The Secrets of Blueberries, Brothers, Moose & Me

by Sara Nickerson

  So what if the other kids made fun of us? So what? Because, as our motto goes: You Never Know When You Need to See the World Clearly.

  I stared at Constance and she stared at me. We both smiled, standing there and Seeing the World Clearly. Then we turned to Allie.

  “Okay, you guys.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out her glasses, which were also decorated, but with scraps of colorful fabric, like a perfect miniature patchwork quilt. Her Spectacular Button was small and cute and shiny black.

  “Whew,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “For a minute I thought we were goners.”

  But the truth was I knew we still weren’t seeing the same thing. For the first time ever, our Spectacular Buttons were not in synch. No one said it, but I could tell.

  • • •

  Later, while the oven warmed up, we sat on the counter and kicked our feet in rhythm. I was about to tell them about my summer job (I’d even waited for dramatic effect), but the longer I went without saying anything, the harder it became.

  Then Constance’s mother walked in wearing a purple skirt and earrings that dangled to her shoulders. During the week she had a regular job in an office, but on some nights and weekends she told people’s fortunes with these things called tarot cards. She worked from a velvet-covered table set up in the back of a small bookstore, and people came from all over to have their futures told by her. She was that good.

  “Oh my goodness! Does this mean you’re ready to go?” Constance’s mother raised her arms in a victory pose.

  “Well, not exactly,” said Allie.

  “There are three things in her suitcase,” I added, imagining Constance for four weeks wearing nothing but the same bathing suit top, khaki shorts, and pink bra.

  Constance said, “We got hungry, Mom. We’re taking a break.”

  Constance’s mother dropped her arms and glanced at the clock. “I wish I could give you girls a reading for your upcoming summer adventures, but I’m running late. Allie, honey, make sure my girl gets packed.”

  “I will,” Allie promised.

  “And Missy, honey,” she blew me a kiss, “you come and visit me, any weekend. I’ll give you a reading then.”

  “Okay.” I giggled. She was outrageously fantastic.

  “I’ll be so lonely without you all!” She swept out of the kitchen, blowing more kisses, and leaving the air behind her smelling spicy and sweet, like fresh oranges and soap from China. The front door slammed and then it opened again. “And don’t forget to take the plastic off the pizza before you cook it!”

  “Okay!” we called back together. The door slammed again.

  Constance said, “She always forgets. About the plastic.” Then she expertly removed the pizza from the box, tore off the plastic wrap, and checked the thermometer one last time before popping the pizza in the oven.

  “Your mom is the best,” I said.

  Constance shrugged. “I just wish she could cook.”

  Allie and Constance were both still wearing their glasses so I put mine back on, too. Maybe I’d been wrong before. Maybe our Spectacular Buttons would work the way they were supposed to. I let out a relieved breath; the world looked nearly right again.

  Constance set the timer for the pizza. “Fifteen minutes. What should we do?”

  “Pack,” Allie said. “We should pack.”

  But Constance was already picking up the phone. “Let’s call Ben. We can pretend to be someone else.”

  “Who would we pretend to be?” I asked. “And why would we call him?” I knew the answer to that second question. Along with wearing bras, something else had changed for my two friends. They had developed a crush. On the same boy. Ben Masterson. They even had a notebook called the BM Book and in it they chronicled everything about him: what he wore to school, what he ate for lunch, where his classes were, and also the first and last numbers of his locker combination. They were still spying on him for the middle.

  When they’d first come up with the book, I was quick to point out that BM also stood for bowel movement, which means poop, which I thought was funny, but they did not.

  While I stared at the pizza timer, Constance handed the phone to Allie, who punched in his number and held the phone to her ear. After a moment, she hung up. “Message,” she said.

  Constance said, “Maybe we should leave a real message for him. Tell him we’re going away for camp. Ask him what he’s doing this summer. Like if he goes to the lake or something like that.”

  “That’s so grown up of you,” I said. “I liked it better when you just made farting noises and hung up.”

  “Missy! We only did that once!”

