“She’s really going at it today,” Gina says. “Just try to calm down, Shrimpy,” she tells me. She rubs my back and it feels nice. “Calm down and you’ll stop. It’s okay.”
She keeps rubbing and I start to feel better. I spit a few times and stand up, finally out of the barf cycle.
“Got a tissue?” I ask.
Nora goes into the front seat of the van and raids Mom’s tissue stash. Mom’s got tissues stored all over the place. Can’t go five feet in our house without coming across a box of tissues. In the winter, Mom even keeps a tissue balled up in her sleeve, just in case.
I blow my nose while Nora gets the hose and runs some water over my puddle of yuck.
“Maybe a flower will grow here,” Nora says with a little smile on her face. I haven’t seen her smile in a long time.
“Yeah.” I laugh. “I just hope it doesn’t look like what it came from.”
“The barf blossom.”
“We’ll give it to Aunt Constance.”
She and I grin at each other and she hands me the hose. I rinse out my mouth and wash my face.
The water on the farm is so good. It’s well water. Cold, cold, cold, like it’s always winter underground, and sweet like it’s never touched a metal pipe. I could drink buckets of it.
Nora turns off the hose and we go into the mudroom under the farmhouse. We’re not allowed inside the house. Aunt Constance doesn’t like us stomping on her clean floors with our dirty boots. Aunt Constance doesn’t like us, period.
The walk to the mudroom is enough to fill my holey sneaker with pebbles. Nora lifts the rusty latch and swings open the door. It makes a low hooting noise, almost like a helloooo. I like that sound. I also like the smell of the mudroom. It smells exactly like you’d think a mudroom would smell. Like clay and dusty wood.
It’s dark in the mudroom. Dark and cold. It never gets warm down here no matter how hot it gets outside. It’s like the well water. On the farm, winter is always waiting, just a few inches down.
There are two windows, but I wouldn’t really call them windows. They’re just little portholes at opposite ends of the mudroom, always clogged with spiderwebs, but they let in a tiny bit of light. There’s a bathroom, too. Well—how do I describe the bathroom down here? You have to duck. You have to squat. You have to aim. And you have to hope nothing with more legs than you decides to bite you when your pants are down.
The mudroom also has another room at the back. But I don’t go there. It smells like blood.
I sit down on the dusty steps just inside the door, take off my sneaker, and shake out my pebble passengers. My father, who was up at the farm an hour before us because he’s got so much work to do, is already handing out jobs.
My dad isn’t really a farmer. Or he isn’t really a chemist. Actually, I don’t know which he isn’t, because he’s both.
Everyone starts stepping over me to get out to the fields while I’m holding my shoe in my hand. I hop over to my dad.
“Wait, where am I going again?” I ask him.
He looks at me and wrinkles his already permanently wrinkled forehead. We have the same green eyes. I notice it when he looks at me like he is now, but he doesn’t look at me very much.
“Well,” he says quietly, “what do you want to do?”
My dad is always quiet. The only time I’ve ever heard him raise his voice is when he’s shouting over the noise of the tractor.
“Well,” I reply. “What do you need me to do?”
I want to be helpful. I want to be one of his strong daughters, like Fay or Gina. Fay and Gina always get the important jobs. But Fay and Gina can also both bench-press twice their weight, and our dad knows it. He looks me over. I know he can see I’m still a little pale and shaky from the knock I took when I fell out of bed, and from barfing when I got out of the van. I’m good at counting, and so is my dad. We have the same eyes, so I see things like he does.
“We have a few orders for blueberries. Why don’t you get a basket and go with Eleanor?”
Blueberries are the easiest. No thorns, like the raspberries. No crouching, like the strawberries. No heavy lifting, like the tomatoes. And the bushes are old enough and tall enough that you’re always in the shade when you’re picking.
Dad’s giving me the lightweight job. Again. And I’m not even in charge of the blueberries. Nora is.
He gives me a weird look. “Your shirt’s on inside out,” he tells me.
