"I've decided that you're gonna spend this summer working on your great-uncle's farm!"
The way Dad said it, I guess I was supposed to think it was some great reward, not a prison sentence. I was not exactly your farm-boy outdoorsy type. Puberty had come and gone, leaving me a spindly asthmatic seventeen-year-old who had topped out at five-foot-seven and still had a goddamn baby face. Mom still bought my clothes in the friggin' boys' department at Walmart, for god's sake.
"Do I look like I'm built for doing chores?", I asked Dad, extending my scrawny arms to emphasize the point. It was one of life's mysteries how a tall and hardy guy like my dad could produce a puny kid like me. If we hadn't shared the same blond hair and dark eyes, I'd have been sure I was adopted or switched at birth...or maybe that my spaceship had crash-landed in the backyard and Mom and Dad had decided to raise me as their son.
"Trust me, son, you're gonna love it," Dad said with enthusiasm that I found dubious. "The summers I spent at Uncle Cyrus's made a man out of me.”
In the weeks that followed, I kept making alternative proposals for what to do with my summer, but Dad would have none of it. On June first, my folks loaded me onto a bus for the 36-hour ride to Texas. I walled myself off from the other riders, popping in my headphones and escaping into my music until the battery wore out.
