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trowel in my hand and watched as a red-winged blackbird landed on a cattail in the swampy stretch a few hundred feet from us. Beyond the field, I could see the curved gray walls of the observatory. I tried not to think about why it was closed. Then I tried not to think about the boy. I thought about the boy.
    â€œI’m hungry,” I said, and no one replied. “Ugh, this is hard.” Still nothing.
    â€œJust try to enjoy that feeling of hunger, of how hard you’re working for it,” Lynn said. “It gets easier and easier.”
    â€œThat’s what my mom used to say, and then she left because nothing got easier,” I said, and that shut him up. I didn’t know why I said that, let that tidbit of information, normally kept locked away, slip. I knew better than to trust professionals in the mental health field.
    â€œTry it like this,” Lynn said, and he grabbed a clump of timothy grass by its base, where the stem disappeared into the ground. It slid right out.
    â€œOkay.” I shrugged, and did as he said. And, yeah, it slid right out.
    â€œIt feels really good to make one small adjustment and have everything align, doesn’t it?”
    How one person could smile so much, at so many tiny and unimportant observations, was beyond me. Except, okay, yeah: it did feel a little bit good to make one small adjustment and have everything align. But I wasn’t going to say so.
    We were working in a small group in the field, and it reminded me of my parents’ honeymoon photos. They had gone to a city in Sicily, an under-the-radar place called Enna, which was one of the highest elevations on the island (not to be confused with Etna, the giant volcano). It offered the magical combination of clear views of the sky for my father and particularly good growing conditions for herbs, which appealed to my mom. That was where they picked the rosemary and the caraway and saw the occultation of Regulus, when an asteroid passed in front of the Regulus star, blocking its light. They’d found everything near and dear to them in one beautiful place. They had photographs of the old women in black scarves amid the fields of herbs, and if I squinted just right, we looked like that here in the park, except we were wayward teens amid the weeds in hardhats and canvas pants.
    It seemed as if hours had gone by, and we’d barely made a dent in those weeds, and I was sweating and stinky and so bored of listening to Kelsey and Tonya compare notes on the members of Duran Duran.
    â€œSimon is totally my boyfriend,” Kelsey said. She was very small, even smaller than I was, with coffee-colored skin and a frizz of black hair.
    â€œNo, it’s Nick—​that hair. Totally decent,” said Tonya. She’d grown heavier since we’d stopped being friends, and it seemed like it was kind of hard for her to breathe with all the hard work. I thought about offering her some water from the cooler, but then she said, “I am so totally having Nick’s babies.”
    Their happiness, to me, was like some giant balloon expanding in my face. I had no choice but to pop it. Duran Duran was just not acceptable.
    â€œThey’re all gay,” I said. “You know that, right?”
    Their faces took on the potent combination of surprise and annoyance, while Lynn’s eyes widened in what looked like fear and his mouth shut sharply. This was foreign territory for him. He was great at talking about hard work and the variety of promising construction tools, but homosexual teenage icons? Not so much. Tonya scrunched up her face and shook her head.
    That cocktail of shame and satisfaction swirled inside me, and I moved over to another section of the path. I took another cassette out of my old worn backpack and changed Big Star to Hüsker Dü in my Walkman, then put the headphones over my ears and pretended to concentrate on the task at hand, the untamable weeds spilling over the land.
    I