Hi. I’m Albie. Today we tried to hurry beans.

It was one of those days my dad calls a dog-day afternoon—too hot to play outside and not enough energy to be bored. Nomi and I were lying on the floor, doing nothing.

Now that I can read, sometimes we play the funny word mashup game. My aunt cut up old kids’ magazines into words and stuffed them in a round, red Christmas cookie tin. I asked Nomi to grab three random words. She did. I read them out loud. If they were funny, I wrote them in my notebook to tell my neighbor later. He keeps his own list. Here are some Nomi pulled: Bacon Slurp Narwhal. Turnip Munch Pirate. Pancake Fat Shark. Jellybean Zoom Toad. Nomi snorted out her nose when I read them, and we rolled around laughing—real laughing and fake hysterical—while the dogs joined in like it was their joke too.

That’s when Momma came in. “Want to grow green beans in a jar?” she asked. We sat up.

“Beans?” Nomi said. “Like…the eating kind?”

“Yep,” Mom said. “Plant them against the glass so you can see the roots sprout.”

We set up jars with damp paper towels and pressed the beans to the sides. Nomi poked hers extra deep. She said it would grow faster because it was “closer to the dirt dimension.” That was pretty funny. We laughed again, then lined the jars up on the windowsill.

“We’ll check in a few days,” Mom said. “You’ll see white roots spiraling around.”

“A few days?” Nomi said. “That’s forever.”

“It’s not forever,” I said. “It’s like…three sleeps.”

“That’s still a lot,” she said.

She tapped her jar like it was a drum. “Grow fast,” she ordered. Moo barked like he agreed. Sadie rooted her nose in Nomi’s pocket, tickling her until she cracked up again.

Rock blinked from my pocket. Slow. Steady.

I stood on my toes and looked at the beans through the glass. I pressed one a little closer to the paper towel. They looked exactly the same.

“What if they don’t do anything?” Nomi asked.

“They will,” I said.

“How do you know?”

I didn’t.

“We’ll see,” I said.

We checked again after dinner. Still nothing.

Nomi squinted at hers. “Mine’s thinking about it.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Thinking is step one.”

The jars sat in the window while the night cooled down. The dogs settled on the kitchen floor. The house got quiet in the way it does before supper.

I looked at the beans one more time before bed. They were still just beans.

Rock blinked once. Slow.

The jars waited. So did we.

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