Project Mulberry Read online

  I was going to feel guilty forever.

  I got to class and sat down and started clicking and typing right away so I could pretend not to notice when Patrick came into the room.

  We were learning to build a website, and the day's lesson was how to put an e-mail link on your site. I got mine to work almost right away. Mrs. Moran went around helping the kids who were having trouble, so that left me free to think some more.

  Why did my mom have to bring up the idea of a silkworm project in the first place? Why did Patrick have to go and get so excited? Why did he just plunge right into everything and not even bother to ask me what I thought? Why couldn't it have been some other idea that got him all fired up? Why couldn't Mr. Maxwell have been less enthusiastic about it? Why did Mr. Dixon have to have a mulberry tree? It was like a whole bunch of people were conspiring against me, and I'd been forced to come up with a plot to fight them.

  But in a corner of my brain, I knew that what I was doing wasn't the same as telling someone you liked their present when you didn't. Because with the dumb-present scenario, you were trying to make the other person feel good.

  And what I was doing was making Patrick feel bad.

  Really bad.

  It was almost as if I'd chanted at him: "Patrick never has money, Patrick never has money...." In my head I could hear a nasty voice saying that over and over.

  My voice.

  I crossed my arms and pressed them over my stomach. Then I leaned sideways the tiniest bit so I could see Patrick, across from me at the other bank of computers. I could see only the back of his head, but it made me feel even worse.

  I'd humiliated him. On purpose.

  What a lousy thing to do to a friend.

  All because the silkworm project was too Korean.

  But Patrick didn't seem to think so. Neither did Mr. Maxwell. If they didn't think it was too Korean ... maybe it wasn't.

  Maybe I was wrong.

  No. I was right. It was a weird Korean project, that was for sure.

  Another thing for sure: I was no good at being a secret agent. Acting one thing while thinking the opposite—I'd thought it was getting easier. Some times it had even been fun, coming up with the right thing to say on the spot without giving myself away.

  But now this, hurting Patrick—this was no fun at all.

  And I had to fix it.

  I opened my e-mail program and started typing.

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Date:Thursday, March 29,2:12 PM

  Subject:Wiggle project

  duh what was I thinking I can get an advance from my mom on my next allowance that will give us enough $$ you can pay me back whenever

  luv J

  I hit Send, then leaned over again to look at the back of Patrick's head. I didn't have to wait very long.

  He spun around in his chair and looked at me. I gave him a little nod. He didn't smile, but he nodded back and gave me a thumbs-up.

  I went back to staring at my screen and let out a big breath. It was like a tight knot inside me had loosened up.

  Top Secret Message to Headquarters: AGENT SONG NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR EVASIVE TACTICS. HAS ALREADY REPORTED FOR HER NEXT ASSIGNMENT—PROJECT MULBERRY.

  On our way home from school, Patrick said, "I still have the letter. We can send it today."

  "Okay," I said. And that was all.

  I gave my mom the twelve dollars and asked her if she'd advance me my April allowance. She gave us a check for the total. Patrick and I walked to the corner mailbox to send off the order.

  "I can't wait till they get here," Patrick said as he pulled open the mailbox's mouth and fed it the envelope.

  "Well, we've got a lot to do while we're waiting," I said.

  Patrick had been to the library the week before to check out silkworm books. He'd found only two. One was for younger kids; it was mostly about the silkworm life cycle and had lots of photos. The other was a really old book written for people who wanted to set up silk factories. It looked almost impossible to read—tiny print and lots of technical stuff—but Patrick was determined to get through it. He'd left the picture book at my house and told me I should read it.

  It wasn't like everything had changed all of a sudden: I still wasn't crazy about doing a silkworm project. But I'd made my decision—that it was worth doing to keep things good between Patrick and me—and now I had to make the best of it.

  At least I was really and truly interested in the sewing part.

  So we agreed that while we were waiting for the eggs, Patrick would do more research on silkworms, and I'd practice my embroidery.

  My mom taught me two more stitches: outline stitch and satin stitch.

  Outline stitch was exactly that—you used it to make outlines. Outline stitch was hard. It was hard to get the stitches to come out as a nice line on both sides. It looked best if I took little tiny stitches, but that was frustrating: I'd work and work for, like, half an hour, until my neck was all cramped from being bent over, and I'd end up with a line that wasn't even an inch long.

  Satin stitch was the most important of all the stitches, because you used it to fill in spaces. Which meant that most of the stitches you put in to make a picture were satin stitches. Satin stitch was more fun in one way because you got to take bigger stitches. But it also had its bad side: I had to be sure to pull the thread through exactly right. Too tight and the fabric would bunch up underneath. Too loose and the stitch would sag.

  At the beginning I'd ask my mom to check my work. She thought I was doing pretty well, but she always pointed out little mistakes—my stitches weren't exactly the same size, or I hadn't lined them up perfectly. "Anyone can stick a needle in and out," she said. "If you want to get really good at embroidery, it's the little things that count. Because all those little things go together, to make the big picture."

