Summer at Meadow Wood

by Amy Rebecca Tan

  “Copy,” she ordered. “Eyes closed.”

  We all copied her stance and closed our eyes.

  “Pay attention to your breath.” Her voice got softer, more soothing. “Feel your chest rise and fall. Feel your diaphragm fill and release. Feel each breath. Settle into it.”

  The range fell into silence as we followed her directions. At first, I felt kind of ridiculous, but then I got lost in the darkness behind my eyelids. I felt the world shrink around me as I paid attention to my breathing. I felt both wobbly and stable at the same time, and everything outside me disappeared. Then, after one minute or five minutes or who-knows-how-many minutes, my world expanded and opened back up.

  Everything was calm and even and connected and whole.

  “Open your eyes,” Chieko said softly, breaking us out.

  My eyes didn’t want to open. I wanted to stay in that peaceful place.

  “Guys!” Chieko ordered. “Snap out of it and open your eyes.”

  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one trying to stay in my quiet place.

  “Now pick up your gear and get in stance,” was her next order.

  Once we were lined up and in position, Chieko continued her directions. “Breathe the same way you just were. Find your target. Don’t just look at it—feel it. Feel the space between you and it. Connect with it. Then . . . go.”

  A series of releases and thwacks followed. Every single shot was a hit. And mine was in the middle circle.

  Bull’s-eye.

  Chieko scanned the targets.

  “There’s hope for you yet,” she told us, then said under her breath, “I definitely don’t get paid enough.”

  I smiled at Chieko. It was obvious she loved teaching us, even though she acted like we frustrated her beyond belief. And I smiled at myself for my perfect shot.

  “Continue,” she said, sounding somewhat exhausted. “And don’t assume you know where the target is just because you see it. You have to connect with it. Don’t rush.”

  And then she looked straight at me as she walked off to grab her water bottle and said, “You have to be patient and do the work, or you’ll never hit true.”

  Day 25—Tuesday

  When we got back to Yarrow after Taco Night in the dining hall, which included fresh lettuce and the first tomatoes from Earl’s garden, I found an envelope facedown on my bed. Mail had been late that day, so there hadn’t been any to pass out at rest hour. I saw that Jordana had one letter on her bed, and Jaida C had three.

  I was used to not getting mail. My parents had only written once each in the last three weeks, which was typical of them even without all the family drama going on this summer. You’d think they’d make more effort to send reassuring I’m-always-here-for-you letters, considering what was going on at home, and considering neither of them were coming up on Visiting Day, but no. I guessed they were both too wrapped up in their own junk.

  Which I sort of understood. Because I still hadn’t written to Jamie.

  I didn’t want to tell Jamie about my parents in a letter, but I also felt funny writing a letter that made it sound like everything was fine when it wasn’t. So I didn’t write at all. And I guessed she was doing the same thing with me, because I hadn’t received a letter from her yet, either. Jamie loved to write and usually sent me at least one letter a week when I was at camp. But I knew enough to know she was busy dealing with her community service at the library. I also knew she missed me the same way I missed her.

  I flipped the envelope over to read the return address but found there wasn’t one. It was addressed to Camp Meadow Wood with the correct mailing information beneath, but it was the very first line that made my mouth drop open and my fingertips tingle. It said: Farmers’ Market Vic.

  As Jordana ripped into her envelope and Jaida C carefully split open the first in her pile, I felt my knees turn to jelly and I lowered myself onto my bed.

  Had Angel written to me?

  It looked like boy handwriting.

  It looked like fourteen-year-old, flower-selling, green-eyed-boy handwriting.

  I took a deep breath and opened the envelope.

  The paper was small and plain, pale blue with no lines. His writing was in pencil, his letters small, and the lines slanted down to the right. It was dated Sunday, July 16.

  Dear Vic,

  Bet you weren’t expecting a letter from me, but I wasn’t expecting to meet a Meadow Wood camper/farmer at the market, so I say we’re even. I don’t even know if this will reach you, but I’m trying anyway, ’cause you never know unless you try.

