What grows

Heather Ezell
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:45:41 PDT

When Emi buries her best friend's bone in her garden, she doesn't expect anything to grow. But something does: a sprout that blooms into a tree, and a girl waiting for her on the road. Famous online for videos that document her everyday life, Nina moves next door to Emi the summer before sophomore year. Soon, Emi earns a place as Nina's film partner--helping Nina manifest a thread to her videos: the idea of a monster who is always watching. As Nina and Emi's friendship grows, so does their monster, though always remaining out of reach. But when Nina and Emi are forced to face their individual hauntings, the monster finally shows herself. One week later, Emi accidentally pushes Nina down a ravine. Now, it's September and Emi is sick with grief. When she finds what she's convinced is Nina's toe bone, she plants it in the garden. What follows is the sprout and Sage, a girl both inexplicably familiar and elusive. In the weeks that follow, Emi's relationship with Sage escalates, and when Sage develops qualities of her late friend, Emi must reconcile her relationship with Nina, the films and hauntings they created together, and what Sage is: their monster. Told in a dual timeline, WHAT GROWS is a young adult novel that is in conversation with the genres of horror and psychological suspense. It explores grief and obsession, the complexity of female relationships, and our ability to create monsters out of paranoia and our desperation to be haunted. I wrote it as my thesis to work on the craft of a non-traditional timeline, and one could argue it also challenges assumptions of genre fiction versus literary fiction.