Chapter One

Cherry

In July, even in the dead middle of the night, you can’t breathe the air in the Atlas pickle plant. You have to suck it. The smell is sharp and thick and sets the hairs in your nose on end and makes you feel like your lungs are getting as slicked over as your white Keds tennies, their laces green and pungent from dragging through puddles of pickle juice.

It was three in the morning, and it had been a bad night for Baby and me. Alfred Lynn Tucker—a tub of lard with bright red hair, glasses, and big, dirty-looking teeth, who was, unfortunately, our boss—had been on our case the whole night long. Not that he wasn’t on our case most every other night. Just tonight was worse than usual.

When we came on shift at eleven, he started us off squirting brine into glass jars full of cucumbers that rolled past us on a conveyer belt. The brine came out of an old black rubber hose contraption connected to a wooden vat, and had a nozzle kind of like a garden hose. I bet we weren’t on that job even fifteen minutes when he pulled us off, because we didn’t let go of the trigger on the hose between squirts and a lot of brine somehow got wasted on the floor. It was an old rusty squeezer that a big man would have had trouble pumping, much less a girl, and it was just impossible to keep letting up on it. Our hands would have fallen off. You’d think Alfred Lynn personally paid for the brine out of his own pocket.

Then he put us to setting empty jars on the automatic packer belt where they passed under a chute that poured the cucumbers into them, but the stupid belt went so fast that we had to practically thr