Among the Impostors

  “Raspberries,” Luke whispered, his mouth watering. Mother grew raspberries, back home, and every June she kept the whole family stuffed with raspberry pies and cakes and breads. She made raspberry jam, too, and spread it on their toast and spooned it into their cornmeal mush all year long.

  Luke eagerly searched the branches in front of him—tasting a raspberry would be like visiting home, just for a minute. But there weren’t any berries yet, only an occasional bud. And it was likely the weeds would choke out those buds before they matured.

  Unless Luke cleared the brush around them.

  It only took Luke ten or fifteen minutes to pull the weeds and give the raspberry plants room, but by the time he was done, he had a full-blown idea in his head.

  He could grow a whole garden out here. Surely no one would mind, or even find out. In his imagination he saw neat rows of sweet corn, tomato plants, and peas. He could put strawberries and blueberries over at the side of the clearing, where they’d get some shade. He’d want beans, too. Squash wasn’t practical, because it wasn’t much good raw. But there was always cucumber and zucchini, cantaloupe and watermelon . . . Luke’s stomach growled.

  Then he remembered seeds. He didn’t have any.

  Luke’s dream instantly withered. How stupid was he that he thought he could grow a garden without seeds? Luke could imagine how Matthew and Mark would make fun of him if they knew. Even Dad and Mother would have a hard time not laughing. Just a month away from home and he’d already forgotten what you needed for a garden.

  Luke stared at the measly raspberry plants in disappointment. Then he could almost hear Mother’s voice in his ears: Make the best of what you’ve got How many times had he heard her say that?

  Even one raspberry would be delicious.

  And maybe he could find blueberry or strawberry plants somewhere in the woods, and transplant them.

  And maybe he could get seeds from some of the food at school. The bean sprouts they were always feeding him, for example—could he plant those? He didn’t know what kind of beans they would grow into, but even if they were soybeans, Jen had told him once that the Government thought those were edible. Roasted, maybe. He could build a fire.

  And maybe later in the summer, they would serve tomatoes or cantaloupe or watermelon, and he could smuggle the seeds to his room somehow. It would be too late for planting by then, but he could save the seeds for next year. . . .

  It made Luke’s throat ache to think of staying at Hendricks School a whole year. A whole year without his family, a whole year of grieving for Jen, a whole year of not speaking to anyone but jackal boy. A whole year of having nothing but a fake name and clothes that didn’t fit.

  Luke stood up and planted his feet firmly on the ground.

  “I have the woods,” he said aloud. “I’ll have the garden. This is mine.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By the end of the week, Luke had a nice plot of land cleared. The raspberry plants were at the center, and he had straight lines of bean sprouts planted on either side. It was Dad he pretended to appeal to most now.

  “What do these look like to you, Dad?” he’d say aloud, as though Dad were really there to answer. “Am I just wasting my time? Or will I have a good crop come fall?”

  Luke truly wasn’t sure. But he felt so proud, looking at the neat little garden. He kept meaning to explore more of the woods, but he was always too busy digging and weeding, tending his plot. Anxiously he shooed away squirrels and chipmunks, and wished that he could stay out and guard his garden all the time.

  But each afternoon he kept a close eye on the Baron watch he now wore on his wrist, so he could run back to the school promptly at six o’clock. He’d found the watch in his suitcase, and faced quite a chore figuring out how to read it. Those lines and “V’s” and “X’s” on it were numbers, he knew, but different from what he was used to. Why did Barons always have to make everything so fancy and complicated? Back home Mother and Dad had just a single digital clock, in the kitchen. It blinked off the minutes as clear as could be. This watch was like a foreign language to Luke. But he stared at the angle of the rays of sun, he studied the digital clocks at school and compared them with the watch on his wrist—eventually he understood the Baron watch as well as any other.

  That made him feel proud, too.

  So did his next accomplishment.

