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sweating. Half an hour and I was dripping. After a while my cuts and bruises stopped hurting, and the whine of the edger and mowers faded away. It was just the slice of the shovel into the ground and the pounding of my heart as I muscled it out of the hole. An inch at a time, a foot at a time. I was good at digging holes. It was the rest of life I sucked at.
    Then I hit rock—check that, rocks—and the dirt turned into dried cement. I had to use the pick to loosen it. The mowers swept by, blasting cut grass and exhaust. I kept digging, pick first, then shovel. Pick and shovel. Break, then dig. An inch, three inches, another foot down. The sun was roaring overhead, cooking everything. Sweat ran down my back and arms. Salt penetrated the bandages the doc had given me. The sting was sweet.
    Days like this I thought maybe I should just blow off school, move to Minnesota or something, get a job that let me sweat, and never, ever think again. I swung the pick harder, putting my back into it until the sun and the stink and the buzz and the pain blurred together.
    And then Yoda was standing above me with Mr. Pirelli next to him. Somehow the afternoon had vanished and it was time to go home. I handed up my tools. The two of them reached down to help me out of the crater I’d dug.
    “Isn’t that a little deep?” Yoda asked.
    “It’ll help the roots get established,” I explained.
    “Established where? China?”
     
    The truck stopped at our corner and we crawled out. Mr. Pirelli reminded me to call him about my schedule now that school was starting. He’d take as many hours as I could give, he said, especially if I wanted to dig holes. It might have been a compliment, but I was too tired to be sure.
    I trudged next to Yoda, my boots clomping on the sidewalk like monster feet.
    “You want to come?” Yoda asked.
    “Where?”
    “To my house, to take over the galaxy, duh. Or we could just hang out. Whatever. We have leftover lasagna.”
    “No, I’m good. Thanks.”
    We stood there for a second, gnats swarming in front of our faces.
    He swatted at them. “I think you should come.”
    “I’m okay, really,” I said. “I’m going to bed. But if I can’t sleep, I’ll come over.”
    He nodded. “You riding with me Monday?”
    “Nope. I’m taking the bus with Hannah.”
    “Cool. May the Force be with you, my friend.”
    “We’re seniors, Yoda. You gotta stop saying that.”

10.
    My house was dark and quiet.
    No dinner, no notes on the counter. Maybe my family had joined the witness-protection program in exchange for testifying about what a loser I was.
    I stood in the shower until the water swirling around the drain wasn’t black. Two of the butterfly bandages on my left forearm peeled off. I poured peroxide on the gaping cuts until they went numb.
    When I went back down to the kitchen, I saw the thin line of light under the closed door to the basement. I filled a mixing bowl with an entire box of Lucky Charms and ate it with a serving spoon. The goal was to finish the cereal before falling asleep facedown in the milk.
    After I put the bowl in the dishwasher, I opened the basement door. Dad was down there typing on his computer and talking to himself. Opera was playing low in the background.
    “Tyler?” Dad called. “Is someone there? Linda?”
     
    There had actually been a time when Dad was cool. Like when I was in third grade, when he was an accountant at a tiny hole-in-the-wall company. If you were going to make a documentary about our family, that would have been the year. Nobody had a shrink. Mom worked part-time at the school library and took photos for fun. Hannah only bit me if I made her really, really mad. And Dad and me won first place in both the father/son knot-tying competition and the three-legged race at the Cub Scout Wilderness Weekend.
    Those were the days, by golly.
    Now he was a dragon hiding in the skin of a small man. In public, he’d act like a human being, all handshakes and “good to