14
OPEN DOOR
Mildred is outside Dr. Flossdrop’s office helping a woman into her car when I arrive to deliver all the goody bags I’ve assembled. Once the car drives away, Mildred stands on the asphalt in the bright sun. Just the sight of her rainbow polka-dotted scrubs lifts my mood.
“Muffin Biscotti Zinnia!” Mildred never runs out of new ways to address me. “You might want to take that sweatshirt off and get some sunshine today, hon. It could do you some good.” She looks worried as she pulls me into a twisty-cinnamon-roll hug.
I don’t stay in the hug long; I don’t want Mildred to sense the shift or buzz of bees.
“A bientot,” she says. “Off to save the world from gingivitis!”
Mildred takes the goody bags — 79 in total — and scuttles toward the office door.
“Oh, and go easy on your mother. She found out that even with so many signatures on her tree-planting petition, the city won’t let her do a neighborhood action that big. I mean, who wouldn’t want more trees? Trees are like nature’s Eiffel Towers.”
With that, Mildred disappears behind the door.
I’m left alone on Dr. Flossdrop’s toothbrush welcome mat. But in the brief moment Mildred had the door to the office open, I saw three things:
A new poster on the wall next to HEALTH CARE IS FOR PEOPLE, NOT PROFIT. It’s of a Yorkshire terrier, like Milkshake, only this one looks a lot more energetic.
Actual Milkshake, dozing on the pink carpet of the waiting room beneath the poster, wheezing.
A hand petting Milkshake’s giant hairy ears — the hand of a boy with a plaid arm attached.
I open the door again.
Both Birch and the dog raise their heads, swinging around to look my direction.
“Zinnia!” Birch exclaims. Milkshake just lays his head down again and pants.
“Birch? What are you doing here?”
“Your mom told Uncle Lou I could have a free cleaning and exam. Dr. Flossdrop is an excellent dentist, by the way. Plus, no cavities! And look, Mildred just gave me this goody bag!” He lifts up one of the smiling tooth bags I assembled.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s wrong?” asks Birch.
“Nothing.”
“Why does your face look like that then?”
“Like what?”
“Like this.” Birch squeezes his eyebrows together and puckers his nose. “Like something smells bad. Or is something bothering you?” He stares pointedly at my head.
“Zip it already!” I make sure no one’s around to have noticed his less-than-subtle inquiry. “It’s Milkshake.”
Birch sniffs the gasping dog. “I don’t smell anything unusual on Milkshake.”
“I don’t mean he smells. He’s what’s bothering me. I have to walk him every day, and I don’t really like him very much. It’s complicated.” I don’t tell Birch that Dr. Flossdrop adopted Milkshake to replace my brother, who Birch doesn’t know exists, and that she fawns over Milkshake while either ignoring me, punishing me, or making me do chores.
“Oh, OK.” Birch pats Milkshake’s head and whispers, “Goodbye, buddy.”
“You can still like him.”
“No, that’s OK. He is a bit damp.” Birch wipes his hands on his plaid shorts. “Actually, I prefer humans to animals, so if I have to make a choice, I choose you.” He starts rifling through the goody bag’s contents.
I can’t help it; I’m kind of flattered. I never thought Birch would say he prefers me to an animal, even if that animal is Milkshake. I mean, my mother certainly doesn’t seem to.
Dr. Flossdrop chooses that moment to peek her head into the waiting room to check on her dog. She waves to me and Birch, and then she’s gone. I don’t even have a chance to say sorry her neighborhood action plan for the meadow isn’t happening. Not that my heart would really be in it anyway.
“So, do you want to hang out?” Birch asks, drawing me back. “I really like your aunt Mildred, and Uncle Lou is the best, and now my teeth are clean, but I could use some, like, age-befitting activity.”
