Project Mulberry (10 page)

We both looked over at Mr. Dixon. He didn't ask us what we were talking about. He looked like he was just waiting—either we'd tell him or it was none of his business and we'd move on to something else.

I was liking him more and more.

"Mr. Titus is a guy in a book," Patrick explained. "You remind us of him—he liked to cook and work in his garden the way you do."

Mr. Dixon tipped his head a little. "Well, now. Is he a hero or a villain in the story?"

"Oh, he's definitely a hero, sir," I said, and Patrick nodded. Mr. Titus wasn't the main character in the book, but he was a really good friend to the main characters and helped them a lot.

"In that case, I'm right pleased," Mr. Dixon said and sort of raised his glass to us.

I drank the last of my lemonade. As I tipped up the glass, I caught sight of my watch. "Patrick, we better get going," I said. We hadn't told my mom we'd be gone this long.

Patrick looked longingly at the brownies that were still on the plate. Mr. Dixon chuckled. "Why don't you take one for the road," he said.

"Thanks!" Patrick took one eagerly.

"What about you, young lady."

I was already full, after that big glass of lemonade and two brownies, and I wondered whether taking a third would seem greedy, or if
not
taking one would hurt his feelings. I decided to take one. Mr. Dixon seemed pleased when I did.

At the gate I turned back so quickly that Patrick almost crashed into me.

"Patrick! We didn't get any leaves!"

"Yikes!" Patrick said. "Here, hold this." He handed me his brownie and ran back to the tree.

"Wouldn't want you to forget those now, would we," Mr. Dixon said. He waited with me at the gate until Patrick was finished picking, then waved goodbye.

I looked back as we turned the corner and saw him still standing there, watching and smiling as we walked away.

 

Kenny was out front again when we got home. I was feeling so good about our afternoon that I gave him my brownie.

He squashed it into his mouth in two bites. It was disgusting. And then he brushed past me and got chocolate all over the arm of my sweater.

"Kenny! You snotbrain!" I yelled.

My mom must have heard me because just then she came to the front door. "Julia Lee Song, you get into the house
this minute,
" she said.

Uh-oh. I was
really
in trouble. I knew that immediately, because she used my whole name and because she wasn't yelling. She was using her special quiet extra-extra-angry voice.

"I'd better go now," Patrick mumbled. "I'll call you later." He handed me the little bundle of leaves and headed off toward his house.

My mom pushed the door open, then stepped back with her arms crossed. "You told me you were going to get leaves," she said. "That was almost
two hours
ago. Where have you been all this time?"

"Mom, I'm sorry. We did get the leaves—see?" I held them up. "We were at Mr. Dixon's house the whole time. We helped him do some weeding, and he gave us something to eat, and I lost track of time. I should have called—"

"Yes, you should have! No, I take that back. You shouldn't have stayed so long in the first place! Didn't you know I'd be worried? And besides, I thought I made it clear that I didn't want you two bothering him."

"Mom! We weren't bothering him! I told you—we were
helping
him. In his yard. And then he gave us brownies—"

"Julia, there's no excuse. You do
not
disappear for two hours without me having any idea where you are. From now on, you are to go to his house to get the leaves and be back within twenty minutes. Is that clear?"

She was being
so
unfair. First of all, she
had
known where we were. We were right where we'd said we'd be—at Mr. Dixon's house. Second, she wasn't listening. Twice now she'd stopped me when I was trying to explain. And third—

"I said,
Is that clear,
young lady?"

"Yes," I muttered.

She spun around and walked into the kitchen. I stood there for a second longer, then went upstairs to my room. I closed the door and sat down on my bed.

Third
was something I couldn't stop myself from thinking.

Third was,
Would she he this mad at me if Mr. Dixon was white?

 

By suppertime my mom had calmed down, and I had, too. Mostly, anyway. I could understand—a little—why she'd gotten so mad, and I knew I should have phoned to let her know we were staying longer than usual. So everything at supper was back to normal.

Except...

Except that I couldn't get
third
out of my head.

