Bone Gap

by Laura Ruby

  So he rubbed his eyes and leafed through the prep books that he would have to study for the next four months. It did not help that he was bad with tests. It did not help that he kept mixing up the test and the scholarship and the application deadlines—June? September? October? November? It did not help that even the tests had essay questions. It did not help that all the questions were stupid. Do you think that cities have the right to limit the number of pets per household? Do you think that high school should be extended another year? Do you believe that previous failures always lead to later successes?

  He tapped the pencil on the paper, searching his brain for answers. Through the open window came the sound of a horse snorting.

  “I could do without the commentary,” said Finn.

  Calamity yawned.

  “From you, too.”

  The cat blinked, once, twice, three times.

  “I don’t speak blink.”

  Instead of limiting the number of animals, cities could make ordinances to keep people from hoarding chickens in living rooms. High school can be extended five or even ten more years, but only for people named Rude. Previous failures will mean that your brother will work extra shifts and come home at dawn so that he doesn’t have to see you anymore. They mean that your brother will hate you and the town will hate you and you will hate you and you will never sleep.

  Somewhere, the horse snorted again.

  “Shut up, already.”

  The man was tall. And he was so still. I’ve never seen anyone that still. But when he finally moved, he moved like a cornstalk twitching in the wind.

  A sharp whinny. Calamity swiveled her head toward the window.

  “It’s just a horse,” Finn said.

  Another whinny.

  “A loud one. Possibly with fangs.”

  A thud. Like hooves against a barn door.

  “Is that our barn door?” Which it couldn’t be, because the only things that lived in the barn were the mice and the birds. Except . . .

  Finn pushed back his chair and went to the window. He squinted, trying to make out the barn in the dark. He was about to sit down again when he heard the second thud and saw the barn doors shake. He left Calamity to guard the books and the honey and raced outside, skidding to a stop right in front of the slanted structure. The horse—he hoped it was a horse and not, say, a bull—was kicking hard enough to take the doors down.

  “Hey, horse,” he said.

  The kicking ceased.

  “If I open the barn, do you promise not to charge me?”

  There was a hushed whinny, as if the horse understood what he was saying. Except he couldn’t speak horse either, and for all he knew the horse had just promised to eat him. His hands fell on the latch. Should he open it now or wait until morning?

  The horse gave the doors a hard kick, the force nearly knocking Finn over.

  “Fine,” he said. He stood as far to the side as he could while still keeping his hand on the latch, flipped it open. He leaped around the side of the barn, expecting that the horse would explode from the building, galloping off to wherever loud, furious horses went. But no, though the latch was open, the doors stayed closed. Finn took a deep breath, grabbed a handle, and walked one door back. He waited for the horse to show itself. No horse. Maybe Finn had had too much tea. Maybe he’d had too much honey.

  A soft nicker from inside the barn.

  Finn stepped inside. He felt along the dusty shelves on the wall where he knew Sean kept an old flashlight. He flicked it on, and a wan yellow glow illuminated the barn. He swung the flashlight around. And there it was. Gleaming. Enormous. At least eighteen hands high, but not thick in the way of shire or draft horses. Lean and elegant as a racer. So black that it almost blended into the shadows pooling in the corners. Warily, he walked all the way around the horse. It was a she.

  “Whoa,” said Finn. “Where did you come from?”

  The horse shook her head, stepped forward, and nudged his chest with her nose. She wore a bitless bridle made of leather nearly as black as her coat, but no saddle. “Hey there,” he murmured, stroking the long face, the silky mane. It was then, when he was petting the horse’s nose, he noticed the smell of fresh hay. A dozen bales were stacked by the door. So someone had put the horse in the barn along with some feed. He’d heard that sometimes families who had hit hard times would leave beloved animals with people they thought could afford them. But Finn didn’t know any local people who had owned a horse as special as this one; he would have remembered. Besides, Finn and Sean couldn’t afford to take care of a horse. They could barely afford the cat.

  And when had this mythical family left the horse and unloaded the hay? Sean was on shift, but Finn had been sitting at the kitchen table all night. Even if he had been too preoccupied to hear the sounds of trucks or voices, Calamity would have, so quick to startle now that her kittens were close.

  The horse gave him another nudge. She seemed young and healthy, groomed and clean. She allowed him to pick up one hoof at a time and check the shoes. They looked new.

  A horse. What the hell was he supposed to do with a horse?

  The mare threw him three times before he managed to stay on her back. He’d ridden a million times before, but not a horse this big, not a horse this strong and fast and fierce, and never at night. He’d barely gotten his hands wrapped in the reins when she was off, tearing a furious path through the darkness as if something wicked was nipping at her heels. He tried using his knees to guide her, he tried to stop her from jumping fences and crashing through streams, he tried to keep her from running all the way to Idaho, but the horse had her own ideas, which boiled down to galloping as fast as she possibly could. After a while, it was all he could do to hold on and hope they wouldn’t die.

  Finally, the horse’s hooves slowed and Finn’s heartbeat slowed and they wandered together past farms and houses, all of them so quiet that Finn almost believed that he and the mare were the only living creatures left in a muted, dormant world.

