Project Mulberry (3 page)

He looked at me, his face all business. "I'll get started on the Internet—oh, wait," he said, and frowned at his watch. "It's not even seven-thirty. I can't do it yet."

Patrick knew our family's evening routine. Kenny got the computer until eight o'clock, and I got it after that.

"Homework comes first anyway, you two," my mom said.

I went to get my backpack, wondering when Patrick would notice that I was not one bit excited about doing a silkworm project.

 

Me:
Is there other stuff in my story so far that comes from real life?

Ms. Park:
Yes. A bunch of things.

Me:
Like what?

Ms. Park:
Well, let's see. I hated kimchee when I was little. I like it now, but I didn't when I was your age.

Me:
Wow. You can remember that far back?

Ms. Park:
Very funny. I don't remember everything, of course. But parts of my childhood are quite vivid to me, and I like going there in my mind. You probably will, too, when you're older.

Me:
Did your parents grow up in Korea?

Ms. Park:
Yes. And my father always did the dishes.

Me:
Did you have a bratty younger brother? Is that why you put Kenny in the story?

Ms. Park:
I have a younger brother and a younger sister. But neither of them was very bratty. I got along with them pretty well when we were kids.

Me:
A sister would be much better. I have a great idea—why don't you delete all the stuff about Kenny and give me a sweet younger sister instead? Her name could be ... Jessie. I like that name. Julia and Jessie—isn't that nice? And she could be really cute, and she could worship me—

Ms. Park:
But I like Kenny. He's funny.

Me:
Funny to you, maybe! To me he's a big pain!

Ms. Park:
Well, I'm the one writing the story, so I get to decide. Kenny stays.

Me:
Gak!

Worksheet. Exponents. We had to write out the problem again the long way, and then give the answer in two different forms.

 

10
²
x 10
⁶

Answer 1:___________

Answer 2:___________

I filled in the blanks:

(10 x 10) x (10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10)

Answer 1:
10
⁸

Answer 2:
100,000.000

Bo-o-o-ring.

Patrick said that whoever invented exponents must have been either really lazy or really impatient. They got sick of writing all those zeroes, so they invented a way to do it quicker.

We finished the worksheet, then quizzed each other on our social studies unit. We'd already done Ancient Civilizations of the New World: North America, and now we were doing Ancient Civilizations of the New World: South and Central America. Today's homework was on the Maya. We were supposed to learn the countries that were now located where they used to live: Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, and parts of Mexico. Patrick made up an acronym to help us remember the countries: BEG-Mex.

It was almost eight o'clock. "Come on, that's enough studying," he said, getting up off the floor. "We can start researching silkworms."

I looked down at the page in front of me. "You go ahead," I said. "I need to study a little more."

Patrick stopped at the kitchen door and turned back. "Okay," he said, "what is it?"

 

I had other good friends at school and on my soccer team—Emily and Carly played defense with me, and we hung around off the field, too. But I spent more time with Patrick than anyone else. Sometimes the other guys teased him about having a girlfriend, but it didn't seem to bother him. It didn't bother me, either. If those guys couldn't tell the difference between a friend and a girlfriend—well, that made them too dense to be worth worrying about.

One thing about being best friends for so long: When one of us is mad, the other almost always knows it without asking. This is usually a good thing. If I'm mad at Patrick, he knows right away rather than being clueless about it and making me even madder.

But once in a while I want to be mad privately. This was one of those times.

"What is
what?
" I said.

"Come on, Jules," he said. "You're mad about something, I can tell."

"Never mind," I muttered.

"Gak," he said. "I hate when you're like this." He stood there a little longer, but I didn't say anything more. He shrugged and went downstairs.

I almost called after him to say that I wasn't mad at
him.
Well, maybe I was, a little—at how he was just assuming we'd do a silkworm project without even discussing it. But that wasn't the main reason I was upset. And I didn't want to talk about the main reason, because it was sort of complicated.

I thought of Wiggle as a club that was all about country life—farming, raising animals, cooking and sewing, stuff they used to do in the old days. Big red barns. Cornfields. Hay rides. That kind of thing.

Silkworms just didn't seem like a good Wiggle project to me. They didn't fit into the big-red-barn picture. They were too... too...

Too
Korean.

In Chicago there had been lots of other Korean families, and I'd had Korean friends. But not in Plainfield. We were the only Korean family in town. In fact, on one of my first days of school here a bunch of girls had yelled "Chinka-chinka-Chinaman" at me on the playground. It made me feel really bad inside—so bad that I hated thinking about it. And, of course, the more I tried not to think about it, the more I thought about it. I was glad when that memory started to fade, and it hardly ever came up anymore.

It might be starting to sound like being Korean was a Huge Issue for me, but that wasn't true. I mean, when I was doing my math homework or watching TV or whatever, I wasn't constantly thinking stuff like, I
wish I wasn't Korean.

Whenever I
did
think about it, though, it was because something was upsetting me. I didn't want my house to smell like kimchee. I didn't want kids to yell "Chinka-chinka-Chinaman" at me. And I didn't want to do something weird and Asian for the Wiggle Club.

I wanted a nice, normal, All-American, red-white-and-blue kind of project.

 

Patrick and I have done lots of projects together. The leaf collection in fifth grade. "Get to Know Your Community" the same year. In sixth grade, we built a model of a water molecule, a Pleistocene-era miniature landscape, and a Revolutionary War diorama. And of course we had our quarters project outside of school.

So it made sense that we'd work on a Wiggle project together. But now I didn't know what to do. I knew what Patrick was like when he was excited. It would take me forever to talk him out of a silkworm project, and I'd have to tell him why I didn't want to do it, and he'd probably think I was being stupid and get really mad at me.