I consider this for a moment. I’ve never done the five-dollar trick by myself, but I watched Adam do it plenty of times last summer. I start talking, slowly, words coming out of my mouth, each one a tiny offering. With every word I’m taking another step in the dark, making sure there’s nothing sharp-edged I’ll bump into.
“OK… yeah,” I say. “I have an idea. We just need some fishing line.”
Birch nods like he is up for any idea I have, but of course we don’t have any fishing line. We search our pockets and the reception desk for a substitute. Nothing.
“How about transparent floss?” Birch holds up his goody bag.
“I can’t think of a better use for my mom’s dental floss,” I say. And that’s the truth.
I affix a length of floss to a five-dollar bill Birch had, and we scramble behind the waiting room’s saloon doors to hide with the other end of the string.
Soon, a patient walks into the waiting room, a man wearing a mustard-colored dress shirt with giant sweat rings under the arms. We see him eye the five-dollar bill lying in the middle of the pink carpet. And we wait to see if he’ll make a move for it…
15
LOOP
Out on the sidewalk a few minutes later, Birch and I pant like Milkshake and laugh hysterically.
“I can’t believe he actually got down on his knees!”
“In his business clothes!”
“And then you tugged the floss.”
“And then he fell on his hands.”
“And then he grabbed the five bucks.”
“But then I tugged it harder.”
“And it ripped in half!” we both shout, laughing uncontrollably.
Once we’ve calmed down enough to walk straight, Birch and I head back to the duplex. We left the torn bill in the office when we tore out of there ourselves.
I have to admit, Birch is growing on me. I didn’t think about the bees once while we were in Dr. Flossdrop’s office together. I almost forgot them entirely. Plus, he chose me over Milkshake. He’s kept my bees to himself. He went on a secret mission he didn’t know the secret of. And he gave me a spin on that inversion table, which was amazing.
I’m happy for the first time in so long that I almost feel like doing Adam’s fancy bow. I mean, that five- dollar-bill trick was just like my best evers with Adam last summer. I remember the last time we pranked someone: a girl Adam’s age. I remember how she didn’t fall for it, and Adam liked that about her. They even exchanged numbers. She had a triangles tattoo on her wrist that Adam complimented her on. He liked how geometric it was.
Wait a minute.
Triangles tattooed on her wrist — just like the ones from Lou’s M. C. Escher LIBERATION poster with triangles and birds.
Birds. Just like the birds tattooed on the girl’s shoulder at Starving Artists Movers.
The same drawing.
The same tattoo.
The same girl.
Adam and that girl from last summer worked at Starving Artists Movers together. That’s not just any girl. That girl must be Adam’s friend. Or maybe even his girlfriend.
When this hits me, I almost faint, right there on the sidewalk next to Birch. Luckily, he probably knows CPR — or at least the kind of CPR used on birds.
Adam was full of secrets. Whatever he was doing with Lou’s boxing gloves. Wherever he’s disappeared to. And that he had a girl friend/girlfriend. He never told me any of that. He met that girl with me last summer and never even mentioned that he saw her again. He might’ve been working with her this whole last year. Maybe all that time he was showing her what was in his secret notebook instead of me.
More secrets. More betrayal when I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
Birch notices a
change in my mood. I can tell because he’s staring at me funny. But I don’t say anything. I race to the duplex before he can even ask.
I run straight to Adam’s room. My eyes are watering, and my face feels hot. I curl up on his bed. I’m crying as hard as I was laughing after Birch and I did the five-dollar-bill trick just now. My breathing is sad heaves I can’t control.
There are some of Adam’s drawings taped up on the walls. A couple of vintage magician posters. He’s got a collection of stuff — plastic figurines and yo-yos — in piles on his nightstand. Coasters. Receipts with doodles. Mixed-up decks of cards. Nothing that tells me anything about where he is.
I open his nightstand drawer.
