Ayrenn
I remember decades ago when this used to be 580, perching my plastic tuatara Korra on the edge of the backseat window, peering past the traffic with her at the sparkling bay. In high school, it was earsplitting demolition, then bare dirt my first year of college. I don’t know what brought me down here after I dropped out, maybe I was drawn to the vacant land because that’s what I felt like, empty and waiting for something new. Even stepping on the field with my own feet, touching its contaminated soil as I planted those first seeds with Marco’s crew, the place itself meant nothing—until you showed up in your dad’s red Ford Prakasha three days into planting.
I remember the Florida plates, the way the tire tracks marred the bare dirt, the way everybody pointedly ignored it like they ignored the tents under the new BART tracks and the cardboard-and-blanket cocoons in the doorways downtown. I hoped it wouldn’t be me who got to the car first and had to plant my sunflower seeds around it, but there I was. No one else was close.
The window rolled down. Please don’t be one of the angry yelling ones, I remember thinking, looking at the soil under my shoes, avoiding eye contact.
I don’t know what I expected, some amalgamation of my own biases and media bullshit. I didn’t expect your voice to be so soft and lilting, so earnestly apologetic.
“Am I in your way? I’m sorry.”
I looked up, and you were my age, brown with thick black hair, disheveled like you just woke up but smooth-skinned. I didn’t expect you to be cute, I know that for sure.
“I’ll move,” you said. “Let me just start the car.” You fumbled around the front seats, moving bags and textbooks around. One of the books fell through the window, and you cursed.
I picked up the book for you. It had a burning forest on the cover: Introduction to Environmental Science. Subtle back then, weren’t they? I handed it through the car window.
Introduction to Environmental Science. Subtle back then, weren’t they?You apologized again. “I’m so sorry, thanks,” you said. “I’m really sorry. I’ll go now.”
You weren’t what I expected. I was sheltered, and I only knew what I’d seen on the surface, in the street. People without homes were obvious, I thought. They had a look to them, an age, a smell. You could’ve been in one of my classes, or a kid from my mom’s new neighborhood in Oregon. Instead of ignoring you and walking away like I’d done that morning to a guy who asked for change on Shattuck, I said, “Hey, are you okay?”
Our eyes connected for the first time, and you said, “Is anyone?”
As if I had an answer.
I thought you might cry. You started your car. I wished there were something I could do to help, but all I had on me were sunflower seeds and a half-empty water bottle. I didn’t carry cash, and my lunch was back in the parking lot. “Wait!” I shouted, an idea forming.
The car lurched forward, then stopped suddenly. “Oh, fuck,” you cried, chagrined. “I didn’t run over your foot, did I?!”
“No,” I laughed. “No, I’m fine, I was just—”
“Oh,” you giggled nervously. “I’m such an idiot.”
“Even if that’s true,” I teased, trying to ease the tension, “I was going to say you can park in the lot if you want to join the volunteer crew.”
You looked around the field at the handful of us pushing sunflower seeds into the earth. “What kind of project is it?”
“We’re planting sunflowers to clean up contaminated soil.”
Your nervousness evaporated. “Wait, is this a phytoremediation site?! I was just reading about that! I thought only drones got to do that stuff. You sure you need another volunteer?”
“Wait, is this a phytoremediation site?!”“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll just tell Marco you came here looking to help. You’re studying environmental science, right?”
You nodded, smiling. “Yeah, at Berkeley City College. Hoping to transfer to Berkeley next spring. The other Berkeley. UC Berkeley.”
I laughed. “I know the one.” I decided not to tell you that I’d just dropped out. “My name’s Ayrenn.”
“I’m Riley.”
Riley
Riley gets the quick version of the orientation from the coordinator, Marco. He makes her feel welcome right away, never asking why she was parked on the dirt or why there was so much crap in her car.
The program is called Ohlone Shoreline Project for Remediation and Rematriation or OSPRRe, pronounced osprey, like the bird. There’s a government grant and a land trust and some private funding. Marco is Ohlone, and the pamphlet he gives her is written in both English and Chochenyo. They work with local volunteers instead of drones, he explains, because the work isn’t just about healing the land—it’s about healing people, too. Riley never thought of it that way, but as he’s talking, she realizes how much she wants to do environmental science for that reason in the first place.
