Jordana turned her back to the flagpole and rubbed at her eyes.
Brenda called her meeting to order, finished her announcements, and then called on the Violets to share a song they’d made up in their cabin during rest hour.
My stomach grumbled for breakfast while the junior campers sang. Jaida C stood next to me, braiding Jaida A’s hair. I ached for Carly. Missing canteen would be a lot more tolerable if Carly were still here.
I looked over at Chieko. Her lean body was moving slowly in a forward and backward rocking motion, like she was half-asleep or floating in some deep meditation. I was jealous of her peaceful state and wished I could do what she was doing. I got really close that day at archery, I remembered. Maybe if I practiced—
But my thought was interrupted by an unenthusiastic dismissal shout of, “Meadow Wood!”
Chieko jumped at the noise as if a firecracker had gone off under her feet, and I flinched so hard I had to put my hand over my heart, the way Earl did, to steady myself.
No canteen, no Carly, and a mild heart attack scare all before eight o’clock in the morning. Even mile-high chocolate chip pancakes with whipped cream for breakfast couldn’t make up for all that.
Day 35—Friday
Earl was in a mood, same as yesterday. He barely greeted me when I showed up for elective and just pointed, caveman-like, to show me where he wanted me to work. There was no nutrition article to read, no lesson about photosynthesis, no discussion of recipes for the dining hall.
I knew why he was so grouchy. It was canteen. Every year campers tried to break in and every year he stopped them. But this time they’d succeeded, and I bet it stung.
Apparently, it was going to be a zucchini-patch-weeding day for me. I grabbed an empty bag to stash the weeds in and crouched down at the end of one raised bed. I parted the leaves and let them rest against my shoulders, the way Earl showed me, and started to pinch and pull. Each time I leaned in to grasp a weed, my sunglasses slid down my nose. I pushed them back into place, shoved the weed into the bag, leaned back in to grab the next one, and the glasses slid down again. The fact that I was already sweating wasn’t helping.
Earl was suffering in his own way, from the looks of things. He was grunting and huffing while trying to set up some kind of drip-hose watering system along his plant rows, and it clearly wasn’t going as he’d hoped.
We had been at it for only twenty minutes, but it felt like two hours to me. I caved first.
“Earl, can we take a break?” I waited for an answer, and when I didn’t get one, I added, “Please?”
Earl threw down the portion of hose in his hand and looked at it with disgust. Then he said, more to the hose than to me, “Yeah, take a break.”
He walked toward me, sweat dripping down his arms and staining his white T-shirt, then past me and into his cabin. I was about to douse myself with the hose when he came back out, a cup of ice water in each hand.
“Hydrate,” he said.
I thanked him and drank greedily.
Once both our cups were empty, I asked, “So what’s gonna happen with canteen? Will we get it back?”
Earl let out a short huff. “Good question. And I don’t know the answer.” He looked down and said to his feet, “Still can’t believe it.”
“That they got in?”
“That I didn’t hear them,” Earl said. “I always hear them. That door is louder than thunder. Haven’t oiled it in years for just that purpose.”
“It was probably the middle of the night. You were fast asleep,” I tried to console him.
“No”—Earl wouldn’t accept the excuse—“that never mattered before. I’m just old. I can’t hear as well as I used to. I can’t wake up fast. I just . . . can’t.”
“You’re not old,” I said, even though the first word that popped into my head whenever I thought of Earl was old. The second word was garden and the third was hardworking. Earl was one of the hardest-working people I had ever met.
“You’d be surprised, the things that change as you get older. Can’t even sleep the same.”
“You can’t sleep?”
“Twists up my back. Brenda got me a body pillow for it. Most ridiculous thing I ever seen.” Earl looked embarrassed for the first time ever.
“Does it work?”
“Like a dream. Best invention in the galaxy.” Earl laughed and pressed the cold cup against his cheek to cool the pink flush that was spreading there.
“Getting old, it happens so fast you don’t see it coming.” He gestured at the space around him, at his bigger-than-a-garden but smaller-than-a-farm yard overflowing with plants and bushes and neatly tended rows of care. “Everything gets older back here, but the growing is slow. When I’m back here, my growing old feels slower, too.”
That’s the kind of smart Earl was—he found a way to slow down time. Being in the garden really was a kind of slow-motion experience. Being in the woods, alone on my rock, was kind of like that, too.
Earl put his cup on the ground and tightened the knot on his bandanna. “Back to the garden now.”
“Do you have anything I could do that doesn’t make me lean over? My glasses keep sliding down my nose, and it’s driving me nuts.”
“All the work back here has you bent over, you know that. What happened to your hat?”
“My head feels like it’s on fire when I wear the hat.”
“That’s what bandannas are for,” he said, as if he were stating the most obvious fact known to man. “No heat trapped on your head, no glasses sliding off your face, no sun in your eyes, and all the sweat gets soaked away. Next to my sleep pillow, it’s the best invention in the world.”
“No way I’m wearing a bandanna,” I told him. “Not happening.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged. “But Steven’s counting on us. He wants to make his famous chocolate chip zucchini bread for everyone tomorrow.”
