by Dalya Moon
Reading this stuff makes my scalp itch like crazy. I read on, unsure if I'm reading fiction or non-fiction. If this is a made-up story, it doesn't have much of a plot.
My head droops under its weight, as do my eyelids. The ornate words blur in front of me. My nose gets closer to the pages, which reek of used books, incense, and garbage.
I roll onto my stomach and bunch my two pillows under my chest. I prop my forehead up with one hand to rest my neck and my eyes begin to blur. I close one heavy eyelid and read further with just the one eye, forcing my vision to not be blurry, and I'm definitely not falling asleep ... this is totally working ...
* * *
This dream is incredibly vivid. I can actually feel the blanket of bees all over me, making me toasty warm. A bee blanket is even more luxurious than freshly-laundered sheets.
This dream feels so much like reality that I reach down and try pinching my arm, to see if I can. The bees hum and move away from my hand.
Hey now. I felt that pinch.
I don't think this is a dream at all, unless you feel pinches in dreams. But of course you can feel pinches in dreams—you feel everything.
I'm inside a beehive?
No, I can't be inside a beehive. I'm big, way bigger than a beehive. Unless I've shrunk. Oh no, I've shrunk! This is a nightmare. What can rescue me? A unicorn. I focus on conjuring up a unicorn, but nothing happens.
I squint in the darkness, expecting to see the waxy honeycombs of the inside of a bee hive, but instead I spot a silver claw. And a silver, glinting shovel the size of my hand. Gardening tools.
The dimensions of my enclosure come into focus. I'm inside a garden shed, on my back, covered in a writhing blanket of humming bees.
A person in this situation shouldn't panic. He should sit up very slowly, so as not to upset the bees and trigger their swarming instinct.
This is what I do, carefully, though my movement does give the bees some concern. They aren't finished feeding me, they say. They gave me their nourishing bee bread, packed balls of pollen held together with honey, but they haven't gotten to the royal jelly.
Royal jelly? How do I know this?
Oh, I'm reading their minds. Of course I am.
I carefully reach over to my pinkie finger and slide off my precious little ring. My mind goes quiet, and I'm alone, lonely. Slide the ring on. Friendship. Family. Togetherness.
Ring off: sad.
Ring on: happy.
All the bees want to do is love me and feed me. Why won't I let them?
In answer, I open my mouth as I lie back down. They drop the sweets onto my tongue. They're good, like candy. Trick-or-treat. I feel sleepy again, and I'm fading away. We are resting now. We are feeding and getting stronger. We are together. We are never alone. We are the hive. We are eternal.
Chapter Thirteen
I'm nearly awake, but my eyes are still closed. I'm in my bed, face-down, and I feel good. REALLY good.
Lights flash behind my eyelids: blue, red, green, yellow, white. My whole body curls up inside itself with pleasure.
I wake up with my face in a puddle of drool and my hand down the front of my boxers. I don't mean to be indelicate, but apparently I was having a very exciting dream. That's what I get for looking at strange, naked bee ladies right before I go to sleep.
I retrieve the book from where it's wedged under my pillow and slip it under my mattress.
* * *
I feel sheepish all morning as I get ready for school.
At breakfast, Gran looks me over. “What's with the suit?”
I look down at the Charlie Chaplin suit, my Halloween costume. I've paired it with a bright blue shirt, though I don't remember making that sartorial decision.
“Lookin' sharp,” Rudy says, handing me a plate of bacon. “All you need is a good belt buckle to bring the look together. Give you some pizazz.”
I don't know if I'm being swayed by his sudden generosity with pork products, or the knowledge of how much dough he's got in his bank account, but I'm starting to like Rudy.
“I could wear this suit to your wedding,” I say.
Gran and Rudy exchange a look.
“What?” I ask, worried maybe the wedding's off, along with my plans for a kidney-shaped swimming pool paid for my Mr. Money Bags, Rudy.
“We're actually moving the wedding up to this weekend,” Gran says.
I clap my hands together. “Awesome!”
