Lost Stars by Lisa Selin Davis Read Free Book Online

also pretended that I couldn’t see Lynn’s crazy muscly calves as they stood before me, weird bulbous hairy calves that ended in olive-colored socks and brown leather hiking boots—​he was some kind of cross between a hippie and an army sergeant.
    â€œCaraway, um.”
    I kept picking at the plants.
    â€œCaraway?”
    Finally he reached and carefully took my headphones off my ears. “Caraway, we need to watch our language and make sure that we don’t say things that could be construed as”—​he paused, collected himself—​“or rather, interpreted as insulting. Okay?” He offered me that wan smile. Lynn. I kind of liked him. He was a nice guy. Probably shouldn’t be forced to shepherd a bunch of unruly kids like us. “Okay?”
    â€œI know what
construed
means,” I said. I kept looking at the weeds, limp in my hands.
    He said, “Okay.”
    Â 
    Lynn told us to break for lunch and to get our journals, and he passed out Styrofoam cups of water and carrot sticks as we unpacked our lunches and sat on hollow logs and, in theory, reflected on the work we’d been doing and how it made us feel.
I feel hungry,
I wrote with Lynn’s pen, and
Carrot sticks just aren’t cutting it.
And then:
Lynn is afraid of gay people.
    Then I turned to the back and futzed with my calculations, applying Kepler’s Second Law of planetary motion—​the closer the object got to the sun, the faster it would go. It was getting closer now, and if I kept charting its movement, kept up with my calculation, I’d know for sure, all on my own, when we would see it. Just thinking about it made my whole body exhale. It released me from my own head and sent me to the stars.
    As we were packing up to return to the land of forced labor, Tonya sauntered by. I saw her looking at my notebook, and my equations, and I shut the book sharply.
    She didn’t even look at me. She just said, “Duran Duran is not gay. That’s Boy George.”
    Â 
    After lunch, each kid returned to stockpiling the weeds, bales of the unwanted green that we were going to take over to the industrial composter—​Lynn’s face absolutely bloomed at this announcement. I returned to my task, lazily pulling at what was left of the weeds.
    I had the smallest pile, I noticed. Tonya’s was the biggest, and she’d not only been dutifully tugging at the weeds all day but had started acting as some kind of coach, or maybe a drill sergeant, to the rest of us. “Soldiers, commence weeding,” she’d said when we started. And now, “Troops—​pull up those roots.” I noticed she had worn-looking dog tags on a ball chain around her neck.
    â€œI lost,” I said to her, holding up my pathetic pile.
    â€œIt’s not a contest,” she said. “You only lost to yourself.”
    Oh, please,
I thought, but honestly I was too tired and sweaty to even say it.
    Then Tonya looked more closely at my pile. “Carrie, you’re not supposed to touch that,” she said as I wrested my last batch of weeds from the ground. For some reason, all the kids had left patches of plants untouched.
    â€œWhy not?” I said. I had only one work glove on—​they were so stiff that I found it hard to get a grip with them on—​and I used my bare hands to take hold of the tall stalk with serrated leaves and an eruption of sad-looking small yellow flowers at the top.
    â€œWere you listening this morning?”
    â€œListening?” I asked as Lynn came over to check on us. I smiled up at him, but he was frowning. “Sure. I was listening.”
    â€œI don’t think you were,” Lynn said. “Come with me.”
    Â 
    He took me back to the park offices and washed my hands with special soap. “I don’t know if it’s going to work,” he said. “That was a lot of wild parsnip.”
    â€œIt sounds