I pulled out a dress I’d been thinking would be perfect for blueberry picking—very 1940s housedress, but in a cute way—and tossed it onto my bed.
“Nothing!” Emma replied quickly. “Tell me about Josh.”
“Well—”
“It’s just that— Oh, Chelsea! I’m totally wrecking things!”
“With Ethan?” I said. I pulled out a pair of red-and-white pedal pushers and tossed those onto the bed too. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know!” she said. “I just love him so much. And I don’t have a lot of time, what with the intensive and rehearsals for Don Q on top of that.”
“So, you’re dying because you don’t have time to see him?” I said.
“When I have the time, he doesn’t,” Emma said. “And when I don’t have the time, he does! Supposedly. I’m starting to think he’s just making that up. I think I’m getting on his nerves. But I can’t help it. I think about him all the time. I can’t sleep! I almost want to quit the Intensive so I can have time for him. Maybe that would help?”
“Emma, no!” I gasped, dropping the tank top I was holding. “What are you talking about? That’s crazy!”
“I know, but love makes you do crazy things,” Emma said. “You know.”
“I guess?” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I did know what she was talking about.
“Okay, like, how do you handle it when you want to call Josh for the third time that day?” Emma asked.
“Um, I don’t think that’s happened,” I said. I sat on the edge of the bed and frowned in thought. “But I guess I would just . . . call him?”
“And what would he do?”
“Well, if he was working, he’d probably let it go and call me back later?” I said. I wasn’t really sure what she was driving at.
“See?” Emma said. “Ethan, too! Doesn’t that make you crazy?”
“No,” I said. I was starting to feel weird. Was it supposed to make me crazy? “Listen, Josh and I talk every night before we go to bed. So, I know I’ll talk to him then.”
“You dooooo?” Emma said yearningly. “That’s soooo romantic.”
And she was right. It was. But it was also what Josh and I had done since the day after our first kiss. We’d just fallen into that sweet pattern, and I’d already gotten used to it. I hadn’t known it was so revolutionary. To me—to us, I was pretty sure—it was just the natural thing to do.
I wondered if I was truly crazy about Josh if I wasn’t feeling crazy about Josh. Being with him made me feel kind of floaty and giddy. And I had noticed that everything seemed a little more intense since I’d started dating him. Like my dad’s bad jokes started to seem funny, and kittens or cute commercials on TV made me go all crumple-faced and sappy. And food tasted really delicious.
But did I feel crazy or desperate the way Emma did? I didn’t think so.
I guess it helped that when I called Josh after hanging up with Emma, he sounded so happy to hear my voice. And when I invited him to go berry picking, he dropped what he was doing to say yes. (He literally did! I heard a big stack of books hit the counter with a thud!)
I couldn’t stop smiling as I hung up the phone and plucked the 1940s frock off the pile on the bed.
If Emma had it right, being with Josh was supposed to make me act either cagey or crazy. And falling for Josh was supposed to make me feel lost.
But instead I felt found. And if that meant I was doing this relationship thing wrong, I decided not to care.
Not surprisingly, my family always went to the same blueberry farm: Chloe and Ken’s U-Pick Farm and Art Gallery.
“Oh, yeah,” Josh said when we told him where we were going. “I know them. Did you know they’re selling free-range eggs now?”
My dad clapped his hands and laughed.
“Of course they are!” he said. “And I bet they’re miserable about it.”
“Totally miserable!” Josh said with a grin.
Ken and Chloe desperately wanted to be brilliant starving artists who made a meager living with their blueberry farm. Instead they were wildly successful blueberry farmers who made really bad art. Chloe worked with clay—wobbly vases that looked like she’d caught them in midair just as they’d careened off her potter’s wheel, or little animals with drunken, hooded eyes and buck teeth. Ken was always carving up wood. He made sculptures and woodcuts,