  Embroidering for me was mostly un-embroidering. I'd take five stitches, look at my work, turn it over, and look at the other side—and I'd have to pick out the last two and do them over. But the funny thing was, I didn't really mind.

  It was weird, because normally I hated having to do things over. I hated having to rewrite a homework assignment. Or when I was younger and the Snotbrain-Maelstrom trashed something I'd built and I had to make it again.

  It was different with embroidery. I got so it would bug me when a stitch wasn't just right, and I was glad to take it out and fix it.

  When I wasn't embroidering, I was drawing little sketches. I was trying to decide what my embroidery project would be—what I would stitch once I had our very own homemade silk thread.

  I was in my room before bed one night sketching. My mom's embroidered flowers were so pretty—maybe I should do flowers. I drew a flower, five petals on top of a stem.

  Bo-o-o-ring.

  I tried drawing more flowers—rose, daffodil, tulip. Still boring. I went back to the five-petaled flower and drew it a few more times, making the petals different shapes. Round in one sketch, then oval, then long and skinny, then triangles ... That one looked sort of like a star.

  I guess thinking about the star distracted me, because then I started drawing stars. The kind where your pencil never leaves the paper.

  Then I tried drawing just the outline, without any of those inside lines. Much harder. I drew four of them in a row, all lopsided.

  I started to draw another one, and for some reason—maybe because I'd drawn them all in a row—I wondered how many stars were in each row on the American flag. Not something I was going to look up, but maybe the next time I saw a flag...

  Flag?

  Flag!

  That was how I could make the project more American! I could use the thread we made to embroider an American flag!

  I jumped off my bed and ran to find my mom. She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth.

  "Mom, after we make the thread, could we dye it? I need three colors—wait, the thread will already be white, right? So really I only
need two—red and blue. I want to embroider an American flag—do they sell the kind of dye we'd need? Like, the stuff you use for tie-dyeing? I don't think it would be that hard—"

  Sheesh. I sounded like Patrick when he gets excited. I saw my mom's face in the mirror, her mouth full of white foam.

  "Jush a minute," she said. She spat and rinsed and put her toothbrush away. Then she turned to face me. "I'm sure dyeing the thread is possible, but I don't have any experience with that. My grandmother just made the thread, then she sent it off somewhere to get dyed and made into cloth, so we never did that part."

  "Oh." I thought for a second. "But that doesn't mean we couldn't try."

  "No, but there's something else. An American flag would be really difficult to embroider, especially if you want to make it a good size."

  "I was thinking, like half a piece of paper, that size?" I said.

  "Okay. The stripes are basically long skinny rectangles, right?" My mom drew stripes in the air with her fingers. "That's one of the most difficult shapes to embroider well." She shook her head. "Definitely not something I'd recommend for beginners."

  Dang it!

  "I'll practice a lot," I said.

  "Julia, please. You need to consider something smaller. That's why flowers look nice in embroidery—the petals are small, the leaves are small. Satin stitches look much better when they don't have to cover so much space."

  Double dang it!

  My mom picked up a sponge and started wiping down the sink. "Don't worry, sweetheart. I'm sure you'll think of something clever."

  I went back to my room a little discouraged. But not too discouraged, because I still thought I was onto something. It didn't have to be the flag, but the embroidery part could be really American, and that would balance out the Koreanness of the silkworm part.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe the flag wasn't such a great idea after all. Because it wasn't very ... creative. I mean, it wasn't something I'd designed by myself. If I embroidered the flag, I'd be sewing a design that someone else had made up.

  Sigh. I had more thinking to do.

  Meanwhile, Patrick was full of ideas. On the way to and from school he hardly ever stopped talking.

  "Jules, listen to this. We could borrow a video camera. And once the eggs come, we'll set everything up and film them every day—for, like, thirty seconds or a minute or so. And we'll have everything on tape, from the time they're tiny eggs all the way to the end, but it will be like time-lapse photography, in one film."

  "Wow," I said. "That's a great idea."

  "We can take still photographs, too. And put them together into, like, an album. So we can show people what we did even if there isn't a TV handy."

  Things really started to move after that. Mr. Maxwell arranged for us to borrow one of the community center's camcorders. Patrick got permission to use his dad's regular camera. My dad moved our barbecue down to the basement so we'd have room to keep the silkworms on the back porch. He also brought up an old aquarium—he'd kept tropical fish for a hobby when he was a bachelor—which was where the worms would live.

  Mr. Maxwell gave us some scraps of lumber from his farm, and Patrick's parents donated an old bent window screen. I spent the next Wiggle meeting making a frame out of the wood and stapling the screen in place to make a lid for the aquarium, so the worms would have plenty of air but not be able to escape.

  Mr. Dixon's phone number was pinned to my bulletin board, but Patrick said we wouldn't need it; he had the number memorized.

  "It's 555-5088," he'd told me. (A whole bunch of times.) "Fifty for the number of states—states-and-eights, it all rhymes, get it?"

  We were ready. The only thing we needed was the eggs.

  Me: I'm feeling a little better.

  Ms. Park: Glad to hear it.

  Me: Told you I could fix things.

  Ms. Park: But now you have to do the project.

