Among the Imposters

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.”

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 com plicated? 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.

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.