Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Overview
A story infused with warmth and emotion about finding something all your own while the world changes around you.
2015 BCCB Bulletin Blue Ribbon Selection
Determined to make some extra money, twelve-year-old Missy and her older brother Patrick get summer jobs picking blueberries at a local farm. For Missy, though, blueberry picking quickly becomes about more than just money— it's the perfect distraction from the fact that her two best friends have gone off to summer camp without her and that her dad is getting remarried. Why can't everything go back to the way it used to be? Back to normal?
Missy soon discovers, though, that the summer is full of secrets: the secrets to making her family feel whole again; the secrets to keeping her two best friends from changing and leaving her behind; the secrets of a local farm's blood feud; and most importantly, the secrets of blueberries.
"Heart-rendingly unflagging in the face of life-changing events, Missy's a funny, compelling heroine that readers will cheer for.” —Kirkus Reviews
"[A] quiet, deftly written coming-of-age novel." —School Library Journal
"The Secrets of Blueberries is a new twist on growing up." —VOYA
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780525426547 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Young Readers Group |
| Publication date: | 07/21/2015 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.50(d) |
| Lexile: | 650L (what's this?) |
| Age Range: | 10 - 13 Years |
About the Author
Sara Nickerson started her career as a writer and producer for television and film. During a screenwriting class at the University of Washington she wrote her first novel How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. She lives in Seattle with her husband and sons.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
MY OLDER BROTHER, PATRICK, CAME UP WITH THE idea. He was nearly fourteen and it was his summer of protein drinks and hundred-a-day push-ups to stop from being so skinny. Something had happened to him, something that made him hide out in the bathroom, examining his thin arms and legs in the full-length mirror. By the end of that summer, I’d know what it was. I’d also know about the blood feud between two farmers, and how it felt to have tiny chunks of gravel lodged in my face. But I’m getting ahead.
One thing I did know, right from the start, was that my brother was desperate for new clothes, and not the new-to-us thrift store variety we usually wore. So halfway through the summer, when he started searching for jobs that a fourteen-year-old could have, I knew he was thinking ahead to September, and the new school year, and jeans with actual store tags.
“Look, Mom!” he said. It was a socked-in rainy day, and we’d already spent most of it watching black-and-white Western movies on TV.
My mother, she loves old Westerns. I’m pretty sure it’s because they are about as far from real life as a person can get. Ladies wear long skirts, horses scramble up rocky cliffs, and fat tumbleweeds bounce across wagon-track roads, making dust fly. Best of all, the good guy always wins and the bad guy gets locked up or chased out of town.
Mom sat on the couch with her legs tucked under her while Claude, my baby brother, napped on her lap. “Look, Mom,” Patrick said again. He pointed to a small ad in one of those free newspapers, the kind you get outside grocery stores.
I slid off the couch, pulled the 3-D glasses from my shirt pocket, and settled close to my brother. When I leaned over his shoulder he didn’t tell me to move and he didn’t even snort at my glasses. Instead, he just pointed to where his finger had already made a small black smear in the middle of the page.
Kids!!! Earn money, have fun!
Pick berries @Moose G’s Blueberry Farm,
42 cents/pound
Best picker wins PRIZE!!!
“Wow,” I said. It was like we’d stumbled upon the biggest secret in the history of the world. Money! Money for picking!
In my mind I saw us standing in an orchard, grabbing bills off branches and stuffing them deep into the pockets of our brand-new jeans. “I could do that, too. Couldn’t I, Patrick? Couldn’t I?” I held my breath waiting.
My brother studied the advertisement again. His finger underlined each word. Earn money. Have fun. He said, “How many pounds do you think we could pick?” And just like that, we were a team.
I thought about a blueberry, imagined holding one in my hand, small and round and light as air. “They’re not very big,” I said.
I looked at Claude, wondering how many blueberries equaled his nearly three-year-old body, and if it would be possible to pick that many in a day. It was a math problem I was determined to solve. “How many pounds do you think Claude weighs?”
