cheese cake.

"Remind me," Willow started, her bright green eyes glaring at me, "how did it turn out like this?"

"Well..."

I knew that my mother was one of the hardest person in the world to beat in a contest, but I just couldn't resist the temptation of one, even if the last three ovens I touched exploded. Challenges and light taunts just got to me somehow, more than I had ever let on. I never could back down. It was just part of me. Me. No matter how much I wanted to change, to become less sensitive, I simply couldn't.

Even if the last three ovens I touched had exploded. All that had happened had been the cake mix exploding after I had accidentally spilled vinegar on top of the baking soda. Well, I reflected, it at least had actually been quite mild compared to the other explosions I made. My mother's expression had been priceless. Then a second later, she had turned back to me, scowling slightly, telling me over and over again that it was because of me that the baking had failed at I really had to be more careful in future. I closed my eyes tight shut, and could still see the image of the exploding oven shattering through my mind's eye, and my mother's disapproving expression frowning at me.

I turned to Willow.

"Well... Um... mymomalwayswinsincompetitionsandiwananbeatherandso ialwayschallengeherbutshealwayswinsandireallyreall ywananbeatherandiwannawinbutididntknowthatitwoulde xplodeafteriputvinegarinit" I muttered incoherently, my Chinese accent returning in a rush of nervousness.

Willow frowned slightly. "What?"

I took a deep breath, steadying myself.

"My mom always wins in competitions and i wanna be good too, and so i always challenge her but she always wins, and teases me lots of times... I really wanted to be as good as her, but I never knew that the cake would explode when I put vinegar.

Willow looked at me sympathetically and sighed.

"I seriously think that competition is your fatal flaw..."

"Fatal flaw! My mom said something about it too! What is it?"

"Well," Willow replied, glancing at me, "just try your best to control your need to win."

I swallowed. That sounded quite impossible. For as long as I remember, I always needed to win. I wanted to be first, never second. Second always meant the first one to lose, which was not something to be proud of. I knew that this made me seem insufferably arrogant and viciously competitive, but I just could not seem to change.

"Whatever. Can we please just leave this to your mom?"

Willow sounded really tired of trying to making cake. She wiped sweat off her forehead and scraped batter off her sleeve. I guess cake mix splattered on her skirt did not help much. Besides, trees usually didn't eat cake, much less bake cake.

I wanted to agree. I had no luck trying to beat batter either. But still. If I did, wouldn't I lose my mother's dare? I so badly did not want that to happen. I gulped.

As if reading my thoughts, Willow said, "Come on, Xinyue. You know you can't win against your mom, so why try?"

I stared at her incredulously.

"How...?"

For as much as I knew, it was hard to read my emotions. The exception was my mom, of course.

"I can read emotions." Willow shrugged.

I stared at her, my eyes wide as goldfish eyes. How could she just simply shrug off this kind of power of reading minds? This meant that she could read my thoughts, my emotions and fears. She probably now knew everything about me that I was not proud of. What else had she not told me about herself?

"Hey! You never told me you have supernatural powers either!" Willow defended.

Supernatural powers? I did? Now that she mentioned it, studies had always been surprisingly easy for me. I had always thought that this was because I worked hard, but was this the reason?

Then Willow seemed to sag. Her eyes darkened slightly and she sighed. "Xinyue, I need to tell you something."

"What?"

"I'll explain. Trust me."

Then she disappeared down the corridor, calling out to my mother.

"Ms. Li, Xinyue and I are going to the park now!"

I was still confused as Willow dragged me out of my house and towards the nearby park.

"Willow, what's going on?"

Seeing the bewildered look on my face, Willow must have come with the same conclusion I did. She cast me a sad look. Her green eyes, always so full of life, suddenly looked mournful.

"So your mom never told you." She said.

I rolled my eyes as I plopped down on the swings.

"Well, I guess my mom didn't tell me a lot of things before today. I never thought she could be so secretive!"

Willow gave me a you-never-know look. I sighed. What else was my mom hiding? For all my life, she had been the perfectly normal lady I knew, even if she's overly perfect. Then, bam, all of a sudden, mythological things were real and mom was somehow part of them. Though I did have a feeling my mom was not her usually cheerful self. She had seemed different since we arrived in America. Well, it might just be because of the war she had talked about.

