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, straight 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.”

He turned quickly then and went into his cabin without waiting for a response.

“What is he, some plant-man prophet or something?” Jordana asked, rolling her eyes.

“Kinda.” I shrugged. “Maybe.”

A breeze moved through the air, bringing with it the smell of garlic, onion, and tomato stewing in the kitchen. We always had spaghetti on Thursday nights. It was two hours away, but I was already hungry for it.

After a few minutes, Jordana said, “My back is killing me.” Then she broke into “It’s a Hard Knock Life” from Annie.

And even though I couldn’t sing to save my life, and even though I didn’t have it half as bad as Orphan Annie or orphan Eleanor Roosevelt, I joined in. Singing made the rest of the period fly by. Jordana would deny it if anyone asked her, but I knew from the way she sang and from the way she proudly handed her overflowing bag of weeds to Earl that she had had some fun, too.