Vin had been to a farm before. Once. As a field trip in fifth grade. They’d petted a llama (or was it an alpaca? He couldn’t remember.). They’d picked vegetables from a garden patch growing in astonishingly straight lines, filling neat, colorful baskets with a half-dozen tomatoes, a handful of snap peas, a few ears of corn. They’d shelled the peas—and honestly eaten half of them raw right out of the shells, a taste that was oddly reminiscent of peanuts. They’d looked at—but not touched, thank ye gods and little pink toasters!—the manure and compost heaps. A few of the braver kids had milked a placid nanny goat and discovered that barn cats were intensely attracted to goat milking—and that they could catch a stream of milk mid-squirt if you aimed properly.
That, he realized, had been a sho
