by Laura Ruby
To Miguel, he said, “Petey Willis.”
“What?”
“Where I’ve been going.”
Miguel nodded.
“You’re not surprised.”
“Surprised that she’s into you maybe,” said Miguel. “Petey, huh?”
“Petey,” Finn said.
“You didn’t give up.”
“I guess not.”
“Well, she’s not boring, I’ll give you that. Hot in her own way. I can see it. So, what do you guys do?”
“We hang out.”
“You hang out. And what else?”
“We talk.”
“Okay. About what?”
“Stuff. I don’t know. College essays. It’s like a running joke. We talk about the strangest possible essay questions and—”
Miguel rested his forehead on the handle of his shovel. “Dude, I haven’t had a girlfriend in months. And when was the last time you had one? You have to get enough play for both of us. And you can’t get any play if you’re talking about essays.”
“Petey and Amber are friends, maybe I could—”
“Amber likes you. A lot of girls like you.”
“No, they don’t.”
“There are a bunch of them sitting on the side of the road watching us right now.”
“Watching isn’t the same as . . .” Finn trailed off. “I thought you didn’t know who was sitting on the side of the road right now.”
“There are nine of them.”
“Why are there nine girls sitting on the side of the road? Provide your answer in the form of a question.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“You need to lay off the books. We have to get through our last year of high school first. We have to get through the summer.”
Finn didn’t want to get through the summer. He wanted to fall into it, hunker down and stay for a while. He’d already laid off the books, already missed the first of the college entrance tests, already didn’t care. More and more, Finn could manage neither the s’mores nor the horse rides, because there was Petey, bee-eyed and lush and way too much to take in at once, and he couldn’t wait until a quiet moment over the fire or the end of a wild and impossible ride—he had to kiss her right away, and keep kissing her to prove to himself she wouldn’t disappear like so many other things had.
“Come out with me,” he asked her one night, as she pressed him down into the grass, small fingers tracing his ribs through his T-shirt, breath warm on his neck.
“Out where?” she said.
“Anywhere. The diner, the movies, out out. Where people can see us. Where I can see you.”
“You can’t see me now?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But what? Who cares if anyone else sees us?”
He couldn’t explain what he was scared of, it sounded too strange—that he worried she wasn’t real either. But if they were seen somewhere, the talk of the people of Bone Gap, the chatter, the opinions, the endless considerations, would make it so he could believe. He wanted to believe in her.
But that was nothing he could say. So he said, “I just want to spend more time with you, that’s all.”
She laughed. “If you spend any more time here, you’ll have to move in. My mom is cool, but she’s not that cool.”
It was precisely because he didn’t want Petey to vanish that Finn thought he should make an appearance at her house while there was still daylight, maybe say hello to her mother, be a man, rather than sneaking around like some dumb horny teenager (even though he was a dumb horny teenager). He left the mare in the barn and took the main road to Petey’s house, keeping out of the way of cars and trucks, stopping traffic to allow a duck with a parade of ducklings cross the street, ignoring the impatient drivers leaning on their horns.
He turned down the lane toward Petey’s house, set some ways back from the main thoroughfare. One of the Willises’ dogs lay sleeping in the middle of the pavement. He had a name, but no one used it. Everyone called this dog the Dog That Sleeps in the Lane. No impatient driver could impress this dog; he moved for no one and nothing. You drove around him or you turned back to wherever it was you came from.
“Hello, Dog,” Finn said.
The Dog That Sleeps in the Lane lifted his head, eyed Finn as if he was nothing but a dumb horny teenager, and went back to sleep.
Finn approached the house, thinking too late that he should have brought something for Petey’s mom—flowers? candy? a signed declaration of only slightly dishonorable intentions?—when he saw the smoke curling over the roof of the house. Strange that Petey would have a fire burning in the daytime and in June, but then Petey had used a smoker to calm the swarm at the café. He made his way around the side of the house, hoping he wasn’t walking right into another swarm. But instead of a swarm, Finn walked into a massacre. Or rather, an autopsy. Mel Willis had one of her hives partially dismantled. From a nearby crab apple tree, a small ball of confused bees hung like a ragged skein of yarn. Both Mel and Petey were wearing white bee suits and hats with nets. The air smelled of ashes and honey.
