13

When they were twenty-four days old, the caterpillars stopped eating. I didn't panic because Patrick had warned me it would happen. "They'll stop eating and change color—they'll turn yellowish," he'd said. "That means they're getting ready to spin their cocoons. Tomorrow we should move them into egg cartons."

Patrick had read that the caterpillars liked to have their own little compartments to spin in. The brochure suggested toilet-paper tubes cut in half or egg cartons. I'd saved two egg cartons, and Patrick brought over a third from his house.

There were twenty-six worms. "I'm not going to put them twelve, twelve, and two in the cartons," I said. "I think they'd like it better to be divided up more evenly. I'm going to put them eight, nine, and nine instead."

The next day we cut through the hinges of the egg cartons so the tops would be easier to take off and put back on. Patrick's research said the caterpillars liked to spin in the dark, so we'd be leaving the tops on most of the time, but we still wanted to be able to watch them once in a while.

I picked up each caterpillar carefully and let it crawl on my hand for a few seconds. Then I put it into an egg pocket.

Some of the caterpillars sort of stood up halfway and swayed around like they were investigating their new homes. Then they coiled themselves up neatly. We cleaned out the old leaves one last time and put the egg cartons into the aquarium.

Now that I knew about Patrick's phobia, I couldn't believe I'd never noticed it before. If he wasn't shooting tape, he was fussing with the focus or playing back what he'd taped or switching to the regular camera. He never looked at the caterpillars straight on. The only way he ever looked at them was through a lens.

I could tell he was still really creeped out by them. I tried to think of something that scared me the same way. I didn't like spiders very much.... When I was little, I slept with a night-light on.... But I knew neither of those was really a phobia, not like Patrick's.

I couldn't imagine what it felt like, to be that scared of something. Sometimes I wanted to talk him out of it again, make him hold one, stuff like that. But that didn't seem fair. I just had to try to understand in other ways. Like by thinking how it was very brave of him to want to do a worm project at all. And how he'd decided to do it both to try to get over his phobia and because he thought it was what I wanted.

My best friend had a phobia. If he could deal with it, so could I.

 

The next morning I went to check on the caterpillars. The egg cartons wouldn't open. Somehow they had gotten stuck closed. I showed Patrick when he came over.

"I can only get them open a little," I said. "Wait, let me try again."

I held one of the cartons at eye level, pulled at the top, and managed to open it a crack so I could peek in.

"Wow!"

"What is it?" Patrick asked. "What do you see?"

"They're going nuts!" I said. "They're moving their heads around like crazy. I can't see very well, but they're all, like, frantic. Do you think something's wrong? Maybe they don't like it in there."

"No, I think they're okay," Patrick said. "The silk comes out of their mouths, and the book said they're constantly in motion while they're weaving their cocoons. That's gotta be what they're doing. But why can't you open the carton?"

"There's all this webbing. It's stuck to the top and bottom—it's like they've glued the carton shut. Maybe they want to make their cocoons in private."

"That's not it," Patrick said. "They make a little sort of hammock thing first, to hold the cocoon. And they have to string it up somehow. So they're doing it from top to bottom. They're not gluing the carton shut on purpose."

I watched for another few seconds. Then I closed the carton gently and put it back in the aquarium.

Patrick flapped his arms. "There's no way I can film through that crack," he said. "What a bummer—this would be the most interesting part."

On the way to school we talked it over some more. "There's gotta be some way to film them," Patrick kept saying.

We were in luck—it was a Friday, so we had the whole weekend to work on the problem.

First we tried cutting a window into one of the cartons. This was a little scary. I picked the carton that held eight caterpillars—I knew I'd left the corner egg pockets empty, so that was where I cut the window. I used nail scissors and poked a hole with the point, then made tiny tiny snips to cut a square. All the while I was praying that none of the caterpillars had moved into that space overnight.

