Chapter 1: Exiled to the Fields

After being sent to rural Ohio as part of a volunteer youth program, the reality of my new life hit me like a snowball to the face—cold, sudden, and impossible to ignore. The bunkhouse where I slept was a far cry from my old room: the mattress springs squeaked every time someone shifted, and the faint smell of laundry detergent barely covered up the musty scent of old wood. The crew chief—a big, muscular man with a face as weathered as an old barn door, and a voice that rumbled like a tractor engine—circled around me at least eight hundred times a day. Sometimes I swear I felt his boots thumping past even in my dreams. I was so scared I didn’t dare slack off, and I often ended up crying myself to sleep under my Walmart fleece blanket at night from exhaustion. I’d bury my face in the pillow so the other girls in the bunkhouse couldn’t hear, wishing for the soft hum of my old bedroom’s air conditioner instead of the distant croak of frogs and the buzz of a dying ceiling fan.

Tonight, as I was crying my heart out, a string of comments suddenly appeared before my eyes:

[Girl, trust me—just call him big bro and watch him turn into a total softie. He’ll carry your buckets, no questions asked.]

[Girl, he doesn’t come by eight hundred times a day to check your work—he’s totally into you!]

The next day, I watched as the crew chief passed by again with that same stern expression, his faded John Deere cap pulled low over his brow. My heart thudded in my chest as I tried, "Big bro."

He stopped in his tracks, turned his head, and stared straight at me. His dark eyes lit up with a startling intensity—just like a puppy’s, but hidden behind a tough-guy glare, the kind of look you see in those old country fair pie-eating contest winners: fierce on the outside, soft underneath.