  “Twice,” I said.

  Allie picked up the phone again. “I’m going to do it. Only I’m going to tell him my name is Allison.”

  “Why?”

  Allie glanced at Constance before turning to me. She put down the phone. “I just decided. I’m going to start using my real name this summer. And probably next school year, too.”

  “What?” I noticed that Constance didn’t seem surprised by Allie’s news. “Why?”

  Allie shrugged. “It’s my real name.”

  “What about you, Missy?” Constance said.

  “What about me? Missy is my name.”

  Allie said, “Missy is a nickname.”

  “My parents had me when they were young. They didn’t know the difference. They thought it was cute. Missy McKenzie.” The picture of my parents, young and happy and naming me as a baby . . . I couldn’t look at it that closely.

  I yanked off my 3-D glasses and my friends did the same. We all looked sort of startled without them.

  “Then you could be anyone,” Constance said finally. “That’s so exciting!”

  “Right,” Allie agreed. “You could go by Marsha. Or Melissa.”

  My throat tightened as I twiddled with the timer. Fifteen minutes while you’re waiting for a pizza and your friends are being stupid is just about the longest time in the world. I said, “You guys haven’t asked me what I’ll be doing this summer.”

  “Are you doing something, Missy?”

  I shrugged. Why was it suddenly hard to talk? I wanted so badly to tell them about the blueberry field—about Patrick finding the ad and about how I made my mom cry, and about Dad and Tessa’s fight over the whole thing, and about how we were waiting, waiting, waiting for a few days of sunshine. But all I could say was, “I might get a job.”

  “A job? A real job?” Allie’s eyes lit up. “Are we actually old enough to do that?” Even though I didn’t wear a bra or have a crush on a boy, I’d stepped up a rung on Allie’s maturity ladder. They were both all over me then, asking a million questions, but the funny thing was, I sort of didn’t want to tell them any more.

  So I said, “It’s not definite yet. I’m just looking in the newspaper. I’ll write and tell you if it happens.”

  I had never kept something big from my friends before, and I didn’t know what to do next. So without them seeing me, I turned the knob on the timer, making it go off five minutes before it was supposed to.

  No one seemed to care that the pizza was a tiny bit frozen in the middle. The crusts were delicious anyway, and we ate slowly, trying to make it last, and everything felt almost normal by the time I had to leave.

  My friends walked me to the door. They handed me the BM Book. “If you see him,” they said, “write it down. Everything. And write to us, too. Everything.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  “Make sure you write ‘Allison’ on the envelope,” Allie reminded me.

  I didn’t ask them again if they were bringing their glasses to camp. We all wore them when we hugged good-bye, but I sort of wished we hadn’t. In Spectacular 3-D it was easy to see the unbearable truth: that this might be our very last time of wearing them together.

&n
bsp; CHAPTER 5

  FINALLY THERE WAS A DAY OF PURE SPARKLING sunshine. Followed by another. And another. We begged Mom to call the blueberry people.

  “We’ll open the fields first thing Monday,” the lady told her. “Send them with a sack lunch and make sure they dress in layers. It can be chilly in the mornings.”

  So on Sunday night, before I went to bed, I pulled out clothes and arranged them on my chair according to appropriate layering order. It took a long time to fall asleep because I was afraid the alarm wouldn’t go off, or that maybe I hadn’t turned it on right.

  But the alarm did go off, just as it was supposed to, and with those first few beeps I scrambled out of bed, pulled on my layers, and ran to get Patrick, who was already up and dressed. He smiled at me and I smiled at him. The feeling in my stomach was bigger than the first day of a new school year.

  Mom stood at the kitchen counter, making sandwiches for our lunches. Claude was slumped on the floor, still half asleep. “Morning, Mom,” I said. I went straight to the cupboard for the cereal while Patrick got out the milk.

  “Morning, Missy.” She nodded at my bowl of cereal. “Honey, when you’re done with that would you take my coffee to the car? And Patrick, maybe you could take Claude and get him buckled in?” I finished my cereal in three bites.