  Me: I know, I know. And I still think it's too Korean. But I'm getting some ideas on how I can fix that, too.

  Ms. Park: So I noticed. In fact, that whole flag thing was your idea. What I mean is, while I was working on that scene when you were drawing and doodling, I tried my very hardest to be you. I even took a pencil and started drawing flowers, and then stars. I don't know if the flag idea would have come up if I hadn't been imagining I was you.

  Me: So it's like even though I'm part of your Imagination, I'm my own person, too?

  Ms. Park: Yes. That's for sure. You think I'd deliberately Invent a character who was as much trouble as you are?

  Me: Me, trouble? Oh, please. Kenny, now, he's trouble.

  Ms. Park: Kenny does not keep me awake at night talking my ear off.

  Me: Yeah, well, at least I leave you alone in the bathroom now.

  9

  Patrick figured that our order would take two or three days to get to the company, and their website said they shipped in a week to ten days. So it would be around two weeks before we'd get the eggs.

  It was exactly two weeks.

  Kenny was waiting on the front walk when we got back from another Wiggle meeting. He started yelling as soon as he saw us turn the corner onto our street.

  "Julia! The worms came today! The worms are here!"

  Patrick beat me to the door by two steps. We charged into the house with the Snotbrain right behind us.

  "Let me see! I wanna see!" Kenny yelled.

  The package was on the kitchen table. It was a square cardboard box about the size of a cantaloupe.

  My mom came over to watch. I let Patrick open the parcel while I stood guard between him and Kenny. The Snotbrain could destroy the eggs in a split second if I wasn't careful.

  Inside the box were a million of those foam peanuts. Patrick dug through them very, very carefully. He pulled out a little square foam block taped across the middle.

  "Here," he said as he held it out to me. He was using his fingertips, like it was really fragile. "You open it."

  That was nice of him, I thought. I pulled off the tape; now I could separate the foam square into two halves. Snuggled in between was a clear plastic tube—sort of like a tiny test tube. It had a cap on it.

  I held the tube so Patrick could see it. The eggs inside looked like tiny dark seeds.

  "None of them have hatched yet," Patrick said, sounding relieved.

  Kenny pulled on my arm. "Julia, Julia, lemme see!"

  "Kenny! Quit it!" I jerked my arm away from him.

  "Kenny, here," Patrick said. "I'll show you, but you have to promise not to touch."

  Not possible, I thought, and I was about to say so, but just then Kenny put his hands behind his back. "I won't. I won't touch, I just wanna see."

  Patrick took the tube from me and held it lower so Kenny could see it. Kenny frowned. "Those aren't worms," he said.

  What a dope. "Duh," I said. "They're eggs. They have to hatch into worms."

  Patrick put the tube back into the box. "We have to keep them in the refrigerator for now," he said. "We can't take them out until we have food for them."

  The first thing Patrick did after we stored the eggs safely in the fridge was to read the brochure that came with the package. It said that you could pick the mulberry leaves and store them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for up to five days. "So we won't need to go over to Mr. Dixon's every day," he said. "We can get five days' worth at a time."

  "How many leaves is that?" I asked.

  "It changes," he said. "When they're first hatched, they're so tiny they hardly eat anything. The bigger they get, the more they eat. We'll just have to figure it out as we go along."

  It was time to call Mr. Dixon.

  "States-and-eights," Patrick said with a grin.

  Mr. Dixon said to come over anytime. He also said we didn't have to ring the bell; we could just walk through the back gate and get the leaves whenever we needed them. He said it was okay even if he wasn't home.

  My mom talked to me after I
hung up the phone. I explained the arrangement to her.

  "Good," she said. "Just get what you need without a fuss, okay? I don't want you bothering him."

  Her perfect face.

  Maybe she really did want to make sure we didn't disturb Mr. Dixon.

  Or maybe she just didn't want us spending much time with him.

  I hoped it was the first reason, but because of her perfect face, I wasn't sure.

  I hated not being sure.

  We decided to take fifteen leaves the first time—three leaves a day for five days. "After five days, the leaves won't be fresh anymore," Patrick said. "The caterpillars don't drink, they get water by eating the leaves, so dried-up leaves aren't any good."

  Everything went fine at Mr. Dixon's house. We made sure to take only a few leaves from any one branch, and we were out the gate again in a few minutes. We didn't see Mr. Dixon. I was a little disappointed. I liked his accent.

  Back home, we took out three leaves and stored the rest in the lettuce drawer of the fridge. The brochure that came with the worms said to use petri dishes, but we didn't have any. My mom gave us a shallow glass bowl that she didn't use much anymore.

  I sprayed water on a coffee filter with my mom's plant mister. I put the damp paper in the bowl, then put the three leaves on top of the paper. That was what the instructions in the brochure said to do, even though the leaves wouldn't get eaten until the eggs hatched. Maybe putting the eggs on the leaves made them feel more like they were out in nature.

  Patrick took out the tube that held the eggs. He uncapped the tube and poured the eggs onto the leaves. They were too tiny to count, but there were definitely more than twenty-five.

  "I guess they give you extra," Patrick said.