The Firefly Code

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  Ilana stood still for a moment, surveying the court. Then she nodded, as if she’d come to a decision. She started dribbling slowly, walking instead of running. Theo hesitated, then came at her. Without looking at me, she called my name, and soared the ball up into the sky. It landed right in front of me, and I caught it on the first bounce. This time I started dribbling. I wasn’t very good at it, but I made it a few yards before Julia was on me. I grabbed the ball to my chest, then pivoted. Benji was heading my way. I passed the ball to him, and he rushed toward the basket. “Shoot!” Ilana called. So he did. It hit the backboard and bounced off, but Ilana was there to catch it and toss it right in. It seemed effortless to her. She high-fived Benji, then rushed over and high-fived me.

  We went back and forth for a few points, but then Ilana took control of the situation. It felt like she knew how Benji and I were going to play even if we didn’t know ourselves. She threw the ball where we were going to be right before we arrived. We were already up by six when I found myself under the basket. “Mori!” she called. I turned and the ball was in my hands. “Shoot! Shoot!” So I did. A clumsy layup, not at all the form that Julia had taught me, but still the ball soared, hit the rim, and danced around and around and around before slipping down for another two points.

  I clapped my hands and jumped up and down. “I never score! Never ever!”

  Ilana threw her arm around my neck. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll be a baller in no time.”

  “Nice shot, Mori,” Theo said.

  “All my coaching is paying off!” Julia added.

  On the next play, Ilana stole the ball away from Julia. Julia was learning, though. Instead of going straight toward Ilana, she headed toward Benji. Theo was covering me, and Julia figured, rightly, that Ilana would throw to Benji. Just as Benji caught the ball, Julia checked him with her elbow. “Foul!” Benji cried. “That was totally a foul!”

  “It was an accident,” Julia said. But I wasn’t so sure. She didn’t normally run at people with her elbows out.

  “Either way, I get my foul shots.”

  Benji stood on the line that Theo had painted the previous fall. He bounced the ball a few times. “Should I do a trick shot? Backward and between my legs?”

  “Just shoot, numb nuts,” Theo said.

  So Benji did. It was an impressive shot, actually, a gorgeous parabolic arch that flew so high up into the sky, I lost it for a minute in the glare of the sun.

  Then it fell down right into Mr. Quist’s backyard.

  “Oh, no,” Theo groaned.

  “You just sent the ball into the land of no return,” Julia told him.

  “I’ll get it,” Ilana said.

  “You can’t,” I said. “Mr. Quist has told us a million times to stay away from his yard. From his house. From his everything.”

  “I’ll just pop over the fence.”

  “Over the fence? Are you kidding?” Julia asked.

  But Ilana was already scrambling up the tree at the end of the driveway.

  “Forget it,” I called up to her.

  “Really,” Julia said. “I can ask my dad to get it when he gets back from his power walk.”

  “No.” She grunted. “I can get it. I just have to figure out how to get down on the other side without messing up the garden.” She edged out on one branch while holding the branch above her. Her sneakers seemed fixed to the lower branch, but she wobbled back and forth. The fence was six and a half feet tall, precisely. Theo’s neighbor, a single man named Meldrick Quist, valued his privacy, and his prized cucumbers, and said that this height blocked the view of passersby—in other words, Theo—while still delivering the proper level of sun to his vegetables.

  “I’m taller,” Theo said.

  “Barely,” she said back. “And I doubt you can balance this well.” She shimmied to the right a little and tugged on the branch.

  “Just swing down and grab it, why don’t you?” Julia asked.

  “If I could just get out a little farther—”

  It’s like we saw her falling before she actually started. Next to me, Benji gasped, and Theo lurched forward. Ilana’s left arm pinwheeled in the air as if she were grasping, grasping for a handhold that would never come. Then her left foot kicked out.

  She tumbled forward, out of sight, away from us. The cacophony of sounds echoed back to us: thump, crash, the cry of a cat, another crash. Nothing from Ilana. Theo ran forward, scrambling up the fence.

