Julia sighed and asked Benji, “Who told you about her being in bed and the invention and everything?”
“DeShawn,” Benji said. “He swore that he and some of the other guys snuck in there, and went upstairs, and there she was in bed, just waiting for science to get to the point where they can cure whatever strange disease she has, and then she’ll be reanimated.”
“He was messing with you, numb nuts,” Theo said. “No way she’s still in there, let alone in stasis.”
I was feeling pretty good. I was co-leading this expedition into number 9, a place I had always wanted to see. Ilana was at my side. I could finally be on the verge of finding out why Dr. Varden had left Old Harmonie—and my great-grandmother—behind. In fact, we really were like Dr. Varden and Baba, back at the beginning, striking out into the great unknown.
Then there was a buzzing sound, low and fierce, all around me. “Ow!” I cried as something pinched me on my ankle. Then again, and again, on my knees, my arms. The buzzing surrounded me, and I saw that it was bees. Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
Tiny flashes of black-and-yellow anger that darted at my arms, my face, my eyes. I squinted against the assault.
Were they in my ears?
My ears?
Through the roar I heard Benji call out in pain, and Julia, too.
It was like they were cocooning me. I would be interred in their bodies. Through the haze of them all, I saw Ilana, so clearly, so still. A bee landed on her arm. She watched it sting her, then brushed it away with a sly smile.
But no.
That must have been some sort of vision brought on by the pain, the swelling, the loss of oxygen as my throat tightened.
It was Theo who pulled me off the nest of yellow jackets. I’d stepped right on it, so enthralled I’d been in my own fantasy, I hadn’t even seen it.
Julia said he carried me all the way to the bikes and put me on my seat. He was about to get on behind me, but Ilana pushed him out of the way. She sat behind me and pedaled us home.
“You’ve never seen someone ride so fast. They say adrenaline takes over and you can do superhuman things, but this, this was amazing.”
Mom, whose turn it was to have a day off, called an ambulance. They came and shoved a tube down my throat before they even put me on a stretcher.
One hundred seventeen stings. That’s what the nurses told me.
I was lucky to be alive.
So now I owed Theo my life. And Ilana. But mostly Theo, I think, for acting first. That’s what Julia said, and my mom and dad, too. “Thank goodness for Theo,” they said over and over and over again.
Julia told me it would have almost been romantic if it had been anyone but Theo.
She had been stung nine times, and Benji five. Theo got twenty-seven stings, mostly on his arms. There were still red bumps when I saw him three days later. Mom and Dad sent me over to his house with snickerdoodles, of all the embarrassing things, to thank him.
“We told them we were out behind the old tennis court,” he said. “Looking for a lost ball.”
“I know,” I said. I had picked up that much in the hospital.
He paused the game he was playing on the television. It was a mix of squares, triangles, and diamonds in all different colors, and it looked like he was fitting them together in complex patterns. Normally we weren’t allowed to have screen time during the day, so I figured it had to be something to do with his latency. He was slumped back onto the couch. His mother had decorated the house in Scandinavian style, and the lightly padded couch didn’t seem particularly comfortable, but he managed to recline all over it.
“Did Ilana come to see you?” Theo asked.
I shook my head. Everyone else had. Even Theo, but I’d been sleeping. Or pretending to be.
“There’s something about her,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Something just a little off, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.” I could feel my lower lip pushing out. But I could still picture that one yellow jacket, how it hadn’t even bothered her.
He looked over at me. “You don’t think there’s anything weird about her at all?”
“No,” I said firmly.
His hair fell into his eyes, which had dark circles under them. “All right then,” he said. “I’m glad you’re okay and thanks for the cookies.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“You can go now,” he told me.
“Right,” I said. Blushing.
“It’s just that you look like you have chicken pox or something, all those red dots. It’s making me nervous.”
“Your arms, too,” I said, pointing. “And three on your face.”
He glanced down at his arms, then right back at the screen. “I don’t notice them on myself. Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.”
His nanny, Clara, walked me out. She said, “They say that boys are mean to you when they like you.”
I found myself blushing even harder.
“You listen to me, Mori. You wait until they are old enough to know to treat you well. Or they’ll think they can always get away with treating you like that.” She shook her head as she spoke.
“I’ll do that. Thanks.”
It was good advice, I thought as I walked down his driveway.
I looked toward Ilana’s house. She had saved me too, but my dad hadn’t made her snickerdoodles or sent me over with thanks.
I knew which room was hers because it was right where my room would be. She was up there, looking down at me, so I waved. She waved back. I hesitated before turning and heading up the street to my own house. Maybe she would come out. Maybe she would see how I was doing, or even apologize, though it wasn’t her fault that stupid old me had walked onto a yellow jacket nest. She didn’t move from the window, though, and I felt her eyes watching me the whole walk home.
15
“I was waiting,” Ilana said when she showed up on my doorstep. “I was waiting until I saw you out and about and that you were okay. You are okay, aren’t you?”
I readjusted my glasses on my face. The left lens had a little smear, but I waited to wipe it. “I’m fine. I kind of wondered why you didn’t visit, though.”
