by Laura Ruby
Or a slap across the face.
He said, “Why is the hive white? Why not red or purple or whatever?”
She said, “It isn’t white. It’s blue.”
“It’s white.”
“Not to the bees. Bees see the white as blue. Bees like blue best.”
Derek Rude laughed. “Bees like blue. Right. She’s crazy. What kind of girl spends all her time with bugs?”
“Says the guy who dates farm animals,” Priscilla said.
Derek’s mouth worked as if he were chewing bark. “We all know who you date.” Snickers from the crowd.
“I’ll date anyone except you.”
“I wouldn’t go out with you, you look like a bug.”
“And you’re an idiot. In thirty years, which do you think will matter more?”
Derek stepped forward, his face so red he put tomatoes to shame. “Ugly ass—” he said, biting off the words when the man standing next to him smacked him upside the head.
Priscilla stood. She took the glove off one hand, flexing her fingers as if testing their strength. The people of Bone Gap whispered, No, don’t, please, as she slipped the bare hand inside the writhing mass of bees. The buzzing deepened, sending sparks along Finn’s nerves. The crowd held its collective breath. When Petey pulled her hand free, she wore a brown sleeve of insects. She held both palms up to face the sky, one gloved, one sleeved in bees, like a shaman performing some ancient ritual. A breeze made her hair dance. All around her, dozens of honeybees whirled like tiny moons in orbit, anchored only by her gravity.
Finn thought, I don’t know what that is, but it’s not ugly.
“Big deal,” said Derek, but his voice was as high as if he’d sucked on a helium balloon.
“Shut up, Derek,” said Finn.
“I’m not Derek. I’m Spike.”
“Shut up anyway,” Finn said. Let them surround him here. Let them start punching now. That would be okay. That would be just fine.
One of Priscilla’s hands twitched, and Finn knew she had been stung. She glared at him. “What are you looking at, Spaceman?”
Roza
JUMP
ROZA DUG AROUND IN A BOX OF RITZ, PULLED OUT A cracker, nibbled. If she wanted, she could go to the kitchen and pick a piece of fruit from the bowl piled high with apples and pears, peaches and plums. But the fruit in the kitchen looked too perfect; she was afraid of it. Afraid that the man had tainted it somehow, ruined it, that she would bite into the soft cheek of a peach and fall away dead.
Like the prisoner she was, she lived on bread and water, though she was sure the water must be drugged.
“Zijem na chlebie i wodzie, jestem niewolnikem tutaj,” she said. Even terrible things sounded better in Polish. She had tried to teach Sean and Finn. Easy words—cat, dog, table, washing machine. In Polish, nouns were gendered; sometimes there were two ways to say the same thing—kot or kotek for cat—and sometimes just one. That makes no sense, Sean had said. Why are tables masculine? Why is a washing machine a girl? What kind of crazy language is this? Not so crazy as English, she’d told him. Little words everywhere. ‘A’ and ‘the’ and ‘this” and ‘that.’ Useless! Like dirt under fingernails! He’d laughed and said, You have point.
“I have no point,” she told him, though Sean was not here, though no one was. She examined her hands, the useless, boneless things dangling off the ends of her wrists. Not so long ago, they’d been lean and strong, able to crack a nut with a pinch, able to press a seed deep into the earth with one stab of a finger. But they were not used to such idleness and had gone limp with despair. She fumbled with the cracker box, and crumbs rained down over the coffee table and the carpet. Anywhere else, that would be something to do, a necessary task, cleaning up after herself. But she didn’t even need to do that much. She could go to bed, and in the morning, every crumb would be gone, as if the man had a flock of birds or a parade of biddable ants on staff.
She might as well be that picture over the fireplace.
