Project Mulberry: Chapters 6–11

I was about to ask what an LTD looked like, but Patrick was in excited mode—he plowed right over me.

Patrick said I was being a big pessimist. I said he was being totally unrealistic.

A perfect execution of my plan. No mulberry tree, no silkworm project.

For me, it was more like Agent Song having to locate and reconnoiter the enemy’s headquarters before being able to carry out orders.

I hated thinking of her as someone who might be prejudiced against black people.

“The Korean War. That was when the army got integrated for the first time, and black and white soldiers fought together. I read about it.”

Perfect—as in no expression. Perfectly smooth. Perfectly bland. My dad also has a perfect face. My parents wear their perfect faces when they don’t want people to know what they’re thinking.

“But nobody had taken care of it, so it was pretty scrawny. Looked more like a bush than a tree—they get that way if you don’t prune them.”

“The worms will need very fresh leaves, and they’ll need them twice a day. Which means the children would have to come over here quite often. For around three weeks or so. That might be an inconvenience for you.”

It was like a whole bunch of people were conspiring against me, and I’d been forced to come up with a plot to fight them.

Top Secret Message to Headquarters: AGENT SONG NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR EVASIVE TACTICS. HAS ALREADY REPORTED FOR HER NEXT ASSIGNMENT—PROJECT MULBERRY.

You think I’d deliberately invent a character who was as much trouble as you are?

I let Patrick open the parcel while I stood guard between him and Kenny.

The first thing Patrick did after we stored the eggs safely in the fridge was to read the brochure that came with the package.

I was about to say something when he glared at me. Patrick didn’t glare at me very often, so I decided to keep quiet and hear what he had to say.

He looked at Kenny solemnly. “Kenny, it could be a matter of life and death. Even, like, fifteen minutes in the cold could kill them.”

He was kneeling by the back fence with a trowel in one hand.

“You dig the weeds,” I said. “I’ll follow you and break all the clods.”

It would have sounded funny if anyone else said it, but with the way he drawled, the words seemed just right.

Patrick looked longingly at the brownies that were still on the plate.

“The first thing you should know about this place is that it’s what’s called a ‘sustainable’ farm,” Mr. Maxwell said. “That means we try to farm here in a way that’s good for both the environment and the animals.”

Now, we can’t leave the cows in there for too long—they’d eat up all the grass and erode the soil.

So the chickens eat up the maggots, and they also scratch—they scratch at the cowpats and spread them around, and they scratch at the soil, which keeps it nice and loose and aerates it.

There they are, tilling the soil and spreading the fertilizer and keeping down the pest population and saving me money on chicken feed!

Battery chickens are also more prone to disease, so the farmer has to put a lot of drugs in their feed to keep them healthy—chemicals that end up in their eggs.