I look down at my shirt and open my mouth. I know I have something to say, but it doesn’t come out in time. My dad is already stomping up the three steps out of the dark mudroom and into the blazing light of the fields before I can tell him that of course I knew that. It’s a fashion choice. Why does the perfect thing to say always come to me way after it makes any sense for me to say it?
May as well get to work. I jump up to knock free one of the ancient woven wicker baskets that hang on pegs from the thick wooden beams that support the ceiling of the mudroom. I catch my basket as it and I fall back to the ground.
I like picking blueberries. I tie the basket around my waist with a bandanna and go out into the sun. I whistle a little bit and swing my arms, setting the mood. Today didn’t start out that great, but it’s still early. I can turn this around.
I walk out into the tall grass between the farmhouse and the old blueberry bushes and get soaked with dew up to the thigh. That’ll keep me cool. It’ll also make me itchy in about two seconds, but what can you do? It’s hot or itchy on the farm, and on most days it’s both.
Nora is already out here somewhere, but I can’t see her because the bushes are huge. They were my nonna’s. My nonno planted them for her when she first came to America because blueberries were her favorite. That makes them older than Dad, and there isn’t much left in the world older than him, or at least that’s what my sisters say.
I tuck myself into a bush with lots of ripe berries on it and start to pick. Blueberry bushes have smooth, glossy leaves with no irritating hairs on them, so you can get right inside the cool branches while you pick and be out of the sun. It’s easy work, but after just a few minutes it’s dead boring. Good thing I’ve never had a watch or I’d always be checking it.
The one thing that I like about picking berries is it gives me plenty of time to think about whatever I want to think about. Mostly I think about what it would be like to be anybody but me. I think about what it would be like to have superpowers. Or what it would be like to live back when there were knights and dragons. I’d have liked to have been a knight and swing a sword and say forsooth. Nora says that girls can’t be knights, but I’ve figured out a way around that. I’d just cut my hair and pretend to be a boy. No one would notice on account of the fact that I’m flat as a board. I’d totally fight dragons. Nora says there’s no such thing as dragons, but how would she know? She wasn’t alive back then.
Nora also says I can’t use the Force because there’s no such thing. My mom said the Force is witchcraft anyhow and all the Jedi are going to hell. That doesn’t make any sense. The Jedi are good. Good people don’t go to hell, I said, but my mom said that anyone who uses witchcraft can’t be good, even if they do good things. I guess it doesn’t matter what you do, just as long as you aren’t a witch.
I’d have liked to have been a witch and cast spells and flown around on a broomstick and been superpowerful, but I’d never tell my mother that or I’d spend the rest of my life getting lectured by some priest. I don’t like priests. They’re creepy, but I’m not supposed to say that out loud.
I hear Nora coming toward me and stick my head out of the bush.
“How much do you have?” she asks. She looks in my basket and then back up at me. She isn’t happy. “That’s it?” she asks. “That’s all you got in three hours?”
I look in her basket. She’s got, like, five times as much as me. “No way! How’d you pick that much?”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on. Let’s measure it out and hope we got enough, because Dad w
ants us to move to raspberries now.”
“Why?” I ask, struggling to keep up with her. Her legs are longer than mine.
“Because they’re ready and we have to pick them today or we lose a lot of money,” she answers, kind of yelling.
“Why are you so mad at me?” I ask. “Why is everyone so mad at me today?” Nora sighs a lot when I do stuff that bugs her, but she doesn’t really get mad at me that often. Her lips are all pressed together, and I think for a second she’s not going to answer me, but she finally does.
“You need to start pulling your weight, Annie. Whenever you don’t pick enough or”—she gestures to my T-shirt—“dress yourself right, that means one of us has to do it for you, because Mom and Dad can’t.”
She said can’t, but I know her better than anybody. The way she said it, like she’s sad, sounds like she means won’t. She shakes her head, sorry that she snapped at me. Nora and I almost never yell at each other.
“You have to grow up faster and look after yourself like the rest of us did, even if you are only ten. You can’t be a kid anymore, because no one wants to take care of you.”
