I miss my routine. My row of quiet habits. I miss Amelia.
And here, in this crowd, it is so difficult to sort out my kids’ feelings from everyone else’s. It’s like walking through mud, there are so many emotions hanging in the air. Desperation. Wonder. Grief. Glee.
Beatrice and Caleb sweat. Their hearts race. Their eyes scan the crowd. Beatrice drums her knuckles on the metal railing too hard; it pings like a loud bell and she winces.
But Caleb is tall. “There!” he shout-whispers, and points his long, lanky finger at a girl. At Amelia.
We weave through more knees, over more toes, and we reach her. Amelia leans over the metal rail, her sundress billowing in the wind, her pile of ropey hair shining in the orange sun. She’s looking at her blue screen. She’s so calm, and we are so worried. She’s simply wandered off, it appears. A Shadow, stretching farther as the sun lowers.
My heart sings but Beatrice’s snarls. She grabs Amelia’s shoulders, spins her so they are face-to-face.
“Don’t do that!” Beatrice shouts, breaking her own don’t-shout-because-the-parents-might-hear rule. “You can’t ever do that, you hear? If you’re not going to talk to us, you can’t just wander away like that, because then we can’t find you. Got it?”
The Merry Band of Five has an internal conflict, as each group must, Sandpaper quips.
Beatrice’s hands are still on Amelia’s shoulders. Her chest heaves like she’s just run as far and fast as the wind. She’s shaking. She is perhaps the desperation I smelled earlier.
Amelia’s eyelashes flutter. Her eyes get glassy and salty. And shaking must be contagious, because Amelia starts shaking too. She nods, then flings her arms around Beatrice’s waist in a tight hug. Beatrice pauses, then hugs her back.
Our fair seekers have overcome another obstacle in their quest, Sandpaper says. They are proving themselves quite worthy of their task.
Amelia and Beatrice stand there like that, hugging, for a long time. I feel like I should wag my tail because hugs! but this feels different. This feels like an I’m sorry hug, rather than an I love you hug. Who knew there is a whole dictionary of hugs? I usually only get the one.
Caleb shifts on his large galumphy feet. “I’m glad we found you, Amelia.”
This breaks apart the I’m sorry hug. Amelia sniffs, lightly swipes at her cheeks. She turns her blue screen toward Beatrice and Caleb.
Beatrice squints at it. “The map?”
Amelia shrugs. She points at a flashing blue dot on the screen. Caleb clucks.
“I get it,” he says. “Your dad. He’s tracking us using your cell.”
Amelia nods.
Beatrice looks from Caleb to Amelia, her fists knotting. “Yeah? Okay. Maybe we should ditch your phone then, A. You know, until—”
But before Beatrice can finish her thought, Amelia turns and chucks her phone over the metal railing. It sails through the orange sunset air in a slow arc, falling, falling. The water is so far below, the splash sounds like a tiny sink drip. I doubt these humans can even hear it.
Plip!
The trio of kids is silent.
Ah, a plot twist this narrator did not see coming! Sandpaper says, tail twitching with delight. Our Merry Band of Five removes itself further from the outside world. It is all going according to literary canon!
FOUR, I stress. Band of FOUR.
“Dang, girl,” Beatrice breathes, looking over the rail at the growing white ring where the phone hit the water. “I just meant we should maybe hide the thing until we could come back later and get it. You don’t do anything halfway, do you?”
Amelia giggles through tears. Another rainbow. We’ve seen a lot of those today.
“And that,” Caleb says, still looking at the white ring sinking phones make, “was our map to Zilker.” He puffs his cheeks. Looks at his watch. Mutters, “Seven twenty-five . . .” Caleb feels conflicted, my whiskers tell me. Conflicted is a bit like playing tug-of-war, but only with yourself. Which is no fun.
The panic I felt just a moment ago—a sailing arc of a tennis ball over a too-tall fence—burbles up again after watching that sailing arc of a cell phone hit the water. I don’t know much about humans and their screens, but I know they rely on them a lot. For directions and seeking food and talking to loved ones. Humans feel safety when they clutch their screens; screens are a dependable, warm blanket. What will we do without one?
Should I turn these kids around now? Lead them back to the church? Follow our scents home and face our punishments?
