A Storm of Strawberries Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An imprint of Bonnier Publishing USA

  251 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010

  Text copyright © 2017 by Jo Cotterill

  Cover illustration by Ramona Kaulitzki

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Yellow Jacket is an imprint of Bonnier Publishing USA, and associated colophon is a trademark of Bonnier Publishing USA.

  Interior design by Véronique Sweet

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2017 by Piccadilly Press, an imprint of Bonnier Zaffre Ltd.

  First U.S. Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-4998-0838-4

  yellowjacketreads.com

  bonnierpublishingusa.com

  For anyone who feels that the world is a confusing place

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  My sister, Kaydee, is the most beautiful person in the world. She doesn’t believe it, and she hates me telling her. She says, “Oh, stop it, Darby, I’m totally not. My nose is too big and my thighs are too fat, and I have zits that are just … ugh.” And if I tell her again that she’s beautiful, she gets mad and won’t speak to me.

  It’s funny, because I like it if someone tells me I’m beautiful. Mom tells me I’m beautiful, and it makes me feel warm and happy, not mad and upset.

  When Kaydee’s friend Lissa met me for the first time, she said to Kaydee, “What’s wrong with your sister?” and Kaydee went all pink and said, “Nothing’s wrong with her. Don’t say that. She has Down syndrome. It makes her look a bit different from other people.”

  Lissa sort of wrinkled up her nose. I wrinkled up my nose too because the way she spoke was stinky. And actually Lissa was kind of stinky too, with a lot of perfume. So I said, “You smell,” and Kaydee gasped and said, “Darby! That’s rude!” and Lissa said, “It’s body spray. You should try it sometime. Not that I’m saying you need it …”

  That confused me, because I couldn’t figure out what she meant. Did I need it, or didn’t I? Sometimes people say one thing and mean another, which makes me mixed up.

  Kaydee took a breath and said, “Lissa, Darby is my sister and I love her more than anything. Darby, Lissa is my friend and I don’t want you to be horrible to her. All right?”

  “Well, she can’t be horrible to me,” I said firmly. Kaydee nodded. “She won’t be. I promise.”

  I live with Kaydee and my mom and my dad and my brother on a strawberry farm. People always look really interested when I tell them that. Not many people live on a strawberry farm. “How lovely!” they say. “Being able to eat strawberries all the time!”

  No one wants to eat strawberries all the time. The only thing I want to eat all the time is chocolate.

  My brother, Olly, is actually my stepbrother, and he can’t eat strawberries. He’s fifteen and he’s allergic. If he eats a strawberry, he gets a rash all over and then he can’t breathe. He’s got a special injection that looks like a pen, in case it happens. It’s kept in the kitchen drawer and I am definitely not allowed to touch it.

  Kaydee is sixteen. I’m twelve. Mom is thirty-six, and my dad, Paul, who is actually my stepdad, is forty-six. If you add up all our ages, you get a big number. If you added in all the ages of all the people who also work on the farm, you’d get an even bigger number. And if you added in the ages of the two dogs and the cat … well, you’d need a calculator.

  Today is Friday, but it’s spring break, so I’m not at school. Instead, Kaydee and I are sitting at the kitchen table. She is on her phone. I am doing painting by numbers. It’s where you have a black-and-white drawing and you have to color it in, and little numbers tell you which color to put where. I looooove painting by numbers. Almost as much as I love music. In fact, the world is perfect right now, because I have my earphones in and I am listening to my favorite songs while I paint.

  … years ago when my stepdad asked me what my favorite songs were, I played him lots, and then he said, “Would you like to hear one of my favorites?” It was by a boy band from the last century and it was about a woman who kept her face in a jar by the door. Dad said, “Listen, Darby, this is such a clever song.”

  I thought it was weird. I wouldn’t want to keep taking my face off and putting it on again. It would be really annoying. And the song wasn’t the sort you could dance to.

  Dad said, “Don’t you think it’s clever, Darby?”

  I didn’t think it was clever. But I like Dad and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I shrugged and said, “Yeah.”

  The tune from the chorus stayed in my head for weeks, though.

  Chapter 2

  There is one other thing that is making me perfectly happy, and that is the thought of the chocolate hunt. On Sunday, in two days, it is Easter, and at Easter we do a chocolate egg hunt. Mom buys four bags of small chocolates wrapped in colored foil and she hides the chocolates in the yard, in plants, and between the stones and places like that. The rest of us go around trying to find them. If you find one, you get to put it in your basket. We have special baskets that are years old. We always use the same ones. Mine is green. Kaydee laughs and makes fun of the chocolate hunt but she still does it. Even Olly, who pretends nothing is fun apart from video games, turns up for it.

  I love the chocolate hunt. I look forward to it for months. “Is it today?” I ask Mom a thousand times. “Is it today? Is it tomorrow?”

  Just as I’m thinking about Mom, she comes into the kitchen. She’s quite short, like me, and she has pale soft hair and a pale soft face, with light brown eyes. She’s wearing jeans and a blue shirt and a big fleece. She starts talking but I can’t hear her because music is playing in my ears. She makes the sign to me to remove my earphones.