She seems surprised by my enthusiasm.
“Hey, there's my man.” Rudy grabs my arm and jostles it, which doubles our total amount of body contact to date. I give him a high-five for his efforts.
“Would you wear a belt buckle if I bought you one?” he asks.
“I think I would! But just with jeans, not with this.”
“A fine buckle draws the ladies eyes to your package!” he says.
“Rudy!” Gran says chidingly.
He leans back and adjusts his shiny buckle, this one bearing the image of a tractor. “It's true,” he says. “Works like magic.”
For some reason, I find this hysterical and can't stop laughing for quite some time. Gran's disapproving looks at both of us only fan the flames.
* * *
At school, I'm mentally spending my future generous allowances from Rudy when I'm slammed into my locker by six feet of human.
I turn and tackle, sending us both to the ground.
“Fight, fight!” someone yells, and I wonder who's fighting. Me. I guess they mean me.
Shad Miller, his arm twisted behind his back, is laughing underneath me. “Easy, karate kid! I just wanted my hacky sack back!”
I look around, confused, and he springs out from under me, along with my legs, and now I'm on my back. More kids gather around, and I reach for someone's hand to help me up, but the hand pulls away. Now Shad's on top of me, pinning me down, his mouth way too close to my face. “One one-thousand,” he says with cereal-breath.
I'd rather not be here, on the dirty floor, so I sit up. Shad seems surprised by this. I grab him, turn him around, and secure him so he can't breathe on my face.
Now that Shad's no longer moving, the crowd of fight enthusiasts disperses, dissatisfied there will be no bloodied noses or suspensions.
“You win,” Shad wheezes. “Let me go.”
I apologize and take my knee off Shad's back. How my knee got there is a mystery, as that wasn't a move we learned at karate. Like I said before, I suspect our instructor is a pacifist. We do a lot of what seems suspiciously like Tai Chi in my Tuesday evening karate class.
Shad's eyes are wide-open, his pale, freckled cheeks are flushed, and his red hair is sticking up as though somebody rubbed it with a static-charged balloon. “How are you not on the wrestling team?” he asks.
I shrug off his suggestion, not wanting to embarrass myself by admitting the grunting during wrestling alarms me—not hearing it, but imagining myself grunting in front of an audience.
I stand and pat myself down, relaxing only when I find my precious ring safely inside my jacket pocket, along with Shad's hacky sack.
“We were going to exchange some information,” I say. “What were you doing downtown on Halloween, and did you see anyone at the pawn shop?”
“You ARE a weird dude, Zan. I rescind my invitation to wrestling club.”
“Darn.”
He stuffs his hands in his pockets and rocks back and forth as though considering. “Okay, I'll tell you at lunch.”
The bell rings for class and the halls start clearing out.
“Dude, spit it out.”
“Fine,” he says. “So, I'm dating Rosemary Stonehurt, right?”
“Sure,” I say, although I did not know that. Some detective I am.
“And she said she'd let me see her naked if she bought me this necklace she likes.”
“Jewelry for sex? There's a word for such exchanges.”
He lets out an embarrassed laugh. “No, we already had sex, like, seven times. But only in t
he dark and I had to keep my eyes shut. I wanted to see what was going on, you know?”
I don't need this level of detail for my investigative purposes, but I don't discourage him from going on about shapes and textures and imagined weights.
Shad's really great story is rudely interrupted by the principal yelling at us to get to class. We part, me still with the hacky sack, and the story not yet drawn to its conclusion.
The morning goes by so slowly.
Ms. Mikado reads us a poem about nectar and flowers, blushing at the end. I think some of the things in the poems may be metaphors, but I don't dare raise my hand.
James pokes me on the shoulder and asks, “Would a Zamboni clean the blood off a hockey rink or just spread it around?”
“Why is there blood on this hockey rink?”
“Broken nose. Duh.”
Normally this sort of thing would provoke a long discussion, but today I'm not interested in such debate with James. My mind is a million miles away, thinking about naked body parts, female.