  The horse slipped between the Bone Gap cemetery and the Corderos’ stone farmhouse, winding her way through the grasses at the edge of the Willises’ beeyard. Mel Willis was the owner of Hippie Queen Honey, and she lived on a shaggy, overgrown patch of berry bushes and brambles and flowers with her hives and with Priscilla. But the beeyard was not dark the way that the other yards were; a small fire glowed in the center of the circle of hives. A figure was silhouetted in front of the fire.

  Finn heard Miguel’s voice in his head—Don’t you know when to give up?—but he wasn’t ready to go home yet. And besides, if he was looking for punishment, he’d rather take it from Priscilla Willis than from anyone else.

  Finn urged the horse toward the figure, and this time, the mare was in the mood to comply. Priscilla Willis glanced up from the flames as Finn and the mare stepped close. She tented her hand over her eyes, trying to make him out in the dark.

  “Who is that?”

  “Finn,” he said. “Finn O’Sullivan.”

  “Okay, Finn O’Sullivan. What are you doing here?”

  “I thought I’d stop by.”

  “You thought you’d stop by for what?” she said, voice sharp.

  Priscilla never made anything easy. “To talk to you.”

  She gazed at him for a few moments longer, then dropped her hand. “Isn’t it dangerous to go riding at night?”

  “More dangerous than hanging out with a bazillion bees?”

  She gestured to the fire. “The smoke calms them. Besides, they won’t sting unless you piss them off.”

  “How do I know what pisses off a bee?”

  “Forget the bees. I saw the bruises on your face the other day. Looks like you pissed off someone a whole lot bigger. Did the horse do it?”

  “She has a mean right hook.”

  “Where’d you get her?”

  “She showed up in my barn.”

  “She showed up in your barn,” Priscilla repeated. She picked up a stick and poked at the fla
mes. “What kind of barn is that, anyway? A magical barn?”

  Maybe Priscilla was thinking of other things that had just shown up in Finn’s barn, but he wasn’t going to talk about that. He touched the mare’s neck, and the horse took a few more steps closer. “I was sitting at my kitchen table, reading, when I heard a noise from the barn. And there she was.”

  “I’ve heard of people doing stuff like that, leaving horses with other people. But regular horses. Not that kind of horse. That’s some sort of fancy show horse.”

  “Maybe. But she was in my not-very-fancy barn with ten bales of hay, so I guess someone wanted us to have her.”

  Priscilla frowned, the firelight etching angry lines in her skin. People said Mel Willis was a pretty woman, but Finn thought that even mad, Priscilla was a whole lot prettier. Not that he could tell her that. He had known her forever, but something had happened in the last year. She was just there all of a sudden, there in a way she hadn’t been before. Spiky as she’d always been, but leaner and lusher at the same time. In class, he would stare at her. He didn’t know he was doing it until she threatened to cut him with a corn knife.

  Other kids stared, too. Some of them said Priscilla Willis was smokin’, as long as you didn’t look at her face. But Finn didn’t see what was wrong with her face. That was what he should have told Miguel: Priscilla Willis didn’t look like anybody else.

  Priscilla said, “I bet she’s worth, like, a million dollars or something. People don’t leave million-dollar horses in barns. That’s crazy.”

  “It is crazy. But now I have a horse.”

  “Are you going to keep her?”

  Finn shrugged. It was odd to be sitting on a million-dollar horse, talking to Priscilla Willis in the middle of the night, but then it was a relief to be talking to someone besides the cat.

  “Mind if I sit with you, Priscilla?”

  “Petey. I hate the name Priscilla. What if I called you Finnegan?”

  “That would be weird, because my name isn’t Finnegan.”

  “Well, my name isn’t Priscilla.”

  “Okay,” he said. This is going well.

  “What did you say?”

  He shut his mouth and shook his head for fear she’d whip out that corn knife. He slid off the horse’s back and patted her flank. He didn’t bother to tether her to a tree. Someone might have put her in his barn, but for some reason, it seemed as if she was her own horse and would decide where and when she wanted to stay, and where and when she wanted to go.

  “You’re not using a saddle? Are you nuts?”

  “I don’t have a saddle. And it didn’t seem right.”

  “So, you are nuts.”

  “She has a bridle and reins.”

  “Great. So, she could have dragged you behind her.”

  “Not by the bridle, she wouldn’t have. Even though it doesn’t have a bit, it would have hurt her, wrenched her in circles.” Finn dropped to the ground on the other side of the fire. “Though I guess she still could have thrown and trampled me.”

  “Awesome.” Petey watched the horse cropping the grass by one of the hives. “What’s her name?”

  “I just met her.”

  “Still.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Come up with a good one. One that she’d like. No one wants to be saddled with a name they don’t like.”

  “Saddled, I get it.”

  “It wasn’t a joke.”

  “Okay.”

  “My jokes are funny.”

  “Okay.”

  The fire lit Petey’s face from below, making her eyes appear even larger, blacker, angrier against the honey skin. Finn had trouble keeping them both in his field of vision, so he looked from one eye to the other and back.

