There, in the corner next to the fireplace. There, in a small pile set neatly on a chair with a caned seat.
A blue pack with straps. A box of narrow yellow sticks. A box of thicker colored sticks. A small pair of the same tool the mother giant used to cut flowers. A packet of white paper. Even from this distance, Cricket could see that the paper was lined. What did it remind him of?
“Hey,” he said. “Does that paper remind you of something?”
She pressed herself further against the screen and squinted.
“Nope,” she said after a moment. “Nothing.”
“Something on Vole’s boat.”
“Quit being so mysterious and just tell me.”
“The paper boat,” whispered Cricket. “Vole’s paper boat.”
Vole’s paper boat? This time she thought a little longer. The packet of lined paper, white and rectangular, seemed to glow from where it sat among the other supplies on the caned chair.
“You’re right,” she said.
The two little creatures hung outside the window screen, gazing in at the pile of shining white paper. They pictured Vole, quiet Vole, mending his fishing net in his lap at night, its silvery filaments spilling onto the deck below. They pictured the ancient paper boat, set in the middle of the polished wooden table, glowing in the lamplight of Vole’s living room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WATCH ME!
Hey!” yelled Firefly. “Watch me!”
She balanced on the rubber duck’s rump and then zoomed straight up into the cloudless blue. She flew so fast that everything around her—the white birch, the river below, Peter and Cricket looking up—blurred together. When she ran out of steam, she slowed to a hover and looked down.
“Well?” she called down to Cricket. “How fast?”
“Three seconds!”
Three seconds. Her best yet. All this practice was paying off. Soon she would definitely be able to get to the moon and back in a single day. Take that, giants, she thought. They had their silver spaceships, but she had wings.
“Now watch me,” said Cricket when she floated back down to the raft.
He crouched on the very edge, just above the lashed-on plastic milk jug.
“Are you watching?” he said, and he pointed to a leaf fluttering down from the maple tree. “I’m going to try a maple leaf!”
Firefly said nothing. There was no way he would be able to catch something so big. Yes, he’d come a long way from the beginning of the summer. But this was not a fluff; it was a leaf. It was at least twice as long as Cricket’s body.
“Are you watching?” yelled Cricket, and he waved both wings in the air.
“Watching,” said Firefly.
“Watching,” said Peter.
Cricket sprang off the edge of the raft, wings open, and—
—oh no—
“Yikes!” said Firefly.
She hovered as Peter pulled the leaf off Cricket. He lay dazed on the sand, flat on his carapace.
“Did I catch it?” he said.
“Well . . . ,” said Firefly.
“Kind of,” said Peter.
He reached down and flipped Cricket upright and helped him up to the raft. Compared to Peter, the raft was tiny. Compared to Cricket and Firefly, the raft was huge.
“Peter!” came the call from the giants’ house. “Dinnnnnnnner!”
Peter pushed the raft under the rock and turned to Cricket and Firefly.
“Tomorrow morning?” he said.
“Tomorrow morning,” said Firefly and Cricket.
Firefly zoomed high into the air above Peter’s head.
“Race you,” she said.
“Me too!” said Cricket.
And they were off, the three of them, to see who could get to the giants’ house first. So far, Cricket or Firefly had always won.
But tonight was different. Tonight Peter covered three times as much ground in a single stride as one of Cricket’s leaps. Cricket tripled his efforts, but it took all his strength to keep up the pace. Firefly pumped her wings as hard as she could, but even she could barely keep up. By the time Peter jumped onto the first step of his porch, the tiny creatures had just managed to stay even.
“I almost won!” said Peter. “I almost beat you!”
Cricket and Firefly were too out of breath to do more than pant. Cricket flopped on his carapace on the stone in front of the giants’ porch. Firefly fluttered her wings just enough to stay afloat on the air. The mother giant suddenly appeared right behind the window screen.
“PETER! DINNNNNNER!”
Cricket clapped his wings over his ears. Firefly spiraled over and over, bowled over by the sheer force of giant decibels. Just as she recovered, and just as Cricket gingerly removed one wing from one ear, came another giant shock wave.
“I’M RIGHT HERE!”
Was that Peter? Neither of them had ever heard him make such a loud sound.
“Well, come on in, then,” said the mother giant.
And in went Peter. Slam. The sound of the front door closing behind him was louder than either Cricket or Firefly remembered it being. Scrape. Even his chair, as he pulled it out from the table to sit down, was louder than they remembered.
“Did you hear that?” said Cricket, once they were safely on their spying perch.
His voice was full of surprise.
“Of course I did,” said Firefly. “It was hard to miss.”
“Peter was as loud as the giants.”
“I know.”
They looked at each other then, but said nothing. They didn’t have to. Each knew what the other was thinking. The voices of the elders sounded in both their heads: Miniature giants are nothing but future giants.
Later, when Peter was asleep, they spied on the mother and father giants at the kitchen table.
“I don’t know what to do,” said the father giant.
“Me either,” said the mother giant.
“I don’t know how to help him,” said the father giant.
