“Remind me which genius suggested we put this off till midday?” My friend Angie’s muffled voice drifted through the stalks of corn to my right.

“I believe the same one who didn’t pack enough water,” my second companion, Lauren—also obscured by giant shafts of corn—replied, from five feet to my left. Her naturally dry tone sounded more sarcastic than usual, probably because, thanks to Angie, we’d run out of water half an hour ago.

I smirked, taking a few seconds’ pause from picking corn to wipe sweat from my forehead with the back of my wrist. Despite wearing a shirt and shorts made of cotton so light it was almost see-through and a wide straw sombrero, and religiously sticking to the shade of the corn stalks, this Texan sun was killing me. Still, I loved this kind of work, using my hands— it was cathartic—so I wasn’t going to complain.

“Also the same one who suggested we spend our vacation on this delightful farm,” Lauren added with a grunt. I pictured her tall, lanky form hunched over as she tackled a far too unripe cob, while her narrow, purple, librarian-style glasses glided slowly but surely down her nose. She was not so much a fan of manual work.

“Oh, come on, Lauree.” I couldn’t resist teasing her, despite my resolution to save my voice for after we’d returned to the farmhouse and I’d downed a liter of water. “We know you love it here.”

“‘Course she does,” Angie proclaimed, and I could hear her broad grin through her voice. “What’s not to love?”

“Guess you have a point.” Amid her heavy breathing, Lauren managed to force a note of thoughtfulness into her voice. “I mean, aside from the fact that we’re off the grid, with no electricity or phone signal for literally miles—who wouldn’t appreciate a welcome package of a heap of moldy towels, a sprinkle of roach droppings on their pillowcase, or… a snake in their toilet pot?”

Angie and I burst out laughing. From the tremor in Lauren’s voice, I could tell she still hadn’t gotten over last night’s surprise. Trust Lauren to get dibs on the snake.

“After I had sat down, I might add.”

“It was a grass snake,” Angie retorted, “and a pretty cute one at that.”

“Cute my ass,” Lauren grumbled.

A span of amused silence fell between us as we returned to filling our sacks. This was the second of three assignments we had to complete today; the first had been running bed linens through a manual laundry machine, draining them through a ringer, and then hanging them up to dry outside, and the third would be picking fresh herbs from the greenhouse. Mr. and Mrs. Churnley, friends of Angie’s grandparents and the owners and sole full-time residents of Elmcreek Farm, were to assign us three such jobs every day, in return for free board and lodging.

We had arrived only yesterday evening, having flown from New York to Austin, but I was already feeling a sense of calm about the place. Being without electricity, internet, or a working phone was a culture shock we were all still getting used to, but the lack of external distractions was exactly why we had chosen to come here.

This summer was the last chance Angie, Lauren, and I would have to spend quality time together for possibly a very long time, because after the vacation ended, we’d all be heading off in vastly different directions—Angie even to a different country. I was enrolled to begin a mechanical engineering course in Michigan, and Lauren was to study pre-law at Stanford, while Angie would be jetting off to Paris for an apprenticeship at a prestigious sports-fashion brand (thus combining her two biggest passions). If things worked out for Angie there, we’d see very little of her indeed.

She and I had known each other since kindergarten, while Lauren had known us since first grade, so we decided we needed to do something special, and completely different, this summer—something we’d never forget.

I also had a more personal reason for wanting to be in the middle of nowhere this particular vacation… unreachable. Before I left for Michigan, I knew my birth parents were going to try to get in touch—something I dreaded from the very core of me. My adoptive parents, Jean and Roger, could only hold them off for so long now that I’d turned eighteen, and the court legislation no longer had the same hold that it did during my earlier teen years. After I became an official adult three weeks ago, my birth parents had gotten the idea that they wanted to know me. I might have been more amenable to that if they hadn’t spent the first decade of my life neglecting me to the point of abuse. Alcohol had always taken precedence over me in their lives, and I didn’t see any reason that would change. Their addiction would’ve gotten me killed if I hadn’t run away at nine, and I swore then that I was never, ever going back…

I let out a breath, forcing my consciousness back to the bright, beautiful world around me, allowing it to separate the past from the present.

Yes. Elmcreek was the perfect escape for all of us this summer.

“Oh man, my hat just blew off.” Angie broke the quiet. “And—augh—I can’t reach it. Could one of you guys help me?”

“I volunteer Riley,” announced Lauren.

Exhaling, I stowed the cob I held in my hand in my sack. “Yeah, okay, shortie. Coming.”