  I’d never been up so early in the summer and was surprised by how perfectly still the world could be. Patrick carried Claude across the grass, so his feet wouldn’t get wet from the dew. Mom came out with our lunches. I took the lunches and handed her the coffee, which I’d balanced on the hood of the car. Patrick climbed into the front seat while I sat in the back, shoulder-to-shoulder with my baby brother, cozy in his pajamas and smelling slightly of pee.

  Mom hadn’t taken the time to comb her hair; she had just pulled it back in a tight, messy ponytail. She held her coffee in one hand and maneuvered through the empty morning streets with the other. I closed my eyes, smelled the good coffee smell, and pretended I was a grown-up woman on her way to work. I would drink coffee in the car, too. I would drive with one hand and hum under my breath.

  I wondered if my mom ever missed going to work in an office. She used to wear such nice clothes. Skirts so straight they were called pencil skirts, with little matching jackets and shiny shoes that clicked across the kitchen floor every morning. She had quit her job just before Claude was born and started her own accounting business, working from a desk shoved in the farthest corner of the kitchen. During her busy time, when people need their taxes done, she’s permanently hunched over her desk, and she never has to dress up anymore.

  “I want boo-berries,” Claude mumbled through his fingers. “We get boo-berries.”

  Mom glanced over her shoulder. “Claude, this is a job for Missy and Patrick. You get to come home with me and play with your toys.”

  “You can pick blueberries when you’re bigger.” I gave his arm a tickle, then leaned forward in my seat. “How much longer, Patrick?”

  “I’m not really sure.” His answer made my mom sigh. I slumped down in my seat and tried not to worry about what a sigh like that might mean.

  On that drive to the blueberry field, the world started to shift. I noticed it first with the houses. The farther we got from town, the more space grew between them, until there were no developments anymore, just houses standing bravely on their own. Patrick suddenly pointed to a sign that said Old Farm Road. “There, Mom. Turn there.”

  I pressed my forehead against the cool window and stared hard. This? I thought in amazement. This has always been here? All this land, just outside our town?

  Old Farm Road was narrow and bumpy with a wall of pine trees on one side and wide-open fields on the other. In the middle of the fields, cows ate grass and horses leaned against faded barns to soak up the first rays of morning sun. “Look, Claude,” I said, pointing. “Look at the horses.”

  “Cats,” he said, sucking his fingers.

  Next to each old-fashioned farmhouse were these large, round satellite dishes. Stark and white, they looked like they’d been dropped straight from outer space, and were pretty much the only sign that we hadn’t magically traveled back in time.

  I tried to imagine what might be happening behind all the different walls. Were farm kids churning butter from the cream of the cows they’d just milked? Were they wearing overalls? Or were they just like us, lying on the couch in their Spider-Man pajamas, eating Fruit Loops, and watching the cartoons that those big white satellite dishes had sucked from the sky? I stared at each house, hoping for a glimpse inside, but I couldn’t tell anything from the dark, curtained windows.

  Patrick looked down at his directions. “We should be getting close, Mom.” And then he sat up straight, pressed his face to the window, and pointed excitedly. “I think that’s the farm, Mom! Turn there!”

  I followed Patrick’s pointing finger to a white wooden board with BLUEBERRIES printed in fading red paint. As Mom turned into the drive, the tires made a loud crunching sound on gravel. The car dipped and bumped and curved until we came to a long, flat brown house. I thought about the ad in the newspaper, with Patrick’s fingers smearing the ink. This was the place behind those smeared words.

  Even before the car had completely stopped, Patrick was lunging for the door. “The blueberries must be down that road,” he said breathlessly.

  Mom stopped him with her arm. “Wait a minute, Mister.” She eyed the place suspiciously. “I’m not just going to drop you off here. Where is everyone?”

  I unbuckled my seat belt and climbed over Claude to get to the other window. On the side of the house was another white board, with red letters spelling the word OFFICE. I pointed. “Maybe over there?”