“Well, like I said, I was waiting. My parents thought you might not want too many people around. Anyway, I’m not so great at lying, and I heard that Theo told them we were all out by the tennis courts.”
“Yeah, he did.”
“But also, I was busy. Come on.”
“Where?”
“Oakedge.”
We climbed onto our bikes and rode around the cul-de-sac. I shuddered a little as we rode past number 9, but there was still a part of me that wanted to see inside. She shoved her bike into the rack at the park, and I put mine next to hers, then we slipped past the playground and the tennis courts and out into the woods. She took me just past the tree with the crook in it to a small clearing where the sun dappled the ground. “Ta-da!” she exclaimed. There was a patch of earth that had been turned over so the deep, dark brown of it was showing. Planted in it were twelve small seedlings. “We’ve got some of those mustard greens that Mr. Quist was talking about—he had some already going in his greenhouse. And then he gave us some sweet peas, and some chard. I don’t know if we’ll get enough sun back here, but I tried to do them in this clearing. What do you think?”
“I can’t believe you really did it,” I said, smiling.
“You’re not mad I did it without you, are you?”
“No,” I said. “Gardening is more than just planting.”
“Right. It rained a little the night before last, and the ground is still damp, so I don’t think we need to water them. Mr. Quist said something about fertilizers or compost. He said he’d give us some. I think the crabby old man thing is just an act.”
I squatted down, leaned over, and sniffed. I couldn’t smell the plants yet, just the earthy soil, but that was a good enough start. “Did you tell everyone else?”
/> She sat down at the edge of the garden. “I didn’t really see anyone after the first day. I ran into Benji. Otherwise they’ve mostly been over at Julia’s or Theo’s.”
“You could’ve gone over,” I said.
She shrugged.
“Do you . . . ,” I began. “I mean, are you happy here?”
“Sure.” She grinned at me. “This is great.” She spread her arms wide and I knew she meant Oakedge and the whole forest around it. As if it agreed with her, a chickadee called across the clearing, and another one trilled back.
“Well, yeah, this is great,” I said. “But my other friends—”
“Benji is real nice,” she said. She brushed a curl off of her forehead.
“But Julia and Theo—”
“Oh, Theo’s just a little prickly.”
“Thorny,” I said.
“Right. And Julia, well . . .”
“Well, what?” I asked.
Ilana got the far-off look she sometimes got. Not like she was looking into the distance, but into a whole other world. She said, “Jealousy is natural in girls our age.”
I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but it just bubbled out of me. It felt like someone releasing the gas from an experiment that was about to blow.
“What?”
“You do speak awfully formally sometimes.”
She spun around so she was facing me. “I guess I’m just saying that I understand why she might not like me so much.”
“Did they make you feel like you shouldn’t hang out with them without me?”
“No biggie,” she replied. She reached over and patted down the dirt around one of the chard plants. “I still want to get some berries.”
“It’s stupid if they left you out. The yellow jackets weren’t your fault.”
She looked back at me. “I was the one who said we should go into the house. If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have been stung.”
“But I was the one who told you about number nine, how I always wanted to go in there. At the museum, I was practically begging.” I looked down at the dirt. It really was a lovely shade of brown, and if it weren’t so cold, it might feel nice to just sink down in it. People did that sometimes. They took mud baths to clean all the toxins out of their skin. I bet that would feel good on my stings. I lifted my eyes. Ilana was still staring right at me. We both knew it wasn’t the yellow jackets that had Julia mad at us. I cleared my throat. “She’s been my best friend my whole life. But I guess people can have different kinds of friends. Different kinds of best friends.”
“Of course,” Ilana said.
“Did you have a best friend back in Calliope?” I asked. I hadn’t ever thought of that before, that she might have had a whole group of friends she had left behind.
Ilana looked down at the ground and scratched around her ear. “Yeah!” she said with a big smile. “Yeah, her name was Emily. Emily Wixham. We did everything together.”
“Like what?” I asked. I felt a hint of jealousy creeping into my chest.
“Oh, you know, we went to this fake beach they built us and just played there. And sometimes we’d go running or we’d play volleyball or tetherball—things like that.”
“Do you miss her?”
“Sure. But we write to each other. And she’s real busy this summer. She’s turning thirteen and getting her latency and all, so—” Then she looked at me and I guess the jealousy was showing, because she said, “Hey, you’re my best friend now.”
“And you’re mine, too. You and Julia.”
She held out her hand, palm up, to me. “My mom told me that people used to do this thing called blood sisters. They would cut a little bit of their finger or their palm, and then blend the blood together. Then they’d promise to be blood sisters forever.”
My stomach turned. “That is so unsanitary!”
“She also said they would spit on their hands to make a promise.”
“Are you asking me to do that? Because I can promise to be friends forever, but I don’t want to cut myself, and I only spit when I’m brushing my teeth. Or eating mint leaves.”
