Among the Imposters (7 page)

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.

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.”

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 hail 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 hail 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 achess 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.

Eighteen

When dinner was over that night, Luke slipped out of the dining hail 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 toldthe 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.

Luke was mad about a garden.

Thinking that way, Luke felt foolish. He wondered if he should turn around. But just because Jen’s cause had been enormous, that didn’t mean Luke’s was unimportant. Like Jen, Luke wanted to right a wrong.

Just then he heard the sounds he’d been waiting for:someone whispering, a muffled laugh, the click of the door latching. Luke waited a full five minutes—it was too dark to see his watch, so he counted off the tics. Then he tiptoed out of the shadows and followed the others out the door.

Nineteen

The moon was out

It had been so long since Luke had seen the night sky that he’d forgotten how mystical it could look. The moon was full tonight, a beautiful orb hovering low over the woods. Luke also recognized the same pinpricks of starlight he’d been used to seeing back home. But the stars seemed dimmer here, overshadowed by a glow on the horizon beyond the woods. Luke puzzled over that glow— it was in the wrong part of the sky to be the sunset What else was that bright?

Luke remembered that Jen’s dad had said the school was near a city Could a city have lights that bright, that shone this far?

“I don’t know anything,” Luke whispered to himself. He’d thought that coming out of hiding would expose him to the world, teach him everything. But being at Hendricks seemed like just another way to hide.

A light flashed in the woods just then, and Luke realized he didn’t have time to hesitate. He’d planned to creep across the lawn, but the moonlight was so bright, he worried