Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,62

all of them splintery and angry.

It seemed like the more frustrated Chloe and Ken got as artists, the more their farm thrived, just to spite them.

Sure enough, when we pulled off the flat, dusty dirt highway, their rows of bushes were fluffy and heavy with berries. Cute little white hens clucked and pecked around the bushes. Up on a hill just behind the rows of blueberry bushes, several rows of boxy hives were swarming with so many honeybees, you could see the clouds of them from the driveway.

When we got out of the car, we were met by Ken, looking long-faced in paint-smeared overalls.

“The place looks good, Ken,” my dad said. “Won’t you please take my card. You need an accountant to manage all this money you’re making!”

Ken winced. My dad had said that as if it were a good thing.

“We started raising these chickens,” he said morosely. “People really like the eggs. And, well, the chickens fertilize the berries, so they’re doing really well. And the bees are making so much honey, we had to add fifteen more hives.”

Ken hung his head and sighed.

“Oh!” Mom said. She had her perky voice on, and she was pointing at a tall, crooked log planted vertically in the ground. “Ken, I see you’re doing something new. Um, is that a totem pole?”

“Chainsaw carving!” Ken said, perking up. “Let me tell you about it . . . .”

My sisters and I looked at each other in alarm.

Run away! Abbie mouthed.

I grabbed Josh by one hand and a stack of buckets in another, and the four of us dashed into the nearest thicket of bushes, all of us snorting with laughter.

“Quick,” I whispered, “before we get sucked into the vortex of bad art.”

We headed for the back of the orchard, twice almost tripping over lazy chickens.

“I think we’re safe,” Hannah said with a laugh. She plucked a few berries from a bush and dropped them into her pail.

“Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk,” she said.

“Ah, Blueberries for Sal!” Josh said. “That’s a big favorite at the kids’ story hours at Dog Ear.”

Of course, thinking about the children’s story hour at Dog Ear made me remember our weird, wonderful first kiss. And that made me want to kiss him right then.

I gave Josh a shy glance and caught him giving me a shy glance. His Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing.

“You know,” I said to my sisters, “these berries look too big and squishy. I think Josh and I are going to try a couple rows over.”

“Oh, yeah,” Abbie said, nodding vigorously. “The kissing will be much better over there.”

“Abbie!” I squawked.

“Oh, did I say ‘kissing’?” she said with a mock gasp. “I meant ‘berries.’ The berries will be much better over there.”

“You’re awful,” I told her before ducking through a couple of bushes with Josh to get to the next row. We kept pushing through until we couldn’t hear Abbie giggling anymore.

Josh grinned at me when we emerged from the last row of bushes.

“She’s awful,” I repeated.

“Oh, yeah, awful,” Josh said, smiling as he bent over to kiss me.

And kiss me and kiss me until—clang—I dropped my bucket into the dirt and we broke apart, laughing.

“Your sister’s right, though,” Josh said. “The kissing is much better over here.”

“I hate it when she’s right,” I said with a grin.

I scooped up my bucket and added, “Come on. We have to pick a lot or they’ll know what we were up to.”

“They know anyway,” Josh said. He snaked his arm around my waist and kissed the top of my head, which for some reason made me feel just as melty as when he kissed me on the lips.

“Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk,” I reminded him, twisting away so I could start picking berries.

“All right, all right,” he murmured.

But he still stood so close to me that every time he reached for a branch, his arm brushed mine.

Or he would bend for some low-hanging berries, and his fingertips would graze my leg.

Or he would find my version of the perfect blueberry—just tender enough that it wasn’t lip-puckeringly sour, but nowhere near as ripe as many people like them—and pop it into my mouth.

It took a while for our berries to stop kerplinking against the bottoms of our buckets. And when we’d finally filled them and headed back to the car, my family had been waiting so long that they’d actually gotten roped into buying some of Chloe’s bad pottery.

“Look, Chelsea,” Mom