Free Project Mulberry by Linda Sue Park

be around two weeks before we'd get the eggs.
    It was
exactly
two weeks.
    Kenny was waiting on the front walk when we got back from another Wiggle meeting. He started yelling as soon as he saw us turn the corner onto our street.
    "Julia! The worms came today! The worms are here!"
    Patrick beat me to the door by two steps. We charged into the house with the Snotbrain right behind us.
    "Let me see! I wanna see!" Kenny yelled.
    The package was on the kitchen table. It was a square cardboard box about the size of a cantaloupe.
    My mom came over to watch. I let Patrick open the parcel while I stood guard between him and Kenny. The Snotbrain could destroy the eggs in a split second if I wasn't careful.
    Inside the box were a million of those foam peanuts. Patrick dug through them very, very carefully. He pulled out a little square foam block taped across the middle.
    "Here," he said as he held it out to me. He was using his fingertips, like it was really fragile. "You open it."
    That was nice of him, I thought. I pulled off the tape; now I could separate the foam square into two halves. Snuggled in between was a clear plastic tube—sort of like a tiny test tube. It had a cap on it.
    I held the tube so Patrick could see it. The eggs inside looked like tiny dark seeds.
    "None of them have hatched yet," Patrick said, sounding relieved.
    Kenny pulled on my arm. "Julia, Julia, lemme see!"
    "Kenny! Quit it!" I jerked my arm away from him.
    "Kenny, here," Patrick said. "I'll show you, but you have to promise not to touch."
    Not possible,
I thought, and I was about to say so, but just then Kenny put his hands behind his back. "I won't. I won't touch, I just wanna see."
    Patrick took the tube from me and held it lower so Kenny could see it. Kenny frowned. "Those aren't worms," he said.
    What a dope. "Duh," I said. "They're
eggs.
They have to hatch into worms."
    Patrick put the tube back into the box. "We have to keep them in the refrigerator for now," he said. "We can't take them out until we have food for them."
    The first thing Patrick did after we stored the eggs safely in the fridge was to read the brochure that came with the package. It said that you could pick the mulberry leaves and store them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for up to five days. "So we won't need to go over to Mr. Dixon's every day," he said. "We can get five days' worth at a time."
    "How many leaves is that?" I asked.
    "It changes," he said. "When they're first hatched, they're so tiny they hardly eat anything. The bigger they get, the more they eat. We'll just have to figure it out as we go along."
    It was time to call Mr. Dixon.
    "States-and-eights," Patrick said with a grin.
    Â 
    Mr. Dixon said to come over anytime. He also said we didn't have to ring the bell; we could just walk through the back gate and get the leaves whenever we needed them. He said it was okay even if he wasn't home.
    My mom talked to me after I hung up the phone. I explained the arrangement to her.
    "Good," she said. "Just get what you need without a fuss, okay? I don't want you bothering him."
    Her perfect face.
    Maybe she really did want to make sure we didn't disturb Mr. Dixon.
    Or maybe she just didn't want us spending much time with him.
    I hoped it was the first reason, but because of her perfect face, I wasn't sure.
    I hated not being sure.
    Â 
    We decided to take fifteen leaves the first time—three leaves a day for five days. "After five days, the leaves won't be fresh anymore," Patrick said. "The caterpillars don't drink, they get water by eating the leaves, so dried-up leaves aren't any good."
    Everything went fine at Mr. Dixon's house. We made sure to take only a few leaves from any one branch, and we were out the gate again in a few minutes. We didn't see Mr. Dixon. I was a little disappointed. I liked his accent.
    Back home, we took out three leaves and stored the rest in the lettuce drawer of the fridge. The brochure that came with the worms said to use petri