Patrick snorted like it was a dumb question, but turned to our mom anyway. “How much does Claude weigh, Mom?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea what you two are talking about.”
“Blueberries,” I said. “A summer job.”
Mom pulled her eyes away from the tumbleweeds long enough to squint at the newspaper spread across the floor. She said, “Where did you find that?”
“What?”
“That newspaper. It can’t be current. Those berry farms stopped hiring kids years ago. Did you get it at Second Time Around? In one of those free piles by the door?”
Patrick pulled the paper close to his face. Then he turned it around and pointed to the date on the top. “It’s this year. It’s this week, even. Look!”
“Well, is it a real newspaper? Or is it one of those strange free things you kids are always picking up everywhere?”
“I’d watch out for Missy,” my brother said, tucking the strange free newspaper behind his back.
“And I’d watch out for Patrick.”
“And it’s a farm. There’s a farmer—”
“That place is—” my mom shook her head. “I remember back when I was a kid. There was some sort of dispute or something. They stopped hiring pickers, or sold half of the farm. I don’t know the details.” She turned back to the TV. “Anyway.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“What?”
“When you say ‘anyway’ like that. What does it mean? You always do it. And we never know what it means.” I’m not stupid. I knew exactly what it meant, but I wanted her to have to say it. To emphasize the seriousness of the situation, I yanked off my 3-D glasses and glared across the room.
My mom looked down at Claude, twisting and turning on her lap. He was named after her name, which is Claudia. “Mr. Claude is having another dream,” she said.
She said this out loud, but she wasn’t really saying it to Patrick or me. More like to an imaginary adult—my mother’s own imaginary friend who seemed to have moved in right after our dad moved out.
I turned to Patrick. He had gone limp. He sat hunched over his newsprint-smeared hands but I could tell he wasn’t seeing them.
I knew what he was seeing. He was seeing the second half of the summer, dragging on like the first. He was seeing September, when he’d be starting as a freshman at the gigantic high school. He was seeing brand-new clothes from the mall, bought with money he’d earned through work in the blueberry field. He was seeing it all disappear with our mom’s anyway.
“There’s got to be another job for you,” Mom said, softening a little. “Mowing lawns or walking dogs. Patrick, bring me the paper.”
Patrick didn’t move and his ears were turning a strange mix of red and purple.
So I said, “Mom, there’s not,” even though I knew he hated when I spoke for him. But what else could I do? His ears—I was afraid they would pop off.
I said, “Seriously, this isn’t fair. All we want is to earn money so we don’t look stupid at school next year.”
“You kids never look stupid.”
“How do you know? You don’t know how it is. Look at us, Mom. We look as stupid as this ratty old carpet.”
My voice was so loud it woke Claude, who sat up, stretched his chubby arms, and shouted, “Cats!”
Claude’s dreams are usually about cats, which is funny because we don’t even have one. When he wakes, we often go searching for his dream cats, peeking behind curtains and underneath chairs. But not right then. Because right then, a funny whistling sound was in the room, and it seemed to be coming from Patrick. I looked him up and down. The noise, I finally figured out, had to do with his nostrils, which were flaring, which led me to believe he was either about to explode or cry.
I turned back to my mother, expecting to see the People-Are-Suffering-So-Stop-Your-Complaininglook that always followed any sort of conversation about new clothes and summer camps. Instead, I saw something new. She had gone limp, too.
The room was quiet until Claude made a wet bubbling sound. Usually Claude’s bubbling sounds made everyone laugh, but at that moment, no one moved. Claude looked around, surprised. “But I funny,” he said.
I felt bad about what I’d said to my mom. I really did. But I knew this: I would have felt a lot worse if Patrick had started to cry, right there on the bad living room carpet.
I picked up the strange little newspaper and held it out to my mom. “Can’t you at least call?” I wished I still had my glasses on. I couldn’t look her in the eye.