  Six and a half feet. Straight down. Was that enough to break an arm?

  I turned toward Julia’s house, ready to run and call for an ambulance.

  “Unbelievable,” Theo said.

  I turned to see him grasping the edge of the fence, peering over. Sticking up above his head was the basketball, clasped tightly in Ilana’s hands.

  Ilana had landed right on a patch of Mr. Quist’s cucumbers, and she returned to our side of the fence covered in goopy seeds. Mr. Quist wasn’t home, so we decided to leave him a note, though Benji advocated for playing innocent. “Easy for you to say,” Theo told him. “You live on the other side of the cul-de-sac.”

  Theo got a piece of paper and a pen from inside and put them in front of me. “Why me?” I asked.

  “You have the neatest handwriting.”

  “And you’re the kindest,” Benji said.

  “And you probably feel the worst about this,” Julia added.

  I took the pen.

  Dear Mr. Quist,

  Due to a tragic basketball accident, one of our members found themselves deposited rather violently into your cucumber patch.

  “Shouldn’t it be herself?” Theo asked.

  “I’m trying to maintain anonymity.”

  We are very sorry for this accident. We know that your cucumbers are irreplaceable, but perhaps we can offer some sort of service in reparation. There are five of us and we are hard workers and not usually as clumsy as this accident might make you think.

  Sincerely,

  “Who’s going to sign it?” Benji asked.

  “We’re all going to sign it,” I said.

  “All of us? I don’t even like playing basketball,” Benji said.

  “It was your ridiculous showboating that sent the ball over the fence,” Theo said. “Trying to impress the new girl.”

  “I wasn’t showboating,” Benji said.

  “I can’t believe you’re all afraid of Mr. Quist,” I said, shaking my head, the pen still over the paper. “If I sign it, you all need to sign it.”

  “I’m not signing a letter for a crime I didn’t commit,” Julia insisted.

  “It was a group effort,” I said. “We are a marauding band of criminals now.”

  “Maybe we don’t need to sign it at all,” Benji suggested.

  I shook my head and signed the letter

  The Firefly Five

  11

  Before we reported to Mr. Quist’s the next morning, Ilana and I hiked out to Oakedge. We hadn’t meant to stay so long, but we’d been lying on our backs, staring up through the leaves and talking about what type of shelter to build—I wanted to build a frame out of sticks and cover it in canvas, like my tent, but Ilana wanted to make a lean-to completely out of branches so it couldn’t be seen, even from above. The next thing we knew, it was nine thirty.

  “Where have you been?” Julia demanded when we got to Theo’s. She sat on a basketball under the net on Theo’s mini-court. “We were supposed to meet here at nine o’clock.” Benji and Theo stood behind her, and it felt a little like coming up to a queen and her soldiers.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “And you left poor Theo here with Mr. Quist ready to strike at any moment.”

  “Whoa, there. Poor Theo nothing,” Theo replied.

  I knew Julia had to be really mad if she was going to profess sympathy for Theo. And I supposed we could have asked her into the woods with us, but it still felt like a special, fragile thing between me and Ilana; and anyway, she probably would have suggested bui
lding the shelter out of something solid and practical like stones.

  “Let’s march to our doom,” Benji said.

  Mr. Quist was waiting for us. He had his hands on his hips, which were encircled by a gardening apron. “The Firefly Five, I presume. I was wondering when you would show up.”

  “We’re sorry,” I said.

  “I’ve never felt so much like poor old Mr. McGregor, his garden assaulted by Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny.”

  Benji kicked up his skateboard. “I’m no bunny,” he mumbled.

  “That’s right. A no-bunny nobody,” Mr. Quist said.

  “Hey,” Julia said, flicking a braid over her shoulder.

  “It was an accident,” Theo said.

  “I thought I’d made things clear with your family.” Mr. Quist was scowling, but when I looked at him, his eyes were turned up like he was smiling, and they twinkled a bit.