Raye-Anne Donovan keeps throwing paper balls at me and giggling. I threaten to give her a spanking and she holds up a written note saying Yes, please!
Cool it, I tell myself. Raye-Anne's just a friend, practically one of the guys. She's not your girlfriend, whatsername. Austin. I smack myself on the forehead for momentarily forgetting my beloved's name. Some people she knows from when she was little call her Tina and some people call her by her full name, Austina. I call her baby sometimes, or even white chocolate.
Ms. Mikado has handed out copies of the poem for us to analyze, but every line of it says sex to me, and my eyes keep wandering over to Raye-Anne's feet in their little boots, hugging her calves. Even Julie looks good today, in a striped shirt that hugs her chest, making the stripes pull apart in two spots.
To take my mind off sex, I finally resort to imagining James on Halloween, eating those pickled duck eggs that were painted to look like eyeballs.
* * *
I eat lunch on the back steps with Shad Miller, even though it's a chilly day and nobody else wants to sit back there. The cold air will do me good, I figure.
Shad's story peaks with a glorious session of nude teen frottage, also known as dry-humping, with one tiny night-light on. “It was amazing,” he says, but his face clouds over as he relates the next part. They got carried away, something slipped, and the next day Rosemary had to see her doctor for emergency contraception. That was why she wasn't at school the day after Halloween.
“So, does the pawn shop figure into this story at all?” I ask. “You sorta hinted you saw something there.”
“This is really sick, but I pawned one of my grandmother's porcelain dolls,” he says. “I feel super bad too, because the necklace was gone when we went to buy it, so I bought Rosemary a bracelet. But then, I felt so bad about stealing from my grandmother that I got an advance on my next five allowances and went back to the pawn shop to buy the doll back, but everything's gone. All the inventory's gone and there was a construction crew there working double overtime Sunday night.”
“Tough break about the doll, but there's always eBay.”
“Good idea,” he says.
“On Halloween, was it an old man who bought the doll from you?”
“Yeah, an old guy with a funny suit. Not cool like yours.”
“Did you see anything suspicious? Was anyone else inside the pawn shop?”
“I don't know. I was distracted by this smokin' hot Cinderella princess who came in. I remember her because Rosemary was jealous of her all night. Yeah, that was great. It made her totally want me. Chicks are weird.”
I agree with him, wondering for a moment if Austin might make more time for me if I were hanging out with, say, Raye-Anne Donovan more frequently.
I toss him his hacky sack, which he catches on his knee, then drops. “Oops. Gotta practice more. Getting rusty,” he says.
My precious ring calls to me, so I slip my hand in my pocket and put it on to help me think.
So, Newt was alive when Cinderella went in there, Cinderella being my lovely neighbor Crystal. And Detective Wrong has been questioning Crystal.
Well, Newt, as much as it saddens me to think of my lovely neighbor being mixed up with all this, it seems she's a Person of Interest in this case.
* * *
After school, I go straight to Crystal's house and knock on the door. The sun is low on the horizon, starting to turn things gold. Nobody answers the door, which makes sense, since she's probably still at work at the veterinarian clinic.
Back at my house, just as I'm rummaging around for something to eat, I get a text message from Gran, reminding me we're meeting at Rudy's house for dinner tonight, which I completely forgot. I've never been to his house before, but it's up on the ridge and not very convenient to get to by bus, so she's left me some cash for a taxi.
At half-past five, the taxi I ordered by phone flashes its lights out front.
I get in the taxi and the driver compliments me on my sharp suit. I've added a black tie to the blue shirt, and I do look good.
The driver chats with me about my marks in school (not great) and what I want to do when I graduate. “Sports scholarship?” he asks.
“I tried basketball, but I've got too much rhythm. I start dancing out there, lookin' all good, and I forget about the ball.”
He laughs and drums on his steering wheel. He's got dark, nearly-black skin and a white beard, trimmed short. There are photos on the dashboard, including a snapshot of twin girls with braids. Recognition fires up a flare in the back of my brain, where faces are stored. If I'm not mistaken, those girls are Shay and Dawna, whom we met at the lake on Saturday.