Mel, recognizable in her gear only because she was even taller than her daughter, said, “Hey, Finn! Not too close, okay? We’ve got some disoriented bees here.”
“I’ll stay back here if you want,” Finn said. He remembered Miguel’s dad after he’d been stung dozens of times, red and swollen all over, Sean scraping the stingers out of his skin with a credit card.
“You can come closer than that. Priscilla’s got the smoker,” she said. “But move very slowly, okay? Bees are myopic. Anything large and still looks blurred to them; anything quick or jerky gets their attention.”
Finn slowed his movements and stopped some feet away from the beehive and keepers. From where he stood, he could see at least one of the problems with the hive. Large black bugs had burrowed through some of the combs.
“Roaches,” Mel said.
As if on cue, a roach fell to the grass. It was big enough to tow a tractor. “Cool,” said Finn.
“What’s cool about it?” Petey snapped. So maybe Petey was a little spikier during the day. Or when her bees were pissed.
Mel sighed. “Don’t yell, Priscilla. You’ll upset the bees.”
“They’re already upset!”
“Thank you for the update,” said Mel. “Now keep your voice down, please.”
Petey folded her arms across her chest, the smoker puffing huffily for her.
“Did the roaches attack the bees?” Finn asked.
“Roaches can find a way into any beehive, but a strong colony can deal with them. I don’t know what happened to this one, and so fast, too. It’s one of my best hives. Or it was.”
“So why did they swarm?” Finn said.
“Lack of space or an aging queen.”
“Or because the bees feel like it,” muttered Petey.
“If there’s no space in the hive, the old queen lays some eggs, which are then fed something called royal jelly so that they grow into new queens,” Mel said. “Before those new queens emerge, the old queen flies off with some of the workers to form a second hive.”
“Maybe it wasn’t too crowded. Maybe something disturbed the bees,” Petey said, in a softer voice this time.
Mel said, “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” said Petey. She tilted her masked face at the sky, as if the clouds could tell her. “In any case, if they planned to swarm, or even if the bees planned to replace a sick queen, the hive would have a new one. We’ve got empty queen cups—new queen cells—but no queens.”
Finn squinted at the exposed comb, a few bees buzzing and crawling on it. “Is that bad?”
“A queenless colony can’t survive,” said Mel. Like Petey, she tilted her face at the sky. “Let’s hope a new queen is on her mating flight and that she’ll be back soon. In the meantime, we’ll clean out the roaches, replace a couple of the frames, hope for the best. After that, we’ll try to get those bees into a new home.” She nodd
ed at the bee ball hanging from the tree branch.
Finn helped Mel and Petey knock the roaches from the old frames. Mel replaced two of the frames with fresh ones that still smelled of wood sap. A single bee alighted on Finn’s arm. He was too fascinated to be nervous. “I can feel her feet.”
Petey snorted. “Her? That’s a he.”
“How can you tell?”
“The ginormous eyes that practically take up his whole head. The girls don’t have those kind.”
“But most bees are girls, right?”
“They keep a few drones around for fun,” said Mel, grinning behind her mesh. Petey aimed the smoker at her, and Mel put her hands up.
“I know, I know, stop embarrassing you,” said Mel. To Finn, she said, “She’s so squeamish.”
“Mom,” Petey said.
Mel said, “Fine. Let’s get that swarm in a box. Finn, you have to back up a bit in case Priscilla needs to use that smoker.”
“Don’t call me Priscilla,” said Petey.
Mel said, “Don’t smoke them unless you have to.”
“I know!”
Mel took a spray bottle and misted the bee ball. The bees hummed and buzzed. “Sugar water,” she said. “They can’t fly so well if they’re wet. And licking the sugar water calms them. I keep telling Priscilla that it’s better than smoking them, but my daughter doesn’t like to be told what to do.” Mel tied a sheet around the tree branch right under the bees. She stretched the sheet from the tree branch to the hive in the same way Petey had done back at the Chat ’n’ Chew.
