"You’ll be trying a terrestrial substance called cinnamon," he told Zillif. "It’s the bark from an Earth-native tree." Dads gave me a look, as if I’d accused him of something. "Humans have a rare long tradition of obtaining medicine from tree bark. Quinine…" He stopped and waved his hand airily, trying to make it look as if there were too many to list. More likely, he couldn’t think of any others.

"Cinnamon," Zillif said slowly. "Cinnamon." Speaking like a woman who’s been told the name of her grandchild and wants to hear how it sounds on her own tongue. "Will I be the first patient to try this cinnamon?"

"The first Oolom," I replied, before Dads concocted some gollygosh story about promising clinical tests all over the planet. Lately, he’d shown a fondness for manufacturing unjustified optimism in patients — at least I hoped that’s why he made such wild-eyed claims, and not that he really believed them. I told Zillif, "We coordinate our tests with other hospitals to avoid unwanted duplication."

"A tree bark named cinnamon," she murmured. As if she was pleased to know her place in the worldwide medical experiment — how she’d make her global contribution to finding a cure, even while lying mud-still in Sallysweet River. "My people enjoy many types of native bark," she said. "You can make a nice salad, just from the trees in this neighborhood. Bluebarrels, whitespots, paper-peels… and of course, chillslaps for color…"

My father and I let her talk — slurry words spoken with putty-muscled lips. After a while, Dads sent me to grate fresh cinnamon while he got the names of Zillif’s next of kin.

Here’s the thing: fifteen-year-olds can fall crazy in love faster than a sigh. In love with a singer, in love with a song, in love with kittens or cookies or Coleridge or Christ, and deeply-ecstatically-drunkenly.

Cynics will say the love never lasts — that you adore impressionist painters for a week, programming your walls with blowups from Monet and Degas, then suddenly, under all those water lilies and po-faced ballerinas, you stumble across a verse of Sufi poetry and boom, you’re a Muslim mystic, memorizing parables and meditating on the Ineffable Garden.