by Dalya Moon
Dawna sticks out her lower lip and Shay says, “But it's still early.”
Those nails on my back. These girls are really hot, and nothing like the girls we go to school with, but as much as I'd like to stay and party with our new friends, my power being on the fritz has dampened my mood. Plus, my girlfriend wouldn't be too impressed. My life isn't just about me anymore; I have to think about Austin's feelings, and the rules of dating.
“You do look tired,” James says.
Shay rests her head on his shoulder. “I'm a night owl,” she says.
The three of them start making whoo-oo owl sounds.
I stop and howl at the sky like a wolf. They turn and stare at me as though I'm a weirdo. Right. They were hooting like owls, but I'm the weirdo.
I walk away shaking my head.
* * *
After leaving James in Shay and Dawna's capable hands, I explore my way through the unhelpful trees, back to the cabin. The semi-wilderness is so dark, the trail bewildering to stay on, and I keep tripping over stumps that have no business existing if I am, indeed, on a trail.
After nearly wiping out for the third time, I sit on a stump to get my bearings. High above, the stars are electric tonight, like bullet holes in a dark wall, letting in the light from another world.
The woods, with all their face-whipping branches, have a sound. Dry leaves scratch each other in the breeze, and the ground is alive with grasses and night-loving things crawling about. Frogs croak down by the lakeside, and something is humming. If I were in the city, I'd say it was a transformer on a power pole, but I'm in the country.
Could the humming be from bees? I know some types don't live in hives, but underground or in trees. Some bee species, such as European honey bees, live communally, in hives, but others are solitary, where every female is fertile. I've done a little research, and there are so many types around here: honey bees, bumble bees, carpenter bees, and some other types, too many to remember.
What I do remember, however, is the term haplodiploid sex-determination system, which is not as sexy as it sounds. When the queen bee lays her eggs, she determines the sex of each batch of offspring by whether or not she lays fertilized eggs. The unfertilized ones become males, or drones. It's funny how both men and women who work in offices sometimes call themselves drones, which would mean they are male hive-worker bees.
If you see a honey bee humming around, it's probably a lady bee, because the females are the workers who go out gathering pollen and nectar from flowers, which doesn't seem like a bad life to me, except the fact they only live about a month. The queen bee can live for years. Lucky girl.
I wonder if there are bees of any type nearby, and if there are, if I could communicate with them.
Eyes shut, I try to isolate the humming sound in the woods. Bees. Black-and-yellow-striped, fuzzy little guys and girls.
I wonder what James is doing now. Oh, hell. Focus, Zan. Bees, bees, bees. Bees' knees. Beeswax. Bee barf. Bee slavery honey.
I breathe slowly, concentrating. I start to feel warm—really warm, like take-off-my-jacket warm.
Something tickles in my throat, like the onset of a cold. I cough, but the tickling doesn't go away. My throat tickles again, as though it's swelling up, which reminds me of my vision of Shay—a vision I do not want to remember.
I cough, and now there's something actually in my throat, in my windpipe.
My breathing is cut off and I'm choking.
I whack myself on the chest with one hand and cough again. The buzz fires up and something comes out of my mouth, then circles lazily in front of me in the thin starlight.
Is that a bee? Did I just cough out an actual, living bee?
I reach my hand to it. “Come here, little guy. I mean … little girl? Land on my finger, if you want.”
As the bee gracefully lands on my finger, I feel a sense of discovery, mastery, and wonder. I am the master of nature.
Pain shoots through my arm. The bee stung me!
I can't yelp, because my breathing is cut off again. I try to swallow, but I can't. I cough, and out comes another bee. And another.
My lungs shake and vibrate, and my whole body is burning out from the inside. My throat is no longer under my control.
My mouth wide open, I have a sensation similar to violently throwing up, only a thousand times worse. Tears stream down my face, and I'm powerless to do anything but hold my mouth open as bees pour out.