I nod because I know all this, but it still makes me feel stupid to hear it. Then Nora gives me a little sideways hug and it cheers me up.
“Now hurry up,” she says, heading back toward the farmhouse. She’s smiling a little when she says it, and if Nora smiles, I smile.
“I’m coming,” I say, huffing along. Woo, it got hot. I wipe my upper lip and blink the sweat out of my eyes.
We go back into the mudroom and dump our blueberries into pint baskets. I got four measly pints. Nora got nine, but we need eighteen. I look over at the filled flats of raspberries. A flat has twenty-four pints in it. Gina and Fay must be picking their brains out today. They’ve got three full flats between the two of them.
Okay, so Bridget is out there with them, but Bridget is even slower at picking than I am, because she doesn’t even try. She just stands around worrying about her tan line, although I don’t know why she cares so much about getting a crooked tan. A straight tan isn’t going to help. I always wonder how someone as plain as Bridget got to be so concerned about how she looks. No one’s ever called me beautiful, but Aurora says Bridget looks like she was put together with construction paper and a stapler and she’s still always got her face pressed against a mirror.
“You go back to the blueberries, and I’ll go help Gina,” Nora says with a sigh.
It’s almost noon and blazing hot right now. “No, I’ll go,” I tell her. I’m going to prove to her I can take care of myself. “You finish up with the blueberries, and I’ll help them because I was so slow.”
I don’t let her argue with me; I just set up some pints in a carry flat. Raspberries are so fragile you have to pick them and place them directly into a pint basket or they turn to jam on you. Our mom calls them persnickety, but I don’t know if that’s a real word or not, so I don’t use it anyplace but in my head. I sit down on the step, untie my shoe, and shake a ton of rocks out. At this point I’ve got more dirt in my shoe than outside of it.
I put my dirty sneaker back on and go out into the sun. I feel my skin pucker with sweat just like my mouth does when I lick something sour. I wonder if drool and sweat are the same thing. I laugh as I head out to the raspberries, thinking of my skin drooling.
My sisters look up from the raspberry canes like I’ve got three heads. Fay rolls her eyes. I stop laughing. Gina looks hassled, and she points me to the end of her row.
“Pick toward me,” she tells me.
I trudge to the end of the row (gathering up a ton of dirt and rocks in my leaky shoe on the way), bend down a bit, and stick my hands in between the thorns.
The first raspberry is for me. I squish it around my mouth. I like the seeds. I like how they taste kind of oily inside the sweet and sour of the berry. I pop the seeds between my teeth as I tug more ripe berries into my hand. I love the taste of raspberries, but they are the meanest things to pick. Even the leaves have tiny little thorns on the edges and on the underside. The real kicker is that the thorns have a bit of venom on them. Just a bitty scratch and your skin swells up, and if your hand gets too full of berries, your fist will be too big to take out of the bush without getting scratched to kingdom come.
If you want to eat raspberries, then you have to let them eat you a little bit, too.
It’s hot. There’s no shade, no wind, no birds, and even the insects have packed it in. It’s so hot and quiet I think I can almost hear the sun coming in waves. In no time my forearms are all scratched up and stinging with sweat. I want to rub the scratches, but that will only make them sting more. I look down at my pint baskets, and only two are filled.
Why am I so slow?
“Annie?”
I try to be careful. I try to focus. I was picking as fast as I could, and then I started thinking about how the sun sounded and how me and the raspberries are eating each other, and …
“She’s fainting!” Gina yells.
I giggle because I can’t see anyone fainting. All I can see is the sky. It’s beautiful.
Chapter Three
It’s the first day of school.
I know I should be more excited. I like school. I have lots of people to talk to and the teachers are nice and I’m almost always the first kid to understand what the heck is going on when we learn a new lesson.
I’m good at school.