She shoved the cracker box away and turned on the TV. She scrolled through chat shows, cooking shows, home decorating shows, cop shows, movies. She tossed the remote to the couch. She never really watched the TV, but sometimes liked to leave it on, liked to hear the voices so she didn’t feel so alone. She had never been alone before. Though she’d had her own apartment at the O’Sullivan place, someone was always home. Sean. Finn. The little barn cat that hated the barn and always found a way to sneak inside. Even Charlie Valentine, who would come over looking for one of his wandering chickens, or for a game of cards. His favorite was a type of poker where the players held a single card to their own foreheads so that everyone could see what you had but you. They bet pennies and sometimes cookies. Seeing Sean—enormous, serious Sean—with a card stuck to his forehead always struck her as so funny that she made absurd bets, pushing whole stacks of pennies to the center of the table, eating the cookies before they made it into the pot. Sean’s mouth would twitch, a smile, and he would warn her that if she didn’t watch it, she would lose.
“Watch what?” she’d said.
“Watch yourself,” he said.
“How? I roll eyes back in head?”
She didn’t care about losing, because Charlie always won. And she didn’t understand the saying, she didn’t understand how a person watched themselves in the first place. The game they played just proved her point.
So she had stopped watching herself, or maybe she’d never quite begun, and here she was, trapped in a coma, trapped in a nightmare, trapped in a suburban house in a pile of cracker crumbs, boneless hands as useless as her naked feet. The man hadn’t come, but he would, and just the thought of that same question—do you love me yet?—that bland smile, those stony eyes scraping up and down her body made her shiver. She turned up the volume on the TV. On the screen, a man was pacing in a bedroom, running his hands through his hair and muttering to himself, reminding her of, well, her. Suddenly, he flipped the mattress off the bed, uncovering the bars that held the mattress in place. He wrenched one of the bars free and turned toward the camera, brandishing the bar like a sword.
Bars. Bars under the mattress.
She flew from the couch, ran up the stairs. Her own bed was king-size, and a platform, so that wouldn’t do her any good, but in the spare bedroom, there was a smaller bed. For a child, he had told her, when the time was right. It was disgusting, that a man at least twice her age would want . . .
“The time will never be right,” she said out loud, then heaved the mattress and box spring off the bed. Wooden bars extended from one edge of the frame to the other. They were not screwed down. She hefted one. It was about as long as a baseball bat, and nearly as heavy. She almost cried.
She ran back down the steps, new tool in hand. She shoved the love seat away from the picture window, took a deep breath, reached back, and swung the bar as hard as she could. Instead of a satisfying crash, the bar thumped against the glass. Frowning, she ran her fingers over the surface, found that she had barely scratched it. She brought the end of the bar to the glass again and again, the bar thumping instead of crashing. She tried the back windows with the same results. Thump, thump, thump. Some kind of special glass, then. To keep people out, to keep people in.
You have no point.
But she would not give up, not yet. The glass down here was too thick, but what about the glass upstairs? Maybe he thought she wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to jump out of an upstairs window. And she wasn’t. But there was a tree outside her bedroom. A tree—drzewo, neither male nor female. The tree was big and strong, the nearest branch a few feet from the house. If she could break the window, she might be able to reach far enough to grab it. Maybe.
She ran upstairs again and paused in front of the window. She said her silent prayer, and then swung the bar with everything she had. The first blow cracked the glass, sent the birds outside scattering. The second sent a web of smaller cracks throughout the pane. The third shattered it completely. She smashed
the remaining bits of glass from the edges of the window. Then she ran to the closet and pulled all those fine dresses from the hangers. She lined the bottom of the window with the clothes so that she wouldn’t get cut.
She leaned out the window and immediately felt dizzy. But she had no other choice. She wouldn’t wait here for him to return. For all she knew, he was out buying her a wedding gown. The thought almost made her laugh out loud. If she hadn’t been so scared, she might have.
She patted the clothes that she had piled on the window ledge. Nothing poked through. Good. She leaned her body over the ledge and stretched for the tree branch, but she couldn’t reach it. Before she had time to think better of it, she’d stepped up onto the ledge, holding both sides of the sash. There she hadn’t been as careful to knock out the glass, and a sliver sliced one palm. She gasped and almost pulled her hand away but forced herself to hold on so that she didn’t go tumbling out the window. She was only two stories up, but a fall could still mean broken legs, and broken legs would mean that she was just as trapped as she’d been before. Even more than trapped. Completely helpless. So she held on, taking huge gulps of air, tensing her muscles, priming them for flight.
