The Year Money Grew on Trees - Aaron Hawkins [46]
"Kind of have a headache and a little stomachache."
"I'm going to go in and take a shower and get everything cleaned off me. You should too."
The warm shower made me feel better, but I still felt like I couldn't quite get everything off my skin. I barely ate any dinner and crawled into bed afraid I would wake up a mutant.
On the way home from school the next day, I didn't say anything to Sam about more spraying. Walking past the orchard brought back the sick feeling, and I headed straight for my bedroom and shut the door. Breathing in that poison had to be bad for us. Maybe enough of it would even kill us. I didn't want to see that barrel or gun again, and I thought up ways to avoid them.
The only sure way was abandoning the whole project. I quickly thought up more reasons to justify walking away. For instance, Brother Brown was bound to have more miserable apple-growing surprises waiting for me even if I could get past spraying.
I pulled the contract out of my encyclopedia and read it over: $8,000. How was that going to be possible? I was killing myself for nothing! Continuing was just going to make it worse and make everyone hate me more when they didn't get any money. Yes. It was best for everyone just to stop now.
There was a knock on my door, and when I answered it, Sam was standing there. "You ready to go?" he asked. He already had his handkerchief around his face.
His eyes stopped me from telling him it was all useless and dangerous. They expected something. I didn't want them looking at me like I was a quitter.
"Yeah, but let's move faster on the next run."
***
The next two days brought the same pain. I stopped being quite as careful, and we finished spraying the remaining twenty-two rows using only two more barrels worth of poison.
"So that's it, right?" asked Sam after we parked the tractor.
"You mean for today or forever?"
"I was hoping forever."
"Me, too, but I'll have to find out from someone how many times we're supposed to do this."
I thought I would throw up when Brother Brown told me we should spray every other week. Those ladybugs had to be a better idea. Sam and I experimented with different face coverings to keep out as much spray as possible. The best facemasks were the little white ones painters wore. We found them stuffed into a forgotten corner at General Supply.
We also decided it was better to get the misery over all at once, so we started spraying the whole orchard in a single day—three barrels, one right after another. During spray days, I couldn't remember why Slim's scrap yard had seemed so bad.
Chapter 11
Summer Vacation
School got out for the summer in late May. Classes ended on a Thursday, which didn't make much sense to me. The junior high had a big dance every year on the last day of school as a type of celebration. This was especially important for the ninth graders like Amy who would be moving on to high school the next year. It was their last chance for a while to feel big and important. Amy had been talking about it for months and had arranged to go with some of her friends.
"So, are you coming?" she asked me a couple of weeks before. "You can probably ride with me."
"I dunno," I told Amy reluctantly. "I don't really know how to dance."
"Oh, that doesn't matter," she said. "No one does. You just kind of move to the music."
"That's easy for you to say. You're probably good at it."
"Come on, it's fun. You're not still afraid of girls, are you?" she teased.
"No! I just don't wanna embarrass myself."
"What if I show you some moves and you could practice a little?"
"Maybe," I said, feeling a little less anxious.
That night I went to Amy's room to practice. She had recorded some of her favorite songs from the radio using her cassette player, and she started playing the tape. She tried to demonstrate how you should move back and forth and use both your feet and your arms. She looked pretty natural doing it, like she wasn't even thinking.
When I tried, she gave me a doubtful look. "You'll get it. You should just practice