by Laura Ruby
Even now—after the people of Bone Gap had decided that Roza left the same mysterious way she had come, as if she were some shining gift that no one could claim, and that they would never have the privilege of understanding her past or being a part of her future—Finn was scanning the crowd for Roza’s glossy coiling hair, the lively bounce of her step, the smile so sunny that it seemed to blaze with a light of its own. But the people here didn’t bounce or blaze, they only pointed and whispered.
“Meh!” said the goat.
“Don’t you have a bridge to cross or something?”
The funny thing was, the people of Bone Gap shouldn’t have taken to Roza at all. She was a stranger who had appeared out of nowhere and wouldn’t say where she’d been, a girl stranger taking advantage of those “poor motherless boys.” Sean told Finn and Roza not to be surprised if the people judged, as the people always did. And the indignant hum erupted as soon as they’d entered the grounds of last year’s fair. Then the three of them had stopped at the 4-H tents so Roza could admire the calves and the lambs. Old Charlie Valentine leaned down low and whispered something that made her smile. He asked her which lamb was her favorite. When she pointed at the finest one in the bunch, Charlie declared, “Knows her critters.” When she asked him in halting English about the acidity of soil and how it affected the corn crop, Charlie said, “Knows her dirt.” He nodded as if he were making the call for the whole town, which he was. “We got ourselves a farm girl, folks. Make no mistake.”
And nobody had. Except for one.
Finn smelled cake and apple pie, and his stomach turned him in the direction of the refreshment stand, the goat trailing behind. “Mr. O’Sullivan!” said the woman manning—womanning?—the stand.
“Hi, Mrs. L.” Mrs. Lonogan, who had been the principal of Bone Gap Elementary since people first walked upright, wore her gray hair curled and woven in an elaborate updo that made her look like she had a dusty basket on her head. She cut him a brownie the size of a barge before he had a chance to refuse.
She handed Finn the brownie on a napkin. “How’s that big strapping brother of yours? Still saving lives?”
He bit into the brownie. He thought maybe somebody had mistaken salt for sugar. “What? Oh, right. Still saving lives.”
“And your mom? That orthodontist must be coming around to the idea of having sons by now. Your mother has always been able to wrap men around her little finger!”
Finn resisted the urge to spit. “Not this time, I guess.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Is it?” said Finn.
Mrs. Lonogan raised a brow that looked as if it had been scrawled with crayon. “So, school’s done. Are you and Miguel ready to start fixing that fence of mine?”
“We’ll be there at seven on Monday morning.”
“My Lonny’s got the tools you need. You can use his pickup to drive out to the fence. He would fix it himself, you know, but his back isn’t what it used to be,” said Mrs. Lonogan. “And I’m tired of those Rude cows wandering onto my property. The deer, too. And whatever else is creeping around.” She shuddered dramatically, though her hair didn’t move.
“We’ll take care of it,” said Finn. Repairing the miles of fencing would take him and Miguel all summer, but the Lonogans were paying well enough, and it would keep Finn out of Sean’s way. Maybe Mrs. Lonogan knew this. Maybe that was why she’d asked him.
“Here’s something else for you.” She pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and slid it across the plastic tablecloth. Printed on the paper was this:
Reaching for the stars,
With hope inside our hearts,
We’re growing, changing, yearning,
The fire within us burning.
To be the people we need to be,
To make the changes we need to see,
We must keep reaching for the stars,
With hope inside our hearts.
Mrs. Lonogan said, “It’s a poem. About hope. I found it on the World Wide Web.”
The goat said, “Meh!”
Mrs. Lonogan favored the goat with a frown, then turned back to Finn. “Moon—I mean, Mr. O’Sullivan, what inspires you?”
Was this a trick question? “I’m not sure what you—”
“When I was a girl, I wanted to raise champion show cats.”
Mrs. Lonogan had a white Persian named Fabian that she liked to dress in skirts and push around in a baby carriage. “Really.”