  I went to Hoefel’s store this morning and got the same cinnamon sugar doughnuts. I ate three in a row, but they didn’t taste as good as the last time I had them. Wonder why.

  See you Saturday (I hope),

  Angel

  P.S. I did some research on Eleanor Roosevelt. Did you know she volunteered at a canteen? Her canteen gave out coffee and sandwiches to soldiers headed off to war, not Snickers and Sprite to campers, but still. It looks like you really do have something in common with that rock star First Lady.

  The second I finished reading the letter, my eyes flew back to the top and I read it again, more slowly this time so I could savor each word.

  He wrote to me.

  He addressed the letter to Farmers’ Market Vic and it got to me. Earl and Brenda sorted the mail, so it made sense. Farmers’ Market Vic could only be me.

  This letter made up for all the ones my parents didn’t write. It made up for no money in my canteen account and for the lousy P.S.’s my parents had sent me. Angel knew how to use a P.S.—he researched Eleanor Roosevelt for me! That had to mean something. Who randomly researched historical figures just for the heck of it? Who, outside of Vera, I mean?

  I scrunched down lower onto my bed and held the paper in front of my face as I read it again. I didn’t want anyone in my cabin to see the flush in my cheeks or the beaming smile on my face.

  I really wished Jamie were here. She would understand the crazy feelings ballooning inside of me that I didn’t know how to explain. I just knew I felt good. I felt happy—a different kind of happy than I had ever felt before in my life.

  And I also felt like Saturday would take forever to get here.

  Day 26—Wednesday

  It was rest hour and I had been called to Chicory. Again.

  Vera had noticed Jolly was looking a little less peppy each day, so she’d decided to release him back into the wild. She didn’t want to do it alone, though.

  “You did get a whole week with him, Vera,” I pointed out. “That’s something.”

  “I guess so,” she agreed, her voice quiet as a hum. “I’m really going to miss him.”

  “Of course you are.” I put my arm around her as we crouched behind her cabin, looking down at the dejected frog squatting in the corner of the shower caddy. “But maybe you’ll see him again. If you sit by the rocks where you found him, maybe he’ll come hopping by every once in a while to check in.” That kind of thing happened in G-rated movies all the time.

  Vera looked up at me with doubt in her big brown eyes. She wasn’t buying it.

  “He came to you once, didn’t he?” I tried. “So it’s possible he’ll come to you again.”

  “Possible, yes”—Vera folded her arms in front of her chest like a statistics professor—“but not probable.”

  I sighed my frustration a little too loudly, then said, “All right, well, let’s take him over.” I picked up the caddy and handed it to her.

  “I want to hold him.” Vera lifted Jolly out of the container. She cradled him against her chest and gazed down at him lovingly.

  “He really does make you happy,” I observed out loud.

  “He does. Happy and calm. Studies say having a pet with fur lowers blood pressure and reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke. It’s called fur therapy, but that’s not fair to furless animals. Amphibians can have that effect, too.” Vera finished her oral report, then looked at me and said,
“I know for a fact that my heartbeat is slower now than it was ten minutes ago. While it’s entirely possible I could still have a cardiac episode at this precise moment, it is not at all probable.”

  I honestly never knew what was going to come out of her mouth.

  Vera continued to stroke Jolly’s back. The two of them together, framed in that moment, were the picture of peace.

  I led Vera around the cabin to the rocks by the water, carrying her filthy shower caddy, which was now in serious need of its own shower.

  It was so sunny that we had to squint. We climbed over the first row of rocks and then settled on the one where Vera had first met Jolly.

  “Okay, my sweet Lithobates sylvatica,” Vera cooed at him. “Off you go. Return to your natural habitat.” She bent down and placed Jolly on her sneaker.

  “Vera—” I started, but she cut me off to say, “That’s exactly where he was when I found him.”

  We would do it her way.

  “Okay.”