—Ready.
—Set.
—Jump.
She sprang from the window, extending her arms as far as she could. Her forearms thudded against the branch, the bark scraping her skin as she scrambled to get a firm grip. She hung from the tree, feet dangling, sliced palm stinging. She barely had a second to congratulate herself for making it before the branch creaked and then cracked. She fell, hitting first one branch, then another, then another before thudding to the ground.
She sprawled there, lungs gasping for the breath that had been so violently knocked from them.
Which was when she saw the beast. Because of course there was a beast.
A beast for the beast.
It growled, showing her its graveyard teeth.
Finn
THE NIGHT MARE
MIGUEL WAS WAITING ON THE STEPS OF THE LONOGAN house, work gloves in his lap, a little sheepdog frantically bulldozing his knee.
“This dog has mental problems,” Miguel said. “Doesn’t he get that I’m sitting down?”
“That’s what happens when a sheepdog lives with show cats.”
The dog, a mottled thing named Mustard, ran over to Finn and jackhammered his calf. Finn allowed himself to be herded over to the steps. A posthole digger, shovels, a few bags of quick-set concrete, large buckets with lids, a role of fencing wire, pliers, and a couple of hammers were piled on the ground near the bushes.
Miguel stood next to Finn while Mustard danced around their legs. “You just missed the Lonogans. They left the truck and said we should start in the southwest corner, where the fence is the worst.”
The new posts were already stacked in the bed of the pickup, so they loaded the rest of the equipment and filled the buckets with water for the concrete—jobs made more difficult with Mustard’s determination to keep them together. When Finn opened the door to the cab, Mustard leaped inside.
“Let’s hope he can dig,” said Miguel.
The southwest corner of the fence abutted the main road but also separated the Lonogan property from the Rude farm. Finn knew the fence was in sorry shape, but it was even worse up close. The wire between the posts was rusted and torn, bowed up along the bottom by animals snuffling underneath it and down on the top by animals leaning or climbing over it. The corner post leaned toward the road, and large black ants covered its surface. Finn pulled a chunk from the post, exposing the smooth tunnels made by the insects.
“That one has to go,” said Finn.
“I don’t know,” said Miguel. “Maybe this is where the Lonogans store their larvae.”
With the pliers, they plucked the staples holding the wire to the post. They dug around the base of the post to loosen it, then kicked the post over. Hundreds of ants spilled from the lacy wood. Immediately, the dog tried to herd the insects with his nose. When that didn’t work, he ate them.
“That’ll teach you,” said Finn.
“I hope you’re not talking to the bugs,” Miguel said.
The new posts were thicker and longer than the old ones, so Finn and Miguel took turns with the posthole digger to widen and deepen the hole. When it was deep enough, they inserted the post into the hole, checking with a level to make sure it was straight. Then Miguel held the post while Finn poured a little water into the hole. After that, a layer of concrete mix, then more water, more mix, until the hole was full.
Miguel said, “One down, eleventy million to go.”
They moved on to the next post, Mustard on their heels, muzzle littered with ant parts.
“What the hell happened to this one?” Miguel said. The post was splintered and gouged, gnawed in places.
Finn fingered the gouges. “Horses will sometimes chew the wood.”
“Horses don’t have fangs. And the Rudes don’t have horses.”
“Well, it wasn’t the corn.”
“How do you know?” said Miguel. He squinted at the field across the street. “Anything could be in there.”
For a second, Finn almost saw her, Roza, crouched in the plants, laughing at him. Then he shook the sun out of his eyes and started removing the staples that held the wires in place on the chewed-up post.
“Did you see her?”
Finn fumbled with the pliers. “What?”