  One day at lunch they served baked potatoes in the school dining hall. They were so undercooked, they practically crunched. Luke bit into a raw end that hadn’t even had its eye removed. Spitting it out, he complained to himself, I’d rather plant this than eat it

  Plant this. Of course. How many springs had Luke spent cutting up potatoes for planting? He and Mother, perched over a three-gallon bucket, knives flashing. When he was little, he’d always tried to rest his feet on the top of the bucket, the same way Mother did, but he was never tall enough. Even when he was tall enough, he never balanced things right. He’d tip the whole bucket over. Mother would look at him sternly and sigh, “Pick it up.” But then she’d smile, like she wasn’t really mad. She’d talk to him the whole time they worked: “Careful with the knife—don’t cut toward your hand. You’re making sure there’s an eye in every potato, aren’t you? Nothing will grow without an eye.”

  But potatoes would grow without a seed. He just needed a raw potato.

  Covertly, Luke used his fork to separate the cooked and raw part of his potato. The raw part he dropped into his hand, and slipped into his pocket. Probably nobody had ever used Baron pants for transporting potato parts before, but Luke didn’t care.

  As soon as the bell rang for the end of lunch, Luke moved quickly among the tables, grabbing the left-behind potato pieces wherever he could. His pockets were stuffed in a matter of minutes.

  He walked stiffly down the hall and out his door, trying not to smash the potatoes.

  Nobody noticed.

  Out in the woods, Luke dumped out his pockets and examined his treasure. He had eight potato pieces that looked like good candidates for planting. He wished he’d thought to smuggle a knife out of the dining hall, too, but that couldn’t be helped. He halved as many of the potatoes as he could using his fingernails and brute force. Then he planted them in a row beside the beans.

  When he was done, Luke sat back against a tree trunk and surveyed his work. It looked good. In a few days he’d know if anything was going to grow. He thought the bean sprouts looked bigger. At least they weren’t withering yet.

  After a few minutes of rest, Luke walked down to a creek that ran through the woods and cupped his hands in it, making trip after trip to bring back water for his garden. If only he had one of those three-gallon buckets now! Even a cup would help. Maybe he could bring one from the dining room.

  In the meantime, he really didn’t mind using his hands. Walking back and forth between the creek and his garden, Luke felt a strange surge of emotion, one he hadn’t felt in so long that he’d practically forgotten what it was.

  Happy, he thought in amazement. I’m happy

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The very next day Luke raced out to his garden even more eagerly than ever. It was too soon to tell anything about the potatoes, but if the beans still looked good, he could probably be sure that they would live and grow and produce. And would the raspberries have any more buds today?

  Luke reached his clearing and stopped short.

  His garden was destroyed.

  The raspberry branches were broken off at odd angles; the bean plants were trampled, smashed flat in the mud. There hadn’t been any potato shoots to be ruined, of course, but the garden was so messed up, Luke couldn’t even tell where he’d planted them.

  “No,” Luke wailed. “It can’t be.”

  He wanted to believe that he’d accidentally walked into the wrong clearing. But that was crazy. There was the maple tree with the jagged cut in its trunk on one side of the clearing, the oak with the sagging limb on the other side, the rotting trunk in the middle?
??this was his garden. Or—it had been.

  Who wrecked it?

  His first thought was animals. Back home, back when his family still raised hogs, there had been a couple of times when the hogs had escaped and found their way to the garden. They’d rooted around like crazy, and Mother had been furious over the damage.

  But there weren’t any hogs in the woods. Luke hadn’t seen anything bigger than a squirrel. And for all his shooings and worrying, he knew squirrels couldn’t have done this kind of damage.

  And squirrels didn’t wear shoes.

  Luke winced. He’d been too distraught to notice before: Instead of animal tracks, the garden was covered with imprints of the same kind of shoes Luke was wearing. Smooth-soled Baron shoes had stomped on his raspberries, trampled his beans, kicked at his potato hills. They had walked all over his garden.