“It’s true. I grew up on a dairy farm, where cats were for mousing and nothing more. My father wouldn’t even let them in the house. He said it was because of the hair balls. But I was determined. I saved up all my pennies and bought my first Persian when I was eighteen. My father told me to choose between living in his house and keeping my cat. What do you think I chose?”
This was not a trick or a question, it was a speech. Finn stayed quiet.
“My point is that you have to fight for what you believe in. So what do you believe in? You must believe in something. What do you want to do?”
It popped out before he had a chance to think about it, before he could remind himself not to. “I want to find Roza. I want to bring her back.”
Mrs. Lonogan steadied herself by gripping the table, as if Finn had just declared his intention to train unicorns for the fairy circus. “I know it’s been difficult,” she said, pouring him a cup of lemonade with the concentration of a scientist measuring hydrochloric acid. “Sometimes, people are not who we think they are. We didn’t know anything about her.”
“Yes, we did. I mean, we do.”
“Nothing about her past,” said Mrs. Lonogan. “Nothing that might help us find her.”
He gave up, tossed the rest of the brownie to the goat. “I know that.”
“Everybody has a story,” Mrs. Lonogan said, her voice dreamy and distant. “Everybody has secrets.”
Finn turned away from the refreshment table. He took a long pull of the lemonade, which, thankfully, contained sugar, when he saw the movement, or rather, the lack of movement. A peculiar pocket of stillness in the middle of all that color and bustle. And his gaze traveled upward from legs planted so firmly they might as well have been tree trunks to a torso carved of stone, immovable, ivory arms, up to a blanched face that—
A hand clamped down on his shoulder. Finn dropped his lemonade, whirled.
“Dude!” Miguel Cordero said. “You were supposed to meet me by the sheep.”
Finn turned back, searched for that pocket of stillness, but it was gone. “Did you see that?”
“I see you spilled lemonade all over yourself,” said Miguel.
“No, over there.”
“What? What am I looking at?”
How could he describe it so he didn’t sound like a lunatic? “There was a guy. Just standing there. I think I’ve seen him somewhere. Did you see him?”
“There are lots of guys here,” Miguel said. “Way too many guys. Fewer chicks for us.”
“Okay,” said Finn, using a wad of napkins to blot the lemonade on his jeans.
“Chicks, dude. Like that one. She’s checking you out.”
Finn tried to scratch up some interest. “Who is?”
“Girl in the green shirt. No, don’t stare! It’s weird when you stare.”
“People tell me I shouldn’t look at them, and then they tell me I don’t look at them enough,” Finn said. “You need to make up your minds.”
“I’m just saying that if you cooled it with the moony act, you’d get tons of play.” Miguel didn’t mention the cuts and bruises on Finn’s face, either because he was too good a friend or because he was getting used to seeing them there.
“I don’t have an act,” said Finn.
“You know what Amber Hass told me?” Miguel said.
“No, what?”
“That you looked like that actor.”
“Which actor?”
“Who cares, dude! Amber Hass says you look like an actor, you go find Ambe
r Hass.”
“Amber Hass chews on her own hair.”
“Speaking of chewing, what’s with the goat?”
“He started following me a while ago.”
“He’s wrecking your game. Doesn’t he belong to somebody?”
Finn didn’t have an act, he didn’t have a game. “Probably.”
“Meh!”
They started walking toward the livestock tents. Miguel was on the shorter side, but his shoulders were broad as barn beams, and his arms long and muscular. He was so self-conscious about them that he almost always had his hands jammed in his pockets (which caused his elbows to stick out at strange angles and only made his arms look that much bigger).
“Saw you over by Mrs. L,” Miguel said. “She find something on the World Wide Web again?”
“She gave me a poem. She said she wanted to inspire me.”
“Mrs. Lonogan has been inhaling kitty litter for centuries.”
“There’s that. You started studying for the tests yet?”
“You sound like my mother. I want to enjoy my summer, okay? Oh, look at her. No, don’t look look.”