“No, Missy,” she said. It was one of those times she said my name like it wasn’t my name. Like if I were named Catherine or Gwen, she would still have called me Missy. Little Missy. Missy Smarty. “And you can go to your room.”
CHAPTER 2
IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR PATRICK BEING EMBARRASSED by our secondhand look, I never would have noticed. I’m like that, though. Something needs to be pointed out before I see it clearly. Which is why the 3-D glasses come in handy. Plus, I have my two best friends, Constance and Allie, and they don’t seem to care where anyone’s jeans come from.
Patrick has always liked nice things. My mother says that when he was a baby, he liked to look at furniture catalogs. My dad is like that, too. I, on the other hand, don’t even like sitting on furniture.
Patrick gets nervous when we shop at Value Village or Second Time Around because he’s afraid we’ll run into someone we know. “Why should we care?” I ask. “They’re doing the same thing we are.”
He never has an answer to this logic of mine except, “You just wait, Missy. Someday you’ll understand.”
After I got sent to my room, I sat on my bed for three minutes. Then I decided to make my bed, just in case Mom came in to yell at me. I pulled the sheets up tight and fluffed the pillow. I smoothed the bedspread until it was perfectly flat.
On the other side of the room was Claude’s bed, which wasn’t a real bed, but something called a toddler bed. Mom hadn’t gotten around to making it yet, so without even being asked, I straightened his sheets and fluffed his pillow, too. I even folded his little kitty-cat pajamas and tucked them in his top drawer. Then I opened the bedroom door, just a crack, to hear what was going on down the hall. But they either weren’t talking or they knew I would be trying to listen, so they were torturing me by whispering. That’s what happens in a family—everyone learns everyone else’s Very Worst Thing.
My Very Worst Thing was being left out. Left out of the fun or discussion or even the fight. So with nothing to do but stare at my face in the mirror—an activity I endured until my eyebrows started looking creepy—I decided to play Intruder.
Intruder is a game I invented right after my dad moved out. It goes like this: You are all alone and you hear a strange noise in the house. Intruder! Quick, you crawl underneath your bed and you camouflage yourself to look like a pile of junk. The intruder will come in, searching for stuff to steal. When he looks underneath your bed, he will see junk. He might poke it even but will quickly realize there is nothing worth stealing.
It’s not so easy, becoming a camouflaged pile of junk, and I had spent months collecting just the right objects:
My Princess Castle and all its parts, saved from last summer’s giveaway pile.
My toy horses that I don’t play with anymore but still want to keep.
This doll I got for my fifth birthday—she hums when she’s happy and cries when she’s hungry, except she doesn’t do either anymore because of no batteries.
A silk fairy costume, which, due to an embarrassing flying experiment, has only one rainbow-sparkled wing.
And the most useful item for playing Intruder: Claude’s outgrown baby blanket, the one with the hole in the middle, just right for covering my face and not suffocating.
The hardest body part to camouflage is feet, because no matter how you try to disguise them, sticking-up feet look exactly like sticking-up feet. I’d finally come up with the best solution ever: my mother’s garden boots. They were big enough to go over my feet and flop down at odd angles, looking exactly like they’d been tossed carelessly underneath the bed. Every once in a while my mother asks, “Has anyone seen my garden boots?” but I usually only feel bad for a few minutes, and besides, it’s not like she doesn’t have other shoes to wear.
I had just arranged everything in perfect random order, slipped on the garden boots, and placed my feet in their thrown-under-the-bed position when I heard a noise at the door. I quick grabbed Claude’s old baby blanket and draped it over my face, my heart beating so hard in my chest I was sure someone would hear it. That’s the thing about Intruder—even when you know it’s just a game, it sort of doesn’t feel like it.
“Missy?”
Through the baby blanket hole I saw Patrick’s feet in the doorway.