I looked at the green zucchini shining in the afternoon sun and felt a whole new motivation. Steven’s chocolate chip zucchini bread was insanely amazing.
“You play dirty, Earl.” I glowered at him.
“I’m a gardener, Vic.” He held his soil-stained hands out in front of him. “How else would I play?”
Day 36—Saturday
Saturday’s market was a total wash.
Literally.
As soon as Earl and I started loading up the truck with zucchini and kale, the sky let out a rumble louder than a hundred garage doors closing at the same time, and then spewed rain down on us.
We spread a tarp over the flatbed but only had time to tie it down in three spots before a knife of lightning sliced the sky right above our heads. The rain was pelting us so hard it almost hurt, and we both raced for the safety of the front seat. We hopped in our sides and slammed the doors shut behind us. The furious drumming of rain softened and we sat like that, sealed in our small dry pod, catching our breath while staring out the windshield at the watery world around us.
“So,” I wondered, “was that in the forecast?”
Earl thought for a moment, then said, “Well, come to think of it . . .”
“Earl!”
“I was going to the market either way, so what does the forecast matter?” he defended himself.
“Well, that answers my next question.” I sighed and squeezed water out of my ponytail onto the truck floor. “Will there be other people there?”
“Most of the vendors will be there, you can count on that,” he said. “There just won’t be as many shoppers. You can count on that, too.”
Fewer shoppers meant less work to do at the stand, which meant more time to spend with Angel.
If he showed up.
It took us forever to get to the market because the rain wouldn’t let up and Earl had to drive way below the speed limit. He was hunched forward in his seat, hands gripping the steering wheel like he was hanging from a ledge, squinting through the back-and-forth rush of the windshield wipers to read the blurry road in front of
him. By the time we finally pulled into our space, he looked completely fried.
“No rush to set up just yet,” he said wearily. “Rain’s bound to lighten soon. We’ll do it then.” Then he closed his eyes, folded his hands in his lap, and leaned back into his headrest like it was his favorite pillow cradling him.
Earl was right. Almost all the regular vendors still showed up, and at least half the shopping population decided to stay dry and cozy at home rather than face the morning storm just to buy a few local vegetables.
Which worked out perfectly for Angel and me.
The hard rain finally calmed itself into a steady drizzle, and Angel made his move then. He showed up with an umbrella and a smile and a bright-green-eyed invitation. Earl told me to take my time. Business was slow.
The air hung thick over us, heavy and soggy. Angel and I huddled under his umbrella on our regular bench eating doughnuts while we argued over which one of us had gotten more drenched that morning.
I’m pretty sure I won.
My toes still squished loud enough to hear inside my waterlogged sneakers and my sweatshirt sleeves were water-stained from the elbow all the way down to the cuff. My hair was still damp, even though his was dry as a bone.
“One of the advantages of a crew cut,” he bragged.
“Yeah, I’m not so sure that look would work on me,” I answered.
“You never know till you try. We have scissors in the truck.” And he acted like he was going to run over and fetch them.
“I’ll stick with my rainy hair, thank you very much.”
“Rainy hair?”
“It’s been rained on, so it’s rainy.”
“You’re weird,” he said.
“Gee, that’s exactly what I’ve always wanted a guy to say to me.”
“No,” Angel laughed, “weird in a good way.” He stared at me for a beat, then broke the last doughnut in half and gave me a piece. “In a really good way.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just bit into the doughnut and chewed.
When Angel finished his last bite, he crumpled the paper bag into a ball and stashed it in his apron pocket. Then he slipped his hand over mine and asked, “Any news from your parents?”
“No,” I told him, my gaze settling on his tanned skin. “We had Visiting Day last week and neither of them showed up, but I already knew they weren’t coming.”
He nodded and waited for me to say more.
“I got to visit Freddy, though, at Forest Lake, and I loaded him up with so much ice cream he got sick to his stomach and had to spend the rest of the day in bed reading comic books!”
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Angel chided me.
“It is. He was in the infirmary, so he didn’t have to watch all the kids hugging their parents goodbye, and he didn’t have a chance to get sad about not seeing his own. It was brilliant.”
“And this is why you’re weird,” Angel laughed at me. “Who else would even think of that?”
“Another weird person,” I answered.
“The good kind of weird person,” he clarified.
A silence fell over us as the light drizzle became heavier. Angel huddled closer to me to stay under the umbrella.
“So, can I have your cell number?”
I laughed so hard I almost spit doughnut crumbs at him.
“Gee, that’s exactly what I’ve always wanted a girl to do to me. Laugh in my face when I ask for her phone number.” He crossed his arms over his chest and slid away enough that rain was hitting him.
“I’m not laughing at you,” I said, trying to pull him back over. “It’s just that my cell phone is in my bedroom in Pennsylvania, so I won’t get your call for another few weeks.”
“Whoa, your camp is harsh. You can’t have a phone at all, not even for emergencies?”