“And you won’t believe the essays they want us to write.”
“That stuff isn’t due for months.”
“The test is in June and September. I might have to take it a few times.”
Miguel said, “Who the hell wants to take a test more than once?”
“I thought maybe you’d help me with my essays. Some of the tests make you write them.”
“I don’t do essays in the summer,” Miguel said. “If you had a geography problem, I might help you with that.” Miguel and his family were into a practice they called “orienteering.” They entered contests in which they were dropped in a strange forest or field or even a city with only a compass and a few landmarks. Finn had no idea why anyone would want to get lost on purpose.
“There are only three real roads in Bone Gap,” said Finn. “What kind of geography problem would I have?”
“Well, if you planned to go somewhere else.”
Finn imagined Roza sitting on a bus or perched in the window seat of a plane, blue sky behind her. “Go where?”
“I don’t know. Saint Louis. Cincinnati. Chicago.”
Finn grunted.
“What have you got against Chicago?”
“Too big.”
“Since when?”
“Too many people.”
“What have you got against people?”
Finn hated crowds. Thousands of people bumping and churning. “Too many opinions.”
“I went to my grandma’s yesterday. She won one of those exercise video game systems at bingo last weekend. My dad set it up for her and we all played with it.”
“Okay.”
“It said I was obese. When I stepped on the console, the little guy that was supposed to be me on the screen blew up like a tick.”
Miguel was as solid as a fireplug. “That’s dumb,” Finn said.
“Point is, even games have opinions. But I can’t even put on weight when I want to. The ghost is eating all the cookies.”
The Corderos lived in an enormous, sprawling farmhouse, with an attic so packed with junk that Miguel’s little brother had once gotten lost for a whole afternoon. (No compass.) Sometimes, at night, you could hear strange noises coming from that attic, and other times, food went missing. The people of Bone Gap said it was the ghost of the old lady who’d died there fifty years before. Miguel thought it was a poltergeist, a sort of mischievous spirit that liked to play tricks on the living. That, or corn on the loose.
Finn didn’t believe in ghosts, and though the corn wouldn’t stop yapping at him, he was pretty sure it stayed put. “I think your little brother is eating all the cookies.”
“He says he’s not.”
“He also said that he didn’t shave your dog.”
“True,” said Miguel.
They kept walking. The smells of hot dogs and cotton candy mixed with the ripe scent of the animals. Miguel kept up his steady chatter about girls, but none of them stood out much. A pink face, a brown face, yellow hair, red hair, cutoffs everywhere. Well, Finn did like the cutoffs.
“That one has nice knees,” Finn said, finally.
“Knees?” Miguel threw up his hands.
Someone standing by the live tents said, “Hey! What are you two doing with my goat?”
Miguel said, “What’s your goat doing with us?”
A dry coughing noise made them all turn. A rusty moped put-putted past them, a red wagon bouncing behind it, streaming smoke. The driver was dressed in white coveralls and a mesh face mask. Like a fencer. Or a villain in a slasher movie. There was only one person in Bone Gap who drove a moped while dressed like a serial killer.
“Come on,” Finn said, pointing in the direction of the moped.
“There are all these hot girls here, and you want to follow her?” said Miguel. “Don’t you know when to give up?”
Finn was an expert at giving up—wasn’t that why Sean was barely talking to him? But by now there were a few other people chasing after the sputtering, smoking machine. The group followed the moped and its rider all the way past the fairgrounds and down the main street.
A huge mass of bees dangled like a living piñata from the weathered CHAT ’N’ CHEW DINER sign. The loud buzz drilled into Finn’s skull and made his teeth ache. Finn couldn’t imagine how many bees there were. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Once, at recess, one of Finn’s teachers—Miguel’s dad, José—had stepped into the nest of some ground bees. By the time Sean arrived in the ambulance, José Cordero had already been stung thirty-six times.
