Larger Than Life (Novella) by Jodi Picoult

just the aftereffects of the sedatives.
     And feel free to eat the mangoes. They’re just going to go bad in this heat—”
    “Alice,” he interrupts. “Are we going to talk?”
    I look him in the eye. “We
are
talking,” I say evenly.
    “I didn’t plan to love you. And by the time I knew I did, I couldn’t tell you what
     you deserved to know.” He hesitates, his face shuttered. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
    I gather the blanket from my bed. “There’s a lot of that going around, lately.”
    Neo steps in front of me, blocking my path. “Sethunye grew up in my village. I’ve
     known her my whole life. She’s what was expected of me.”
    “Then what am I?”
    His voice breaks. “You’re everything I dreamed,” he says. He reaches for me, and my
     body sways into his. Neo’s eyes are closed, his forehead pressed to mine. “Please.
     If you have any feelings for me, you’ll tell me what to say. What to do.”
    “If you have any feelings for
me
,” I whisper, “you’ll let me go.”
    As if my words are a key, his grasp on me unlocks. I push the blanket at Neo so that
     he will not see the tears in my eyes. Then I step onto the porch, where Lesego is
     dozing under the canopy. She gets up, logy, when she sees me.
    “On three,” I say, the shorthand we’ve developed for this process where we cover the
     calf with a blanket so I can make a clean getaway. “One, two …” I turn, to make sure
     Neo is ready, but he is not holding out the blanket like a matador’s red flag. He
     has buried his face in the cotton, surrounding himself with my scent, the same way
     Lesego does when I disappear.

    When I was four years old and was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I repeatedly
     said I wanted to be either a doctor or one of Charlie’s Angels. My mother, in her
     infinite wisdom, somehow crossed these two careers and came up with scientist. She
     bought Dixie cups and marigold seeds and brought a bucket of dirt from the backyard.
     “What do plants need to grow, Alice?” she asked me.
    The way she tells the story, which she does—often—I was a genius, because even at
     that young age I came up with the answer of water and light. I’m pretty sure, in retrospect,
     she coaxed the answer out of me. Then she asked how we could prove it.
    We planted three seeds. One, which I watered daily, went on the windowsill in front
     of the kitchen sink, which had sunlight for ten hours every day. Another, which I
     also watered, went into the back of the hall closet, where there was no light. The
     third I set on the windowsill in my bedroom, which had tons of sunlight streaming
     through the glass—but I left this one dry.
    Every day at 4:00 P.M . my mother had me report my observations, and she recorded what I said in a small
     black journal. The plant in the closet did grow—but it never flowered. It looked like
     a creepy jungle vine. Nothing at all happened to the cup on my bedroom windowsill.
     The seed in the kitchen, however, grew and flowered. It had a gorgeous, bright yellow
     blossom that craved the attention of the sun. Each day it craned its stalk toward
     the light, much like the way I’d looked up to my mother when her hands pressed that
     seed into damp soil for the first time.

    My first stop is at the Department of Wildlife and National Parks in Gaborone, asking
     for permission to translocate an orphaned calf to Karen Trendler’s reserve in South
     Africa. As it turns out, however, even getting across the border between Botswana
     and South Africa is a nightmare, thanks to the 1985 raid by the South African military
     on the ANC offices in Gaborone that killed twelve people. I manage to score an appointment
     with the director of the wildlife department, a man named Wilhelm Otto with a distractingly
     thin mustache that looks like a residue of chocolate milk floating above his upper
     lip. Otto assures me this isn’t like taking a puppy on vacation. Elephants in Botswana,
     he