  “Darby, have you brushed your teeth?” she asks. “Yes,” I say, even though I haven’t. Brushing teeth is very boring. And it means going up the stairs. I’m sitting down now.

  Mom runs her hand through her hair, which is all messy. “I’ve been checking the tunnels,” she says, and her forehead creases up like when you fold paper to make a fan.

  She means the polytunnels. Polytunnels are made of big metal hoops, with plastic stretched over them. Our farm has three sites. The one we live on has four big greenhouses, and the other two sites (which are about a ten-minu
te drive away) have polytunnels. All of them are packed with strawberry plants. At this time of year, there are lots of green fruits in them, slowly ripening.

  “Why?” asks Kaydee. It isn’t usually Mom’s job to check the tunnels. That’s what Dad does with Juris, one of our managers. Juris is actually from Latvia, which is one of the Baltic states, which always makes me think of baldness, but Juris has lots of black hair, so he’s not in the least bald, not one tiny bit.

  “Wind’s picking up,” Mom says, and Kaydee and I know not to ask any more. Farmers are obsessed with wind. This always makes me giggle, because “wind” is also about farts, but Dad says it’s not a laughing matter. High wind can knock out electricity lines and pull apart plastic sheeting. It can also suck out glass from windows if it’s strong enough. Like a huge vacuum cleaner in the sky.

  Mom goes to the sink and fills the kettle with water. The sink is big and square and ceramic. The tap is a bit drippy if you don’t turn it off correctly. To the right of the sink is the draining board, and against the wall to the left is the stove, big and black and hot all the time because it’s an oil-fired Aga and you can dry your clothes on it double-quick. I like leaning against the oven.

  When Mom has filled the kettle, she stands and stares out of the window for a moment. Then Kaydee says, “Er, Mom? You forgot to switch the kettle on.”

  “Oh!” Mom blinks. “Sorry. Don’t know where my head is this morning.”

  I think I’ve probably been paying attention for long enough, so I put my earphones back in. But before the next song starts up, I hear Mom say, “Could be a tornado on the way.”

  Tornadoes are bad. I used to get tornadoes confused with tomatoes. I knew they were different things but sometimes I get words mixed up. A tornado can whip through our farm and blow out all the glass from one of our huge greenhouses without touching anything else. A tomato can’t do that.

  Tornadoes make everyone stressed (unlike tomatoes, which just make me stressed). When people are stressed they shout at each other. I don’t like people shouting. I turn up the volume in case Mom is about to start.

  And then it occurs to me that if people are stressed, and a tornado is blowing all over the place, then the chocolate hunt is in danger.

  So I take out my earphones and say, “We’re still doing the chocolate hunt, right?”

  Mom is in the middle of a sentence but I don’t know what she was saying. It’s very important that she hears me. “I still want to do the chocolate hunt,” I say louder.

  “Darby.” Mom sounds annoyed. “I’m in the middle of talking to Kaydee. I’ve told you about interrupting. You need to wait until there’s a break in conversation.”

  “Yes, I know,” I say, “but the chocolate hunt.”

  “You and your chocolate hunt!” Kaydee exclaims. “There are other things going on, you know, Darby. Mom’s really worried about the wind. The forecast is really bad.”

  “But—”

  “Darby,” Mom says in that tone of voice that lets me know she’s mad at me, “I don’t know if the chocolate hunt will happen or not. It depends entirely on the wind and the state of affairs on Sunday.”

  I stare at her. “I want to do it,” I say, in case she hasn’t quite understood.

  “I will do everything I can to make sure it happens,” Mom says, and I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s going to be okay.

  … a chocolate hunt one year where Mom forgot to shut the back door. We were all inside waiting because Olly was in the bathroom and we couldn’t start without him. But the chocolate was all out in the yard, and the dogs found it first.

  Our dogs now are named Butter and Cherry, but back then we didn’t have Butter; we had another dog named Jelly Bean. She was a really good sniffer dog, and she sniffed around the yard and ate a lot of chocolate, maybe twenty or thirty pieces, in their foil wrappers. When we got outside and saw what was happening, Mom went crazy. She shouted at the dogs and they put their tails between their legs and looked all sorry, and then Mom and Dad put both dogs in the car and drove them to the vet. Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, and tinfoil isn’t something anyone should eat. The vet did some things to the dogs, and Cherry was okay. I think maybe he hadn’t eaten as much as Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean died.

  I was very sad that Jelly Bean died. But I was also sad that most of the chocolate was gone. I only found six chocolates in the yard, and one of them had teeth marks in it.

  Kaydee’s phone beeps her text noise. She taps the screen and reads the message, and her face goes all smiley. I know what that means.

  “She’s on her way,” says Kaydee.