Now Priscilla Willis hopped off her moped and leaned it against the window of Hank’s Hardware. She plucked a smoker from the wagon. She reached up and gave the bees a few puffs before setting the smoker on the ground. Then she grabbed a white box from the wagon bed and placed it on the curb, a couple of feet beyond the piñata of bees. She got a sheet and tucked one end underneath the box. The other end she tied around the door handle of the diner, the sheet slung between box and door like a hammock. She crouched next to the sheet, waiting.
The people of Bone Gap crowded behind Finn and Miguel, also waiting. It didn’t take long for their low mutterings to give way to louder commentary. Their voices washed over Finn the way they always did. Like a strange sort of choir music, one voice blending into the next, the refrains so familiar that he could have mouthed the words along with them.
“Your mom should keep a better eye on her bugs,” said one.
“Who says they’re my mom’s bugs?” said Priscilla, not bothering to turn toward the voice.
“Don’t you keep track?” said another.
“Sure,” said Priscilla. “We beekeepers tag every bee. See that one?” she said, pointing. “She’s number five thousand six hundred sixty-two.”
“Really?”
“Each bee also gets a tiny T-shirt with our logo.”
“No need to get sarcastic.”
“We own all the bees in Illinois,” Priscilla continued. “Billions and billions. That’s a lot of T-shirts.” A bee alighted on the girl’s hand. She didn’t brush it away.
“What’s that box, Priscilla?”
“Don’t call me Priscilla.”
“It’s the name your mother gave you.”
Priscilla didn’t answer.
“Fine, fine. What’s in the box, Petey?”
“It’s a hive body with a few frames of comb in it,” Priscilla said, in a tone that said it was the dumbest question in the history of questions.
“Her mom isn’t as cranky,” a woman informed the crowd. “She probably gets that from her daddy’s side.”
“Oh, that one! He was a good-for-nothing, and that’s the truth. Ran off with one of those jugglers from the state fair. I remember because she had that red hair.”
“Stop telling tales. He didn’t run off with anybody. He started walking one day and kept right on going.”
“She’s better off without him, aren’t you Pris-I-mean-Petey?”
The girl ignored the comments and let another bee march up her arm.
Someone sniffed. “You’re going to get stung if you’re not more careful. My niece over in Benton? She got stung on the nose. Yeah. They almost had to cut it off.”
“You’re full of it. Nobody had to cut nobody’s nose off.”
“I said almost, didn’t I? And you should watch yourself, Priscilla Willis. I don’t think you would be happy if you didn’t have a nose.”
“She’s not so happy anyway. Likes those bees better than she likes anyone.”
“What’s the big deal? I bet those bees probably don’t even have stingers.” Finn recognized that voice. One of the Rude boys. Derek.
With her bee-free hand, Priscilla swept off the mesh face mask. Long honey waves streaked with ropes of pink spilled down her back. “Why don’t you come over here and hold these bees for me? Then you can tell me if they have stingers.”
“I don’t need to do nothing for you,” Derek spat. “And your hair is dumb.”
“Don’t distract her,” said one of the adults. “I’ve been waiting to get into the Chat for a cup of coffee for fifteen minutes already. If I don’t get some caffeine soon, I might drop into one of those whaddyacallits. Comas.”
“And that would be bad how?” said someone else, and the crowd cracked up. Only Priscilla Willis’s “SHHHHHHH!” hushed them.
“Before bees swarm, they stuff themselves with honey, so they’re usually too full to sting,” she said. A single bee finally inched out on the sheet and used it as a walking bridge to the box. Another bee followed.
“Are they going to walk over to that hive you put there?”
“Why would you walk if you had wings?”
“Bees have tiny little brains.”
“I only got out of bed because I thought this would be more exciting.”
Finn blurted, “Why is the hive white?”
Priscilla Willis turned her dark, wide-set eyes on him. The people of Bone Gap said it made sense that Priscilla Willis was born into a beekeeping family, because she resembled nothing so much as a bee. But Finn didn’t want to hear what they had to say about Priscilla, because the weight of her gaze felt like a hand on his shoulder.