“Now,” said Mel, “we wait for the queen. It’s easier to see her against the white sheet.”
Finn and Petey and Petey’s mom knelt in the grass as one bee after another marched back to the hive. When the bees started to move in clusters, walking and flying, something occurred to Finn.
“How do you know which one’s the queen?”
“She’s bigger than the others,” said Mel.
“That doesn’t always help,” Petey said. “I can’t always find her.”
“Because she’s not that much bigger,” said Mel. “You don’t rely on her size as much as you try to use the way she moves. It’s hard to describe. It’s as if she walks in a more determined way.” She pulled off her hat and smoothed her long, straight hair. “She’s got a big job. Babies to bear. Workers to inspire. A colony to manage. She moves like that. Like she’s a woman with a plan. The best way to see her is to let your eyes lose their focus, let things get a bit fuzzy on you. See the bees as a whole rather than individuals. When you do that, you understand the entire pattern. The queen’s movements will stick out because they’re so different from everyone else’s.”
“You mean, you try to see like a bee,” Finn said.
Mel laughed. “Exactly. That’s exactly right.”
Finn did as Mel suggested, letting his vision go slack and blurry. It didn’t take long. “There,” he said, pointing to a long bee in the midst of all the others making their way across the sheet.
Mel leaned in to look. “That’s her!”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Petey.
“Finn, it looks like you have a talent for finding the pretty ladies.” Mel jerked a thumb at Petey. Petey ripped a daisy from the ground and popped the head off, but it only made her mother laugh again.
Even though Finn knew Mel was talking about Petey, he suddenly couldn’t help thinking of Roza, and how he had not found her, how he had almost forgotten about finding her since his brain and his dreams and his nights were so filled with Petey. And he thought about Sean, if Sean had been kissing Roza the way Finn had been kissing Petey, which he must have been. What it would feel like if Petey were suddenly taken, if Sean had been there to witness it, and Sean had done nothing to stop it, and had made no sense when he talked about it later? Finn’s stomach crawled up into his throat.
“Finn? Are you all right?” Mel asked.
“What? Oh, yeah. I’m fine.”
“Always in your own world, aren’t you?” said Mel, but not unkindly. Mel didn’t call him Spaceman or Moonface or Sidetrack or Dude or anything else—she called him by his name. She didn’t seem to blame him for Roza the way so many others did, and that just made it worse.
“Let’s go inside and have some tea and honey clusters,” she said. “I just made them this morning.”
Mel Willis’s honey clusters were almost as famous as her Hippie Queen Honey, and nobody would refuse, not even a dumb horny teenager torn between paralyzing guilt and an insane urge to carry a bee-eyed girl to the nearest bed to show her all those things he couldn’t say, all the ways he didn’t want to lose her.
Instead, the three of them filed into the kitchen, Finn keeping his eyes on the ground as Petey stripped off the white coveralls. They sat around the Willises’ kitchen table, dunking the honey clusters into lemony-sweet tea. And after Finn had eaten more honey clusters than was lawful in the state of Illinois, Mel packed an extra tin for Sean, along with a large jar of honey, in a brown shopping bag.
“Oh!” Mel said. “Before you go, you should sign Petey’s yearbook.” She held out a slim maroon hardcover.
Petey made a strangled sound, as if she were choking on her own tongue. “Uh, Finn doesn’t need to sign my yearbook.”
“Why not? Everyone wants people to sign their yearbooks.”
“I’m not everyone. And I didn’t even want a yearbook. You ordered that book for yourself.”
“So, I’ll have Finn sign it for me, then.”
Petey rolled her eyes, but when her mother’s back was turned, Petey reached out and gave Finn’s pinkie a squeeze.
Finn flipped pages, reading the lists of names until he came to his own, three names down from the top of the page. Then he went to the row of pictures, counted three photos over. He took the pen and scrawled something over it.
