The Leaf That Wouldn't Get Dirty

The rain stopped, but everything was filthy. Maya's sneakers were brown to the laces. Soren's notebook had a smear of mud across the cover where he'd dropped it climbing the fence.

They crouched under the willow at the edge of the pond, waiting for Soren's mom to finish her shift at the garden shed so she could drive them home. Everything around them dripped. Mud, leaves, the bench, the wheelbarrow somebody left out. All of it streaked and spattered and gray.

Except one thing.

Maya was staring at the pond. Floating in the middle were the big round leaves of the lotus plants the garden club had put in last summer. They had been rained on harder than anything. And they were spotless.

"Soren. Look at the leaves."

He looked. On top of each leaf sat fat round beads of water, perfect silver spheres, like somebody had spilled a bag of marbles made of mercury. As they watched, a breeze tilted one leaf and the beads rolled. They didn't soak in. They didn't spread. They rolled clean off the edge and dropped back into the pond.

"That's wrong," Maya said.

"That's not how water works," Soren agreed. He poked his muddy notebook. "Water gets things wet. That's the whole thing about water."

Maya found a stick and snagged the nearest leaf, dragging it toward the bank. The water beads slid around on the surface but never broke and never wet it. When she finally got the leaf close, she could see something else.

"It was muddy," she said. "Look. There's a clean stripe."

There was. A track ran across the leaf where a bead of water had rolled, and the track was bright green and clean. On either side, faint dust. The water hadn't just refused to stick. It had picked the dirt up and carried it off the edge.

Soren leaned in until his nose almost touched it. "The water cleaned the leaf by leaving."

"Why this leaf," Maya said. It wasn't really a question. It was the start of one. "The willow leaves are soaked. The bench is soaked. This is the only thing out here that's dry."

She touched the lotus leaf with one finger. It felt strange. Not slimy. Not smooth like plastic. Almost soft, almost dusty, like the skin of a plum.

"Feel it," she said.

Soren touched it. "It feels like it has a coat on."

"A coat the water can't grab."

They were both quiet, thinking the same thing from two directions. Maya was thinking about why the water made balls instead of puddles. Soren was thinking about what would have to be true on the surface to make that happen.

"If it was flat," Soren said slowly, "the water would lie down flat on it. Spread out. Like on the bench."

"So it's not flat."

"It can't be. Even though it looks flat." He held the leaf up so the gray light came across it sideways. "Maya. The water's barely touching it. It's sitting up on something. Like it's on a bed of tiny points and it can't sink down between them."

Maya took the leaf back and tipped it. A bead the size of a pea rolled the whole length and gathered three specks of dust as it went and dropped off the end.

"Points too small to see," she said. "It has to be. Because I can't see anything. It just feels dusty."

"Bumps," Soren said. "Tiny waxy bumps. So small that the water can only sit on the tops of them and there's air underneath. It never gets the chance to spread." He was talking faster now. "And the dirt is the same. The dirt's only touching the tops too. It's barely holding on. So when a water ball comes by, the dirt would rather stick to the water than to the leaf."

Maya looked up at him. "You can't get it dirty."

"You can't get it dirty," Soren said. "It cleans itself every time it rains."

Maya sat back on her heels in the mud. She looked at her brown sneakers. She looked at the spotless leaf. The whole muddy world, and one green thing in the middle of it that the dirt could not hold onto, because of bumps so small that no eye would ever find them.

"Soren." Her voice had gone quiet. "Your jacket."

He looked down. Soren's rain jacket was the cheap kind from the discount bin, and the rain that had soaked everything else had beaded on his sleeves and run off. He'd never thought about it. He pinched the fabric and tilted his arm and watched a drop roll off exactly the way the lotus drops rolled.

"Somebody figured it out," he said. "Somebody looked at this leaf and figured out the bumps and put them on a jacket."

"On a jacket. In a bin. At the store." Maya laughed, a short surprised laugh. "The plant invented it and somebody copied it."

"Self-cleaning paint," Soren said. "My grandfather's house has the white paint that never goes gray. He thinks it's a miracle."

"It's this. It's the leaf."

They both stared at the pond now, at every floating leaf, each one carrying its handful of silver beads, each bead a tiny moving broom. The willow dripped on them. The bench sat there soaked and gray, made of the wrong stuff, knowing nothing.

"How small are they," Maya said. "The bumps. To do that." He stopped. "There's a whole size of things down there. A whole size where stuff doesn't behave the way it does up here. Where water won't even lie flat."

Maya was already pulling at the wet hem of her own shirt, tilting it, watching the drops sink in and spread and stain, because her shirt was cotton and had no bumps and the water owned it completely. Then she looked back at the leaf, which the water could never own.

She reached out and tipped the leaf one more time. A single bead rolled the length of it, gathering every speck in its path, and slid off the green edge into the gray pond.