I should. I—
Scccreeeeee! Scrriiiiittcchh! Screeaaaattchh!
A chorus of high-pitched wails pulses out from underneath the bridge we’re standing on. It sounds like sirens. No, not sirens. The sound—it’s higher than that. It sounds like balloons rubbing against each other. Like Styrofoam squeaking in tight boxes. Like chalk on a sidewalk. I can feel these screeches in every hair of my fur, in every tooth, in my toenails. My head cocks one way, then the other. My silver ears flop.
Sandpaper chuckles at my apparent confusion. He licks his lips. Here is where things get interesting, friends. A temptation to stray from our quest. Our very own siren song. Because lo and behold: here come the bats.
13
Here Come the Bats
It begins as a pulse of noise, but so high-pitched, it’s likely these humans feel it rather than hear it, like being wrapped inside a heartbeat. The hum throbs out from the bridge beneath our feet, rising and vibrating, a silver shimmer of sound wavering across the orange sunset sky.
The smell is next. The stirring of millions of creatures unfurling wings, uncurling toes. It causes a waft of scent to rise to our nostrils. It’s a wild animal smell—musky and earthy. But with a tinge of guano—bat poo.
And then they pour out of the small holes carved beneath this bridge, these bats. One by one, but by the thousands. They pour and they pour and they pour, black ink spilled onto an orange sky. They lift and they swirl, they stretch thin and they cloud together. Moving, pulsing, swaying. Thousands become one.
The bats are the opposite of nighttime: instead of orange dots on a black sky, here are black dots on an orange sky. Alive. Like changing constellations from a too-rapidly spinning earth, each bat a star. Tessa likes to look up at the stars and point out the pictures the constellations make: Orion, Pegasus, Leo, Draco. I wag when she does this, because while I can’t really see the pictures she traces with her delicate fingertip, it makes her happy. But here! These bats lift into a volcano, whirl into a dragon, stretch into a curling snake. I watch this, and I wonder: Do humans see pictures in their heads too?
“Wow,” Beatrice breathes. “I’ve heard about this, but I’ve never seen it.”
Caleb nods once. “One-point-five million Mexican free-tailed bats.”
Bats pull the sky toward them. They climb awkwardly, with great vigor and much flapping. Birds sail like sleek needles over silk, but bats earn every inch of height they gain.
People all around lift their cameras, their screens, and record the masterpiece these bats paint for us. We’re hidden from the approaching adults inside this crowd. It’s hard to be here, though. It’s one thing to sort out my humans’ feelings from the noises in the city: sirens and horns and engines. It’s another here, on this bridge, with all these people. It’s so heavy with mood. I’m surprised this bridge doesn’t collapse.
“A group of bats is called a colony, but it’s sometimes called a cloud. Appropriate, isn’t it?” Caleb says as we watch a more than million bats etch the sky.
Beatrice never takes her eyes off the bats, but she smirks. “You don’t know.” She’s teasing, I believe. Beatrice walks a fine line between teasing and shoving.
Caleb mashes his lips to hold in a grin. “A group of owls is called a parliament. A group of hawks is called a kettle. A group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope.”
Beatrice folds her arms over her chest, breaking the spell by looking away from the bats and at Caleb. “A group of
Calebs is called a smart aleck.”
She means it to be funny, I can tell by her arched eyebrow. But Caleb falls silent. He turns and allows himself to be hypnotized by the bats again. He is stung.
Beatrice feels—we feel—confused and hurt by this. Weren’t we playing? Isn’t that how friends act? Don’t they give each other a hard time? Our hurt blazes slowly into smoky fury. Beatrice grits her teeth, knots her fists. She takes the toe of her boot and kicks the metal rail ping ping ping. “Wake up, bats!” she shouts. “Wakey, wakey!”
The people around us shift away, like they smell a fart. They were just enjoying this mesmerizing sight, and here’s this kid, causing a scene. Caleb folds his long arms over his chest. Amelia edges her chin away from us ever so slightly. We feel frustrated with Beatrice right now.
It’s how they felt about me, hurting that bird.
This is Beatrice’s instinct, this tightness. This kicking.