The thing was, I knew I couldn't bring myself to go up to my mom and say, "Hi, Mom, what's for dinner? And by the way, I've been wondering—are you racist?"

I was pretty sure my mom didn't think she was. I could sort of guess what her answer might be—that of course she wasn't racist, that there were good and bad people of all colors, that you had to be careful these days and strangers could be dangerous....

She'd be right about a lot of that. But wasn't everyone a stranger before you met them and got to know them?

Maybe I was being a coward. Maybe I didn't want to ask my mom because if it turned out she
was
racist, what could I do about it?

The worry stayed with me all evening and for a couple of days afterward. Not that I was thinking about it every second, but it kept popping up even though I wanted to forget it. It was like the time I accidentally bit the inside of my cheek and it got really sore, and after that I couldn't seem to stop biting the same spot a whole bunch of times more, when all I wanted to do was to keep from biting it. It took ages to get better.

Fortunately, it did not take ages before something happened that pushed
third
right out of my head. It took only two days.

 

Day seventeen was a Sunday. I slept in a little; when I got out of bed, the clock said eight fifty-seven. I did the usual: washed up, got dressed, went downstairs, and checked on the eggs. The commas had been uncurling over the past few days. Last night some of them had looked like little rings—a black outline with a clear center.

I lifted the screen lid and peered inside. There were a whole bunch of tiny black hairs on the leaves—how the heck had hairs gotten in there?

Kenny ... Had Kenny put hairs in the aquarium, maybe thinking the worms could use the hairs to make nests? What an idiot—they weren't
birds.

But it was weird because these weren't like hairs you'd pull out of a hairbrush. They were much too short and tiny. Where had he gotten them? And what was he doing messing with the aquarium? If he'd done anything bad to the eggs, I'd—I'd think of the very worst thing I could possibly do to him and then do something
worse
than that.

I put the lid down, leaning it against my leg, reached in to brush away the hairs—and froze with my hand an inch above the glass bowl.

Because I thought I saw the hairs
moving.

I blinked, then stared for a few seconds. The hairs were so tiny that I almost couldn't tell—were they moving? Yes—yes, there they went again, tiny, tiny wiggles....

Wiggles.

They weren't hairs.

They were worms.

Little tiny itsy-bitsy worms!

Our eggs had hatched!

I hopped up and down, forgetting that the lid was leaning against my leg. It crashed down and landed on my bare foot. Which hurt, but I was too excited to really notice. Still, the pain calmed me down a little. I picked up the lid and put it carefully, carefully, back on the aquarium, so I wouldn't bump or jar it and scare the poor little things. I took one last look through the glass, then ran inside to call Patrick.

I swear he was on the back porch almost before I'd hung up the phone. With a major case of bed-head, and his sneakers untied and a jacket on over his T-shirt and sweatpants, which was what he wore for pajamas.

I lifted the lid again. Patrick sort of leaned back, like he didn't want to get in my way. Then he squatted down so he could look through the glass.

"Wow," he said in a quiet voice. "They're so little! They're almost—well, you wouldn't really say they're cute, would you? But they're the littlest worms I ever saw."

"It's like they're barely
there,
" I said. "I can't believe they're going to become big huge caterpillars."

Patrick had shown me pictures on the Internet. The worms were supposed to grow to be as big as a person's finger.

We saw that there weren't any rings in the eggs anymore—all of the eggs had hatched. "They'll need to eat within a day," Patrick said. "They'll be too weak to eat much at first, but from now on we'll have to keep a really close eye on them. And on the leaves—we have to make sure there are always fresh ones in there."

Patrick went inside and came back with three fresh leaves. He handed them to me. "Okay, Jules," he said. "You have to get them onto the new leaves somehow."

I picked up one of the old leaves, using my fingertips to hold just the very edges. The worms were so tiny that their wiggling didn't really get them anywhere.

I held the old leaf right over a new one, tilted it, and gave it a very gentle shake. Nothing happened.

The worms were either hanging on for dear life or they were somehow stuck to the leaf.

