Summer at Meadow Wood by Amy Rebecca Tan

Author:Amy Rebecca Tan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Day 21—Friday Evening

After dinner I begged Chieko to let me skip evening activity, which happened to be our first social with Forest Lake. The dance was from eight to ten in our rec hall and I wanted to spend my night watching Jordana flirt about as much as I wanted to revisit the dentist who fixed my broken tooth four years ago. The fact that Chieko agreed showed just how bad she felt for me about losing Carly.

Once everyone in Yarrow was primped and gone—Jaida C had gone to Marigold to do hair after she did Jaida A’s and Jordana’s—I stretched out on my cot and tried to dive back into Chieko’s Eleanor Roosevelt book. It was hard to concentrate, though. The music in the rec hall was pumping so loud I could hear it through the walls of the cabin. It was mostly just bass and beat, like listening to someone’s heart through a stethoscope. It also wasn’t helping that Carly’s bed above me was stripped bare. There would be no more bed tents. Her parents had been only two hours away, vacationing in Vermont, when they got the call from Brenda. They drove straight here, packed up all of Carly’s stuff, and whisked her out of the hospital in a blink.

I didn’t get to say goodbye.

None of us did.

After reading the same sentence four times in a row and absorbing none of it, I realized reading wasn’t going to work right now. I got up, tucked the paperback in my back pocket like Chieko did, grabbed a flashlight, and walked out of Yarrow. The mosquitoes swarmed around me as if they were having their own social, dancing around me in twos and threes. I slapped at them as I walked.

I remembered the small bugs I saw Earl picking off his lettuce leaves and wondered if frogs ate those. I’d have to ask Vera. For now, I headed to the trash area behind the dining hall and started searching for insects for Jolly. I quickly found two grubs in the dirt but realized I had nothing to put them in, and there was no way I was going to palm those suckers all the way to Chicory. Grubs were called grubs for a reason—they were 110 percent grubby gross.

I walked over to the recycling dumpster and found an empty plastic tub that would work as a bug carrier. I killed a mosquito on my arm and dropped it into the tub, not sure if it was a food option for Jolly or not. I returned to my twin grubs on the ground and wondered how I was going to get them into the tub without touching them.

I picked up two short twigs and tried using them as chopsticks. I was pretty good at them, but I still couldn’t get them to work on the bugs. Next I tried one stick in each hand so I could use them like salad tongs, but the grub kept falling before I could get it into the container.

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