I flung off all my Intruder junk and crawled out from underneath the bed. “What’s happening? Am I in trouble?”
Patrick shook his head. His ears were still red, but not so purple, and he was smiling. “She did it.”
“What?”
“She called the blueberry people.”
“What? Really?”
“Yeah, after you left.”
He stepped into my room with his slight Patrick limp, on account of his right leg being just a tiny bit longer than his left. In his hand was a rolled-up catalog. “She called the number. She talked to a lady.”
“Wow,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”
“I know.” He sat on the edge of my bed, and I plopped down next to him.
“What did she say? The lady?”
“I don’t know exactly. Mom just listened and nodded her head for a long time. She asked about the stuff that happened there, years ago. The trouble.”
“What trouble, Patrick? What kind of trouble?” My spine was suddenly tingly, the way it got before something big was going to happen.
Patrick shrugged. “Some sort of fight, I guess. Between the brothers.”
“What brothers?”
“I don’t know, Missy. The farmers, probably. They divided the farm so everything is all right now.”
“So can we go?”
“She said that Bev told her they opened it up to kids last week—”
“Who is Bev?”
“The lady she was talking to.”
“So can we go? Or are we too late? Do they already have all the pickers?”
“No, we’re not too late. They still need more kids. But they had to postpone because of the weather. The lady said to wait for a few days of sun.”
I glanced out the window. Gray skies and splats of rain against the glass. “But Mom said yes?”
“I guess she did, Missy.”
I still couldn’t believe it. “So did she say a bunch of rules?”
“That’s the funny thing. She just looked at me the way she does. You know?”
I nodded. Mom had a look like a laser beam that could burn warning messages straight into a brain. But the laser-beam warning usually came with a long list of words.
“It was like—” he shook his head.
“What?”
“It was like I was a grown-up. And she didn’t need to say all the usual stuff.”
We sat in silence, trying to understand this new thing. I looked him up and down. To me he still looked like skinny Patrick. The only thing different was the enormous red pimple on his chin.
“What about me?” I asked finally. “Did she say anything about me?”
“She said we’d need to stick together out there.”
I rolled onto my back and kicked my feet in the air. “I did it! And you owe me a big fat thank-you.” When I heard Patrick open his catalog I sat back up. He was looking at the end section, with all the pictures of beach things.
“She cried though.”
“What?”
“Mom cried. Because of what you said.”
“What did you do?”
Patrick shrugged. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there. Claude patted her back and then she sort of laughed. But still, she seemed sad.”
For once, I didn’t know what to say. I had made my mother cry? Just thinking about it turned my stomach into a twisted knot. I wondered if I was having an appendicitis attack, brought on by stress and sorrow. I hoped so. Then she would have to forgive me.
“The first thing I’m going to buy,” Patrick said, studying his catalog, “is a pair of swimming shorts, the long kind. For the lake.”
Even as I said, “Uh-huh,” I wondered if he would really be brave enough to show up at the lake. The summer before, right after he’d been nicknamed Praying Mantis Boy, he woke up with a sick stomach every lake day. “Anyway,” I added, “when are we going to have time for the lake? We’ll be too busy picking blueberries.”
“Weekends,” he said. “Dad weekends.”
“Uh-huh,” I said again. Dad weekends were about a lot of things, but never about the lake. Mostly they were about Dad and Dad’s girlfriend, Tessa. About fixing up Dad’s new old house and “getting to know Tessa better.”
Patrick flipped through the catalog’s heavy pages filled with photographs of teenagers playing in the surf and sand. Their teeth were all shiny white. Their hair had streaks of sun. “Forty-two cents a pound,” he said.
“And a prize,” I reminded him.
“What are you going to buy, Missy?”
I studied the pages and wondered: Could you buy hair like that? A group of laughing friends? A perfect afternoon at the beach?
“Maybe those shorts,” I said finally, because I couldn’t give voice to the other secret wishes. I could barely let myself think them. “The ones with the little flower stitched on the pocket.”