  We both stared at Jolly, clumped like a sad wad of clay on top of Vera’s dingy sneaker. He didn’t move a muscle. I glanced at Vera, who was staring intently at her pet, her eyes filled with tears. I reminded myself to be the kind of camp sister I would have wanted to have if I were a seven-year-old Chicory kid saying a tough goodbye.

  “Vera, can you keep a secret?” I asked her.

  She turned to me, wiping away the one tear that had escaped down her cheek. “Of course I can,” she said sadly. “But studies show that keeping secrets is associated with anxiety, depression, and poor health.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m always serious,” she answered immediately. “But I think it might depend on the kind of secret.”

  “Well, I don’t think my secret is one of those kinds,” I said, hoping I was right. Good camp sisters weren’t supposed to give their little camp sisters anxiety, depression, or poor health.

  I leaned down to her shoe and gave Jolly a slight nudge, just to slip him off Vera and onto a bit of shaded rock beside her foot. Then I held out my hand. “Come with me.”

  Vera took a long last look at Jolly, then put her hand in mine and followed me off the rocks, across the lawn, and into the woods. I was preparing an argument to convince her to break the rules and leave camp property with me, but it turned out I didn’t need one. She followed me, step for step, without a sound.

  “It’s like paradise,” Vera said in a whisper, taking in the lush green scenery around her. “It’s like a green sea forest.”

  “And this rock is like my ship,” I added, running my hand over the boulder we were sitting on, tracing the familiar dents and bumps along its surface.

  “How did you find this?” Vera was in a state of true wonder.

  “I don’t know,” I told her, shaking my head. “I just did. Four years ago. I’ve been coming to this spot since I was nine.”

  “Wow.” Vera breathed it all in and held it inside her like a wish.

  “Maybe you could say I found it because I needed to.”

  Vera nodded at me. “That sounds right.”

  We sat for a few minutes in the quiet, enjoying the dusky shade of the woods, which felt like a whole other world after the bright light by the waterfront.

  “And I can come here whenever I want?” Vera asked all of a sudden.

  “Actually, no. You’re not allowed to come here at all.”

  “Why not?” Vera huffed at me.

  “Because you’re just not,” I said.

  Vera slumped and stuck her bottom lip out so far a bird could have landed on it as a perch.

  I changed my approach. “You could get in a lot of trouble if you got caught sneaking into the woods.”

  “It’s barely in the woods. We couldn’t be more than eight meters in. I can practically see Chicory from here!” Vera contested.

  “You use meters?”

  “It makes more sense. It’s a base-ten system,” she answered matter-of-factly.

  Vera could sulk like a toddler and then whip out an accurate metric estimation in the same minute.

  She really killed me.

  “Look, I can bring you here whenever you want. You just can’t come here alone, okay?” I offered, then added, “I’m kind of a master at getting here and back without anyone noticing.”

  “Like a ninja?” Vera asked hopefully.

  “Sure. Like a ninja. I’m Ninja Vic.”

  “And I’ll be Ninja Vera. The Ninja Vs!” Vera hopped off the rock and started to twist and kick and crouch like a ninja in training. It was a side of her I hadn’t seen before, and unsurprisingly, she wasn’t much of a natural in the grace and physical coordination department. But I joined her anyway, copying her moves until I was sure the sadness of losing Jolly had been high-kicked away.

  On our way back to the cabin, we stopped at the rocks to look for Jolly. The shaded nook where I had placed him was empty. There was no sign of him anywhere.

  Vera let out a loud sigh, then put her hands on her hips the way Brenda always did when a pitcher broke in the dining hall or lightning cracked through the sky during a water activity. “That’s nature for you,” Vera said. “He’s either hopping back to his froggy friends at this very moment, or he’s decomposing in an acid bath inside the belly of a predator.”

  My eyes popped out of my head. “Vera, I don’t think—”

  “It’s okay, Vic.” Vera put her arm around me. “It’s the cycle of life.” She gave me a quick squeeze and then disappeared back inside Chicory.

  I hurried back to Yarrow, making it just in time to sign myself up for farm elective for the rest of the week.

  Day 27—Thursday

  “I cannot believe this is happening to me,” Jordana huffed, twisting her hair into a tight bun on top of her head. “I’m supposed to be water-skiing!”

