Project Mulberry (2 page)

"Domestic Arts," Patrick said. "But it was still a really good project. Mr. Maxwell said so, because it counted in two categories, Gardening and Domestic Arts. I wish we could think of an animal project like that."

Patrick looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It was almost five o'clock. "I'd better go," he said. Now that his older sisters are in high school, they're almost never home, and Patrick usually helps his gram give Hugh-Ben-Nicky an early supper. He stood up and put the pamphlet next to the clock. "I'm leaving this here. Read it before you go to bed. I've already read it, so I'll think about it. Maybe one of us will wake up with a good idea."

That's one of Patrick's favorite theories. He read somewhere that people remember stuff better if they read or think about it right before they fall asleep. We always try to study for a test together at bedtime, on the phone or by instant messaging.

I glanced at the pamphlet as we left the room. It would probably take a while before I got around to reading it. I don't like to read, not the way Patrick does.

Besides, he reads enough for both of us.

 

I've got another story to tell you, and I'm going to do it here, between the chapters.

Every story has another story inside, but you don't usually get to read the inside one. It's deleted or torn up or maybe filed away before the story becomes a book; lots of times it doesn't even get written down in the first place. If you'd rather read my story without Interruption, you can skip these sections. Really and truly. I hereby give you official permission.

But if you're Interested in learning about how this book was written— background information, mistakes, maybe even a secret or two—you've come to the right place. Some people like that sort of thing. It's mostly conversations between me and the author, Ms. Park. We had a lot of discussions while she was writing. Here we go.

 

Me:
Why am I named Julia?

Ms. Park:
You're named after my sister. Sort of. Her name is Julie.

Me:
What about Patrick?

Ms. Park:
Oh, that's just a name I like. But his character is partly based on a boy named Mark who lived across the street from me when I was growing up. Mark had five or six brothers and sisters, and he always had some kind of 'project going. I liked hanging out with him and was sad when he moved away after only a year in the neighborhood. I guess writing about Patrick is a way for me to spend more time with Mark.

Me:
Do you know what's going to happen in the story? Do you already know the ending?

Ms. Park:
I have a general idea of how I want the story to go, but nothing definite yet. Really just you and Patrick and the Wiggle project—that's all I've got so far.

Me:
Hmm. It looks like you could use some help. Good thing I'm here. And I have one more question. That part about the friends who thought the house smelled awful. Did that really happen?

Ms. Park:
To me or to you?

Me:
To you, of course. I know it happened to me.

Ms. Park:
Yes. But it happened to me in third grade, not fourth grade.

Me:
Is that, like, legal? To change stuff like that?

Ms. Park:
It is if you're writing fiction....Fiction is about the truth, even if it's not always factual. I changed the fact about the grade, but not the truth about the feelings. Get it?

Me:
Yeah. I think so.

Okay, do you see how this is going to work? On to chapter 2 now, and I'll see you on the other side.

"Wait," I said, stopping in the doorway. "Come back."

Patrick was almost at the stairs. "What?" he said.

"Everything in your pockets, please," I said, holding out my hand. "Unless you've checked already?"

"Um, no," Patrick muttered. "Okay, here." He reached into his jeans pocket, took out the contents, and showed me: A quarter, two pennies, a paper clip, a ball of lint, and a rather furry-looking cough drop.

"Yuck," I said, pointing to the cough drop. "Is that the same one from last time?"

He grinned. "Probably."

I took the quarter from him. We looked at it together.

Patrick and I were collecting and studying the state quarters. We'd bought special folders that had a slot for each one. Patrick kept track of which ones we needed, and looked up information about the little images on the backs of the quarters—the horse for Kentucky, the tree for Connecticut. He also had a little notebook to record when and where we found each one.

I was in charge of finding the quarters. That was pretty much the way we always worked. Patrick did the reading part, the research. I did the hands-on stuff—whatever needed to be cut and pasted or built or painted or sewn. Of course, we weren't very strict about it. Sometimes I'd do some of the reading, and Patrick would help with the making part. But we had our main jobs, and it suited us both.

Like with the quarters. To me, the exciting part was looking for them; whenever I got a quarter, I checked it out right away. That part drove Patrick crazy. He almost always forgot to look at his quarters—I had to remind him most of the time—and if he remembered, they usually weren't the ones we needed. He'd get mad at himself for forgetting, or mad at the quarters if they weren't the right ones. But he loved looking up the stories about the pictures on the coins.

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, of 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!"