  “We were just playing basketball and—”

  “It went over the fence—”

  “And we didn’t want to bother your cat—”

  “Or you, so—”

  “It was me.” Ilana stepped forward. “If you want to know, the basketball went over the fence, and I was trying to drop myself down without disturbing your garden, but I slipped and I’m afraid I landed on your cucumbers. And a few other things.”

  Mr. Quist rubbed his hand across his forehead. “At least one of you I can understand.” He pulled out a small notebook, no bigger than his hand. “Here are my calculations. You destroyed three cucumber vines and two summer squash. These seeds were planted in late winter, and I have spent one to two hours a day on the garden. One point five hours a day for approximately one hundred twenty days give us one hundred eighty hours, and we’ll say you owe me one-tenth of that, so that’s approximately eighteen hours of work that you owe me. I don’t care if one of you Firing Five does it—”

  “It’s the,” Benji began, but then stopped, and no one stepped up to correct Mr. Quist.

  He went on as if Benji hadn’t spoken at all. “—or if you divide it up amongst yourselves. But you will complete eighteen hours of work, and they will be logged here. I am the keeper of the log. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Good. She who speaks first gets the first task.” He held out a small rake-like thing. “You’re going to be planting mustard in that bed over there.”

  I started to giggle. I couldn’t help it. Benji giggled next to me. Mr. Quist sighed and looked up to the heavens. “Where do you think mustard comes from?”

  I knew enough not to say from the delivery service.

  “Mustard the condiment is made from mustard seeds. Mustard seeds grow on mustard plants. You can also eat the greens. You are going to plant mustard seeds.” He pointed to a raised bed.

  “But I thought you just said you make mustard out of mustard seeds?” Benji asked.

  “Honest to goodness, what do they even teach you in school? Each mustard seed will grow a mustard plant, which in turn will have several flowers and hundreds of seeds. It’s simple multiplication. Do you at least learn that in your backward academies?”

  “In third grade,” Benji said. “Sometimes in second if you’re smart about math, like Julia.”

  “I’m sure she’s a genius.” He turned to Theo. “You look like you’re built for spreading compost. And you two workhorses,” he said to Julia and Ilana. “The retaining wall needs repair. The bricks are there. Figure it out.”

  And with that, he was gone back inside.

  “He’s calculating it wrong,” Julia grumbled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was fuzzy math. Estimations here. Rounding there. He should have added up all the work he’s done, divided by the number of plants, and then given us the proportional amount. We didn’t destroy one-tenth of his garden.”

  “You going to tell him that, Julia?” Theo asked.

  I had my tiny rake, and I was turning over the dirt in the raised bed. A ladybug landed right on my knee.

  “Ladybugs aren’t all girls,” I whispered to Benji, who was coming along behind me, digging tiny holes and dropping seeds. “They don’t even all have spots.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Benji said.

  I looked over at Ilana and Julia, who were stacking bricks that had fallen off the retaining wall. They didn’t use any cement or anything, and I wondered if it would just fall again.

  By the afternoon, only Ilana and I were left. They all had reasons: Julia had her art lesson, Benji’s mom picked him up for an asthma checkup, and then Theo’s nanny called him home. Still, it kind of felt like they were flaking off from us, leaving Ilana and me behind the way we had left them.

  My hands had dirt in all the creases and under my nails. “I guess we should have worn gloves,” Ilana said, looking at her own dirty hands.

  I rubbed my finger over a callus. “I kind of like it.”

  “This is good preparation. Maybe we could grow our own little garden in Oakedge.”

  Mr. Quist came back out to check on us. “Twenty minutes left, girls.”

  “Why do you even do this?” Ilana asked him. “Why don’t you just get the vegetables delivered?”

  “You have cucumbers in your delivery yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “And tomatoes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever consider where they came from?”

  I glanced over at Ilana. “I knew they were grown, but I didn’t know it was right here.”

  “Not all of the vegetables, but in the summer, I do my part. We can’t just import all of our food. It’s not safe and it’s not sustainable. I’ve been telling the people at Krita for years that we need our own farms.”