“Amber Hass. She just rode by on her bike.”
Finn let out a breath. “No, I didn’t.”
“I might have told her you’d be here today.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe you should take your shirt off.”
“What? Why?”
“Then she’ll come over here.”
“Cut it out.”
“Don’t you want to talk to her?”
“Not really.”
“She’s unbelievable, man.”
She can’t do that thing with the bees. “She’s okay.”
“Okay? You’re not a normal human.”
“That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
“There she is again, riding the other way.”
“Maybe she’s here for you,” said Finn. “Maybe you should take your shirt off. Isn’t that why you work out so much?”
“She’s not here for me.”
“How do you know?”
“Her dad once asked my dad if he knew any gangsters in Mexico.”
“Isn’t your dad from Venezuela?”
“Do I really have to explain this to you?”
“The hell with her dad,” said Finn. “Maybe Amber likes Mexicans.”
“Which might help if I were Mexican. To her dad, I’m just another brown kid.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Finn said, though he knew what Miguel was talking about. Roza was the sort of color that older ladies first called “dark” and then later called “olive,” as if being green was somehow nicer. “Maybe Amber would like you even if you were—”
“Do not tell me you were going to say green. Or purple.”
“I definitely wasn’t going to say purple.”
Miguel pointed at Finn’s face. “Well, you’re red already. That shit’s going to hurt tomorrow. And it serves you right for all this ‘We Are the World’ crap.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“My arms are too long.”
“That’s good. Amber will always be able to spot you in a crowd.”
Miguel ripped a staple from the wood. “I see why you get beat up all the time.”
“Twice isn’t all the time,” said Finn.
“What’s Sean say about it?”
“About what?”
“About subsidies for corn farmers,” Miguel said. “About your face being smashed in, dumbass.”
Finn stabbed the ground with his shovel, stamped down on the edge to bury it deeper. “What should he say about it?”
“Nothing, I guess,”
Miguel said.
They dug for a while, the only sound the scrape of the shovels against the rock and the dirt. Then Miguel started to laugh.
“What?” Finn said.
“Your brother. Remember that Halloween when we were around seven or eight and those big-city kids came down to the corn maze dressed like skeletons?”
“They were chasing us,” Finn said. “They wanted our candy.”
“And your brother jumped on Amber’s pink bicycle?”
Finn smiled. “The one with the white basket. And the flowers.”
“He caught up with them, took a flying leap off the bicycle, and cracked their heads together? Knocked them out cold. That’s gangster.”
“He got in trouble for that.”
“Not too much,” said Miguel. “Jonas Apple hates city people.”
Finn leaned on the handle of his shovel and pointed past the fence. “Maybe you should go ask Amber what happened to that pink bicycle.”
“Yeah? Maybe you should ask your brother to teach you how to fight.”
If he were talking to me, maybe I would.
Suddenly, Mustard went rigid, rearing and barking at the cornfields.
“See? He’s barking at the corn,” said Miguel. “You can’t say I didn’t tell you.”
“What is it, boy?” Finn said. They stood there, scanning the fields, the dog barking, the corn waving.
Just like that, Mustard stopped barking. He leaned his weight against Finn to move him closer to Miguel, as if that would keep the flock safe.
Late that night, Finn sat at the kitchen table, test prep books spread in front of him, steam curling from his fourth cup of tea. Calamity Jane, also spread out on the kitchen table in a nest of papers, watched as Finn poured nearly half a jar of Hippie Queen Honey into the cup.
“I know,” Finn said. “I should just skip the tea and drink the honey instead.”
But he drank the tea anyway, frying the taste buds off his tongue, because he didn’t drink coffee and because he wanted to stay awake. The clock read two in the morning, and his body begged for sleep, but Finn was having none of that. Even if he got in bed, there would only be twisted sheets and damp pillows as he thrashed and sweated out all the hours of the dark. Maybe other guys would watch TV all night, but TV was just a bunch of noise, and when Sean came home, if he ever came home, he would tell Finn to turn it off.