“You won’t lose me if I get a girlfriend, all right? Do two guys stop being friends when one of them starts dating a girl? No. So why should we be different?”

We shouldn’t be. But . . . “Never mind,” I say. “I’m just sorry for the way I acted. OK?”

“Sure. Fine. OK.”

He follows me to the barn and watches me mix Lucy’s feed.

“That smells pretty disgusting,” he says.

“She seems to like it.” I fill a bucket of water and motion for him to carry it while I lug the feed bucket to Lucy’s pen. She appears to be asleep in the shade of her shelter, so I quickly step up on the fence with the bucket and swing it over and try to settle the handle in its hook before she wakes up. She must have been faking, because the minute I step on the fence, she comes charging out of her shelter and rams her side against the fence again. I drop the bucket and fall back into Micah, who falls back onto the ground, spilling the water bucket he was carrying all over both of us. I roll off Micah into the puddle. My sunburn stings where I rubbed against him.

“Sheesh,” Micah says, sitting up. “Are you OK?”

“Dumb pig.” I get up and brush myself off, then reach down to pull him up. “I’ll be right back. Gotta go get more water.”

Micah walks over to the fence and watches Lucy. She snorts at him and goes wild eating her food before any more can seep out from under the fence.

When I return with the water, Micah is standing on the lowest rung of the fence, talking to Lucy. “You know, if you didn’t body-slam Rachel when she’s trying to feed you, you wouldn’t lose half your food. I thought pigs were supposed to be intelligent.”

She grunts at him and flicks her curlicue tail.

“She hates me,” I say. “How come she’s not trying to knock you down?”

“She just wanted her food.”

I climb up the fence and balance next to him. Lucy steps closer, as if she’s going to try slamming me off again. But then she seems to think better of it and turns away from us, farting a little with each step so a tiny bit of poop squirts out of her butt each time a hoof hits the ground.

“Wow!” Micah says.

“So gross.”

Lucy turns back, and I swear she smiles a wicked smile at me.

“You sure are making it hard to be friends,” I tell her.

“Why do you want to be friends?”

“I want to save her,” I say.

“From what?”

“Becoming bacon. The Townsends are raising her for meat.”

Micah makes a face. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

“Where do you think meat comes from?”

“I don’t like thinking about it.”