CHAPTER 3
DAD WASN’T SO SURE THE BLUEBERRIES WERE A good idea, even though Patrick brought the calculator that weekend and punched numbers like a crazy math genius. It was Sunday afternoon, after lunch, and we were counting down to our three o’clock going-home time.
“Dad,” Patrick started in again, “you always say that if we want more than you can provide we need to work for it. And now we’ve found a job, but you’re saying no.”
Tessa cleared her throat. “Ted,” she said, “the kids have been making good points all weekend. It’s a summer job, a learning experience. Like camp would be.”
I looked at Patrick. His eyes were wide. Tessa hardly ever spoke up in family discussions.
“Yes, it’s a summer job,” Dad said slowly. “But so are other things. Like, well, mowing lawns.”
“Mom already called the field,” I said quickly. “There’s a lot of supervision, if that’s what you’re afraid of. And Tessa’s right. It’s just like camp.”
Even though she’d been hanging around for way too long, it was the first time I’d said her name out loud, and it sort of stuck in my throat like I imagined a hairball or a fish bone would.
Dad shook his head. “I’m not afraid. I just didn’t think kids were allowed to do that kind of thing anymore. Child labor or something.”
“This is more like an experience,” Patrick said. “Like Tessa said. It’s what the lady told Mom, too.”
Dad’s face got tight, like a balloon with one too many puffs of air. “I just want what’s best for the two of you,” he said finally.
“Sure, Dad. We know.” Patrick still believed everything Dad said.
“Right,” I started in a mocking voice, but then nothing more came out. Words swirled around in my head—all the mean things I wanted to say. But suddenly, I couldn’t put them together. And then my heart constricted. Was I having a heart attack? At twelve? Could bottled-up words be choking my heart?
Dad, not noticing my sudden medical emergency, cleared his throat cheerily. “Okay, listen! How about a frozen treat?”
My dad works for a company that makes ice-cream bars. It’s how he met Tessa, less than a year after he moved out of our house. Mom and Dad said it was both their decision to split up, that they just couldn’t get along as married people, but they’d always get along as our parents. Claude had just learned to walk.
“Like that makes any sense,” I said at the time. “What about Claude? This might stunt his growth.” To which they had no response except, “It will all work out, Missy,” and, “It’s for the best.”
What I really wanted to say was this: Claude’s only had one Christmas with all of us being a family. One birthday. One month of walking on his own two feet. But I could barely even say those words to myself.
So Dad found himself a mess of a house—a “fixer-upper” he called it. And we got this thing called a Parenting Plan, which told us when we got to be with Dad and when we got to be with Mom, and everything felt weird, especially since Claude didn’t spend the whole weekend with us at Dad’s yet, and then there was Tessa, who he met at some weird frozen-treat convention for weird frozen-treat people. And that’s when ice cream stopped tasting so good to me.
Dad pulled two boxes from the freezer and placed them in the middle of the table. He pointed at the one with a picture of a sombrero-wearing banana. “Something new we’re testing,” he said. The banana appeared to be dancing. There was a crazy balloon coming from its mouth, with the words: Banana Amarillo!
“Why is the banana saying that?” My voice had found its way back to me.
“It’s the name of the product.”
I picked up the other box, happy to see that it was the only thing I could still choke down: ice-cream sandwiches. There are no tricks or surprises in an ice-cream sandwich. No crazy packages that try to convince you of something. Just pure vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two soft chocolate wafers.
Because he knew Dad wanted him to, Patrick opened the dancing banana box. “Bananas can’t dance,” I warned him. “They do not wear hats or speak. Never eat anything so full of lies.” Then I pushed back my chair and marched out of the kitchen, making gagging sounds with every step. Ghaagh, ghaagh, ghaagh.
Because sound effects are often more accurate than words.