I pulled out the little cardboard square and let out a huge breath. It was fine—there wasn't any caterpillar under it. But I couldn't really see any of the other ones either, unless I put my eye right up to the window and tilted the carton a little.

Patrick shook his head. "We gotta make the window bigger," he said.

So I did that next. I cut more of the carton, so three egg pockets would be exposed. But when I lifted off the flap of cardboard, a caterpillar came with it, trailing a little cloud of webbing.

Patrick jumped back in alarm.

"Oh no!" I cried out, then rescued the poor thing as it dangled in the air.

I pulled the caterpillar off the flap—the webbing was really sticky—and put it back into the carton. Then I checked it over anxiously. It seemed fine, but the first thing it did was try to wiggle away from the open window.

"This isn't working," I said. "See, it doesn't like being out in the open."

I ran into the house and found a roll of masking tape. Then I ran out to the porch again, taped the bits of cardboard together, and stuck them back onto the carton.

I felt much better once I'd done that. It had made me quite panicky—the caterpillar was obviously upset by our invasion of its privacy.

"Gak," Patrick said. "Now what?"

Kenny came out to the porch.

"Hey, Patrick. Hey, Julia. Whatcha doing?"

Patrick explained the problem to him.

"So you need to leave us alone," I said to Kenny and glared at him. "We have to work on this."

Kenny ignored me. The snotbrain. He looked at Patrick. "Just put one in a little jar," Kenny said. "That way you could film it through the glass."

Patrick looked at him and then at me. Then he laughed, clapped Kenny on the shoulder, and said exactly what I was thinking. "Why didn't we think of that?"

***

I opened the cardboard window one last time, took out the same caterpillar, and put it into a little glass jar. We'd poked air holes in the metal lid. We kept the jar in the aquarium alongside the egg cartons, and I put a cup upside down over it so it would be dark most of the time. But whenever Patrick wanted to film, we took the jar out for a few minutes.

It was so cool. My parents came out to see, and Patrick's parents brought Hugh-Ben-Nicky over that evening to have a look. The porch was very crowded; I worried that all those people would upset the caterpillar. But it didn't seem to care, not even when both the twins started jumping up and down and screeching with excitement.

The caterpillar moved its head constantly. Sometimes fast, sometimes a little slower, but never stopping—it looked like really hard work. The silk came out of its mouth just as Patrick had said.

At first the silk was almost invisible. You could see the strands only if you looked really hard.

By the next morning, though, the caterpillar had already wrapped itself in a layer of silk. It looked like it was living inside a cloud. We could see its black mouth moving, moving, busy, busy, busy. Patrick wanted to stay up all night to film it, but both our moms vetoed that idea. The following morning he was at our house in his pajamas again. The silk was almost solid; now we could barely see the black mouth moving inside.

I was glad Patrick was taping it; I'd be able to watch it again as many times as I wanted. But I knew it would never be as special on tape as it was now, happening right in front of me, those wispy threads at first barely more than air, and then like a cloud, the caterpillar spinning layer after layer after layer, each layer made of one hundred percent real silk thread.

 

I stood with a piece of paper held behind my back. "I am a genius," I said to Patrick.

It was the afternoon of the third day of the spinning, a Sunday. Patrick was sitting on the couch in our living room. I'd told him to sit there while I went and got the paper from my room. He raised his eyebrows at me but didn't say anything.

"I've decided what I'm going to embroider. I'm going to do"—I paused dramatically, then whipped out the paper—"the Life Cycle of the Silkworm."

I held up the sketch I'd drawn.

"Egg. Worm. Cocoon. Moth." I pointed to the drawings one by one. "And wait till you hear the best part. I'm going to use regular embroidery floss to do the egg and the worm. And the moth, too. But for the cocoon, I'm going to use the thread we make. The cocoon is made of silk in real life, and it will be made of silk in the picture too, get it?"

Patrick grinned, a really huge grin.

He got it, all right. I almost felt like hugging him. He put his hands up in the air and bent forward a few times like he was bowing to me.