Petey watched him do this, frowning. Mel, on the other hand, was delighted, the way she seemed to be delighted by most things. “Thank you, Finn. Even though Priscilla thinks this is silly, five years from now, she’ll be happy to read your message.”
“I won’t even open that yearbook,” Petey said.
“Yes, you will!” sang her mother.
“No, I won’t!” Petey sang back. “And I’m walking Finn out now!”
“Don’t get lost,” said Mel.
Petey slammed the kitchen door shut and stalked into the backyard. She waited until they were around the side of the house before she said, “Okay, seriously? I hope you never change?”
Finn flushed to his hairline. “I was going to write something about my dishonorable intentions toward you, but I didn’t think your mom would approve.”
“Oh, yes, she would. She likes to think that she’s hip about all that stuff. Which she is, I guess, but it’s sort of weird to listen to a thirty-six-year-old woman reminiscing about all the boys she made out with under the bleachers when she was in high school. Who wants to hear about that? Even if it’s not illegal to say out loud, it’s got to be illegal-ish.”
“We never made out under any bleachers.”
“Who needs bleachers?” Petey threaded her fingers through his and pulled him into a patch of wildflowers, more weeds than flowers, a patch that came up almost to their elbows. “So, about these intentions of yours. How dishonorable are we talking?”
He was going to make a joke—Write about the moment of your most dishonorable intentions in the form of a fortune cookie—but her flashing eyes, the curve of her shoulders in the tight T-shirt, the secret wink of her collarbones under her skin, the sweet smell of strawberries thick in the air, sent his thoughts scattering like fish at the splash of a rock. He dropped the shopping bag, not caring what broke. Twining his hands in her hair, he kissed her as if possessed, and they tumbled into the flowers, their bodies hidden in the tall grass. She wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips and they moved together, losing themselves in each other. And though there were layers of clothes between
them, he could imagine himself inside her.
He didn’t have a coherent thought for a long, long while.
Finn took the same route back home, passing the Dog That Sleeps in the Lane, who didn’t even lift his head to yawn when Finn said, “Later, Dog.” As day drifted into night, the sky shucked its oranges and purples for black and blue. A sickle moon threaded itself into the silk. Finn walked in the ditch on the side of the road so that the passing cars wouldn’t mow him down. Or so he wouldn’t stagger into oncoming traffic, he wasn’t sure which.
He trudged along, the night air filled with the song of crickets and the calls of frogs and the Who? Who? of the occasional owl. The sour-milk-and-manure smell of the cows came and went with the breeze. Pollen tickled his nose. The grass crunched beneath his feet. The plants could use some rain. The frogs, too. The whole town. He’d like to be outside with Petey in the rain, one of those warm summer rains that was just hard enough to drench you, but not hard enough to chase you indoors.
Behind him, the rumble of an engine, the whir of tires, a voice yelling, “MOOOOOOOONFAAAAAAAAACE!” He ducked just in time to avoid a rotten green tomato to the head as the Rudes drove by in their old pickup, their cackles wafting behind.
Then the Rudes were gone, and their cackling with them, and Finn had the road to himself. He was so busy listening to the crickets and the frogs and the crunch of his own boots and imagining Petey in a rain shower, skin slick and sparkling with raindrops, he didn’t notice the footsteps behind him until they were right behind him. He spun around, fists up. But the road was dark and empty. No one was there.
He shook his head and kept walking. Again, the crickets and frogs lulled him and his mind drifted into another storm and burst of Petey, and again, only the sound of strange footsteps kicked him out of his dreams. He stopped, head cocked. Even the frogs and the owls held their breath.
Nothing.
The houses were set far back from the road, cars dark and silent in the lanes. The fields stretched for miles in either direction. He couldn’t see anything moving on the road or in the fields, but still, the skin on the back of his neck prickled.
Miguel’s voice boomed in his head. Any minute now, a cat will jump out in front of you and you’re going to feel like a dumbass. And just when you relax, the ax murderer will chop off your head. Surprise cat, then head chop. Always in that order.