Even though dramatic exits are thrilling in the moment, they mean you miss out on all the exciting things that happen after you leave. And also you miss your ice-cream treat. Luckily, I had Patrick to fill me in. So what came next, after I’d ghaaghed out of the room, was this: They had a fight. A real fight. The first fight in the history of Ted and Tessa.
“I can’t believe I missed it,” I whispered.
“I know. She called him spineless.”
We were in Patrick’s bedroom and I was sitting on his bed, gulping down the melting mess of ice-cream sandwich he’d smuggled up for me. Through a mouthful of cold vanilla-and-chocolate goodness I said, “Well, he is spineless.”
“Shut up, Missy. He’s our dad.”
“I know. He’s our spineless dad.”
Patrick shoved the last of his weekend clothes into his backpack. “Anyway, we’re picking blueberries this summer.”
“I already knew that. Mom already decided.”
“But Dad said it was okay, so now it’s official.”
I licked my fingers clean. “I don’t care what he says. He’s just a weekend dad. He has no rights during the week.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s true for me,” I said.
“Well, that’s just stupid.”
“I’m stupid, then. But I’m not spineless.”
“You need to watch your mouth, Missy.”
He didn’t say it in a mean way so I said, “I know.”
Patrick liked Dad weekends. He liked the color of his bedroom walls and the fact that all his bedding matched—sheets and pillowcases and bedspread. He liked that the hardwood floors had been sanded smooth and were now the color of honey.
I liked the bedding, too, but I never slept as well as I did at home in the room I shared with Claude, who breathed too loud, giggled in his sleep, and shouted out words like, “No!” and “Pee-pee!” and, of course, “Cat!” And I’ve always liked having carpet on the floor, even if it is bad green and worn out by too many feet.
Patrick slung his bag over his skinny shoulder. “Come on, Stupid.”
I laughed. “Coming, Spineless.”
I rode in the backseat of the car, staring at the small patch of scalp beginning to peek through the wavy black hair of my father’s head. If it had been an ordinary day—a day with no fighting or stomping up the stairs—I would have said something to him about it. Something like, “Hey, Dad, you probably don’t know this but you have a bald spot the size of a silver dollar. And your scalp is all shiny and white underneath.”
I turned my attention to the back of Patrick’s head. Except for not having a bald spot, it could have been my father’s. It made me wonder what the back of my own head looked like.
I put on my 3-D glasses and stared out the window. With the world framed in that perfect black border, I was able to slip into the foggy little dream I slipped into every Sunday Dad drove us home. It only lasted the length of our street, but it gave me such an awful good feeling, I couldn’t stop. I pretended we were all going home to stay.
CHAPTER 4
IT RAINED THE NEXT DAY AND THE DAY AFTER THAT, too. While Mom taped thin strips of yellow paint samples to the living room wall, Patrick and I searched the sky for a break in the clouds.
We waited for the five o’clock weather report, and even rode our bikes to the library to consult a thing called The Farmer’s Almanac, which made me an expert on the different natural disasters that might occur at any moment, including earthquakes, flash floods, sinkholes, and volcanic eruptions, which are still a real thing, especially to people like me, who have lived their entire life in the shadow of Mount Saint Helens.
Even though I still didn’t know what a blueberry plant looked like, I imagined those poor berries out in a field, small and green and wrinkled with cold. The worst part was wondering if this weather delay would make Mom change her mind, so I did everything possible to prove I was worthy of my first job.
Without being asked, I made my bed and cleaned my room, including Claude’s side. I played hide-and-seek with Claude, even when he didn’t want to. I did not mock Patrick when he made his smelly protein drink for breakfast, or when he lifted weights in front of the bathroom mirror. I did not ask to ride my bike around the neighborhood or visit my friends Constance and Allie, not once. And I folded pile after pile of laundry, and even tried to start the washing machine with a load of Claude’s clothes that were disgustingly crusted with pieces of honey toast and chunks of banana.