“We’re not even allowed to use the regular phone without permission. There’s no contact at all with the outside world for us Meadow Wooders. Except by flat mail.” I rolled my eyes as I said it.
“What’s flat mail? Is that something Eleanor Roosevelt invented?”
I laughed, then explained.
“So we’ll keep writing letters, then,” Angel said. “Fine.”
“Unless . . .” An idea started to hatch in my mind. “You know what? Give me your cell number. Just in case.”
“You’re not going to break into the office for the phone, are you? I don’t think they could take that after the canteen tragedy.”
I had caught Angel up on the latest camp drama. “No, not break in. But maybe . . .” I didn’t want to make any promises I couldn’t keep, so I didn’t finish my sentence. “Just write your number down for me, in case.”
He ripped off a piece of the bag in his apron pocket and printed his number on it. “Here. But don’t do something dumb and get kicked out of camp,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because then you’d get sent back to Pennsylvania and there would be no more doughnuts, that’s why not,” he answered.
But I knew it wasn’t about the doughnuts.
Day 36—Saturday Evening
Chieko agreed to let me skip the social before I even started pleading my case. I didn’t have to explain how lousy I felt after waking up early, standing in wet clothes for six hours, and packing and unpacking heavy boxes of food with Earl all morning. And I didn’t have to confess how pointless the dance was for me, since the only guy in New Hampshire I was interested in was not going to be there.
She had just said, “Whatever,” and brushed me off quickly so she could get back to her book.
I crossed the fields, trudged up the hill, and made my way to Chicory. Vera was on her bed when I arrived, even though the rest of her bunkmates were in the counselor room, engaged in a serious jacks tournament.
“Vic!” She looked up the moment I came in and hopped off her bed to hug me.
“Vera, why are you hiding in here?” I asked right away. “Remember what I said? You have to try.”
“I did try. I got out on the first round,” she explained. “Eye-hand coordination is not a strength of mine.”
“Oh.” It wasn’t hard to believe that. “Don’t you want to watch the others?”
“It gives me anxiety. My canoe friend Jordyn is the reigning champ, and it’s just too stressful to watch her play. What if she loses her title?”
“I think you can just call her your friend. Drop the ‘canoe’ part.”
Vera tilted her head at me.
“So, you wanna take a walk with me?” I asked. “I bet I can get your counselor to let you go.”
“Oh, you don’t even have to ask,” Vera said, waving the idea away like it was an annoying fly. “She loves it when I’m not here.”
We climbed onto the rock and sat side by side, the quiet hum of the woods surrounding us.
We talked about the books she was reading, the letters she received from her mom and her favorite teacher, and the pinch pot she was making at arts and crafts to use as a water dish for her next amphibious pet.
Then she said, out of the blue, “You should have named this rock. Back when you first discovered it—you should have given it a name.”
“I did.”
“What is it?” She turned toward me, eager to know.
“Rocky.”
She blinked, hard.
“You named this rock Rocky?”
“I was nine,” I reminded her.
“I’m only seven and I can do a lot better than Rocky.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Rocky is so pedestrian,” Vera continued.
I really didn’t want to snap at a seven-year-old kid who couldn’t play jacks to save her life and used the word pedestrian in casual conversation.
“You should have named it something more original,” she kept going. “Something poignant.”
A seven-year-old kid who used the word poignant.
“Something unique,” Vera said.
<
br /> “The first thing I thought of was Rocky, okay?” I wished she would drop it.
“The first thing I thought of was Ferdinand. Like that gentle bull from the book. It’s a text-to-life connection that has meanings on many levels, plus layers of symbolism. I would have named it Ferdinand.”
“Then go find your own rock and name it, Vera,” I snapped.
Her face grew cloudy and it looked, for a quick second, like she might cry. But she gathered herself together and said, “I don’t think you’re supposed to talk to your camp sister like that.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re supposed to call your camp sister pedestrian,” I said back.
Her whole body deflated.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice cracking. “I always do that. I get bossy when I’m upset. I know that about myself.”
I saw Freddy when I looked at her then, the way his face crumpled before he cried, the way it strained to fight against the tears and the way it broke when he lost the fight.
“It’s okay, Vera.” I held my arms out to her for a hug. She leaned into them and snuggled like she couldn’t get close enough. “Why are you upset? Because of the jacks tournament?”
“No. I’m homesick again.”
“You’re allowed to be homesick. You’ve been away for weeks, and sometimes Visiting Day makes it even harder. It’s okay,” I assured her.
“Are you homesick?” she asked, and I could hear the hope in her voice.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am, a little bit.” And it was true. My home was a mess, but it was my mess. I missed it even though I didn’t know what it would be when I got back.
“I don’t know what I would do without you, Vic,” she said to my shoulder.
“Well, then, we’re a good match, because I don’t know what I would do without you, either.” And I really meant it.
She snuggled into my lap and squeezed me like a koala clinging to a tree branch. Then she lifted one small fist up to the sky and cheered quietly into my sleeve, “V team!”
Day 39—Tuesday
Summer at Meadow Wood Page 17