My brain lights up white-hot with pain, but not this throat pain. It's something new.
The bees are stinging me.
They're stinging my arms, my hands, my neck, my face.
I clamp shut my mouth and they pile up inside, stinging my tongue and my cheeks. My mouth and throat are swelling, so I do the only thing I can: I begin chewing and trying to swallow.
Somehow I get to my feet. I'm staggering toward the cabin for help, grabbing tree branches to steady myself. I chew and spit as the bees sting me and continue to pour out from between my lips. The ones already airborne swarm around my head.
I fall on my knees and vomit on the ground. Up come bees and the hot dogs I ate for dinner, chunky and acidic.
I'm dying.
Chapter Nine
The bees continue to pour from my suffocating throat.
Stop, I think, and the crowd in my mouth seems to lessen. My throat opens up for some air. Ah, sweet oxygen.
I must control them. I have to try harder, be smarter. I start coughing again, and dry heaving.
Bees, I am your master, I think as clearly as I can.
They sting my ears furiously.
BEES, I command you to STOP everything. Drop dead, bees!
A pulse of power comes from my hands and an orb of light flashes around me.
The bees fall from the air. They're gone, vanished—as though they never existed.
I search the ground for their bodies, but there are none. Gray ashes are on my hands and in my eyelashes. I check my finger, where the first bee stung me, and my arms, to assess the damage from the stings.
The dim light of the stars may be playing tricks on my eyes. I do have red spots, welts, but they're fading even as I examine them.
I spit the taste out of my mouth and cough, the scratching sensation of them lingering in my throat. Bees. Black and yellow bodies, stingers. I'm thinking about them, possibly summoning them back. A jolt of fear liquifies my insides.
Don't think about you-know-whats, I tell myself.
The skin on my arms is smooth again, the stings just an awful memory.
Around me, the wind picks up, and the dry leaves scratch each other angrily. I don't want to be with Mother Nature anymore, I want to be inside a nice cabin with walls and glass windows and electricity.
I'm completely off the trail and I can't find a clear way, but I stagger in the direction I believe leads to the cabin. The tree branches are merciless, but my anger at them keeps my mind off the other things.
When the topic of the yellow and black insects comes to mind, I flick the idea away. Pizza, think about pizza, I tell myself.
Bees. Pizza! Pepperoni! With hot banana peppers.
Bees. NO!
I cough and cough, though there are no obstructions in my throat. The tickle is only my imagination.
When I reach the safety of the ring of light at the front of the cabin, I check my arms. I have only the smallest of red blotches, and those may be from the branches on the trail.
I bang on the cabin door until Julie opens it, wearing heart-dotted flannel pajamas and rubbing her eyes.
“Facepuncher?” she asks, looking left and right of my head for her brother.
“No. Twins this time.”
She shrugs. “Someone's gotta get some,” she says, which is unusual for Julie. She's usually disgusted at her brother's sexual exploits.
We go inside and I sit at the little kitchen table with the peeling blue paint, trying to make sense of the evening—the whole day, really. Under the blue paint on the ta
ble is green, and under that, red. What color is the table? What does anything even mean?
Julie produces a mug of hot cocoa and I am grateful—times infinity—for the beverage and the human company.
“I was totally asleep for a bit,” she says, tossing mini marshmallows into her own mug. “Did you know, before the Industrial Revolution, people would have two sleeps? They'd go to bed right after dark, then wake up later and hang out for a bit before going back for the second sleep.”
“Before light bulbs?”
“Yeah.”
“I believe it,” I say.
After a few more sips, my jaw finally stops shaking. I didn't realize it was trembling until it stopped.
“I nearly killed myself out there,” I say.
She sets her mug down hard, with a bang. “We have to get you proper mental help.”
“No, no, I'm not depressed. I was trying to work my bee power. My so-called defensive power.”
She asks me to continue, so I tell her what happened, as best as I can make sense of it all.