  “My parents say the same thing, that we should have local food. They say it’s better that way. More natural.”

  Mr. Quist stopped moving and regarded Ilana carefully, the way the nurses looked me over at a checkup. A little bird flew down from the fence between Mr. Quist’s house and Theo’s. It hopped right up to Ilana and pecked at the ground at her feet before looking up, seemingly startled to see her human face. “Is that what your parents tell you?” Mr. Quist asked her.

  “Yes.” Ilana furrowed her brow. “They even go out of Old Harmonie to get food.”

  “So do I from time to time.”

  “Is that your job?” I asked. “Are you in agriculture?”

  “I’m retired.”

  “What was your job?”

  “I worked in the Idea Box.”

  “Really?” I asked. “That is so cool!” If you worked in the Idea Box, you spent all day coming up with any sort of idea and trying to make it work. Hacking, they sometimes called it. They’d come up with a problem and then hack it—just spitting out any old crazy solution to see what would do the trick. The more creative, the better. Some of the stuff went nowhere—most of it, actually—but some of it led to great innovations. Like our watchus; they came out of the Idea Box when people wanted a way to track their body’s vital signs over time in natural settings—plus be able to tell what time it was without looking at a phone.

  “Cooler than other positions, I suppose.” He plucked a dying leaf from one of the plants. “You’re the one who planted those trees, right?”

  “Yes. I thought the plants could use more variety, to avoid diseases and all.”

  He smiled then. “Precisely.”

  “We’ve been thinking of starting our own garden, actually,” Ilana said. “Do you have any seeds?”

  Mr. Quist hesitated, then said, “I can do you one better. Come by later this week and I’ll have some seedlings prepared.”

  “The place we have in mind is kind of shaded,” I said.

  “I’ll choose some that can do well without a lot of sun.” He turned his head to the side. “You’ll share the bounty with me, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “All right, then.” He clapped his hands together. “You’ve done good work. The l
edger is clean.”

  “But we didn’t do the full eighteen hours,” I said. “Even with all of us working—”

  Ilana elbowed me in the side. “Thank you for this lesson,” she said to Mr. Quist, and she tugged me away from the garden.

  12

  Ilana invited me over for dinner. I spent twenty minutes in my bedroom figuring out what to wear. Her mother was the picture of glamour, and her father—I had never seen a more handsome man.

  They must be artists, I decided, trying to picture my mother in the sleeveless dresses I’d seen Ilana’s mother wearing. In the air-cooled offices of Krita, my mother would shiver and shake and then put on a sensible cardigan. So far I had not seen either of Ilana’s parents boarding the bus to the village or to Center Harmonie. Artists often worked at home or outside. En plein air, Julia had said about the art lessons she took from a woman over in Oneida Village. Sometimes I would stop my bike outside of Felicia Winthrop’s house, number 27 Firefly Lane, and listen to her practice her violin. It was times like that I really wished there was a test that would tell me that hiding deep inside of me was a musical ability that could be released by my latency and that I, too, could play notes that danced out and around the neighborhood.

  I knew that out in Calliope they had the film actors and pop musicians, and their work was beamed all around the world both within and without the Kritopia system. So maybe Ilana’s parents had been part of that world, the pop art world, but decided to move east and refocus on more classical work. That would make a lot of sense. It would certainly explain the breezily confident way they all walked around.

  Which made the problem of deciding what to wear that much worse. In the end I wore my green Capri pants with a black shirt that had a funny little lace collar that I had always hated but thought maybe it would look sophisticated or cute or something other than like myself.

  Ilana was sitting on her front steps waiting for me when I arrived.

  “Hi,” I said, feeling shy all of a sudden.

  “Hi,” she said back. She scratched at a long scrape on her calf.

  “When did you get that?” I asked.

  “Sometime when we were in the garden, I guess. I came home, and there it was. Pretty cool, huh?” She picked at it. “I really can’t remember ever getting anything like this before.”