The work isn’t just about healing the land—it’s about healing people, too.“Here,” he fills a pouch with seeds from the bin in his truck. “These are our local Bay Area species, Helianthus californicus. We use the natives even though we’re tearing them out in the fall because birds still come and spread the seeds around.”
“Aren’t the seeds toxic?”
“Nah. The sunflowers know how to take care of their friends. They store all the heavy metals in the roots and stuff.”
The group is diverse, a lot like the Bay Area in general. The first volunteer she met, Ayrenn, is kinda cute with freckles and a short, pink ponytail. Riley takes an area of the field next to hers, and when their paths finally lead them to each other, she has a chance to thank her.
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Ayrenn says. “I wish I could do more.” They silently push more seeds into the soil while Riley tries to think of a non-awkward response. Ayrenn changes the topic first, though. “I heard someone found a salamander in one of the other fields. All this dirt along the Bay here used to be the freeway, so it’s kind of a mystery how it even got there.”
“Was it a teleporting salamander?” Riley asks, hoping her anxious humor lands. “I heard they live around here.”
Ayrenn pauses, then laughs. From there, the conversation comes easy. Morning turns into lunch before Riley realizes she’s hungry. Ayrenn introduces the other volunteers as they unpack their lunches, and Riley tells them she already ate. Ayrenn slides a bag of taro chips across the picnic bench between them.
At least with the volunteer parking permit, Riley has a few days to worry about something besides getting towed or arrested.
Ayrenn
I asked you to get dinner that first day when everyone was going home and you were trying to look like you had somewhere to be. I didn’t know if I was trying to help someone in need or just trying to spend an extra hour with you.
You hesitated. Checked your phone.
“It’s on me,” I said. “We can walk to the sandwich place near my bus stop.”
“You mean the donut shop,” you said, smiling.
“So you know it then!” I smiled back.
You asked if I was from here on the walk, and I rambled about the old freeway, how they tore everything out to make way for the rising sea levels. You told me it was a common strategy, and the technical term was “managed retreat.” You held the door for me, and over sandwiches you told me about volunteering with a mangrove rewilding project in high school just to have somewhere to be every weekend. You’d shared a tiny FEMA trailer with your parents since that Category 6 took out the whole west coast of Florida.
I couldn’t imagine losing my home like that. Having nowhere to go. Ending up in a camp at the edge of ruins.
On the bus ride home, I lingered on your laugh and the way you suddenly got shy when you said goodnight. I’d felt shy, too.
And then guilty because I was going home to a bed. And you weren’t.
Riley
Without the stress of constantly finding a new parking spot, Riley manages to balance the new volunteer gig with her classes well. Her favorite part is always dinner with Ayrenn, and with her next UBI payment, she finally has the chance to return the favor of that first sandwich. Ayrenn lets her, and it feels good.
When all the sunflower seeds are in the ground, the crew moves on to a site with no overnight parking. Marco apologizes and asks Riley if there’s anything he can do to help. She jokes that he could move her up the waitlist for refugee housing, and happily, he gets it and laughs. Ayrenn suggests the street in front of her garage apartment in the hills, but hill people love to call the cops.
She’ll stay in the lot and hope the patrol doesn’t notice her parking pass is expired. In class, she can barely focus, worrying about her car.
Ayrenn comes by on the weekend with coffee and donuts to “watch the seeds come up.” They sit on the roof of the Prakasha, so close their knees touch.
“I think there’s a hint of green,” Ayrenn says.
“I don’t see it.”
“Well… maybe in here!” Ayrenn pulls an envelope from her jacket pocket.
“What is this?” Riley laughs. “Is this for Eid?”
“Um. Do you celebrate Eid?”
“Not since...” My parents started fighting all the time, she thinks. “Middle school.”
“Let’s say it’s for Eid.”
