Super-Silly Lemonade

The lemonade stand was Blueberri's idea, and by the middle of the morning it was almost ready, and by the middle of the morning it was already going wrong.

It started fine. Lemons, water, honey. Slice. Pour. Stir. A perfectly good jug of lemonade sat on the flat rock in the sun, and if the story had ended there it would have been a very short story.

But Blueberri knows things about her friends.

She knows Tang likes a drink that fizzes, because Tang likes anything that does something. So she went down to the giggling part of the stream where the water comes up in bubbles, and carried some back, and poured it in.

She knows Cheri likes things sour. In went more lemon.

She knows Jackfroot would drink honey straight out of the pot if nobody stopped him. In went more honey.

She knows Taro likes things cold, so she stood the jug in the shallows for a while, and she knows Kiwi never says what he wants, which meant guessing, and Blueberri's guess was mint.

She stirred it.

It had gone a colour.

"That's fine," said Blueberri, to the jug.

Then Tang came past, saw a jug, saw a big red tomato lying in the grass, looked left, looked right, and dropped it in.

Plop.

He walked off whistling. This took him about four seconds and he thought about it for none of them.

At noon, everyone came.

Blueberri poured six cups and handed them round and watched their faces. That was a mistake. Watching faces is the thing Blueberri cannot switch off.

Jackfroot's ears went sideways.

Kiwi swallowed with his whole neck.

Cheri held her cup up to the light and did not drink any more of it.

"It's good," said Jackfroot.

"It's interesting," said Cheri.

"I like it," said Kiwi, in the voice of somebody who did not.

And every single one of them smiled at her.

Blueberri smiled back. Then she took the jug round the back of the rock and added more honey to it, because more honey fixes drinks, and stirred it, and poured a fresh cup, and it was worse.

She stood there holding it.

She could tell exactly how much her five best friends were pretending. She could have measured it. That was the whole trouble with being Blueberri: she had made a drink out of every single thing they loved, and the only thing she had made was five friends being kind to her about it.

Behind her, somebody said, "Tomato."

Taro was sitting on the end of the rock. He was still holding his first cup. He had been holding his first cup for about twenty minutes, and he was, at that moment, roughly halfway through his second sip.

Blueberri turned round. "What?"

"There's a tomato in it," said Taro. "And mint. And two kinds of honey — no, one kind of honey, twice." He had another very small sip and looked up at the leaves while it happened. "Bubble water from the giggling bend, not the still part. Lemon. More lemon after the lemon."

Everyone stared at him.

Nobody else had tasted any of that. Nobody else had drunk slowly enough to.

"You can taste all of it?" said Kiwi.

"One at a time," said Taro. "It takes a while."

And Blueberri, who had been trying to build one drink that contained six friends, sat down on the rock and laughed, and then stood straight back up again, because she had it.

She rinsed the jug out in the stream. She lined up six cups on the flat rock and filled each one with one plain thing: lemon, honey, berry, mint, bubbles from the giggling bend, and the tomato, which she rescued.

"Make your own," she said. "I'll pour."

That afternoon the stand was the busiest thing in the Great Clearing. Blueberri stood behind the six cups and called it before anybody spoke — bubbles and berry for Tang, lemon, no honey, don't argue for Cheri, honey and honey for Jackfroot — six times out of six, all afternoon, and she was never once wrong, and the being-right of it was the best feeling she'd had all day.

Cheri came back for a second cup of tomato and lemon and announced, to nobody, "That one is the only one that tastes like anything."

"THAT WAS ME," said Tang, from somewhere.

At the end of it, when the sun was low and the cups were empty and Blueberri was finally sitting down with her feet in the stream, Jackfroot appeared beside her with a cup he had mixed himself and put it in her hands.

She drank it.

It was exactly right.

"How did you know?" she said.

"You always make mine," said Jackfroot.

Then he was gone again, because he was Jackfroot.

Blueberri stayed where she was with the cup in both hands, and drank the rest of it slowly, on purpose, the way Taro would have.