Firefly floated up a few more inches, so she could get a better view. The mother giant was looking down at the table.
“He won’t talk about him,” said the father giant.
“He misses him too much, David.”
“I went down there to the beach, but he wouldn’t say a word about Charlie. He tried to introduce me to his imaginary friends instead.”
The father giant leaned forward in his chair and held the mother giant’s hand in his own. “He used to be an ordinary kid playing catch on the beach with his best friend, and now he’s out there talking to crickets and fireflies.”
“Everyone needs friends, David.”
“Real friends, Beth. Actual friends. Human friends. Not crickets and fireflies.”
Cricket and Firefly waited for the mother and father giant to say something else, but neither of them did. After a while the father giant got up and cleared the table and began to wash the dishes. The mother giant dried them and put them away.
Firefly pushed off into the dark air, down the shore to the boat hidden behind the tiger lilies. Cricket leaped along beneath her.
Deep in the woods, the clearing was already bright with fireflies, and cricket music rose around them. Just then Firefly missed her nation. She missed swooping out of the knothole and gathering in the clearing with her friends. She missed daring them to go higher than the first branch. She missed trying to shock them into forgetting how to fly, and then hearing the thud, thud, thud all around her.
More than anything, she missed Elder. She looked up at the sky, glittering with stars. Which one was he? Was there any way to know?
When I fly up there, maybe I can find him, she thought.
But how would she know which star was Elder?
Below her, Cricket hopped along in time to the music. For a minute he wished he was singing too. His life would be simpler if he was still in school. If he could have just made himself sit dutifully through Telling Temperature and High Jumping and Fear
of Giants class, if he hadn’t stormed out that day, Cricket could be out there with the other crickets now, making music in the night. He even sort of missed Teacher.
But not as much as he missed Gloria.
He pictured her, her blue-green eyes, her desk and chair in the far corner, the way she had told him to go, told him to be free, told him to escape for the both of them. It was because of Gloria that he had come so far, he told himself—further than any other cricket had ever come—with his catching. He reminded himself of that. But still. It wasn’t easy.
Just then, above him in the sky, he could have sworn that Firefly sighed.
They came to the fork in the path. If Firefly flew straight and Cricket turned left, they would end up not at Vole’s boat but at their separate nations. Firefly slowed and Cricket paused. From the woods and marsh rose the song of the crickets, and the glow of the fireflies lit the deep woods.
After a moment, they looked at each other.
Then Firefly gave a single mighty pump of her wings.
Cricket crouched, all six legs tensed, and then sprang into the air.
“We’re back!” called Firefly, swooping through the open galley window.
Cricket leaped nimbly—one, two, three—from the shore to the top of the tallest tiger lily to the deck, and then into the living room, where Vole, twig broom in paw, was sweeping the floor. A leaf full of minced tubers and fried fish waited for Cricket and Firefly on the wooden table, next to the old paper boat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE NEW GIANTS
The getaway raft was ready for final inspection. Cricket leaped its length and width several times, counting to make sure that each side of the raft was composed of an equal number of leaps.
“One, two, three,” he murmured under his breath. “Four, five, six.”
Peter sat back and watched nervously as Cricket circumnavigated the raft. After the third time around, Cricket stopped. Out of breath, he nodded to Peter. The raft had been measured by Cricket, and no creatures were better at measuring than crickets.
Then it was Firefly’s turn. Peter held tight to the mooring rope and let the raft drift into the current while Firefly flew back and forth above it from a height three times as tall as Peter. Her job was to note any places where the bound driftwood rode too low in the water. This was where Firefly’s keen vision proved invaluable.
“There,” she called, pointing with one wing, “and there, and there.”
Once Peter hauled the raft back to shore and reinforced its weak places with additional driftwood, the raft was finished. Enormous though it might be, it was beautiful. Its twine knots were tight and secure. The red balloon atop the fishing-pole mast bobbed in the morning breeze. And the blue stars blanket flag, and the yellow rubber ducky made it cozy and inviting.
“Now for the final touch!” said Peter, and he unloaded the brown paper grocery bag he had lugged down to the shore.
A bag of oyster crackers.
A bottle of chocolate milk.
Three carrots.
An apple.
“That should do it,” he said, and he stood back to admire the raft. “We’re ready.”
“What are we ready for, exactly?” said Cricket.
“To make our getaway,” said Peter.
Just then there was a sound, a grinding noise, from the far bend of the road. All three of them turned to look.
The strange noise grew louder and louder and louder until a huge truck, enormous even by giant standards, hove into view. It trundled past Peter’s driveway, and came to a shuddering halt by the empty giants’ house down the road from the boy’s house.
This was something entirely new.
Then came the sound of thunder. Cricket glanced up at the sky, but it was cloudless, the dark blue of late summer. He looked back down the road, toward the empty giants’ house. Ah. The back of the enormous truck was rolling up into the roof. The truck was full of giant furniture and boxes. Boxes and boxes and boxes.
Three unfamiliar giants jumped down from the high cab and tromped around to the yawning-open back of the truck. They shouted to one another in voices so deep and loud—
OUCH—
—that Cricket and Firefly both clapped wings over ears. Giants! So loud!
