Among the Imposters

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 hail 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 theyd 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 pots-toes and yanking up the raspberries and hurling uprooted bean plants across the garden. Luke’s garden.

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