When I'm done, she asks, “You're sure you didn't imagine all this bee stuff? Bees do not live inside people, whatsoever.”
Everything happened so fast, but some of the ash remains on my hands, which I hold out to her. “They disintegrated into these ashes. That's not regular dirt.”
“That dust? Could have come from the bonfire.”
“It didn't. I'm telling you, the bees were really there, and they were clumping together, all angry.”
“Bees do have a swarming instinct,” Julie says. “When one bee stings someone or something, she lets out a pheromone to drive the other bees crazy. Well, not crazy. They're just doing what they're programmed to do, for the survival of the hive.”
“Since when do you know about bees?”
“Uh, since they keep stinging me? Know the enemy, I say.”
“I'm sorry.”
She catches me under the chin with her finger. “Don't apologize. I know you didn't mean it. James and I are going to help you with this, because that's what friends do. I could ask my family doctor for a referral to a good psychiatrist.”
“Ugh. Julie! I'm not crazy or depressed, and I'm not going to a psychiatrist.”
“We both saw that dead body. There's trauma counseling, I think. Didn't that cop lady say we could talk to someone for free? Deal-io! Hey, we could go in as a couple. That would be funny.”
“You're doing okay though. No nightmares or anything, right? That scene was pretty gruesome.”
She fidgets with the mini marshmallows, licking their flat sides and gluing them into towers. “Actually, I don't think about it much, though I do want to drive by there and look at the place again sometime, just to see everything standing there, real and solid. Seems almost like something that happened on TV, or to someone else.”
I think about what Ms. Mikado has said in class about memory, and how time is supposed to dull our pain and highlight our joy, when our brains are working properly.
“That's good,” I say. “A little disassociation seems healthy.”
She makes explosion sounds as she flicks over her marshmallow towers.
I catch her hand in mine and give her what I imagine is a weak smile. Julie's so pretty, not like her brother, who looks like her but without the pretty. That guy, Liam, doesn't know what he's missing out. He should not have stood her up at the Halloween party.
“What are you thinking?” Julie asks.
I drop her hand and pick up my mug of cocoa again. “Liam's a dickweasel.”
She sighs. “I wish I had magic powers or psychic powers.”
“No you don't.”
“Don't tell me what I want or don't want.”
“Julie ...” I feel strange and tingly all over, as though I need to hug her or something. If I could hug her, everything would be much better. Her pajamas are so cute. They have little hearts on them, and they make me feel safe.
The door to the cabin blows open and James struts in, his hands on his hips.
“Oh, Hell no,” I say. “We're never going to hear the end of this.”
“Ew,” Julie says, taking one look at the miles-wide grin on her brother's face. “Oh, ick. I'm going back to bed. Ick.”
“TWINS!” James says.
“Never mind me, you're the one with the truly magical power,” I say. “Must not have been that great, you weren't gone for long.” Even as I'm talking, I realize how wrong I am. The little clock on the kitchen wall, a vintage '50s style that plugs into a wall outlet and hums constantly, shows the time as three in the morning. I was in the woods with the bees for three hours?
“Jealous?” James asks. “You only have one girlfriend, and you only had sex with her once.”
“Say-what-now?” Julie sputters. “Once?”
James is sitting at the table now, so I kick him in the shin. That was private information, and not anybody's business. Austin and I were together the night we met—for the record, it was twice—but she hasn't felt comfortable being with me in that way since. Sometimes she says I'm too young, and says she'll reconsider after I turn eighteen. I love her, so of course I'm willing to wait a few months, but I wonder what her excuse will be then. Thinking ahead makes my heart feel heavy, so I try not to.
“Is that true?” Julie asks. “I don't know what to make of this. I thought women's sex drives sped up as they got older. I figured she'd be all over you, every chance she got.”
“I'm tired.”
“Do you guys do other stuff?” Julie asks. “Like, are you just making out all the time or, um ...” She covers her face with her hands, as though finally realizing how embarrassing she's being.