I put the leaf down carefully. Patrick frowned. "Maybe you need to pick them up and move them," he said.

"They're too tiny," I said. "My fingers are so fat compared to them—I'm scared I might crush them. Do you wanna try?"

Patrick took a step back. "No way," he said.

What we needed was something like tweezers. But even tweezers were scary—I still might squash them. Something tiny, that wouldn't squeeze them...

I went into the house and up to my room. My mom had given me a basket to keep my sewing stuff in. I pawed through it until I found my pincushion and took it back down to the porch.

"I'm going to try this," I said, holding up a long pin. It had a bead on the end of it.

I took out one of the leaves with the worms on it and told Patrick to take out a fresh one, and to put the lid back on the aquarium. We put both leaves down on top of the screen. Now I wouldn't have to bend over so far.

I held the pin tightly with the bead pushing against my palm, which helped me keep the tip steady. I put the pinpoint down next to one of the tiny worms and slid it a millimeter at a time until it was under the worm. Then I lifted it and moved it to the fresh leaf.

"Whew," I said at the same time that Patrick said, "Good." We both let out big breaths.

It took me more than half an hour to move all the worms. I felt like a doctor doing microsurgery—slow, gentle, careful, so I wouldn't hurt any of them.

Sheesh! They were
so
tiny. It was hard to believe anything that little could survive for long.

 

Me:
I've been thinking about something. It's not fair. When I mess up, everyone sees it. Like with Patrick and the money thing. But no one sees any of
your
mistakes. Remember when you started my whole story in present tense and then decided to change it to past tense? Nobody else saw how long it took you. Or how mad you got. I think I even heard you swear a couple of times.

Ms. Park:
Ahem. Well—

Me:
So I did some digging around on my own. Look what I found.

Ms. Park:
Where did you get that?

Me:
I found it on the hard drive. In your first-draft file.

Ms. Park:
Put it back!

Me:
Too late. Already copied and pasted.

I took up the fork. "You dig up all the weeds," I said, "I'll follow you and break up all the clods."

Patrick threw the weeds onto the pile Mr. Dixon had already started. I broke up the clods of dirt with the fork.

Me:
Pretty awful stuff. Look at all those "ups"—four in a row.

Ms. Park:
Come on. Everyone makes mistakes. I fixed that part—you can check on page 114. Besides, if you want to know the truth, I like finding my mistakes and trying to make the story better—changing little things here and there, taking some words out, choosing others....

Me:
Hmm. It's like embroidery. Only with words instead of stitches.

Ms. Park:
I like that idea.

Me:
Thanks. That's twice now you've admitted my ideas were good. So maybe you should go back and reconsider giving me a little sister—

Ms. Park:
Sorry. No dice.

It was
amazing
how fast our worms grew. Patrick started videotaping them twice a day. He'd come over early on the way to school to tape them, and then we'd do it again after supper. I always moved them to new leaves before we did the taping, and he'd get shots of the old leaves, too. At first the worms ate teensy nibbles, so there were only tiny holes in the leaves.

On the second day I noticed that when I picked up a worm on the pin, there was an almost invisible strand of webbing attaching it to the leaf. Maybe it had been there all the time but I hadn't been able to see it before. It was so thin that it broke as soon as I lifted the worm.

I pointed it out to Patrick.

"I think that's how they attach themselves to the leaves. So they don't fall off," Patrick said. "I mean, our leaves are always flat, but if they were on a tree out in nature, the worms would have to sort of hang on."

"Makes sense," I said. "And maybe they're also getting started practicing. To make silk."

I wondered if the worms were like dogs—if they were getting to know me by my smell. They seemed to get a little excited when I moved them; they'd squirm around more. But as soon as they were on a new leaf, they settled right down to eating again. By the fifth day they were big enough to wiggle onto a new leaf by themselves, so I didn't have to move them anymore. That was a relief. Moving them twice a day had been hard work. And when we took out the old leaves, we saw that they were always covered with strands of webbing.