"Julia Song, you are a genius. We are absolutely, positively, going to win a prize at the fair."

I made a silly curtsy back at him. "Thank you, thank you." I'd thought of doing the life cycle a while back. But it was the caterpillar that had given me the idea for the cocoon part. I'd watched it spin for a while right before I went to bed, and I'd woken up that morning with my genius plan.

I had known right away that it was perfect. There was just something so completely right about it. It wasn't American, like the flag—but it wasn't Korean, either.

Or maybe it was both?

Patrick took the sketch from me and studied it for a second. Then he looked up. "It's almost like an exact picture of the whole project, right?"

I nodded. "That's what I was thinking."

"Okay, so if it's supposed to be just like the project, you should leave out the moth at the end."

"Why would I leave out the moth? That's the final stage, right?"

"The final stage of the silkworm life cycle, yeah. But not the final stage of our project."

"What are you talking about?"

"We're not going to have any moths."

"Of course we're going to have moths," I said. "Look how great they're doing—they're almost done spinning their cocoons."

"But we want thread. So you can sew with it."

"Yeah, so?" What was Patrick's problem?

Patrick rolled his eyes at me. "Oh, I get it. You never read the book, did you."

"I did so. I mean, I didn't read every word, but I looked through it. I studied the pictures a lot—I traced one for the caterpillar sketch."

"Jules. If you'd read the book you'd know."

"Patrick, what are you talking about?"

He shook his head. "If you want to get silk from the cocoons, you have to kill the—the creatures inside. Before they come out as moths."

What!

I stared at him. I could feel the blood going out of my face. "You have to kill them?"

Patrick nodded. "You have to boil the cocoons. For about five minutes, to dissolve all the sticky stuff that keeps them together. Then you can unwind the silk. But the boiling kills them—the pupae."

For once, there was no jostling in my head because there was only one thought, with nothing else for it to bump into.

Kill them.

We'd have to kill them.

My hands were freezing cold. I closed them into fists—open, shut, open, shut—while I tried to get my brain to work.

"Patrick, wait. Why can't we unwind the cocoons after the moths come out?"

"Jules. It's all in the book."

"Okay, okay. I didn't read the stupid book! Tell me!" I almost screamed.

Patrick spoke slowly, like he was trying to calm me down. "The moth gets out by making a hole in the cocoon, right? To make a hole it has to chew through the silk—well, it doesn't actually chew, it spits out this chemical that dissolves the silk and makes a hole. And the hole goes through all the layers of silk, see? So instead of one nice long thread, you'd end up with a million tiny short pieces that you couldn't sew with. Silk farmers never let the moths come out—it would ruin everything. Get it?"

I got it, all right. I closed my eyes because I felt dizzy.

I hadn't known that I didn't know.

 

Ms. Park: Julia?

(silence)

Ms. Park: Julia, come on.

(silence)

Ms. Park: I know you're there. I can hear you.

(more silence)

Ms. Park: Okay, so you're upset. But we need to finish this story. I'll give you some time on your own now, but I'll be back in a little while.

Ms. Park: Julia? Three days and you haven't said a single word. You still need more time? All right, let me know when you're ready.

Ms. Park: Are you ready now? It's been two weeks....

Ms. Park: Come on—you can't hide forever.

Ms. Park: At least I hope not.

Ms. Park: Julia! I've given you more than a month! Enough is enough! You can't run away from this—it's your story and you have to see it through! Now stop being a coward and come talk to me RIGHT THIS MINUTE!

(silence)

Ms. Park: Julia. I'm sorry I got mad. (pause) But I really want to finish this story, and I can't do it without you. I'm stuck. Completely stuck.

(silence continues)

Ms. Park: There. That was what you wanted at the beginning, remember? For me to admit I'm not always the boss? Well, you were right. I need you. Talk to me.

(silence gets louder)

Ms. Park: Please? Please, please, PLEASE?