The one thing I did not do was apologize to my mom. The words were there, always on the end of my tongue, but they would not come out, no matter how bad I wanted them to.
But Mom didn’t seem to mind. She thanked me for helping with Claude, and didn’t get too mad when the washing machine got clogged with suds because I hadn’t read the instructions on the detergent label. And she even remembered when it was Packing Day.
“Aren’t you going to Constance’s house this afternoon?” she asked. I’d been sitting in front of the window, searching the dark clouds for a glimmer of light.
“What?”
“Isn’t it Packing Day?”
“I guess,” I said.
“Do you want me to drive you over there? It looks like it might pour again.”
I shrugged. “I could ride my bike. If I go.”
Mom shot me her laser eyes, but this time, instead of trying to put something into my brain, it was like she was trying to suck something out. “Is everything okay?”
“What?”
“Are you and your friends getting along?”
“Of course,” I said quickly. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“No reason. Sometimes things just change.”
“What do you mean change? No one is changing, Mom. Ever.”
Mom smiled. “Then you’d better get over there. Packing Day is halfway over.”
I laughed. “Not when Constance is packing.” I went to my room and grabbed a sweatshirt, then took my 3-D glasses from the special top drawer. I slipped them in my pocket.
It was nice to be on my bike. Even though everyone complains about how much it rains in the Pacific Northwest, the air is always fresh here, and the grass and trees are a bright and cheery green. I pumped my legs as fast as they would go and felt the good damp air fill my lungs. The tires made swishing sounds as they sliced through the murky brown puddles.
I turned the corner of our development and pedaled past the entrances to two other developments. Both Constance and Allie lived in the third development down from me, exactly seven minutes by bike.
Constance’s mother met me at the front door. “Where have you been, Miss Missy? I’m no help and poor Allie is about to lose her mind.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I lost track of time.” I walked down the hall and stood quietly in the bedroom doorway, studying my two best friends. They were so different from each other—Constance, like a three-year-old or a chipmunk, constantly darting from one shiny object to the next, and Allie, more like one of those panting dogs in Scotland, the kind obsessed with herding sheep into neat little pens.
Allie, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, saw me first. “Missy! It’s about time!” She rolled her eyes at Constance, the pile of clothes and empty suitcase in the middle of the floor. “Every time I put something in she takes it out!”
Packing Day had started two summers before, when Allie and Constance first signed up for the same sleepaway camp on the east side of the Cascade Mountains, where it is a guaranteed summer with no rain. They tried to get me to go with them, but my parents said it was too far away and too expensive. I know Packing Day was supposed to help me feel like I was a part of things, and it had worked that way before. But standing there, I just felt dangly and useless. Still, I tried to sound cheerful when I plopped down next to Allie and said, “Okay, what can I do?”
Constance, with a furry pink slipper in her hand, wandered around the room. “I need a theme,” she said. “To help me get started.”
Allie jumped up. “I told you. The theme is summer camp.” She grabbed the furry slipper from Constance’s hand and tossed it aside. Then she crouched next to the pile of clothes and pawed through it. Soft, wispy things flew through the air. “You don’t need anything like any of this. You need shorts. T-shirts. One sweatshirt for chilly nights. Where’s your underwear?”
I slid off the bed, joined Allie at the clothing pile, and dug around until I found a black velvet cap. “You’ll need a hat,” I said, placing it on my head. “Even I know that and I’ve never been to camp.”
Allie snatched away the cap. “No velvet at summer camp!” She dug out a pair of khaki shorts and dropped it in the suitcase. “There. Do not remove. And find more like it.”
Constance reached into the pile and pulled out a bathing suit top. It still had the tags. She placed it in the suitcase, right next to the khaki shorts. Then Allie found a pink bra and said, “Where are your others? You’ll need at least two more bras.” Which made Constance sigh dramatically.
“Well, thank goodness I don’t have to worry about that,” I said, my voice a little too loud to be real.
Customer Reviews