  For a crazy instant, Luke wondered if he himself was to blame. Had he been careless leaving the garden yesterday? Could he have stepped on his own plants by mistake? That was ridiculous. He’d never do such a thing.

  What if he’d sleepwalked, and come out here in the night without even knowing it?

  That was even more preposterous. He would have been caught.

  And he didn’t wear shoes to bed.

  Anyhow, he could tell by stepping next to the other footprints: Some of the imprints were made by shoes that were bigger than Luke’s. Some of the imprints were made by shoes that were smaller.

  Lots of people had been in Luke’s garden. Lots of people had been there destroying it.

  Luke sank to the ground by the tree trunk. He buried his face in his hands.

  “This was all I had,” he moaned. Once again he was pretending to talk to someone who wasn’t there. But it wasn’t Mother or Dad, Jen or Mr. Talbot he appealed to now. It was Matthew and Mark, his older brothers. He had to apologize to them. He had to explain why he, Luke Garner, a twelve-year-old boy, was crying.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Luke went back to school early that afternoon. What good would it do to stay in the garden? He’d only make himself more miserable. It wasn’t worth trying to clean up, to replant. Whoever did this would only come back and destroy his garden again.

  Washing his face in the creek before leaving, Luke tortured himself with questions. Who had done this? Who were the—vandals? The criminals? Luke couldn’t even come up with a harsh enough word to describe them. Then he thought of the insults that had been hurled at him for the past month. Yes. The guilty ones were fonrols. Exnays. Leckers.

  Luke wiped his face off on his sleeve, and it left a streak of mud. Who cared?

  He circled wide leaving the creek so he didn’t have to see his poor butchered garden again.

  He didn’t even bother running across the wide expanse of lawn back to the school. He trudged.

  At the door, his brain woke again. He couldn’t go back in now, in the middle of classes. He’d be noticed wandering the halls alone. How many people had yelled at him and Rolly that first day? Luke looked at his watch and puzzled out the time. It was only one-thirty. It probably would be another half an hour before classes let out, and Luke could slip into the stream of other boys walking between rooms.

  Luke leaned hopelessly against the rough brick wall beside the doorway. He almost welcomed the pain it brought, scraping his arm, pressing into his forehead. Maybe he should run back to the woods, where he could hide better, be safer. But he didn’t care. He’d given up his name, his family—everything—for safety. Right now it didn’t look like such a great deal.

  Anyway, the woods didn’t seem the least bit inviting anymore. They weren’t his. They never had been.

  Standing stoically before a closed door, Luke suddenly understood the clues he’d been too dense or blind—or hopeful—to notice before. Of course some of the other boys visited the woods. That’s why the hall monitor had been so panicked that first night, when he saw Luke near the door. The monitor wasn’t guarding the hall. He was guarding the door. Some boys had been planning to sneak out, that night, and the monitor was making sure it was safe. Probably they sneaked out to the woods all the time.

  Luke could imagine how they’d acted, discovering the garden.

  “Hey, look!” he could hear one boy calling to another. “Let’s rip this up!”

  And then they did—a horde of boys stomping the potatoes and yanking up the raspberries and hurling uprooted bean plants across the garden. Luke’s garden.

  “I’m going to find you,” he whispered. “I’m going to get you.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Promptly at two o’clock, Luke eased the door open a crack and peeked in. His timing was good—boys were walking to and from classes, their heads bowed, their eyes trained on the ground. But a hall monitor stood directly across from the door. Luke ducked back.

  Look away, look away, Luke mentally commanded the monitor. Luke waited. Then, just when he moved over, ready to peek again, he saw the door slide shut.

  Oh, no. Luke tried to figure out what had happened. Had the monitor seen the door open, thought that one of his marauding gang had forgotten to close it, and merely shut it to save his own skin?

  Or did he know Luke was out there?

  Stay calm, Luke commanded himself, uselessly. His panic boiled over. And his anger. He hated that monitor. He was probably one of the boys who’d trampled Luke’s garden.

