She doesn’t say anything to me because I’m not cheating. When we got to her house this time, Grandma called me Peanut.
‘Last summer you were just a peanut,’ she said.
I liked that. But then Ana said, ‘She means you were still a baby.’
I didn’t like that.
‘I’m almost six,’ I told Emma.
‘Five is a lucky number,’ she said.
Today, the boys went camping and us girls stayed behind to pick mushrooms. Emma gave us baskets and plastic bags and told us which mushrooms we were looking out for: black trumpets. In Spanish they’re called las trompetas de la muerte, death trumpets, even though black and dead isn’t the same thing. You just can’t trust English: it translates stuff all wrong. And they’re not even really black; more like very dark brown. I know because Emma gave me a trumpet all of my own in a sandwich bag. I’ve been dragging it along behind me and the bag is so covered in mud already that you can’t see anything inside. My death trumpet is camuflashed. It’s happy, too, I can tell. Emma said that it’s my guide specimen. A specimen is something that’s like a mention of its species.
The boys are my dad, Pina’s dad Beto, and my two brothers. They took the canoe and they’re going to sleep on an island in the middle of the lake. I wanted to go with them, but then I saw Theo putting a bunch of straws in his backpack and I thought best to go with the girls. Yesterday, Pina made us breathe through straws with our heads camuflashed under the water in the lake and it felt horrible. Only Theo lasted a long time, and now he thinks he’s king of the straws and he wants to play at straws all day long.
The grown-up girls are my mom and Emma. The little girls are me, my sister Ana, and her friend Pina who has a woolly dead pilot sweater that doesn’t belong to her tied around her waist. She doesn’t have her own one because she’s not part of the family. We call her Pi, and when she annoys us we call her Pee-Pee and Ana gets real mad. Pi is sad because her mom left her a letter. If my mom left me a letter I’d be happy, but when I said as much to Ana she said, ‘That’s because you’re dumb.’
Ana is ten and she thinks she’s the queen of the forest.
When my mom lent Pina the sweater I instantly wanted mine. Mama said that I could only put it on if I took everything else off. That’s why under my sweater I’m only wearing my swimsuit, and that’s why the mud feels scratchy against my knees as I crawl along. And that’s why I try to stick to the mushy parts, where I can slide along and nothing hurts.
I find a river of mud and follow it, even though it leads me off the track, even though there isn’t really a track because the trees in the grove are planted in rows, and if you look at them from the right spot they hide behind each other, and between the rows everything that’s not a chestnut tree is empty space, and everything that’s empty space is track.
My woolly dead pilot sweater is yellow and tickly, but the sleeves are too long for me and I have to fold them up to my shoulders like an accordion. This morning Theo said that there’s such a thing as a giant slug, and they’re yellow and black and called banana slugs. He said I look like one in my sweater. I liked that. But Olmo said if anything I look like a rotten banana. I told him he has the face of a porcupine and Theo said, ‘Luz está right.’
They all start talking weird when we come to the lake. And that’s why I’m not going to speak English. I’m never ever going to speak English. English makes you weird.
I sit down at the end of the sort of river and rub mud in my face, because everybody knows mud-masks make you pretty. Mud-masks and also drinking tomato juice, but tomato juice is trick juice because it isn’t sweet at all. Then, just next to my foot, I spot something, and that something is a black trumpet. I don’t move. Apart from my eyes. I spot another one, three, four, seven, all together. I take out my guide specimen to check and yep, they’re like twins. According to Grandma, when you find one you’ve found a ton. I turn around, get on all fours again and start singing to them even faster so that more appear.
‘Flashy flashy flashy flash.’
And it works.
Where before there were none, suddenly I can see millions of them. It’s like the Magic Eye pictures in Olmo’s book where if you just stare at the page you don’t see anything, but if you make yourself go cross-eyed you see a dinosaur.
‘Trumpets! Truuumpettts!’
I shout until my mom appears, springing out from between the trees.
‘Where?’ she says.
‘Kneel down,’ I say. But she only crouches down. I point and it doesn’t take long before she spots them too. They’re all over the place, the same color as the dirt. Black trumpets are the real queens of camuflash.
Pina and Ana turn up to pick my trumpets, and I want them to go away but I don’t say anything because they are saying how good I am at this and how excellent my mask looks on me. Emma picks a few and smells them. She says we’re going to do spaghetti with black trumpets, garlic and white wine and, ‘didn’t I tell you five was a lucky number?’
‘I’m a lucky peanut,’ I say.
‘You’re my little truffle hog, that’s what you are,’ says Mama, and she rolls my sleeves back up.
I don’t know what a truffle hog is, but I guess it’s a pig made out of fancy chocolate. I get up and my legs are totally brown, just like my hands and my face, and I guess that’s why she said it. I’m a chocolate-covered peanut.
‘Wanna go shower?’ Grandma asks.
‘Not now,’ I tell her.
‘Okey dokey,’ she says.
Ana and Pi take the trumpets to the house because in the end we’ve collected a ginormous paper bag of them. The rest of us go on walking because now Grandma wants us to find another mushroom, a chanterelle, which is yellow, but it’s not like any of the yellows that Mama has in her basket, or like my sweater, or even like the yellow of the banana slugs which she says only exist on the other coast.
‘Of the lake?’ I ask.
‘Of the country,’ Grandma says.
I want to find the chanterelle. I’m going to find it. We walk. I’ve got so much mud on my knees it’s like there are two cow patties sitting on them. I like them. I like walking with the adults because they talk without whispering secrets to each other and don’t make you do anything with straws. One time, Pina and Ana tried to put a straw up my front bottom because they said that all of us women have a little hole there to make children. But they couldn’t find it, so they told me I don’t have one and that I’m never going to have children, which is fine by me because children can be so dumb and nasty with their little sisters, even when the little sisters are really nice and pretty.
My mom picks a mushroom for her already very full basket.
‘That’s a magic mushroom,’ Emma tells her.
‘Really?’ I ask.
‘She just means it makes you sleepy,’ says Mama.
‘And giggly,’ Grandma says.
‘And it makes you see things,’ says Mama.
I say it doesn’t sound so bad, but it doesn’t sound that magic either.
‘Which one is it?’ I ask, and they point to one in Emma’s hand, but they won’t let me touch it. Emma collects chestnuts and I see her putting them in her sweater pockets which are now all big and bulgy like the stockings she hangs by the chimney at Christmas when we come to see her, and which she fills with trick presents for us, like fruit and pencil sharpeners.
‘Are you going to eat them?’ I ask her.
‘I’m going to paint them,’ she says.
‘What color?’ I ask.
‘I’m not going to paint on top of them. I’m going to paint them in a still life.’
‘Emma’s Pickings: A Still Life,’ my mom says.