Project Mulberry Read online

  Connecticut was my favorite quarter. It was Patrick's favorite, too. I liked it because the tree was so pretty; I wondered how hard it had been for someone to carve all those tiny branches. And maybe I also liked it because it was on my mind a lot: I was having no luck finding a second Connecticut. I had two quarters from lots of other states, but still only one Connecticut.

  Patrick liked Connecticut because of the story about the tree. It was sort of a spy story. Way back in colonial times, the king of England tried to take away Connecticut's government charter. There was this meeting where the king's men were going to tear up the charter, and suddenly the candles got blown out so the room was all dark, and when they got the candles lit again, the charter was gone. Some guy had escaped with it, and hid it in a hollow oak tree—the tree on the coin. It even has "The Charter Oak" in teeny letters.

  We never put the quarters into the folders until I'd found two of the same state, so both of our Connecticut slots were still empty.

  I turned over Patrick's quarter.

  "New York," I said.

  "Dang it."

  We already had our New Yorks.

  "Bye, Patrick," my mom said. She must have heard us coming down the stairs, because she was all ready for him. Her chopsticks were loaded with a bite of rice and a few pieces of kimchee. Patrick opened wide, and she popped that mouthful right in.

  "Thanks, Mrs. Song," he said, not very clearly because he was chewing. "Bye, Julia."

  This is their routine whenever Patrick leaves our house at dinnertime. We have rice and kimchee for dinner almost every night, no matter what the main course is, and my mom always gives Patrick a bite as he goes out the door.

  For dinner we were having beef short ribs—and rice and kimchee, of course. I love short ribs. I like picking them up in my hands and gnawing on them to get every last shred of meat.

  "Patrick coming back after supper?" my mom asked.

  "Yup," I said. "We haven't done our homework because of the meeting, and afterward we talked about our project."

  My dad said, "What project?"

  I picked up a rib. "Wiggle project," I said. "We want to do something with animals."

  "A report on an animal?" My dad again.

  "No, it's a hands-on thing," I explained. "You have to work with a real animal. So they suggest all these things like sheep and cows and pigs, or else you can do pets. We can't do any of those."

  "So if you do a cow project, you have to milk it yourself—something like that?"

  "No, you have to raise it. In the old days, kids used to get a lamb or a calf or something from a farmer, and they'd learn how to feed it and take care of it. That kind of thing."

  "Mom, if Julia gets an animal, can I have one, too? Can I have a dog?" That was Kenny.

  "No pets," my dad said. He turned to my mom. "Didn't your family raise animals?"

  My dad grew up in Seoul, which is the capital of Korea, a really big city. But my mom's family lived outside the city, and in those days Seoul didn't have many suburbs. It was mostly countryside.

  "Not really," my mom said. "It's not like my family were farmers."

  I knew that. I heard about it all the time—my parents were always saying that I had to get good grades because both of my grandfathers had been teachers.

  "But almost everyone kept poultry," she went on. "I know a little bit about chickens."

  "Could we—"

  She didn't even let me finish. "No," she said immediately. "Chickens are a mess. And they need lots of space to run around and scratch and build nests. Besides, I'm sure it would be against zoning laws or something to keep chickens here."

  Our apartment is a townhouse—one of a whole line of skinny houses all stuck together. It has a little square of grass on one side of the front walk, and a back stoop big enough for the barbecue grill. But that's all. No yard.

  "Bawk," Kenny said. "Bawk-bawk." He bent his arms and flapped them like wings. "I'm a chicken, bawk-bawk-bawk."

  I'd had lots of practice over the years ignoring Kenny's dorkiness, but this time I couldn't. His flapping wing hit my arm, and the rib in my hand went flying. It landed in the kimchee bowl.

  "Kenny!" I yelled.

  "It was an accident!" he yelled back. "I didn't mean to!"

  "Both of you, hush," my mom said. She picked up the rib and put it back on my plate. No way I was going to eat it now—it was all covered in kimchee juice. I kicked Kenny under the table.

  "Mom!" he yelled. "Julia kicked me!"

  What a baby. A snotbrain and a baby.

  "Okay, that's enough," my dad said. "Julia, clear the table, please."

  Kenny and my mom left the kitchen. He'd play a computer game and my mom would watch the news while my dad and I cleaned up.

  It wasn't fair that Kenny never had to help. My parents said he'd have to when he was older. Well, I was clearing the table when I was his age. Still, I liked that it was just me and my dad. It never took us long to clean up because we had a routine. Me standing at the table, my dad at the sink: I'd grab a plate, scrape it into the garbage can, hand it to him; he'd rinse it and put it in the dishwasher. By the time he did that, I had another plate ready for him. He didn't even have to look up; he'd just stick out his hand, and I'd put the plate right into it. We were like a machine—a scraping, rinsing, loading machine.

  We were almost done when Patrick knocked at the door and came in. He wasn't a member of the family, so he knocked, but he was almost a member of the family, so he came in without waiting for anyone to answer. He yelled hi as he went up to my room to get his backpack, then came down again.

  "Can I help?" he asked.

  "It's okay, Patrick, we're almost finished," my dad said.

  Patrick sat at the table and opened his backpack. Just then my mom came into the room.

  "I thought of a project you might be able to do," she said quietly.

  "Really?" I said at the same time that Patrick said, "What is it?" I stopped scraping the plate I was holding.

  My mom's eyes twinkled at me.

  "Worms," she said.

  ***

  I stared at her for a second. "Worms?" I said.

  My mom nodded.

  "We'd raise worms?" I said. "You mean, like, for fishermen to use as bait?"

  Right away a whole bunch of thoughts started jostling around in my mind. I turned to Patrick. "Maybe we could have them in an aquarium, but filled with dirt instead of water, and that way you could see them through the glass."

  Patrick looked doubtful. "Worms," he said slowly. "I don't know. ..."

  Then he started talking faster. "I read a book a while ago. There was this part where the people released bags and bags full of ladybugs on a farm because they were good for the plants. Or something like that. Somebody had to raise those ladybugs to get so many bagfuls, didn't they? Maybe we could raise ladybugs—"

  My mom laughed and held up her hand. "Slow down, you two. I wasn't thinking of earthworms. Or ladybugs."

  I said, "Well, what other kind of worms ... Oh, like caterpillars, you mean? 'The Life Cycle of the Monarch Butterfly' or something?"

  I didn't mean to sound impatient—I knew my mom was only trying to help. But raising caterpillars was more like a science-fair project, not a Wiggle project.

  "Sort of. No, not exactly." My mom took the plate out of my hand and gave it to my dad. "I was thinking you could do a silkworm project."

  I stared at her with my mouth half-open.

  "My grandmother raised silkworms in Korea," my mom said. "I used to help her. It's really quite interesting, and it's not like butterflies. I mean, it is in some ways, but it's more than that. Because at the end you get an actual product—the silk."

  "It's sort of like sheep," Patrick said. "Only instead of sheep and wool, it's caterpillars and silk...."

  I was pretty sure I'd already known that silk came from silkworms. But I'd never really thought about it before.

  "Exactly," my mom said. "It would be on a small scale, o
f course—you wouldn't end up with enough silk to make fabric. But you might get enough for some thread."

  "Thread?" Patrick opened his eyes wide. He took a deep breath, swallowed, and sort of shook himself. Then he stood up and started pacing around the kitchen. "Jules, we can raise the—the caterpillars, and get thread from them, and then you can sew something with the thread, and we can enter the project in two categories—Animal Husbandry and Domestic Arts!"

  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!

  3

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

  102x 106

  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: 108

  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: w
hine 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 1010—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.