There’s not much in there. Pay stubs from Starving Artists, matchboxes, a harmonica. But in all the mess is a photo I’ve never seen before. It’s of Adam when he was little, with Dad. It must have been taken a couple of years before I was even born. They’re working together in a wood shop full of stuff. They wear matching denim coveralls. Dad leans over Adam, steadying his forearm, helping him hammer a nail into wood.
Dad died before he had the chance to show me how to hammer a nail into wood. How to show me anything. But I always had Adam. Having Adam made me feel like I knew Dad — at least a little. Adam was my brother, my best friend, and my connection to our dad all wrapped up into one. Having Adam made it not matter so much that I’d never really met my dad. But now it does matter. Because now I’ve got nothing I can count on.
I bring the photo to my room down the hall. I slip it in my own nightstand drawer, cushioned by a million skeins of yarn. I need something else to yarn bomb in here besides my alarm clock and bed. I settle on the geometric base of my lamp. I’ll use stripes again, this time in muted rainbow colors instead of black and yellow. I can’t take any more black and yellow.
As I measure and start knitting, I think about how Adam left me here, all alone, with Dr. Flossdrop and these bees. I think about all the secrets he was keeping, especially this latest one, his girlfriend. About those twice-goodbye blue leather boots. About where he went. More than anything I wonder when — or if — I’ll ever hear from him again.
Bees
THE HUMAN
We were angry at the human. Perhaps even more than we were angry at Bee 641 for getting us into this mess. It was easier to be angry than to admit what we really were — scared.
We didn’t like how the human smelled. We didn’t like the sharp wooden needles she stuck in our hive every once in a while. We even came to detest the sound of her breathing.
We wanted nothing more than to get back at her, but we wouldn’t stoop to using our stingers. That would be low. And also, it would be self-sabotage.
Every night when the human climbed in bed, just before she rested her head on her pillow, we rearranged ourselves so we wouldn’t be crushed.
We stayed like that for hours. We waited in an uncomfortable position all night long until her head finally came up in the morning, and we could resettle properly again.
While the human slept, a couple of us would break away and hover over her dreaming face in order to come back to the group and give commentary. We were told she looked disturbed. Restless. Worried. Sometimes her chin twitched.
And as much as we tried, it was hard to hold the fact that she was a terrible home against her when we heard how her perturbed chin twitched in her sleep like that. It almost made us feel sorry for her. She wasn’t the only one who was worried, restless, and perturbed. It might’ve been hard to admit, but we could relate.
16
BACKSTITCH
Whoosh.
Lou is at my front door, carrying a package. Mail often gets delivered to the other side of the duplex by accident. Probably has a lot to do with the fact that Dr. Flossdrop has been known to order large quantities of recycled paper — which she uses for neighborhood action flyers — online.
“Zinny!”
“Hi, Lou.”
“You can call me Coach, you know that.”
“I know,” I say. But that’s all I say.
“And did you know it’s summertime?” asks Lou.
“Of course I know it’s summer.”
“Oh, well I wasn’t sure, what with that hood on your head and being indoors. In my day, I would’ve been… oh, never mind,” he says, stopping himself from saying something that’s probably inappropriate.
When I don’t say anything else, Lou holds out a FROM THE OFFICE OF PHILOMENA FLOSSDROP, D.D.S. sticky note.
“I believe this is for you,” he says.
I take the note, which says that I shouldn’t walk Milkshake today because he appears fatigued and needs to rest. That’s great news because I could really use a rest from walking Milkshake — not that Dr. Flossdrop would ever notice that.
“And this has your name on it,” Lou adds, handing me the package.
“My name? I never get mail.”
Then it hits me — maybe it’s from Adam! It has to be. Maybe he’s sent me something to explain his series of betrayals and restore order to my universe. There’s no return address, which confirms my suspicion. I want to shut the door in Lou’s face but that would be rude.
“I’m sorry. I have to open this,” I tell Lou. “Now.”
“All right. Glad to see you’re excited about that box. Keep your head up,” he says as I start to close the door. “And I mean that. Keep your clavicle open so your neck stays nice and long. Work on that. Consider it your homework.”