“Twins!” James says.
“Yes, James, you win,” I say. “You win the prize. It's a trophy. Julie and I wanted to surprise you, but we got you a sex trophy. We'll pick it up when we get back to town.”
“Awesome,” he says, then without missing a beat, he continues, “so what happened was I got to Shay and Dawna's cabin, and—”
Julie interrupts with, “Zan was nearly killed by magical bees that came out of his mouth!”
“What? How?”
“Pretty much what Julie said.” I tell James what happened, careful to access the memory as though standing outside of it. I don't want to remember the bees too vividly and trigger a return—not just for my own safety, but out of fear of what might happen to the twins. I might have some immunity to bees that come from myself, but my friends could get hurt.
“Make one bee now,” James says. “Just one.”
“No. Too dangerous.”
Julie yawns, and within seconds James and I are yawning too. I really am tired, which is such a comforting feeling compared to being scared or shaky.
“Yawn transmission successful,” Julie says, getting up to return to bed.
After she's wandered off, James pulls his chair in closer and asks if he can tell me what he did with Shay and Dawna. It's nearly four in the morning now, but I guess I could stay up a few more minutes.
“That Dawna,” he says. “The quiet ones are always the freakiest, you know that. Dawna was the one with the earrings and the tiger-lady nails, right?”
“Yup.” I sip my cocoa and try to be a good friend, though as he describes his adventures, I'm uncomfortable with how vivid the description seems, as though I was actually there, experiencing it. Perhaps this is what Heidi meant about the visions getting more real, less about simply observing.
I don't know how I feel about this. What I do—finding secrets—isn't simple and clearly beneficial, like, say, getting the winning lottery numbers. I've tried to help girls, to offer guidance when I've seen bad things in their future, but is that my call to make? I like the idea of becoming more powerful, but at what cost?
If my visions continue to get darker, my power might disappear, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
* * *
By the time we crawl out of our respective beds, it's noon. Most of our f
ood is gone, since James and I ate Gran's sandwiches late last night, so we eat hot dog buns with peanut butter for breakfast then pack up to return home.
My mind is on more earthly things and off magic bees and visions. I want a shower that's not freezing cold from Julie using up all the hot water ahead of me, and I want to see Austin. Specifically, I want to see that sweet smile she makes when I walk in the room. Her smile makes me feel like the wealthiest guy in the world, and I can't wait to hold her in my arms. I'm going to hug her and never let go.
James is driving the Jeep, and as we make our way back to town from the lake, we round the corner where the gas station is and all three of our cell phones beep and vibrate simultaneously.
“Back in range,” Julie says, checking her texts from where she's sitting in the front passenger seat. I'm in the back because I was slow to call shotgun.
What I see on my phone makes me swear. There's a series of messages from Austin, with the second-to-last one saying she's going out of town for a bit. The last one says Don't be angry, and she's included a frowny face.
I wasn't angry ... until she told me not to be.
“What's all the swearing about back there?” Julie asks.
“Nothing.”
She turns and bats her dark eyelashes at me. Her eyelids are sparkly. Since when did Julie start wearing girly makeup every day?
“You should talk about your feelings,” she says. “It's healthier. Those swarming bees might represent your repressed emotions. You know, when people say they're choked, it's because their throats actually close up from emotion.”
James goes, “Hah!”
“I'm fine, I swear. I had a reminder on here for some homework I forgot about.” I'm not sure why I'm lying to Julie, but I guess I'm embarrassed my girlfriend isn't making me a priority. Or, rather, I feel embarrassed this bothers me.
Instead of sending Austin a message back, I pull up some local newspapers and look for the funeral announcements. We're in luck: Newt's funeral is this afternoon.
“Who wants to come with me to a funeral?” I ask.
James says, “Cricket noises. Tumbleweeds.”
Julie giggles. “I'll go with you. Oh, I can wear my new black dress!”