But maybe...

Maybe I wouldn't have to talk him out of it. In all my life, I'd never heard of anyone raising silkworms except my grandmother, who did it about a million years ago in Korea. So maybe it would be really hard to raise silkworms here. Maybe we wouldn't even be able to get started.

I could just wait and see. And if we ran into an impossible snag, we'd have to give up the idea, and it wouldn't be because of me.

I felt a lot better after I figured this out. I got up and went into the living room. It was seven fifty-seven on the computer clock. Patrick was sitting next to the computer watching Kenny play a game.

"Three more minutes," Kenny whined at me. "You can't have it yet—I've got three more minutes to beat the boss."

"Two and a half now," I said. "Better not mess up—you won't have time to try again." Of course, my saying that made him mess up immediately, and he lost his last life.

"Julia!" he yelled. "You made me die!" Kenny only had two volume levels: whine and yell.

Patrick once told me that I was too hard on Kenny. "He's a little kid, Jules. Sheesh, you fight with him a lot more than I do with my whole family put together."

I didn't say what I was thinking, which was three things. One: Patrick had so many brothers and sisters that the fighting was sort of spread out instead of concentrated between two people. Two: Patrick spent as much time as he could at
my
house, so he couldn't fight with them when he was here. And three: All of Patrick's brothers and sisters multiplied by ten—no, multiplied by 10
¹⁰
—wouldn't be anywhere near as bratty as the Snotbrain.

When Kenny was born, he was really cute. He'd sit in his baby chair and watch me all day long as I went around doing stuff, and whenever I stopped to talk to him, he'd give me a huge smile.

But then (loud scary music here, like in the movies) ... he learned to crawl.

Who knew that a little baby—one that couldn't even
walk
yet—could be such a maelstrom of destruction? A maelstrom—a word I learned from Patrick, who had picked it up somewhere in his reading—is a giant, violent whirlpool. It had seemed like a very unusual word at the time, but a few months after I first heard it, I saw it on a computer game. It was a weapon you could use to destroy enemies. It was also the perfect word to describe what Kenny could be like.

Kenny the Maelstrom knocked down whatever I built. He scribbled on the pictures I drew, or ripped them to pieces. He chewed on stuff I left lying around. He
threw up
on my very favorite stuffed panda. My mom washed it, but after it came out of the dryer, it was rough and lumpy, not soft like it used to be.

As soon as Kenny learned to talk, we started fighting. When I was eight and he was three, he made me really, really mad. I can't remember now what he did, but it was so awful that I yelled, "
You— you —
" and I tried to think of the worst thing I could call him. "
You
SNOTBRAIN!"

Ever since then, that's been my nickname for him. But I never called him that around my parents. They had a no-name-calling rule. In general, I thought it was a good rule.

Except when it came to the Snotbrain.

 

Me:
Do you want my opinion? I am not happy with the way things are going here. I hate the project Idea, Kenny is driving me nuts, and I still haven't found another Connecticut.

Ms. Park:
Actually, no—I don't want your opinion. In fact, I have to admit, this is weird for me. I've written other books, and only once has a character ever talked to me. You talk to me
all the time
, and I'm finding that hard to get used to.

Me:
Like right now, while you're in the—ahem—bathroom. Well, I don't care whether you want my opinion or not— you're getting it.
That was a terrible chapter
.

Ms. Park:
Would it help if I said I'm sorry you're having such a hard time?

Me:
If you were really sorry, you'd go back and rewrite it.

Ms. Park:
You're the main character. You have to have a problem or two. If you didn't, there wouldn't be any story.

Me:
In that case, how's this: Patrick and I get, like, five ideas for the project, five good American Ideas, and they're all so brilliant that we can't decide which one to choose. That would be a much better problem.

Ms. Park:
That would be a different story. Not the one I want to tell.

Me:
But it's my story. I should have a vote.

Ms. Park:
Okay. In the next chapter, I promise Kenny won't bother you as much. Now will you leave me alone for a while?

Me:
Fair enough. But what about the other stuff?

Ms. Park:
One thing at a time, please.

Patrick sat down in the computer chair and typed
silkworms
into the search-engine box. I flopped down on the old armchair nearby. Across the room my parents were reading. Kenny had stormed upstairs after losing his game and had not come back down again to pester us, thank goodness.

While Patrick clicked and read, I did some hard thinking. Ideas jostled around in my brain and I tried to get them organized.

We had only a couple of months to work on our Wiggle project. It might take a little while before my plan worked and we could drop the silkworm idea. I didn't think we'd have time for a whole new project after that, so I needed to get started on something else.

Patrick wanted the silkworms to make thread ... and then I was supposed to sew something with the thread, so we'd be able to enter our project as both an animal project and a sewing project....

A sewing project. I could plan a sewing project, and when the silkworm part didn't work out, I'd be ready to do it with regular thread.

But what should I sew? It would have to be something really cool to have a chance of winning a prize at the state fair.

I thought about it some more. Wiggle sewing projects were usually clothes. Mr. Maxwell had shown us pictures of projects kids had done in other years. One girl had made mother-daughter dresses (gag). Another had sewn a lot of bright red fleece vests. On the back of each vest she'd embroidered
Oak Hill School and Home.
That was a boarding school for disabled kids in our town. On the front was a person's name. The girl had made these vests for the kids at Oak Hill—the ones who were her age. When they went out on field trips, they wore the vests, and that bright red color made it easy for their teachers to keep track of them. Another double project: Domestic Arts
and
Community Service.