The Year Money Grew on Trees Read Online Free PDF Page B

out a set of cards. She selected one and wiped off the dust.
    "Name?" she barked.
    "Jackson Jones ... ma'am."
    She wrote my name on the card, pulled out another card in the little envelope inside the front cover of the book, and wrote my name on that one too. She stuck the first card back in the book and held it up. Then she yanked it away before I could grab it and growled, "Have it back here in two weeks."
    "I will," I said as she finally let go of the book. I turned and walked quickly toward the exit, not wanting to look back in case she changed her mind. I threw the doors wide open just as the bell rang for the next period.
    Cool relief filled my whole body. Looking down at the book, I exhaled loudly through my mouth, as if I'd been holding my breath for the last fifteen minutes. I held the book high over my head like a trophy and walked victoriously to my locker.

Chapter 4
No One Works for Free
    The afternoon after my library visit, I ran all the way home from the bus stop and shut myself in my room. I cracked open the apple book and only stopped reading grudgingly to eat dinner. I did a lot of skimming so I could get through it quickly. As I got closer to the end, panic gripped me. There was much more to raising apples than I had thought. The book explained a lot, but I could only keep it for two weeks. I needed that copier I saw in Mr. Palmer's office but decided I would do the only thing available to me. I grabbed a spiral notebook and started hand copying important sections.
    At first I copied whole paragraphs word for word, but then moved on to writing down titles and important sentences. I woke up the next morning with my face pressed on top of the book and my written pages scattered all over the floor. By the next night, I forced myself to stop copying. There was so much to actually do that I didn't think I should spend any more time just reading about it. I tried to organize all the necessary work into categories and even drew out a calendar of what needed to be done and when. It was a mess of chicken-scratch writing and crooked lines, but phenomenal compared to what I would usually turn in for homework.
    According to the book, the first thing you needed to do was prune, and you were supposed to start during the winter. It involved cutting off part of the branches on a tree. This didn't make a lot of sense, but by then I completely trusted Mr. Jeffrey Haslam and everything he had written about apples. My calendar allowed for six weeks of pruning starting right then.
    Three hundred trees in six weeks would mean fifty trees every week. I could probably only work three hours after school before it started to get dark and then maybe twelve hours on Saturday. There was no way my mom would let me work on Sunday, since it was against the Ten Commandments, so I knew that day was completely out. That meant twenty-seven hours per week
or about two trees an hour! Thinking back on how big and wild the trees looked, and how many branches I'd have to remove, I knew it would be impossible for one person. And there were a ton of things to do after pruning too! Maybe my friends were right to laugh at me without even knowing why. At some point during the summer, my dad would figure out how hopeless it all was and drag me down to be Slim's slave.

    ***
    The next afternoon I saw Mrs. Nelson waving at me from her house. A feeling of humiliation oozed through me. Was she just making fun of me too? She must know all this was impossible. I decided to go talk to her and find out exactly what she was thinking.
    "Come in, come in, Jackson," she said happily as she opened the door.
    "Hi," I said as I walked in, not bothering to wipe my feet very carefully. I sat in the nearest chair and launched into my first question. "Mrs. Nelson, when your husband was running the orchard, did he have another job too?"
    "Oh, of course."
    "So how many hours a week would he spend working out there?"
    "Well, that was always different for different times of