Riley opens it. The card has a sunflower on it, and inside is a green parking permit. “Is this…?”
But Ayrenn agrees. Riley clears the passenger seat for her and places her new parking pass on the dashboard. “It has a place of honor now,” she says. Ayrenn giggles. She turns the heat on and shifts around in the driver’s seat to face Ayrenn, hoping the motion looks less awkward than it feels.
Soft, gold light peeks briefly through the fog, brightening Ayrenn’s pink hair and the tip of her nose. She’s too nice. Too pretty. Too miraculous, really, to be sitting here in the front seat of Riley’s car.
Ayrenn smiles, and Riley’s breath quickens. Ayrenn opens her mouth to say something but pauses, like she forgot what it was or maybe lost her nerve. Riley’s heart pounds when Ayrenn grins again, and Riley finally says, “Um, do you—”
“Yeah, all day.”
Ayrenn leans over the emergency brake. Their lips touch.
Every sunflower shoot feels the moisture of fog for the first time and shivers.
Ayrenn
I couldn’t stop smiling to myself on the bus ride home. I bit my lower lip where yours had pressed into it, and I could still taste you.
If you could dream so big, why couldn’t I?As my bus went past the Berkeley campus, I forgot for the first time in months how frustrated and ashamed I was about my abandoned degree. Instead, I imagined you living your dream—transferring there, becoming a scientist—and embellished it with a book you’d write on mangrove flood control, interviews on NPR, listeners captivated by your anecdotes about living in your car when you first got to California as a climate refugee. Maybe I’d design your book cover or, who knows, come with you to Florida to study anole lizards living in the mangrove branches. Herpetology had seemed impractical when I was eighteen, but if you could dream so big, why couldn’t I? Maybe we could even climb the old-growth redwoods, looking for the wandering salamanders in the canopy. Teleporting salamanders, you’d joked when I first met you. I laughed out loud remembering.
For the first time since dropping out, I felt a glimmer of meaning.
Riley
That weekend and a few more grow between Ayrenn and Riley, lush and bright like leaves unfurling in sun.
It’s so ridiculous but so right, Ayrenn’s fingers entwined with Riley’s as late morning light comes through the single window of Ayrenn’s garage apartment in the hills.
Ayrenn whispers to her, “We’re like the soil and the sunflowers, aren’t we?”
“We’re like the soil and the sunflowers, aren’t we?”Riley laughs. Then she thinks it through. She pulls her hand away. “That’s kinda fucked.”
Ayrenn sits up. “What? How?”
“I don’t need fixing any more than you do.” Riley sits up and looks for her clothes. She should check on her car. It got towed once in a neighborhood like this for being an inch into a driveway zone without even blocking it. It took an entire UBI check to get it back.
“That’s not what I meant! I was thinking you were the sunflowers.”
Riley pulls her jeans on and says, “Come on. You’re always going to feel like you’re doing me some kind of favor.”
Ayrenn fishes her T-shirt out from under the sheets and says, “That’s so not true.”
Riley looks for her socks. “You think I don’t know what it’s like?” She hears the anger in her voice. She doesn’t even fully understand where it’s coming from, but it’s taking on a life of its own. “To feel that responsibility to help? Why do you think I’m in college in the first place?”
“I don’t know! Most people just go because it’s expected!”
“And look how that turned out for you! You’re a dropout!”
Ayrenn looks stricken, but her riposte comes quick. “And your decisions are going so great.”
Riley grabs her left shoe from the top of the mini-fridge. “I need to go check on my car.”
“Riley, wait.” Ayrenn pulls her own jeans off her desk, knocks over one of her reptile toys, curses, and picks it up.
“Ayrenn, drop the fucking lizard. I’m waiting.”
“It’s not a lizard—it’s a tuatara!” She sets it back on the desk and turns to Riley. “I didn’t mean it. I don’t even think of you like that, Riley. You made me realize—”
Riley knows her skepticism about whatever comes next is showing. She can see Ayrenn’s confidence falter, but she’s too angry to soften.