Well, except for spelling. When I put the letters down they look okay to me, and to be fair, I almost always have all the right letters. I’m just usually wrong about the order they’re supposed to go in. But I’m an ace at understanding what I read as soon as I get the letters to stop crawling all over the dang page, so apart from the occasional spelling test, I get all As without trying. I just listen in class and I know all the answers without having to study, ’cause things tend to stick in my head even if I don’t want them to.
You’d be surprised what gets stuck in my head. TV jingles and the price of tuna fish and just about everything there is to know about Dwight D. Eisenhower. I had to do a report on him last year. Operation Overlord was the code name for when they stormed the beaches of Normandy. I like the word overlord. I keep looking for a place to use it, but it hasn’t come up yet, so the word just rattles around in my head, waiting for the chance to get said. I guess my brain is like my mom. It doesn’t ever throw anything away either.
I like school, but this year I’m not excited for the first day because of my destroyed sneakers. Mom said they’d make it a few more weeks, until it turns cold. I didn’t get any new clothes, either. I didn’t fit any of Nora’s hand-me-downs. They’re too loose around the waist or not long enough in the leg, and most of her shirts were already hand-me-downs from, like, three other people, so they’re worn so thin you could throw a cat through them and Mom said it wasn’t decent for me to wear them until I get my first bra. Which will be never, considering what I’m working with. Ribs and skin. My chest looks like a xylophone with two pinkish moles on it. The only clothes that fit me are JP’s Sunday button-downs and his old jeans, and I don’t want to wear boy clothes, seeing as how I look so much like a boy as it is.
It’s not just that they’re boy clothes. It’s that they’re boy clothes from ten years ago. I don’t think any of the other girls at my school are going to be wearing button-down shirts, beat-up old sneakers, and bell-bottom jeans. I look in the mirror and take my hair out of my usual low ponytail so I look a little more like a girl. It doesn’t really help. I don’t look like other girls, and I never have, to be honest.
I don’t know what to do.
I try to wash my sneakers. I take them to the sink and wet an old rag, but the dust just turns to mud. I’ll have to rinse them off. Maybe I should use some soap.
“What are you doing?” Nora asks. She comes in and turns off the tap.
“I’m trying to clean off some of the dirt,” I say. I’m starting to panic now because I realize my sneakers are still filthy,
and now they’re soaked, too.
“Annie, we have to go. The bus is coming,” she tells me.
I sit down on the floor and pull on my wet sneakers. My face feels hot.
“You think anyone will notice?” I ask. When I stand up, I make a squelching sound.
Nora sighs. “Come on,” she says, but she isn’t angry or anything. “We’ll sit at the front of the bus so you don’t have to walk by anyone.”
My shoes go squish, squish, squish all the way out the door. At least I don’t have to stand at the bus stop with anyone but Nora, because everyone else on our block is in high school and Nora and I are the only ones still in middle. I’m in fifth grade this year and she’s in seventh, and Fay is in eighth and Bridget is in ninth. Eighth and ninth grades are in the high school in my town for some dumb reason. I look into the woods across the street as I jump up and down, trying to stamp the water out while we wait for the bus. It doesn’t work. All it does is make the hole in the toe even bigger. Nora crosses her arms and shakes her head.
“You’re just making it worse,” she says, her voice kind of sad, kind of tired.
She looks away like we’re not together as the bus pulls up. I sit down next to her in the first seat without looking up, because I don’t want anyone to notice me. The hole in my sneaker and my boys’ clothes bother me, and I don’t know why. My clothes and shoes didn’t used to be a big deal to me, unless they were uncomfortable. I’ve never had anything new, but just this once I wish I had new sneakers for the first day back at school.
“Hi, Annie! Did you have a good summer?”
I look up and see Kristin Gates standing over me.
“Yeah!” I say, even though I spent half the summer working on the farm, fainting or barfing. “How was your summer?” I ask.
Kristin sits down in the seat across the aisle from Nora and me. She’s in my grade and she lives just down the hill from us. I like Kristin. She’s smart and she has super-straight blond hair and one dark freckle on her left cheek that looks like an itty-bitty star.
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