I pushed the thought aside. Thinking about it too much would just drive me nuts. I looked around. Well, since we were in the park, I decided to ask her something that had just occurred to me.

"So which one's your tree?"

I scanned the trees around me. They all looked pretty old, with thick trunks and gnarled roots. Hopefully, my friend was not fifty years older than me. But if her name was Willow, then she must be a willow tree right? Willow trees didn't usually live past fifty years.

"The willow tree of course. There's only one in the park."

Willow pointed to the lush green weeping willow tree with sweeping leaves next to the pond. It bent over the water, swaying almost mournfully in the breeze. I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that that tree was actually my friend. Whoa. Even with all the weird stuff that had happened, I still could not fully stomach that fact.

"Um, just wondering, how old are you exactly?"

The willow tree looked like it had been here since the town had started, but I guess you never knew with fast growing plants.

Willow shrugged.

"I don't know... Time isn't really important for a tree. I'm probably around fifty years. Or sixty. I don't know exactly.

Fifty years? Wow. My skinny best friend, who tied braids and wore flowery dresses, attended the same school as me, was actually fifty years' old. I swallowed. Then something occurred to me, and my stomach seemed to drop. Hadn't my grandmother told me that a Willow usually only lived for thirty years? I decided not to bring that up.

"How come there's only one willow tree?"

The willow tree was my grandmother's favorite plant. She had once told me that it had magical properties. Well, from all the things I learned today, I would not be surprised if it really has magical powers.

Willow's face darkened. She seemed to sag slightly, and the corners of her lips turned down. Her expression turned sad, mournful even. I immediately knew I had asked the wrong question.

"The others had to move away after their tree died. My tree is stronger than most, but your mother foreseen it would die very soon. She... She told me to tell you before it's too late. This is what I was trying to tell you, Xinyue."

I felt like someone had thrown a brick at me. The world seemed to be yanked out from beneath my feet. My head spun dizzyingly. Did this mean that Willow was going to die? Emotions clawed their way up my stomach; fear, desperation, shock and misery swirling together into a black amalgam of color, choking me. I bit my lip. My friend was going to die. My one and only friend was leaving me, for good. I had never had a friend like Willow before, and she had to be taken from me after I just got to properly know her? It was so unfair! Tears welled up in my eyes, threatening to fall. My heart weighed heavier than the earth.

"It's okay, Xinyue. Don't cry, please don't cry!"

Willow put an arm around me. Her voice was soothing. A lump formed in my throat.

"I'll just find a new tree. It might take a while with the war, but eventually I'll come back."

That warmed me. She was not gone for good. I could see her again. Hope sparked in my chest. I gathered my composure and tried for a weak smile.

"If you do, I'll make sure to find you!" I promised. She smiled at me one last time. It suddenly struck me, that very moment, how pretty she was. She did not need to be like Madison and her gang, with their makeup and ridiculous diets. She, with her petite features and sincere smile, was the most beautiful friend I had had.

"Until that day then, Xinyue. I have to leave now, I led you here to say good-bye."

She had mixed emotions on her face: regret, fear, sadness all mixing together. But one thing I knew for sure: Her tree was almost dead. Maybe after a few days, or even a few minutes.

"Bye Willow!"

Green mist started to swirl around her. A sudden surge of desperation shot through me. I needed to capture this moment. I probably would never see her again. I needed to memorize her; her voice, her smile, her friendship. I couldn't just let her leave like this! I had so much to talk to her about: my life back in China, how it was like being a tree, and a whole bunch of other things.

Yet the words got trapped in my throat. All I could do was wave at her as the green mist slowly dissolved her into a mixture of flowers, branches, and thin, long, leaves.

The only thing left of my only friend.

I stood there for what felt like an eternity, staring at the spot where Willow had vanished, struggling not to cry. How would I ever find another friend like her? How long would it take for me to find her again? I will find her, I promised myself. I will. And I would not give up until I did.

"I'll find you Willow," I promised. " I swear it on the River Styx."

special thanks to Ivy my beta reader! I'm so happy that I have such a wonderful editor~~~

This story is going to end soon and I'm going to make a sequel

And I watched Tsubasa Chronicles and its soo good!

anyways back to main topic, PLEASE REVIEW I REALLY WANTED TO KNOW WHAT OTHER'S THINK EVEN IF YOU ARE GOING TO TELL ME MY STORY SUCKED! I WANTED TO IMPROVE~