  We were on our way to farm. There was a last-minute change in the schedule because of an equipment crisis on the waterfront, so Brenda asked Jordana to leave water-ski and go to farm instead.

  Jordana wasn’t taking it well.

  “Are there bugs?”

  “We’re at camp, Jordana. There’re bugs everywhere,” I told her, as if she didn’t already know. “You’ll survive this. Trust me.”

  “Thank God you’ll be there with me.” She sounded a lot like Bella the way she said thank God, but I threw my arm around her shoulders anyway and we walked like that to the garden.

  Earl showed us a magazine article about the nutrients in leafy green vegetables and then sent us both to work around rows of lettuce and spinach and kale. Instead of working on opposite ends and meeting in the middle, Jordana insisted on working right next to me. Earl was three rows away, trimming leaves and tying tomato plants to stakes.

  The sun beat down on us, but Jordana didn’t complain. Instead, she sang Broadway show tunes as she worked, stopping only to push back bits of hair that fell out of her bun. Soon she was a couple of feet ahead of me, busily ripping handfuls of green out of the ground like a robot set on hyper-speed.

  A shadow fell over me and I looked up to find Earl there, peering curiously at Jordana. “What can we do to get you to slow down?”

  “Huh?” Jordana stopped mid-lyric. “I need to work fast ’cause you’ve got, like, eight million weeds back here.”

  I looked around and realized she was right. It was starting to look like there were more weeds than plants.

  “You should sell the weeds!” Jordana said. “You have so much you’d make a ton of money.”

  “There aren’t many buyers for weeds.” Earl glanced at me and I quickly looked away, hiding the grin on my face. “Anyway, what you’re doing is not productive. If you don’t get the root, they just grow back. Watch me.”

  Earl squatted down between us and grabbed a weed around its middle. He ripped it out of the ground the way Jordana had been doing and held it out for us to see. Then he grabbed the next weed all the way down at its base, right where it entered the soil, and pulled slowly, st
raight up. When he held that one before us, we could see the knot of roots that had been feeding the weed beneath the ground. “This here is what we’re going for. See the difference?”

  Jordana sighed. “Yeah, I see it.”

  “So the key is to work slow and careful. Don’t be in such a rush.”

  “But it’s not fun,” Jordana whined.

  “It’s not?” Earl asked.

  “No!” Jordana shouted. “Canoeing is fun. Dance, which I have next period, is fun. And canteen, later tonight, is amazingly fun. But weeding is not even in the same neighborhood as fun!” She looked at me for help, like she couldn’t believe she had to explain this.

  “Earl doesn’t get it because he honest-to-God enjoys this,” I informed her.

  “That’s not right. I’m worried. I think you should go to clinic.”

  Earl chuckled once, then pretended to take his pulse by pressing two fingers against a spot under his neck. “I believe I’m okay for the moment, but thank you for your concern.”

  Jordana crouched back down to the ground, grabbed a weed at the base, and pulled. She held it above her head, the tangled roots hanging off it like bunched thread. “See? Happy?”

  “Thrilled,” Earl answered. “Can’t fix it without getting to the root of it. How’s that for a life lesson?”

  “This elective is the longest lesson of my life,” Jordana groaned. “How many more minutes? I can’t wait for dance.”

  Earl scratched the top of his head and looked off into the distance, his eyes slits against the sun. “You’re here now, Jordana. See if you can find a way to enjoy what you’re doing while you’re doing it.”

  She stopped weeding and looked at him as if he had just spoken in a different language. She watched him take off his bandanna, unroll it, reroll it the opposite way, and then tie it back around his head. I could tell she was dying to say something about his head accessory, but she held it in.

  “Besides,” Earl said, looking happy as could be even though his neck was slick with sweat and his arms were covered in patches of dirt all the way up to the elbows, “when you’re busy rushing to the next thing, it’s easier to make mistakes. Sometimes when you rush, you don’t move forward at all. Sometimes you set yourself back.”