“I know you’re a refugee,” Ayrenn pleads. “Not a homeless person. It’s not your fault.”
Riley can feel her pulse rise. There are so many things she could say about standing in the same long lines as people who were truly suffering, whose entire UBI checks were going to the treatments Medi-Cal didn’t cover; elderly people, who were alone and losing their memories, who thought their paperwork was already filled out; about how long it took her to realize that the other people parked at the rest stops in the middle of the night were just trying to sleep, too. About the guy she talked to on Telegraph yesterday, with the slobbery black lab, the only friend he kept from home when he came out as trans.
She leaves Ayrenn with the short version, words she hasn’t been able to articulate until now: “Those aren’t different things.”
Ayrenn
I know how right you were, now. And I know that we were both sunflowers and soil and seeds and that metaphors are all bad maps at best, persistent bullshit at their worst.
That night, I ate microwaved tikka masala alone, obsessively checking my phone to see if you’d read my confused half-apology. Your text finally came around sunset: All the sunflowers are starting to bloom.
I wanted to cry. Sounds pretty, I texted back.
I guess. They’re literally toxic waste.
All the sunflowers are starting to bloom. I wanted to cry. Sounds pretty, I texted back. I guess. They’re literally toxic waste.I sat with that, feeling like shit, and finally typed, I guess this isn’t working, huh?
It was at that moment, as my thumb hovered over the send button, that the siren started. I dropped my phone. The warning took over the screen: MANDATORY EVACUATION: GRIZZLY PEAK.
I went outside. The whole neighborhood was doing the same, old Berkeley academics and middle-aged tech workers with their fancy drone assistants all murmuring at the orange glow coming from the park. We could smell the smoke. One outraged blonde woman cursed the invasive eucalyptus trees with a raised fist and slammed her door. The gay couple down the block called for their kitty, voices edged with panic. I looked under the closest cars and found a Siamese hiding behind the tire of a landscaping truck. I coaxed her out and carried her to the couple, who were nearly in tears.
“You’re a renter, right?” the heavier guy asked. “Do you have a place you can stay tonight?”
For the first time in my life, I realized I didn’t.
Riley
The figure dragging too much luggage toward Riley through the parking lot looks like any other displaced person. Riley prepares to tell them what she learned the first week: There’s a patrol every other day to check the permits, and they always call the cops on tents. Then she remembers Ayrenn’s cryptic text: Nowhere else to go. She didn’t connect it with the smoke in the hills until now.
Riley puts her homework away and jumps out of the car as Ayrenn drops her backpack and a duffle bag by the Prakasha’s fender. Ayrenn slumps onto the duffle, forehead in her hands, pink hair falling out of a hasty ponytail.
“What happened? Was it the fire?” Riley scooches in next to Ayrenn on the duffle. “Are you okay?”
Ayrenn shakes her head, then looks up, chin quivering. “I think everyone got out, but what about the pets people couldn’t find? The houseplants. Korra, my tuatara, she was just plastic, but—”
“Hey,” Riley wraps an arm around Ayrenn. “I know. Trust me, I know.”
And then Ayrenn’s tears fall, and Riley remembers everything.
Ayrenn
I slept in your passenger seat. While you were in class, I wandered the fields, touched the first yellow petals I found peeking out from the buds, panicked when I realized the portable toilet the volunteers used was gone, finally found one three lots over, but there was no hand sanitizer or anything, and then realized the truck stop shower you recommended was four freeway exits north. How the hell did you always smell so nice? I got hungry, but I didn’t want to leave my luggage in the car because someone could break in. You left me the keys, but I’m not a great driver, and anyway, if I parked it near the sandwich shop, someone would definitely break in. I finally realized why you liked to walk up there and leave your car down here. I finally realized a lot of things.
On the second evening, my landlord called. My rental was ashes, but the main house only needed roof repairs. The relief in the landlord’s voice made me want to punch something. My home had always just been their garage.
I hung up and stared out at the budding sunflowers, dwelling on the things I’d left behind. Books from the degree I never finished. The watercolor set I’d meant to use for months and now never would. All the reptile figurines I’d collected up through high school and poor Korra the plastic tuatara, my favorite toy when I was a kid. We’d had adventures together, damn it.
