Like Bug Juice on a Burger (15 page)

“Definitely not,” I said.

“And by the way,

will you make me a juicy burger when we get home?

With ketchup only,

on a bun?”

“Of course I will!” he said. “I’d like nothing better.”

We’d arrived at the barn then.

“It’s exactly the way I remember it,” my mom said.

“Even the smell!”

Inside,

the farm counselor was feeding the animals.

“Eleanor!” she said

when she saw me.

“We’re really going to miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too,”

I said.

“Your daughter is so helpful with the animals,”

she told my parents.

“You see?” I said to them.

“I’m a huge help with animals.

And dogs are animals!

So can we get one?

Please
?”

My parents looked at each other.

“We’ll see,” my mom said.

And my heart went flying.

Because I could tell,

I could just tell,

that she really meant

yes.

Grandma Sadie called me up on the phone

about a week after I got home.

“I just received a very nice thank-you note,” she said,

“from a very nice granddaughter.”

“That’s me!” I said.

And then I had to say,

“Can you hold on a second, please?”

Because my little puppy,

Antoine,

was trying hard to climb into my lap.

His wagging tail almost knocked over

the new double picture frame on our coffee table,

with my mom’s camp picture on the left

and mine just beside her on the right.

“Careful!” I said,

lifting him up.

He licked my face,

and I set him on my lap.

“Sorry about that,”

I told Grandma Sadie.

“I’m back now.”

“I hear there’s a new member of the family,”

she said.

“And that you’re taking good care of him.”

“I’m bad about feeding him from the table,”

I said.

I had to laugh,

because he was climbing all over me.

“Otherwise, I’m very good.”

“He must have been a wonderful surprise,”

Grandma Sadie said.

“But I gather camp wasn’t?”

I almost said, “That’s true.”

But I caught myself

and thought for a minute instead.

I thought of soaring through the air with Joplin,

and Cornelius’s brown eyes.

I thought of delicious croutons

and tetherball.

I thought of treading water the longest

and taking a camp picture of my very own.

And then I said,

“Sometimes—

not always,

but definitely sometimes—

camp
was
a wonderful surprise.”

Julie Sternberg
is the author of
Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie,
which tells another of Eleanor’s stories. Formerly a public interest lawyer, Julie is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program in writing for children. Like Eleanor, she hates pickles and pickle juice, bug juice, sloppy joes, and meat loaf. Also like Eleanor, she is particularly fond of M&M’s. She lives in Brooklyn.