We slipped ball games in when we could, and loafed on Sunday afternoons, but the camp springing up around us was all the incentive we needed to keep our minds on our jobs. Day by day, we were getting better at them. Getting fond of showing how we could do a thing, too.

Which maybe was why it was easy to get grouchy when things didn’t go right and all we had to show was wounded pride and a mistake.

Romeo was the worst for making mistakes though he tried the hardest of anybody. He just couldn’t pound a nail without bending it crooked or drill a hole without breaking a drill bit. And somehow he latched onto me as his favorite person to work with. “Your shadow,” Nate joked.

I shrugged. “I don’t mind,” I said. “He reminds me of my brothers.”

Though I did lose my temper with Romeo when he made me look bad before Pops.

I’d been preparing to cut some shelf boards to go inside a cabinet when Romeo volunteered to help. “I can cut them while you put up the supports,” he said.

I had misgivings, but he looked so eager, I agreed. “They need to be twenty-nine inches each,” I told him. I wrote it on a slip of paper so he couldn’t forget. “Four of them, each twenty-nine inches,” I repeated. “And remember, measure twice, cut once.”

“I’ll measure three times,” Romeo promised.

I was still nailing in the two-by-two supports when he brought over a stack of neatly cut boards. “Done in time for lunch,” he said. “Want me to do anything else before I knock off?”

“Nah, I got this,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you in the mess tent.”

I was so close to finishing the supports that I pushed on. And then, just to see how the whole thing was going to look, I tried setting one of the shelves inside.

Pops came over just as I angled it into position, only to have it fall right through the supports and clatter onto the floor.

My first thought was I’d somehow set it in wrong. But of course I hadn’t. The board was too short.

“What’d you do, try to eyeball it?” Pops asked me. “Or make your measurements without checking the blueprints first? Learning to follow blueprints is part of your job.”

His criticism was mild enough, but I felt my face flaming. I hadn’t read the prints—like most of the fellows, I’d avoided figuring out how—but that wasn’t the point.

“I measured inside the cabinet, instead,” I said. “Look!” I grabbed a tape measure and showed him. “Twenty-nine inches, just like I told Romeo.” I picked up the shelf and laid the measure on that. Twenty-seven inches.

“That—” I held back the name I was about to call my friend, but I thought it.