Liam and his mother sit on the kitchen floor. The sun drops low, and the sunflower throws a long shadow across the tiles. Neither of them speaks. The plant knows where the light is going, and so does Liam.

The next afternoon, Liam pulled his mother into the kitchen by the hand. He held up his chart — twelve hours of angles, all in a clean arc. The sunflower leaned straight toward the window, exactly where the sun sat. "It follows," Liam said. "All by itself."

That night, Liam pressed his eye to his telescope and found the moon: still, pale, and pocked with craters. But the moon was not still at all — it pulled the tides, held by the same light that turned his seedling. Everything, he thought, moves toward something.

By the last drawing, Liam could see it clearly: a curved line, hour by hour, matching the sun's slow path across the sky. The seedling had followed every step. It was not still at all — it had been moving the whole time, chasing the light like a green compass needle finding north.

Liam took his notebook outside. Every hour, he drew where the sun sat in the sky, then stepped back inside and drew the angle of the seedling's stem. He did this six times. Two pictures, side by side, hour after hour — sun and plant, plant and sun.

Liam sat at his desk and held up his glass prism. A band of color stretched across the wall — red, then yellow, then blue. The prism was not making that light. It was only bending what was already there, invisible, passing through the window. Liam set the prism down and looked at the plant.

Hours passed. Liam lifted the plastic dome and looked inside. The seedling had bent itself sideways, pressing its small head toward the same bright window. The barrier had not stopped it at all.

Liam had a new theory: a draft was pushing the plant. He turned a clear plastic container upside down over the pot and pressed the edges flat against the soil. No air could get in now. He wrote "draft blocked" in his notebook and waited.

The chalk circle was still there, thin and white, exactly where Liam had drawn it. The pot had not moved at all. But the plant had turned back to the window, quiet as before. Liam looked at it for a long time.

Liam had a theory: someone was turning the pot. He got the chalk from his desk and drew a careful circle right around the base, tight against the red clay. If the pot moved, the circle would break. He stood back and looked at the line, then at the plant, then at his cat sleeping in the corner.

That afternoon, Liam walked back to the red pot and stopped. The leaves were pointing the other way now, aimed straight at the garden door. He stood very still and looked at his notebook, then back at the plant. Something had moved.

One morning, a small green shoot had pushed up through the soil. Liam held his ruler straight beside it and wrote down the number. The two pale leaves pointed toward the kitchen window, steady and still. He drew a careful arrow on his chart.

Liam pressed a single seed into the dark soil and set the red pot on the kitchen windowsill. He opened his notebook to a clean page and drew a chart with empty rows waiting to be filled. At the top he wrote: Day 1. Height: 0.

Liam liked to find the rules inside things. He tracked ant trails across the sidewalk and wrote every measurement in his grid notebook. Numbers, distances, directions — he put them all down in small, careful squares. The world made sense when you looked at it closely enough.