“Sure,” I say, even though I’m not totally sure what my clavicle is.
Once Lou is gone, I open the box with scissors. Inside, there’s a smaller package wrapped in brown paper. A note sits on top. I can tell immediately it’s not Adam’s handwriting. I don’t want to read any note that’s not from Adam, but I can’t stop myself — it’s from NML.
Why would they send me something in the mail? I wonder. Is it too awful to give me in person? What mean thing could they pass off as a gift? What could this package contain that will permanently sever our friendship and betray me even more?
I read the note.
Zinnia,
We thought the rattlesnake mascot looked a lot better with that sweater on. Even if we’d known you were the one who did it, we wouldn’t have gotten you in trouble. We miss you and hope you’ll be friends with us again in eighth grade.
Have a good summer.
Nikki, Margot, and Lupita
I can’t believe what I’m reading. They seem to be claiming they didn’t betray me to the vice principal… that someone else saw me knitting and knew it was me. They also seem to be under the impression that I was the one who stopped being friends with them.
But why should I believe anything they say?
I open the package wrapped in brown paper. It’s a skein of yarn. It’s charcoal gray, like all my clothes.
They sent me yarn in my favorite color. Which is pretty weird.
Despite my confusion, I immediately want to put it to good use. I take a ceramic cactus Mildred gave me a long time ago from my dresser and start wrapping one cactus arm, then the other, with the gray yarn from NML. I do it again and again and again, then move on to the main part of the cactus until it’s all covered too. I cut and tuck the loose end under the bottom of the pot before moving on to my old piggy bank shaped like a robot.
As I wrap, I reach back in my memory and try to figure out if there was a specific moment that NML and I stopped being friends. Some crucial scene to unlock the mystery of when and where and why they deserted me.
The reel that plays in my mind is a collection of scenes, and they’re all basically the same. Me eating lunch alone against the concrete wall by the back entrance of school. Me avoiding them. Me not telling them about my knitting or my parking meter yarn bombs or my plans for Ronny the Rattlesnake. Me thinking Adam was my only friend, that no one el
se could possibly understand.
Yup, Adam. He’d turned eighteen and was working full time at Starving Artist Movers when I started school last year. His arguments with Dr. Flossdrop were escalating. I felt the ground shifting under me at home, tremors of what eventually cracked — that Adam wouldn’t be around forever, at least not in the same way he always had. I didn’t want anything to change, but I felt Adam drifting away. So I grabbed on harder any way I could. I pretended nothing else mattered. I didn’t want anything else to hurt me like Adam’s distance did. Like his exit would.
The reel of seventh grade continues to play in my mind, and it’s me backing away, step by step. Me, too scared to take a step in the other direction. Instead of walking toward my friends when I needed them, I walked away.
I wrap and wrap. The yarn feels soft between my thumb and forefinger as my feelings toward my former friends begin to soften too. I wrap until the robot bank is completely covered and looks like a gray, robot-shaped blob.
I guess I did the same thing with the truth about what happened between me and NML — I covered it up. I made myself believe NML were the ones leaving me; that way I could pretend it didn’t matter. I could pretend I preferred to be just a Z.
But the truth is, I didn’t feel that way — I just felt safer.
And now it means I feel all alone.
17
MOVIE NIGHT
The smell of roses surges toward me when I arrive at Aunt Mildred’s apartment for movie night. Flower overpowers the cinnamon that’s always in the air.
“Zinnia! Action’s in the kitchen!”
Mildred’s right about action. She’s wearing an apron with dancing pizza slices on it, and she’s bustling around. There are at least a dozen whitish-pink roses on the counter, their petals mostly unfurled. Mildred is scooping something that smells sweet and creamy.
Three mugs rest on the kitchen table, and for a second I expect to see Adam, just like usual. But the third mug isn’t for Adam.
Zinnia and the Bees Page 7