  Luke could have looked for another door. He could have waited another hour, in hopes that a different hall monitor would be manning this spot, and not paying as much attention. He could have even gone back to the woods and waited until his usual time to come back.

  But he didn’t. He grabbed the doorknob and yanked.

  As the door swung open, Luke saw that the hall monitor wasn’t looking directly at the door just then. If Luke was sneaky enough, he could slip in without drawing attention to himself. But Luke let the door slam behind him. A cluster of boys with their eyes trained on the ground were jolted by the noise and even looked up briefly. Some of them started running, as panicked as if someone had fired a gun. Other boys didn’t even glance Luke’s way.

  The hall monitor jerked his head around immediately. Luke quickly joined the slow-moving group of boys with their heads down. But just before he lowered his own head, Luke caught the hall monitor’s stare. Their eyes locked for just an instant. Luke waited for the monitor to grab him by the collar, to yell, to haul him off to the headmaster’s office. Luke could feel his shoulder hunching into a cower.

  Nothing happened.

  Luke shuffled forward with the other boys, and dared to look up again. The hall monitor was carefully looking past Luke.

  He knows I was outside, Luke thought And he knows I know he knows. Why isn’t he doing anything?

  It was like a chess game, Luke realized. He remembered one winter when Matthew and Mark had brought home a chess set from school. They’d had a blizzard after that, and they’d been snowed in for a long time, so Matthew and Mark spent hours playing chess. Luke had been a lot younger then, maybe only five or six. The game that fascinated his brothers only puzzled him.

  “Why don’t all the pieces move the same way?” he had asked, picking up the horse-shaped piece. “Why can’t this one go in a straight line like the castle?”

  “Because it can’t,” Matthew had replied irritably, while Mark squealed, “Put that down! You’re messing up our game!”

  Now Luke almost trod on another boy’s heel. The boy didn’t even turn around. If everyone at the school were a chess piece, Luke realized, most of the boys were pawns. The hall monitors and the other ones Luke thought of as starers were the big, important pieces. The bishops. And the king. Luke remembered that Matthew and Mark had treasured those pieces, sacrificing pawns and knights and castles to protect them. But Luke hadn’t understood why. And he didn’t understand the hall monitor now.

  But he knew how to find out about him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When dinner was over that night, Luke sli
pped out of the dining hall behind all of the other boys. Instead of going into the evening lecture room like everyone else, he ducked down a dark hall. It wasn’t a direct route to the door that led outside, but if Luke turned three corners and backtracked a bit, he’d get there.

  I know the school really well now, Luke marveled. If I had a note I needed to read in private now, it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

  Luke felt decades older than the scared little boy who’d worried so over the note from Jen’s dad. And gotten so upset when he read it.

  It was just a scrap of paper. What did I expect?

  Luke wondered: Would he ever look back on this day and regret getting so upset about his ruined garden?

  No.

  Luke had told himself it didn’t matter if he ran into hall monitors. He could just start asking them questions: Why did you destroy my garden? What if I told the headmaster that you’ve been sneaking out? But now, creeping down the deserted hallway, he was glad he didn’t have to test his bravado. As far as he could tell, the hall monitors only guarded the main route to the door. He’d suspected as much. The monitors didn’t have to be very cautious, because most of the boys at the school behaved like sheep, only going where they were told. And all of the teachers seemed to be gone in the evenings.

  Luke reached the final corner before the doorway, and stopped. The sound of his watch ticking seemed to fill the entire hall. Luke pressed his wrist to his chest to muffle it. Then it was his heart pounding that seemed too loud. His ears roared with listening.

  Was this how Jen had felt, the night she left for the rally? Brave, reckless, crazy, courageous, terrified—all at once?

  It didn’t seem right to compare. Jen had been going to the rally—leading it, in fact—in an effort to win rights for third children all over the nation. Even her parents didn’t know what she was doing. But she had believed so strongly that nobody should have to hide that she’d died for it.