  Mom sat a moment longer. Then she opened the car door. “Wait here.” I watched her walk up to the office and rap on the window. I saw her lean her head down and motion back to our car.

  Up front, Patrick squirmed. “I wish I could hear what they’re saying.” He sounded nervous. I was nervous, too. Nervous that our mother might change her mind, put the car in reverse, and then whisk us the wrong way along that country road, back to our world of beige-colored neighborhoods and tidy planting strips with miniature matching trees.

  But Mom came back to the car smiling. She slid into her seat and said, “That very nice lady is Bev, the one I talked to on the phone. She’s married to Moose, the farmer. The two of them run the farm together.”

  I said, “Moose? What kind of a name is Moose?” I was suddenly interested in names since, as I’d just discovered from my friends, mine wasn’t a real one.

  Patrick reached for the door handle. Mom put her hand on his shoulder. “Not so fast. You need to follow the road that leads to the fields. Follow it all the way down the hill. When you get to the bottom, you’ll see that the field has been divided. One side belongs to Moose, and the other to his brother.”

  I looked across the gravel drive and saw a hedge, tall and thick as a wall.

  “On the other side of the hedge is the brother’s farm,” Mom continued. “Always stay on this side of the hedge. It’s planted there for a reason. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Patrick said.

  I said, “What’s the reason?”

  “I told you, there was a fight out here, years ago. I don’t know the details. Just stay on this side of the hedge and you’ll be fine.”

  Suddenly realizing we were using a word he didn’t know, Claude’s head snapped up. He shouted, “Hedge! Hedge! Hedge!”

  “It’s like a bush, Mr. Claudio,” I said, patting him on the arm. “It’s just a plant.”

  “Scary,” he whispered.

  Mom held out our sack lunches. “Keep walking down the hill until you find the weigh station. There’s a man named Al. He’ll tell you everything else.”

  We grabbed the lunch sacks and bolted from the car before Mom could say another thing. But she managed to,
anyway. Rolling down her window she gave us one last rule, which was her very own rule, which is always her rule, no matter what the situation.

  “Remember!” she called. “You two stick together out there!”

  CHAPTER 6

  STARTING DOWN THE TIRE-TRACK ROAD, MY BROTHER and I walked in the faint morning shadow of the giant hedge. The word hedge didn’t really seem to fit, since it was more like a dark and prickly prison wall than any sort of plant. “Claude was right,” I said. “There is something scary about it.”

  At the bottom of the hill the road made a sharp curve, and at the end of that curve, the world opened to a brand-new place. The blueberry field.

  My blueberry field. Because that’s how I felt the moment I saw it. Love at first sight. Which I know is an embarrassing thing to say, but it is also just the truth.

  “Patrick,” I whispered. “This is where blueberries come from!”

  “Of course, Missy.” But I knew he was just as surprised as I was.

  The delicate bushes looked like miniature trees, standing side-by-side in straight rows. The leaves on the bushes were oval in shape, tapered at the end, and the prettiest green I’d ever seen. Big bursts of purple-blue berries hung in clumps, more like party decorations than food. And the rows of plants went on forever, a perfect blanket of green and blue.

  As I stood, breathing it all in, I learned the first secrets of blueberries—that plain air had an actual smell, and that quiet was an actual sound. I noticed, for the first time, how the fabric of my jeans rubbed against my legs, and also how the paper lunch sack felt in my hand, dry and crinkly. I learned right then that in a quiet place, I didn’t have to speak every word that came through my head. I could just be quiet, too. All that I learned in an instant, without even knowing I learned it.

  Patrick, for once, broke the silence. “Come on, Missy.” He pulled on my arm. “Let’s hurry.” That’s when I remembered what Mom had told us, about the man we were supposed to find.

  We stepped quickly, kicking up dirt. “I think that’s it,” I said, pointing to the far end of the road, where a small shed was coming into focus. When we got close enough I could see that it was built on wheels, and open in the front, like a hot-dog stand at the beach. There was a man sitting inside.