  Petey gave the fire a sharp stab, sending sparks spiraling into the air. “You’re staring again.”

  “Sorry,” he said. But he didn’t stop staring.

  She dropped the stick and met his gaze. “I thought they said you never look anyone in the eye.”

  No one else had such interesting eyes. Another thing he wouldn’t tell her. “Do you always pay attention to what they say?”

  “If I did, I’d have to walk around wearing a paper bag over my head.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to do that,” said Finn.

  Petey blinked so rapidly it was like watching the beating of wings. Finn cursed himself for his big, stupid mouth.

  Then she said, “Your horse needs some water. I’ll be right back.” Despite the fire and the half-moon overhead, she snatched up a flashlight long enough to double as a club and jogged toward the house. Petey ran on the track team, and her stride was long and graceful. At the spigot, she filled a bucket with water and brought it back to the beeyard. It must have been heavy, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell from watching Petey. She was used to hauling buckets and hives and boxes filled with honey jars.

  She set the water in front of the horse, and the horse lapped at it. She murmured to the mare. The mare exhaled and nuzzled Petey’s ear.

  “She likes you,” said Finn.

  “She’s a good horse,” Petey said. “You really should keep her.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Petey stood for a while, hugging the horse, which probably should have seemed strange but didn’t. The mare was huggable when not kicking things or careening across the prairie at a hundred miles an hour.

  Petey said, “You hungry?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. She dug around in a bag by the fire, pulled out a marshmallow, and speared it. She handed the stick to Finn, who held the marshmallow over the flames. Petey did the same. When their marshmallows were burned the right degree of delicious, Petey gave Finn two crackers and a piece of chocolate. He pressed the marshmallow between the crackers and chocolate and took a bite.

  “No, no,” said Petey. “Dip it in this first.” She held out a large jar of Hippie Queen Honey. The mouth of the jar was just wide enough to fit the edge of his s’more. He took another bite.

  “Even better, right?”

  “Even better.” He managed to cram the rest of the s’more into his mouth. Then he had to lick his fingers to get the rest of the honey. Petey, on the other hand, took delicate nibbles, like a bee sipping at a flower.

  “You never told me why you were out here in the middle of the night,” said Finn.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “I’m asking.”

  She shrugged. “Can’t sleep.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Just restless. End of school does that to me. Keeps me awake. My brain won’t stop talking.”

  “My brain does that, too, sometimes.” All the time. Every night.

  “It’s worse now. Maybe because I’m thinking about what I’m doing after graduation next year.”

  “College?”

  Priscilla—Petey—nodded. “You, too?”

  “Yeah. Everyone says it’s early, but . . .”

  “I’ve been thinking about this since I was ten years old.”

  “Thinking about college?”

  “Thinking about getting out of Bone Gap.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I was looking at the applications online. It’s like a bunch of guys got together, got drunk, and tried to see how many essay questions they could think up. You know that one of them wants us to write a five-hundred-word essay on the color red? And that’s not even the craziest one. There’s one that asks you to write a poem or essay or play, but you have to mention a new pair of loafers, the Washington Monument, and a spork. What’s that about?”

  “Which college is that?”

  Petey waved a hand. “Who cares? Someplace I can’t afford to go to anyway.” She sighed and examined her fingernails in the dim light of the fire. “Most I can hope for is the state university.”

  “Me, too. You don’t sound that excited about it.”

  “It’s big. Forty thousand people or something.”

  Finn
swallowed back the knot that immediately rose in his throat. Forty thousand people, forty thousand people, forty thousand people.

  “And people . . . ,” said Petey. “Well, I don’t particularly like people. But they have a bee research facility there. I would like that. But it’s hard to get into. And it’s really expensive, too. My mom won’t be able to help much.”

  “My brother, either,” Finn said. “I’m on my own. Scholarships if I can get any, and loans, if I can get those.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “My mom calls once a month to tell us how happy she is to be away from boring old Illinois. For my birthday, she sent me ten bucks.”

  “Isn’t she with some rich guy now?”

  “Yeah. Some cheap rich guy. Maybe that’s how rich guys stay rich.”

  “Doesn’t that make you mad?”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. Getting mad at his mom seemed about as logical as getting mad at a thunderstorm.

  Petey said, “I guess ten bucks doesn’t cover much tuition.”

  “But it almost buys a whole pizza.”

  One corner of Petey’s bow mouth curved upward, her version of a grin. She tucked her long, wavy hair behind her ear. In the dark, the pink streaks looked black.

  “You could sell the horse, skip college, and buy a hundred thousand pizzas.”

  They turned to the horse, which suddenly stopped munching on the grass to regard them with deep, fathomless eyes. “I don’t think she’d like that.”

  “How do you know what she’d like?”

  “I know animals. I’m good with them.”

  “Or maybe they’re good with you?”

  “Either way. I want to work with animals. Study them. Be a vet or scientist or—”

  “A rodeo clown?”

  “That’s exactly what I was going to say. A rodeo clown.”

  Petey stretched her long legs. “I told you why I’m up. Why are you two wandering around in the middle of the night?”