Ah, more challenges arise for our Merry Band of Five, Sandpaper purrs next to me. He’s licking a dirty orange paw, drawing it casually over his ear. A riff between the main characters, it seems. This makes our quest all the more interesting, does it not? In past times they would duel to the death.
FOUR, I snap. And why are you here? Sandpaper ignores the question. I wish I could ignore things the way a cat can ignore things.
I shake my head, jangle my tags. This is all so new to me, this huge world out here. Our feelings have to be so BIG to get noticed in all this space, all this noise. I blink at the haze of bats still somehow pouring out of this bridge, each individual bat including themselves in the cloud. It’s what emotions feel like to me, I realize. Each feeling is individual, but it blends with others to form shapes and sizes. Some round and swooping and graceful; others pointy and sharp and foreboding. And each feeling, when added to a bigger swirl of other feelings, gets amplified. It’s hard. It would be easier if it were bat by bat.
I whimper a bit, thinking of how overwhelming it can be, all these strong feelings, hacking and punching and pushing one another. Beatrice hears my whine. She stops kicking, stoops, and flings her arms around my neck.
“Thank you for coming with us, Luna,” she whispers into the soft fold of my ear. She squeezes my neck. “I kinda didn’t want you here, but I need you here.”
She sees my duty! Her heart hugs mine, and I give her a quick lick on the chin. She tastes like confusion. She wrinkles her nose and nuzzles me.
The bats squeak and pulse and loom overhead. It seems Beatrice feels my heart because she takes a wavery breath and says, “It’s hard to see just one bat, isn’t it?”
Amelia tilts her chin back to the two of us, nods. Caleb’s grip on his own arms loosens a bit, his Waterfall shifting ever so slightly. “It is.”
Sandpaper coughs a tiny guffaw. Was Luna’s well-timed sob a clever move, or just dumb luck? Let’s see if our protagonist can hold this Merry Band of Five together to the climax of our tale, shall we? When at last we’ll see our true hero emerge.
Dumb luck is better than no luck, cat, I say, and I give Beatrice another quick kiss. And it’s FOUR.
“Hey, there’s that cat again,” Beatrice says, loosening her grip on my neck. “Here, kitty kitty!” She leans over, still squatting, but Sandpaper is too quick. Just a whip of a tail and snap! He’s lost in the crowd.
The moving crowd. Because the spill of bats, while still going, is now thinning. The people are moving on to the next miracle.
A kid on a scooter whizzes by, and Beatrice has to fling herself backward from her squat so her fingers don’t get run over. “Hey!” she shouts in his wake. Her knuckles scrape the sidewalk, eating pebbles. Her head whacks the metal rail.
Caleb and Amelia rush to help Beatrice stand. “Are you okay?” Caleb asks. Amelia squeezes Bea’s hand, checks out her skinned knuckles.
Beatrice dusts herself off. Rubs the back of her head. She feels grumbly like gravel, but when she sees the concerned tilt of Caleb’s eyes, feels the attention from Amelia, she softens like sand. “Yeah. What a mumblehole.”
I don’t understand the word Beatrice uses, but it makes Amelia titter behind her hand.
Caleb blinks. Swallows. “My mother says there is always a better way to express yourself than using a curse word.”
“Better than calling that dude a mumblehole? I don’t think so.”
Amelia is laughing outright now, like bright dandelions popping up from fresh green grass. But Caleb reddens. Shifts. Tugs at the bloody neck of his T-shirt.
Beatrice must pick up on how uncomfortable Caleb is, and here’s one thing I’ve noticed: humans are usually great at knowing how other humans feel. But their own feelings get in the way of them knowing what to do next. Tessa has these magnets that she uses sometimes in counseling sessions; she says the two ends that are alike actually push each other away. Humans do that a lot with each other.
“You don’t ever cuss?” Beatrice asks Caleb.
“Oh, sure, I do,” Caleb stammers. He works his jaw. “We should, you know. Get moving . . .”
“You don’t,” Beatrice says. “But you should. It’d make you feel better. Loosen you up.”
“I don’t need to be loosened.”
“Au contraire, mon frère,” Beatrice says. “I think you do.” And I find this funny because Beatrice is the Knot here. Loosening is something she works on all the time.
