Margaret Haddix - Among the Imposters

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.

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.

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.”

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.