Page 7 of Then Came the Fall
I followed group one to the veggie garden. The boys ran ahead, kicking up a trail of dust from the dirt road. I kept my lips pursed but could still taste the dirt in my mouth.Strike two for the farm.
At the garden gate, boys who had obviously been doing this all summer paired up with one another quickly. They grabbed big straw baskets and began claiming rows. Cucumbers were the crowd favorite. Cries of “I got cukes!” became the anthem of the wildebeest boys in my group. The only children who didn’t know what to do were me and one other kid, a boy with floppy brown hair and a spray of freckles across his nose. We were the same height so I guessed he was probably eight years old, like me. He didn’t seem feral like the others.
Derek Moss, a counselor whose name I knew because all the girls thought he was cute, handed the boy a basket. “Green beans, dude. You got a partner?”
The boy looked around, having missed the part where someone explained the rules of this activity. He shook his head.
“What about you?” Derek asked me.
“No,” I began. “But if you don’t want to pick with a girl, I can get my own basket.”
The boy looked at me, sizing me up. “It’s all right.” He shrugged.
“Great,” Derek said. He held up a green bean from a full basket. “Take that row over there,” he pointed. “Ones that are ready will look like this.” The green pod was about six inches long and plump around the center. I committed the size to memory and gave Derek a nod.
In the garden, we crouched down low with the basket between us.
“So, are you new?” I asked.
“Yeah, I started here yesterday.”
“Too bad your parents started you mid-summer. There’s always new kids at the beginning of summer, but not so much in the middle.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” he replied. “I think the kids in my cabin have been together the whole five weeks.”
“Who you got in there?”
“Billy McIntosh, Toby I-forget-his-last-name, Chris something-or-other, Kevin, I don’t know. I don’t remember everyone.”
“Well, Billy Mack is okay. I took horse with him. And I know Toby’s sister, Stacey. She’s a CIT in my unit.”
“What’s a CIT?”
“Counselor-In-Training. They help out the real counselors.”
“Hmm.” He picked a bean, inspecting it. “You know a lot.”
I shrugged. “It’s my third year here.”
“Really? How old are you?”
“Just turned eight.” I reached into the shrub, picking a pair of pods and tossing them into the basket.
“Wow,” he said.
“Wow what?”
“You started young.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I used to hate it. Not anymore, though. My first year I came for two weeks, second year was four weeks, and this year I’m here for the whole summer.”
“I’m just here for two weeks.”
“And? Are you homesick?”
He shook his head no.
“Well, that’s good. Camp’s fun. Way better than home, if you ask me.” I dropped a handful of beans into the basket.