  Lissa is coming to stay this weekend. She’s going to stay three whole nights. Which means she’ll be here for the chocolate hunt. She’s nicer to me now than she was at the beginning, but I’d still rather she wasn’t here for my favorite thing. And I’m worried about the baskets. You see, we have the right number of baskets for one each—me, Olly, Kaydee, and Dad. (Mom doesn’t have one, obviously, because she hides the chocolate.) Four baskets. But if there are five people doing the hunt, we won’t have enough.

  I sigh.

  “What’s the matter?” Kaydee asks me.

  I shrug. “Nothing.”

  “Darby, Lissa’s my friend, so you could at least try to be nice to her.”

  “I am nice!” I say.

  “You always make a face when I mention her,” Kaydee tells me.

  “I don’t,” I retort. “This is my face.” I stick out my tongue.

  Kaydee sticks out her tongue in response. Hers is very thin and pointy and she can touch her nose with it. I can’t do that. Mom says Kaydee gets her tongue from our dad, Hayden. We haven’t seen him for years, so I can’t ask him to stick out his tongue to check for myself.

  “Don’t be childish,” Mom says, and then turns to Kaydee. “Do I need to come up and clean your room?”

  “I’ve done it,” says Kaydee. “Sheets all changed and everything.”

  Something inside me feels sore. Sometimes, if I have a bad dream or I just want some company, I get up in the night and go up the steep stairs to Kaydee’s room. I burrow under her duvet and snuggle up with her, and she drapes a toasty-warm arm around me and mutters, “All right, Darby?” and goes back to sleep. This is the first time Lissa has stayed over and I hadn’t thought about where she would be sleeping. I don’t want her sharing a bed with Kaydee.

  “What if I need to come into your bed?” I ask Kaydee.

  She makes a funny face. “Well, you can’t. Lissa will be there.”

  “But what if I have a bad dream?” I say.

  “You’ll have to go and see Mom,” Kaydee tells me.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Mom says, smiling but in a voice that tells me she means it. “You sleep in the weirdest positions.”

  It’s true. I do sleep in funny positions, like curled up at the bottom of my bed right under the duvet, or half on the bedside table, my arm twisted around the lamp. I don’t do it on purpose; it’s just what’s comfortable at the time. I like sleeping. But I don’t want to be on my own if I’m scared. I’m worried now, so I look scowly.

  Mom looks out of the window again. “This wind …” She drinks some coffee. “We just have to hope.”

  I stop listening and go back to my painting. Number four: brown. For the tree trunks and the girl’s hair … My mouth moves by itself. I do this thing where I talk to myself. It’s like a conversation with myself, but if anyone asks me what it’s about, I can’t tell them. Sometimes I’m just repeating a word I like. Or what other people have just said. Sometimes the words aren’t even real words. When I do it, I stop listening to what’s going on around me. It’s kind of nice. Like an off switch for the world.

  After a while, Kaydee goes out of the kitchen and Mom does too. I finish my painting. I am really pleased with it. I’ve hardly gone outside the lines at all, and I only made a mistake with the color twice. I look around to show it to someone, but the kitchen is empty, apart from Pike, the b
lack cat, who has padded in and is standing on the end of the table. He’s probably hoping for food. He’s not supposed to be on the table, but right now he’s the only one here, so I motion him over and show him my painting. “Look,” I say.

  Pike sniffs at it, but it’s not food, so he doesn’t care. He nudges at my hand. I pick him up and squidge him in a good cuddle. His black fur is so soft, and dark as midnight. He wriggles away and jumps down to the floor. He doesn’t like being squidged.

  I look around the kitchen and sigh. Something feels wrong. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t like the feeling.

  Luckily, I know what to do when I have feelings I don’t like.

  It’s time to find some music.

  Chapter 3

  My room is on the second floor at the end of the house. You go up the stairs from the hall, turn left, and there’s Olly’s bedroom. Next to him is Mom and Dad’s room. On the left of that is the bathroom, and left of that is my bedroom. There are a lot of lefts in our house. Unless you’re facing the other way, when there would be a lot of rights. I have one bed, two windows, and lots of my things. And no one is allowed in my room except Kaydee and Mom.

  And me of course. Because that would be silly if I couldn’t go in my own room.

  I have lots of posters of pop bands and dolphins. I like dolphins and one day I want to swim with them. It won’t matter that I can’t swim well because the dolphins will help me.

  I have speakers that connect to my iPod so I can listen to music. I also have a laptop, and I love watching music videos online. I practice the moves so that I can do them along with the dancers on the screen. That’s what I’m doing now. Dancing is the only exercise I like. I’m in a dance group at school and we dance to all our favorite songs.

  “Darby!” yells Olly from his room. “Turn it down!” I don’t want to turn it down, so I ignore him. And then there are more footsteps on the stairs, and I hear Kaydee’s voice, and so I pause the video and open my bedroom door and come out onto the landing.

  She’s there with Lissa. Today, Lissa has purple streaks in her hair and purple nail polish. Purple is her favorite color. Once she and Kaydee went out to a party and Lissa wore all purple clothes, and she even had purple lipstick and purple boots.