Peter didn’t move at all. He stood absolutely still, watching.
Another sound of thunder, but this time it was a ramp that one of the new giants pulled down from the back of the truck. One giant thudded up the ramp into the shadowy interior, the second stood at the bottom of the ramp, and the third halfway to the house. The first one began hauling boxes out two at a time. He thunked down the ramp and handed them to the second giant, who turned and tromped them over to the third giant. The third giant propped open the door to the empty house with the first two boxes.
The assembly line picked up speed. These giants were fast despite their massive size. Boxes and boxes, two at a time, disappeared into the interior of the empty giants’ house. Cricket and Firefly watched, wings still protecting their ears, until all the boxes had disappeared from the truck and were in the house.
Then the giants began unloading the furniture.
Despite her best efforts, Firefly trembled.
Cricket knew how she felt. All six of his legs were tensed.
After many weeks of spying on the giants, Firefly and Cricket were almost used to the hugeness of their kitchen table and their four-legged chairs and their hearth with its dark, enormous pit.
But to see the size of giant furniture now, in the stark light of day, was shocking. The three new giants abandoned their assembly line and moved each piece of furniture together, their muscles straining. Grunts and groans rose from their bent bodies as they struggled inside the house and then out again, straightening their backs, rolling their necks, shaking out their arms.
“You know what this means?” said Cricket suddenly.
“Of course I do,” said Firefly, who didn’t.
“It means that a new giant family is moving in,” said Cricket. “Just like the mother and father giant said.”
Peter said nothing. He didn’t correct them the way he usually did—they’re not giants; they’re my parents—because he was still staring in the direction of the truck.
Just then an unfamiliar car came humming around the bend. As it approached the road where they stood watching, a blinking light appeared. Firefly scowled. She despised giant-made sources of light. So bright, so unvarying. So monotonous. So unlike the dancing, moving light of a firefly.
Peter still said nothing.
The car turned onto their road and slowed. Gravel spurted from under its wheels. It was a brown car, dusty-sided.
Whoosh!
As it passed, Cricket and Firefly huddled into themselves and covered their heads with their wings. No matter how good Cricket had gotten at catching, he was no match for a single piece of gravel flung from the wheel of a moving car.
The car slowed and slowed and slowed, and then it stopped. Cricket and Firefly held their breath as the two front doors of the dusty-sided brown car opened simultaneously.
“Giants,” whispered Firefly. “More giants.”
I told you so, thought Cricket, but he said nothing. Firefly squinted. A tall male giant. A slightly less tall female giant of the same age.
“A father giant,” said Firefly.
“And a mother giant,” said Cricket.
More giants, right here, right in Firefly Hollow. Then one of the back doors of the dusty-sided car opened, and they watched in silence as yet another giant emerged. Except this one wasn’t a giant.
This one was a boy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WHAT DO THEY DO IN GIANT SCHOOL?
Clink. Clink.
Gulp. Gulp.
Clink. Scrape. Gulp.
“So the new family is here?” said the father giant.
“They’re here,” said the mother giant.
“Did you meet them yet?”
“No
t yet. They just moved in this morning. I thought I’d make them a cake tomorrow, as a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift.”
The father giant cleared his throat. The sound was so loud and gruesome, even through the window, that Firefly and Cricket cowered on their spy perch.
“And did I hear right, son?” he said. “Do they really have a boy your age?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you two can be friends.”
“No thanks.”
The father giant sighed. The mother giant turned to the boy.
“Maybe you can be friends with Cricket and Firefly and the new boy.”
Clink. Scrape. Gulp.
“Nope,” said the boy. “Two friends are enough for me.”
The father giant cleared his throat again. The awful sound was nearly enough to tumble Cricket right off the window ledge.
“Look, Peter,” the father giant said. “School starts next week.”
“Not for me it doesn’t.”
“Peter.”
“David,” said the mother giant. “Shh.”
“Yeah,” whispered Firefly to Cricket. “Shhh.”
She fluttered up and down to keep warm. The chill in the air was unmistakable. Soon the leaves would turn red and gold and brown. The first frost would come, and then the first snow. The cricket and firefly nations would settle in for their long sleeps.
Not me, she thought. Not Peter and Cricket and me, the nation of three.
Cricket hopped back and forth on the window frame to keep warm. For a minute he thought of the School for Young Crickets. It was always warm in school. Then he pushed the image out of his mind. Be tough, Cricket.
Peter pushed back his chair: SCRAPE. Both Firefly and Cricket winced.
“So loud,” Firefly said.
“Yeah,” said Cricket. “It’s as if he got bigger and louder overnight.”
Cricket sounded like an elder, thought Firefly, always warning them about how giants got bigger before your very eyes. The front door opened, and there was Peter.
“He looks the same,” said Firefly, and Cricket agreed.
Then, down the road, the door to the other giants’ house opened, and the new miniature giant came outside. This one didn’t leap out the door the way Peter did. His head was down and he moved slowly.
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