I waded through the field, batting away flies and pushing aside leaves until I reached her. The five-foot-five girl with curly blonde hair was standing on her tiptoes, the hem of her short blue dress hiked high up her legs as she stretched for a floppy pink sun hat that was ridiculously out of her reach. She turned around to face me, her hazel eyes meeting mine. She had a smile on her round, impish face, and her light blonde eyebrows, so fair in the daylight they were almost invisible, rose in expectation.

I eyed the hat again and tried to reach for it myself first, given that I was a fair bit taller than her, but I couldn’t, so we ended up coordinating a balancing act with her on my shoulders, knocking my own hat to the ground in the process.

“Wo-hoah, it’s like a whole other world up here,” Angie gasped as her head rose above the jungle of corn.

“Just be quick,” I muttered from between her chunky thighs. “Your butt is breaking my shoulders.”

“It’s all muscle and you know it,” she retorted, before stretching out.

Then she stilled.

“What’s taking so long?” I asked, squinting in the glaring sunlight.

“Hey, I thought the Churnleys didn’t have neighbors on that side of the woods.”

“What?”

“Looks like there are people over there, sunbathing on logs.” She pointed northward, toward the direction of the woods that bordered the Churnleys’ portion of land. I realized she had grabbed the hat already, and was now just staring straight ahead.

“Okay—I’m glad you’re having a nice time up there, but if you’re finished I’m gonna—”

Angie’s knees suddenly clenched around my head. “Wait, Riley. They’re dudes… Four of them. They look like lumberjacks or something. Here, you can see too.” She dove a hand into the side pocket of her dress and slipped out her phone. “That’s what a zoom lens is for… Still got a bit of battery left.” A sharp click sounded as Angie’s phone camera went off.

“Okay, geddown now,” I growled, tugging at her ankle.

She acquiesced, sliding down me with a self-satisfied look on her face. She squinted down at her phone to check out the photo she’d just taken, but it was far too bright to see the screen properly.

“Well, now we all have an extra incentive to hurry up and get back to the house.” She winked at me, before donning her hat and continuing to pick corn.

Smirking, I rolled my eyes and picked up my hat, then moved to return to my spot in the field, when Lauren suddenly materialized out of the bushes in front of me. Her faded blue dungarees looked decidedly grubbier than when we had started, and her coffee-colored ponytail was a tangled mess, but her brown eyes sparkled with mild interest. Adjusting her spectacles primly, she flashed us a sardonic smile.

“Did I hear someone say ‘lumberjacks’?”

* * *

Water was more than enough of an incentive for me to finish the job quickly. After my little break, I worked at twice the speed and managed to pick enough corn to fill all three of our sacks within the next fifteen minutes. Then, lugging each sack over our shoulders, we traipsed back to the wooden two-story house that stood at the edge of the cornfields.

We mounted the steps to the porch, passing the Churnleys’ three lazy golden retrievers, who barely raised an eyelid as we reached the door. It had been left on the latch, and Angie pushed it open with a creak. We stepped directly into the kitchen/dining area, where we were met with the pungent smell of Mrs. Churnley’s cooking, and the short, podgy lady herself standing in front of a stove, her bouncy gray hair cooped up in a brown bonnet, while her bald husband sat at the dining table dutifully peeling potatoes.

Their eyes shot to us as we strode in and planted our sacks down on the wooden floorboards.

“Where should we leave these, ma’am?” Angie asked, panting.

“Oh, good girls!” Mrs. Churnley left the frying pan she had been monitoring and bustled over to examine our finds. “You got some real beauties here! I’ll have Mr. Churnley skin some for lunch.”

Mr. Churnley, who was of a similar height and build to his wife, waddled over to join her in examining the corn with his monobrow furrowed, while Lauren, Angie, and I hurried to the sink. We each grabbed a metal cup from the drainer and quickly served ourselves water from a large pitcher. Once we’d swallowed two cups in a row, Angie remarked to the couple, “Seems like you might have new neighbors, by the way.”

Mrs. Churnley turned, her rheumy eyes widening as she made her way back to the frying pan. “Hmm?”

“Yeah,” Angie replied, “we—or I—saw four guys lounging around in the field next door. They were shirtless, so I assumed they were sunbathing…” She set her cup down and dove her hand back into her pocket to retrieve her phone. But as she navigated to her photo app and touched the screen to zoom in, she frowned. “Huh. That’s real weird.” Her eyes narrowed to slits as she squinted at the screen.

“What?” Lauren and I asked.

“I can’t, uh, make them out in the photo,” she replied, still looking befuddled. “There’s just logs. Odd. I could have sworn I saw dudes there too.”

Lauren’s lips twitched in a wry smile as she took the phone from Angie. “Yup,” she confirmed. “Logs.”

I peered over Lauren’s shoulder to take a look at the photo for myself. A cluster of four logs lay near the edge of a flat field, right near the woods’ border… Definitely no shirtless lumberjacks.

