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only offered her tent and storage space in her basement, she also e-mailed each farm that we thought of visiting. “To make sure it’s okay for you to work, Rosario,” she said. “In Canada, kids have to be twelve years old to work, even with their parents’ permission, but hopefully it’ll be okay for you to help your parents while they’re working.”
    Thank goodness Ms. Norton knew these things. In our town in Mexico, everyone worked because otherwise families couldn’t make enough money to buy food. Canada had more rules than I’d ever imagined. Luckily the farms wrote back to say children were welcome.“As long as parents look after them and they don’t eat all the fruit,” Ms. Norton added, giving me a pretend-serious look.
    I have no idea why my parents eventually agreed to my wonderful, impossible plan. Maybe they liked the idea of not paying rent for two months, or maybe they were as curious as I was about seeing the rest of the province. I didn’t ask questions. I wanted to get on the road before they changed their minds again.
    The night before we left, Julie gave me a little white box. “So you don’t have any excuses not to write,” she said. When I opened it, I found a battery-operated light to clip onto my notebook when it was dark out.
    I threw my arms around her, and suddenly I missed her, even though we hadn’t left yet. When I left my friends in Mexico and Guatemala, I knew I might never see them again. I’d never had a chance to say good-bye to my brother. I knew this time everything was supposed to be different. The whole idea was to come back here in September with more money and a whole summer of adventures behind us. If there was one thing I’d learned though, it was that you could never know exactly what was going to happen. So I said good-bye to Julie as though I’d never see her again. She hugged me right back, and Ms. Norton gave us a bag full of chocolate-chip cookies for our trip.
    Early the next morning, our car was stuffed with everything we’d need for our summer adventure: a tent, sleeping bags, a cooler, cutlery and all sorts of other things my parents thought might come in handy. Maybe they were making up for how little we took when we left Mexico for Guatemala, and Guatemala for Canada. It was a wonder the old station wagon could move with all the stuff we’d crammed in.
    We took the first ferry of the day from Vancouver Island to the rest of Canada. Mamá and Papá and I sat outside on the upper deck, watching the seagulls above the ship and the sunlight sparkling on the water. Later, our car rumbled off the ferry with a long line of other cars, and we drove along big highways with farms or trees on either side. After what seemed like forever, we turned onto a smaller road and finally came to a stop in a gravel parking lot with a floppy-headed scarecrow and a big wooden sign that said Green’s Farm— Strawberry Capital of the Fraser Valley .
    â€œWe’re here!” I shouted from the backseat.
    â€œ Vamonos! Let’s go!” Mamá smiled at me in the rearview mirror.“We’ve got berries to pick!”
    I was out of the car in an instant. The farm was exactly like the photo I’d seen on the website. In the last month, Julie and I had spent hours at her computer, looking for farms, and later I brought Mamá and Papá to the computers at the library to show them what we’d found. Beyond the edge of the parking lot, little green strawberry plants stretched far into the distance, all the way to the edge of the forest.
    Two teenagers stood by stacks of white plastic buckets at the entrance to the field. “We pay thirty-five cents a pound,” said the one with pimples and glasses. “Leave the buckets at the end of the row, and we’ll weigh them on your way out. Make sure you get red berries with a bit of the stem on. Not green. Not brown.