She laughed. I loved her laugh. It was full and hearty and sounded like leaves rustling before a storm. “No, silly. But we could have our own promise. An Oakedge promise.” She reached over and snapped off a leaf from a mint plant just outside of our garden. Then she tore it in half. “Here, take one bite of this half.” I did as she said, and she took a bite of hers. “Now switch,” she said, holding out the remaining bit of her half of the leaf to me. I traded with her, and we each chewed the second half. “By the power of these mint leaves, I, Ilana Naughton, and Mori Bloom are forever sisters, the daughters of Oakedge. Now you say it.”
“By the power of these mint leaves, I, Mori Bloom, and Ilana Naughton are forever sisters, the daughters of Oakedge.”
“Now you have to swallow your leaf.”
I swallowed hard to make it go down. It scratched as it traveled down my throat.
“Perfect,” she said.
“Perfect,” I agreed.
She held out her hand. I extended my hand back and placed it in her palm. She gave a squeeze and I squeezed back and we sat like that in silence, just listening to the birds and the squirrels and the branches in the breeze.
She leaned back and I lay next to her so we were looking up through the veil of leaves from the oak tree. The sun shone through them so it was hard to tell what was the leaves and what was the space between: it was just a beautiful blue-and-green pattern, like Ilana’s dappled eyes.
“They’re going to be wondering where we are,” I said.
She was quiet for a moment, just looking up at the trees, but then she nodded, and hopped to her feet in one easy motion. She reached her hand down to me and pulled me up. In a blink, she started running through the forest back toward the park just fast enough so that I could keep up.
As we rounded the bottom of the cul-de-sac, she slowed and then stopped in front of number 9. “See those boxes back there?” She pointed to some wooden boxes that sprouted up, crooked, out of the tall grass. “They’re beehives.”
I felt my body go stiff.
“Honeybees,” she said. “They aren’t mean like yellow jackets; and anyway, I doubt there are any still living there. But if Dr. Varden kept bees, she probably had a garden. I bet we could find all sorts of stuff in her house. Tools and maybe old seeds and everything.”
She started down the driveway.
“We can’t go without everyone else,” I said.
“Why not? I thought we weren’t telling them about Oakedge yet.”
“We’re not.” I was still a little scared after the last time, but more than that, I wanted to put our group back together. Maybe if we had some good memories together, we really could all be friends, even Julia and Ilana. “But we are the Firefly Five,” I said. “We started this number nine adventure together, and we should finish it together, too.”
“Okay,” she said, and started pedaling up the street.
Theo was against the idea, of course. “Are you crazy? Mori almost died last time.”
“I didn’t almost die,” I said for the millionth time.
“You almost almost died,” Benji said.
“Mori wants to go in,” Ilana said. “And Mori is my friend. Isn’t she yours?”
Julia turned her head away. Theo kicked at the ground. “Mori talks to inchworms and she likes to make up stories about bikes that can fly, but you don’t see me attaching wings to my bike, do you? And that’s because I actually want Mori to live to see her thirteenth birthday. That’s what a friend does.”
“I don’t need anyone to protect me,” I said.
Theo didn’t even bother to reply.
“I want to see what Dr. Varden left behind. There has to be some clue in there about why she left. Anyway, there’s no reason for them to keep this from us. It’s as much ours as anyone else’s.”
“Well, yeah, except that she’s still in there, remember?” Benj
i said.
Ilana was undeterred. “You don’t have to come with us, but Mori and I are going. Right, Mori?”
“Right,” I agreed.
We might as well have dared them.
Walking through the grass, I kept my eyes down, looking for another yellow jacket nest.
We were just passing the side of the house when Theo grabbed my arm. A thin black snake slithered in front of us. “Black racer,” he whispered. “Not poisonous, but vicious.”
I knew. My parents had made sure I knew about any and all potential dangers in our neighborhood. Black racer snakes. Poisonous red berries. Standing water.
Ilana, who was up ahead of us, turned back. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Theo called before I could tell her about the snake. Where there was one, there could be more, and I didn’t want one to attack her. They were defensive fighters, like most animals. But if she stumbled over one, it would bite and bite and bite until she retreated.
Which, I suppose, could have happened to me if Theo hadn’t stopped me.
Julia and Benji caught up as the snake disappeared from sight.
“I do not like this place,” Benji said.
“Me neither,” Julia agreed. “And that’s without even believing that Dr. Varden’s body is still in there.”
“But you aren’t a hundred percent sure, right?” Benji asked.
“Guys, just think about it,” I said. “There could be all sorts of cool stuff in there.”
When we got around back, we saw wooden trellises covered over with vines that were heavy with grapes. Raised gardens put out a tangle of vegetables, cucumber blooms climbing over the first hints of tomatoes. Mr. Quist would love to see this: all of these plants surviving on their own. Beyond them, there was a set of four wooden boxes that were grown over with white-yellow wax. “What are those?” Benji asked.
“Honeybee hives,” Ilana replied.
She headed straight for the bulkhead door. There was a lock on the door, but the wood that it sat on was all rotted out. Ilana tugged at it, and it moved. With Theo’s help, she pulled it all the way off.
The Firefly Code Page 10