“Those are my granddaughters,” the taxi driver says. “Traveling across the country now. They say they're doing it for their brother—Jesus rest his soul—but I think they're happy to be free of their mama tellin' them what to do. You got a good mama? You must, to be dressed so spiffy.”
“My mom's passed away, but my grandmother is good. I'm really lucky and I know it.” My stomach twinges with guilt at not mentioning I've met his granddaughters. Omission feels worse than a lie sometimes.
“So, what's it going to be?” he asks, clicking on the turn signal to take a left at the lights. “College? Trade school?” Red tail lights whiz past us, streaking the night.
“I'd like to be a detective.” I'm shocked to hear myself saying these words. When last prompted about my future, I surely said something about becoming a chef at a fancy hotel.
The driver lets out a low whistle. “Do some good in the world, you will. That's a good boy. Maybe I'll introduce you to my granddaughters.”
I smile to myself and tell him that would be nice.
He says, “When you're a detective, you can solve all these murders we've been having in Spiritdell.”
“Haven't there only been two this year?”
He turns and looks at me over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “Two too many! And weird ones. My bridge club's been talking about them non-stop. They're hitting our demographic!”
“I didn't know that. Probably a coincidence.”
“Now what did old people ever do to anyone?” he asks, which I assume is a rhetorical question. I'm sure senior citizens are like everyone—some good, some bad.
“Being a detective is a new idea I'm considering,” I say. “I'm not sure about anything.”
“I'm sure!” he says. “I'm sure we're at your address.” He pulls up to the curb.
I pay him with all the money Gran gave me, and he insists on shaking my hand. “Real nice to meet you, Zan,” he says.
As he drives away, the taxi's tail lights disappearing down the street, I realize I never said my name in the taxi. At least I don't think I did.
I look around for a moment before I go up to the door of the house. Rudy lives on the ridge, overlooking all of Spiritdell, and I can see the neon signs of Chesapeake Avenue from here. The three bridges twinkle like fairy light
s over the water.
To tourists, our little winding Spirit River, running down the middle of the city, is quaint. If you believe the postcards, we're either a small town trying to look big or a big town trying to feel small.
* * *
Rudy may have a big pile of dough, but you wouldn't guess by his house. Maybe it's nicer on the inside, I think on the front step, but a moment later I discover the interior is possibly worse. I understand why he spends so much time over at our house.
I take a seat in a rickety wicker rocking chair in the front room, “the sitting room,” Gran called it, and squeak back and forth. The carpet's got an ugly geometric pattern that moves, but only out of the corner of your eye. When you look directly at the carpet, nothing happens in front of you, but off to the side, the dots and squiggles wave and undulate.
The paintings on the wall are of horses on black backgrounds. I get out of my squeaking rocking chair and get right up close to a painting and touch the surface. Smoothy, velvety. The horses are painted on actual black velvet. I've heard of such things, but never seen one in real life.
Not to be too mean about my wealthy future family member, but if he's going to get all his stuff from garage sales, he should get up early in the morning and hit them before all the good stuff is gone.
“Beans are ready!” Rudy calls from the dining room. This must be one of his odd cowboy expressions, because there are no beans in sight.
With Gran's permission, Rudy gives me a beer to have with dinner. We clink our bottles together and he says, “Thanks for saving me from drinking alone.”
Gran doesn't have a bottle because a lot of commercial beers have wheat in them, and she's super careful about her gluten-free diet these days.
“I have a bottle of your Peppermint Schnapps,” Rudy says, trying to tempt her.
“Water's fine, thanks. I'll be our designated drive,” she says to me.
Rudy clears his throat and gets all serious, like he's about to have a heart attack, then says, “I want to thank you both for saving me from having to eat alone. I am ... grateful.”
He clinks his bottle against mine once more, then against Gran's water glass, and I notice her eyes are wet.