Mrs. Churnley chortled, nudging Angie in the arm with her elbow. “Seems we all react to the heat differently, eh? The only ‘shirtless dude’ I’ve seen around here in the last twenty years, other than Mr. Churnley, is Mr. Doherty, our neighbor on the southern side of the fence, and I wouldn’t say he’s anything to get excited about—unless curly white chest hairs are your thing.” To our alarm, she threw us a salacious wink.

“Now, Nora,” her husband spoke up in a gruff voice, “don’t get the ladies too excited.”

I felt myself turn as red as the tomatoes on the kitchen counter as Mr. and Mrs. Churnley erupted into raucous laughter. Angie, Lauren, and I cleared our throats in an attempt to join in, before inching toward the door.

“We’re just gonna go and rest a bit before lunch if that’s okay,” Angie said with a plastic smile.

“Of course!” Mrs. Churnley replied, and the three of us swiftly took our leave. “It’ll be ready within the hour!”

I let out a breath as we entered the narrow corridor. They were definitely an unusual couple. Apparently they used to live in the city, and worked as bankers before they got so burned out on metropolitan life that they had a midlife crisis and swung the other way—completely the other way. They bought this patch of land decades ago, and judging by the state of the house, they probably hadn’t renovated it since they moved in.

We climbed the rickety staircase that led to the second floor, where the three of us shared a bedroom fitted with three single beds. Although the Churnleys had space for guests, it was quite obvious they weren’t used to having any. There were two other bedrooms on our level—one belonging to the old couple, and another that had fallen into disrepair. Angie suspected the latter had belonged to their only child, a boy who had died at the age of thirteen from a rare form of cancer.

Angie’s grandmother was convinced they were terribly lonely, but would never admit to it, since they’d “rather rot” than go back to living like the rest of the world. So when she learned that Angie, Lauren, and I wanted to do something memorable this summer, she had been quick to think of her old friends, and had contacted them by snail mail.

Lauren was the first to use the en-suite bathroom when we entered our musty-smelling room, while Angie and I flopped back on our creaky beds. The shower started, and we sniggered as Lauren stepped in and sighed to herself, “Ah, luxury.”

It was kind of amazing the things you appreciated when everything got stripped from you. I imagined I’d feel utterly spoiled when I returned home in a month.

Angie blew out softly, staring up at the bare wooden beams strutted across the cobwebbed ceiling. “I could have sworn I saw dudes there,” she mumbled.

I smiled to myself. “It was an illusion, Angie,” I said in a dreamy voice. “A mirage… Where normal people would see an oasis of water in a desert, you would see an oasis of, well…” My tone dropped. “I do kind of worry what that says about you.”

She chucked a pillow at me. “Shut up.”

“Hey,” I said, changing the subject, “why don’t we go visit the creek this afternoon? After lunch, we can gather the herbs quickly, and then have the rest of the day free.”

“Suits me,” she muttered. “We’ll see what Lauren thinks.”

I stood up to stretch out my arms and, yawning, caught sight of myself in the stained mirror near the window. My brown hair was hardly in better condition than Lauren’s or Angie’s, even though I’d braided it and then wrapped it in a tight bun, and the corners of my blue eyes were tinged reddish—they were feeling a little irritated, come to think of it. I wasn’t used to being so close to nature.

The shower stopped abruptly. Lauren emerged from the bathroom a moment later, clutching a towel around her bare body, her shoulder-length hair foaming with shampoo. “So, the water just stopped,” she announced, her toes curling on the wooden floor as water pooled around her feet.

“Ah.” Angie threw her an amused, yet apologetic look. “Maybe—”

Before we could hear her speculation, Mrs. Churnley’s voice boomed up from the bottom of the staircase. “You used too much water at one time, dear—whichever one of you was in the shower just now. I’ll have Mr. Churnley come up and show you how to manually work the pump—”

“Oh, don’t bother, ma’am,” Lauren replied quickly. “I’m sure Mr. Churnley has enough to do.”

She looked back at the two of us with tight lips, and I frowned, assessing our options. “Maybe we should just save our hair washing for the creek and use this bathroom only for quick showering—Angie and I were gonna suggest we go there this afternoon anyway.”

Lauren blinked, taking a moment to process my suggestion. “Hair washing in the creek,” she repeated, almost robotically. “Right. Okay. So, I’ll just… wrap up this sticky slop of hair and wait then. That’s fine. No problem.”

With that, she turned and marched stiffly back into the bathroom. Exchanging glances with Angie, I laughed. It seemed Lauren was getting past the stage of expecting things to work and surrendering to the experience. And that was good.

It was the first step toward us all having a lot of fun.