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calculations in my notebook. I’d started them earlier in the year, when I knew that Vira was on its way. It had been discovered back in the 1600s by Dmitri Sergeevich Alexandrov, a kind of tragic figure in the history of physics, Newton’s shadowy nemesis. It always traveled in an elliptical path around the sun, just as we did. At last count, it was still zooming its way past Mars at 128,000 miles an hour. It was still more than two hundred million miles away.
    I couldn’t imagine how footbridges would possibly be more fascinating than comets, and I was prepared to just pass the book on, as I had with the jewelweed. But then I saw a couple of them as Jimmie handed it to me. There were ones made out of whole logs; ones with curved side rails, painted red; one with zigzagging planks like Jenga; one made out of arched rock.
    â€œHow do they get that to stay that way?” I asked. Apparently I hadn’t voiced a rhetorical question, because Tonya answered me.
    â€œIt’s how an arch works,” she said. “Two weaknesses that form a strength when they lean together. Basically just two forces, one downward and one outward.” She said this as if she really wanted to say “dumbass” at the end of her sentence. We had not had a real conversation for almost two years.
    â€œRight,” I said, as if I’d known the answer all along. Which I should have. “It’s defying gravity.”
    â€œNo, dumbass,” she said, quietly enough so that Lynn didn’t hear. “It’s
using
gravity. ‘Every force has an equal and opposite force,’ as I’m pretty sure you know.” I looked down at my still-newish work boots. “They’re pushing against each other, and that holds them in place.”
    â€œRight,” I said again. There was one in which the handrails and posts were made out of a tangle of vines, storybook style; one with flower boxes all along the sides, long, weeping flowers hanging toward the water, weirdly beautiful and sculptural; and some really boring ones with plain old sticks of wood at the end.
    â€œOurs will be like the ones on the last few pages,” Lynn said, and I felt the small descent of disappointment.
    Â 
    I hated it. This was no surprise to me, and probably not to my father, but by week two, after the introduction to weeding and elementary hammering, it seemed to surprise Lynn.
    â€œCaraway?” he said, walking up to me and putting a hand on my shoulder as I vaguely picked at some weeds that were doing their best to choke the path that wound through a grove of cypress trees. Why had I told him my real name? “Need a hand?”
    â€œNo,” I said. I crouched down, or at least I tried to, but the boots were still stiff, the leather unforgiving, and it was hard to bend with my ankles held captive inside them. My canvas painter’s pants were too scratchy. My mother’s gardening shirt, green and blue and black plaid, which I’d somehow grown attached to, was now covered in dirt. I reached for a weed and yanked on it, but it was tenacious and it didn’t come with me as I leaned back. I ended up falling on my butt. I looked up to see if any of the other kids had noticed, but they all seemed perfectly focused as they wrested unfriendly vines from the ground.
    The morning had started with a brief presentation on the kinds of flora and fauna found in the park, what was good and what was harmful and what to go toward and what to avoid as we began to weed and clear the path.
    I had doodled in my journal through the whole thing, making 3D letters of the lyrics to that Jam song—​no matter where he roams he returns to his English Rose—​so I really had no idea what we were supposed to be doing here. Weeding, apparently, in the spot where we would eventually build the footbridge: a youth chain gang.
    A breeze drifted in and the park turned golden and hazy. I leaned back with my park-issued