“Shout one out now,” Beatrice continues. She waves her skinned hand over the side of the bridge. The sky is now turning lilac at the edges, the lights of the city beginning to bounce off the green-brown water.
“I . . . don’t know. We should get going. Hector will only be at the park until nine. And our parents . . .” Caleb stands on tiptoes, looking over the thinning crowd. “We should go.”
“Cay-leeeeb,” Beatrice sings. She pokes at him with both pointer fingers and bounces on her toes. “C’mon, Caleb . . .”
“Beatrice!” Caleb snaps. Beatrice leaps backward like she’s seen a snake. Caleb’s brow tightens. My brow tightens.
“We should go.”
Here’s the thing. Caleb is a Waterfall. If he wants to say no, he will. He will plow forward relentlessly. But this isn’t a no, and Beatrice knows it. And Beatrice understands relentless. They can both be bloodhounds.
Beatrice lets the should part of Caleb’s comment hang in the air for an extra heartbeat. Then she begins again, gentler.
“C’mon . . .” Beatrice elbows him, rubs her skinned knuckles. “Real quick. Shout out the foulest, stinkiest word you know. Then we’ll go.”
Caleb huffs, rolls his eyes, then nods once. His face shifts. He steps up to the railing, grips the metal, and clears his throat. His frustration melts into nervous excitement, here on the edge.
Caleb breathes in deepdeepdeep, and bellows:
“CHECKMAAAAAAAAAATE!”
He stands there, wavering. His shoulders drop. He beams.
He turns to Beatrice. “Let’s go.”
But Beatrice now blinks. That is rare. “Did you just shout . . . checkmate?”
Amelia mashes her lips, unsure whether or not to giggle.
“I did. And you were right. That felt great. Thanks, Beatrice.”
“But”—Beatrice adjusts the flannel shirt tied at her waist—“that’s not a cuss word.”
“You didn’t tell me to shout a cuss word,” Caleb says. His eyes are shining. Glee, not glum. “You told me to shout the foulest, stinkiest word I know. And that’s checkmate.”
Amelia does it. She giggles.
“Checkmate,” Beatrice repeats. “That’s the foulest word you know.”
Caleb beams, and it’s like watching light glitter through the mist of a Waterfall. “Absolutely! It means death and destruction! It means bloody battles and coldhearted strategy and terrifying defeat and kingdoms falling! It’s the deterioration of a whole society! A regime is about to crumble! The world as you know it will cease to be! If that’s not foul and stinky, I don’t know what is!” Caleb is
fully satisfied. He lifts his chin, and I realize I can’t think of the last time I saw that particular slant of his jaw. It’s usually tucked into his chest.
Beatrice shifts. Here she was, trying to unloosen Caleb, and she’s the one slackening. She steps up to the rail.
“CHECKMAAAAAAAAAATE!”
A man with a bushy gray beard who totters by rolls his eyes. “Kids.”
These kids—my kids—laugh. Together. Caleb and Beatrice head to the opposite side of the bridge.
But Amelia hasn’t had a turn. She steps up on the bottom rail, cowboy-boot toes wedged between metal slats. She leans too far over. My heart leaps into my throat. This bridge is HIGH and the water below is LOW. Beatrice and Caleb both freeze. She is stretched dangerously thin, this Shadow.
Amelia screams, “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
She is red-faced. She trembles. Tendrils of hair shake loose from her ropey braids. But she keeps screaming.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
And then she is done.
I’ve never heard her voice before. It is stronger, more powerful than I imagined. Like a song inside a scream.
She hops backward off the rail and dusts her hands. She jerks her head toward the opposite side of the bridge and marches toward it.
“Well, I’ll be checkmated,” Beatrice mutters. Caleb chuckles.
Beatrice links her elbow through Caleb’s, and he doesn’t recoil.
They follow Amelia.
They’re off to find Hector.
He is their quest.
I follow them.
They are my quest.
14
Vote: Borrow or Starve
Beatrice’s stomach grumbles as they descend the opposite side of the bridge. “I’m hungry,” she says. “This is usually when my mom and I eat dinner.”
Caleb nods. “That’s wise, to get something to eat now. The trail to Zilker Park probably won’t have anywhere to stop for food or water. I think there’s a convenience store a block or so up.”
Luna Howls at the Moon Page 6