It seemed like we spent a million years picking strawberries. The girl in purple never came back, and no one else talked to us all week. I tried to distract myself by working out something interesting to write about, but so far nothing had happened that I felt like writing down. I practiced English words to myself as I dropped strawberries into my white bucket, repeating all the words I could think of that had vowels we didn’t have in Spanish. When I first started learning English, bear and bird, hip and heap, or collar and color all sounded the same. Between the rows of the strawberry fields, I practiced all of them until each word sounded different, and I thought I sounded Canadian. Then I tried to imagine what Julie was doing at her father’s place—swimming in a pool on top of his skyscraper, or picnicking with him in a park (or, more likely, playing games on her computer or hanging out at the library). I wondered if she and her father would go to the museum she had told me about with the huge movie screen that wrapped around the audience like a giant bubble.