My eyes stung. I kicked a tire on the Prakasha, but it only hurt my foot.
When you got back from class on the third afternoon, you had our favorite sandwiches from the sandwich-and-donut shop, and we ate together at the picnic table.
“Guess what?” you said. You seemed excited.
I couldn’t even fathom feeling that way. “What?”
“Well… there’s this housing program for climate refugees that’s been on the county agenda for like, ever, and now that your rich neighbors are fighting over hotel rooms, suddenly it’s funded! I got moved up the waitlist today.”
“Like… What kind of housing?”
“Better than this car?”
My other options were a cigarette-burned couch at my dad’s cabin in Montana or the pull-out mattress in my mom’s boyfriend’s home office in Oregon, which would have to be vacated daily at 7 a.m. “How do I sign up?”
“Oh, I was thinking…” Your expression changed in an instant from enthusiasm to doubt. You looked at your phone. “I’ll send you the link.”
After a short sign-up form and a tedious document upload, I got my confirmation email. My spot on the waitlist was ten thousand something. I thought they’d put extra digits in there like some kind of code, but no, you said your number had been five thousand something for a year. It had dropped in the last two days because the county bought an entire hotel.
I wanted to hurl my phone into the Bay. Instead, I dropped it screen-down on the picnic table and looked out at the water. “That was pointless.”
You surprised me. “What if we move in together when my number comes up?”
“What if we move in together when my number comes up?”I felt so many things at once. Excited, scared, relieved you didn’t hate me. What kind of housing would it be? In which neighborhood? I imagined the FEMA trailer you hated, but even something like that would have a mini-kitchen and a bathroom. And you would be there. I imagined plants, a pet turtle, eating sugary cereal together in the middle of the night. “That sounds amazing.”
Riley
“These sunflowers have done a pretty badass job cleaning up this dirt all summer, and we are grateful. ‘Alšip-mak,” Marco says, finishing his introduction to the new fall volunteers.
The spot where Riley first met Ayrenn is overgrown with brown-tinged, bushy sunflowers just past their peaks. Song sparrows pry the last few seeds from them, scattering as she approaches. She pulls up each bush by the base of its stalk and shakes the dry dirt off the roots and rhizomes before laying them to rest in her wheelbarrow. She feels strangely proud of them.
At noon, “just in case anyone forgot to bring lunch,” Marco offers roasted native bay nuts from an Ohlone-managed grove, mushroom jerky made from chanterelles gathered at a new rewilding site in the North Bay, and Doritos. Riley tries a bay nut out of curiosity, but this time, she brought lunch.
She texts Ayrenn before taking the wheelbarrow back out. How’s class?
Just finished my first dissection. Did you know snakes have two clitorises?! Also, check your email. I heard admissions letters for Spring just went out!
She does. It’s there. She reads every word three times and sends a screenshot to Ayrenn.
FUCK YEAH, RILEY!!!!!!!! We’re celebrating when you get home!
Home. She reads that word four times.
Ayrenn
I remember coming back here with you, planting sunflowers every May with Marco and the OSPRRe crew until the soil became salty. Then we planted goldenrod and then we planted pickleweed. In between, we sowed our own seeds, joined the protests for housing, and later, when we were fully-fledged scientists, used our lectures on salamanders and their habitats to bring attention to the role of housing in society. A lot more people realized that the so-called “homeless problem” wasn’t any different from the growing crisis of climate refugees and that the solution was the same. When universal housing finally passed, we volunteered to help get people on the street signed up, even though the list was long. We tried to shape the policies of the new city-state when the Movement finally made its way to us, supporting Marco’s run for office. I don’t know how much we made a difference in the way our world turned out, but I know that it meant everything to grow beside you for those sixty years.
We planted goldenrod and then we planted pickleweed. In between, we sowed our own seeds.You’re beside me always, Riley, but especially here. I still come every spring to watch the shorebirds wading where the flowers used to be.
