“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure what bedraggled meant, but it didn’t sound good.
Weylyn tried running his fingers through his hair, but they got stuck partway. “I haven’t seen my own reflection in months.”
“Here,” I said, pulling my mom’s camera out of my pocket and snapping a picture of Weylyn before he could protest. I looked down at the screen, disappointed. His eyes were half-closed, and he looked more confused than scary. If I showed Mike this picture, he’d just think it was some random homeless guy.
“Can I see it?” Weylyn asked. I hesitated, then handed the camera to him. His face sank. “It’s worse than I thought.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“I have actual twigs in my beard,” he said, pulling one out and tossing it on the ground. “I’ve never been one to obsess over my looks, but this is a new low, even for me.” He handed the camera back to me. I tapped the little trash can icon on the screen and deleted the picture.
I may not have had a scary picture of Old Man Spider, but Weylyn helped me stage a few action shots with Boo to impress my friends. My favorite was one of Boo mid-yawn with my head dangerously close to his open mouth. It was kind of blurry, but you could see the fangs really well, which is all I cared about, anyway.
Weylyn invited me to hang out for a while, so we tossed the leftover straw from the roof in the fireplace along with a few pieces of wood, and Weylyn showed me how to light a fire. Once we had a flame going, he cracked open a bag of sunflower seeds, and we took turns spitting the shells into the fire.
“Nice one!” I said when one of Weylyn’s shells knocked over a charred twig. “I thought I was the best spitter I know, but looks like you got me beat.”
Weylyn laughed. “I’ve never been complimented on my spitting before.”
“I guess wolves don’t really do spitting contests, do they?”
“No, not so much. Although sometimes they bet each other on who can howl the longest. I usually lost, but I had the disadvantage of being human. Different lung capacities, I guess.”
I spat out another shell. “Don’t you ever miss being around people? I mean, wolves are cool, but they can’t spit or climb trees or anything like that.”
Weylyn chewed as he considered my question. “I miss some people. Not everyone, of course, but I like to think I still have friends out there.”
“Like … What was her name again? Your foster sister?”
“Lydia.”
“Do you ever see her?”
“I visit her every now and then, although it took me a while to get up the courage to go.”
“Because of what happened with Mary?”
He nodded thoughtfully.
“What finally made you decide to go?”
Weylyn’s eyes flitted around the mostly empty room. “I was tired of being alone.”
book 5
FIREFLY KEEPER
FAIRWEATHER, PENNSYLVANIA
2011
48
LYDIA KRAMER BARNES
Bill and I put down roots in Mouse Country. I had a baby inside me and an irrational notion that I had to give birth to my child in a wheat field so that in the event he jumped out of me too quickly, he’d have something soft to break his fall. I had Micah in a hospital, of course, but I had a very acceptable view of a wheat field from my window.
Bill called the Pennsylvania countryside Mouse Country because there are mice everywhere, literally. Name a place you wouldn’t think you’d find a mouse, and we’ve found one there: the toaster oven, a shampoo bottle, Micah’s potty. At first, I tried laying traps and I caught a few of them that way, but Pennsylvania mice are smarter than Oklahoma mice. They quickly learned how to get the piece of chocolate without tripping the spring. I had effectively set up an open candy bar.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was an old farmhouse, after all, yolk colored with white shutters and a wraparound porch, the kind of place that made you want to throw open the windows and set pies on the sills for the neighbor boys to steal. Previously owned by generations of Amish, the house didn’t have a single outlet, so we hired an electrician to wire the place. Supposedly, it had lived through the Civil War, although I couldn’t confirm if it had seen any actual combat. There’s a hole in the fence I like to pretend was made by a musket ball intended for Ulysses S. Grant. Thanks to the soldier’s poor aim and an iron codpiece, Mr. Grant lived to tell the tale, but the fence wasn’t so lucky.
We had a garage that I used as my studio—I had moved on from body art to more salable goods: paintings. I sold them at art fairs and local shops and used the profits to make scary art that was only allowed in the house at Halloween: leather gargoyle masks with teeth growing out of their wagging tongues; dolls’ heads with scorched hair floating in bowls of oatmeal; a portrait of my mother wielding a bloody stake entitled Clara Kramer, Vampire Hunter. Daddy thought it was hilarious, but I didn’t show it to Mama. Somehow, I didn’t think she’d find it funny.
I made these things not because I was living out some sick fantasy but because they made me laugh. No one else did, so I painted cute animals, too.
We inherited one unexpected asset with the property: a bee colony. Neither Bill nor I knew anything about bees—Bill thought they were the same as wasps—but we hired a beekeeper named Rodger who not only knew the difference between bees and wasps but also could identify all twenty thousand species. We built a fence around the beeyard to keep Micah from wandering into the hives, and Rodger brought us honey every Friday, which I sometimes traded with my neighbors for muffins or pies.
At age seven, Micah decided he wanted to be a beekeeper. From his bedroom window, he’d watch Rodger in a cloud of bees, gingerly sliding frames of crispy, golden combs from their hives; then he’d beg me to let him help. “I’m not a baby anymore!” he’d shout, his miniature fists balled and shaking. “I’m seven years old!” He was so cute when he was angry.
My voice was calm. “Let me ask you something. When was the last time you saw a seven-year-old keeping bees?”
“A couple of days ago,” he said confidently.
“Really? And where was that?”
“At the place where they let kids work.”
“Oh, you mean the Third World!”
He nodded. “Yeah, that one.”
“You should have said that in the first place. We’ll go get you a passport tomorrow and put you on a plane.”
“A plane?” he said, bunching his eyebrows.
“Yeah, you’ll have to fly across the ocean, far away from me and Dad. But you’ll be fine ’cause you’re seven now, and you can take care of yourself.”
Micah’s face whitewashed with fear. “No! I don’t want to go far away!”
“Then talk to me again in another seven years; then we can talk about you helping Rodger.” I figured by that time, he’d be too interested in girls to care about bees, anyway.
Minus the occasional bee-related outburst, Micah was a really good kid. His teachers were always telling me stories of how sweet and kind he was: how he helped up Bethany H. when she fell on the playground; how he stayed in during recess to help clean the chalkboards; how he always raised his hand before speaking. I knew behind all those sweet stories there was something they weren’t saying. I saw it in the occasional bruise on his chin or rip in his backpack. Micah was picked on. He was slightly chubby, like me, and would rather be inside reading fantasy stories than playing sports. I gave him my old Wandering Wizards books for his tenth birthday, and he read the whole series in only three months. He started calling himself Tarquist the Unseen and testing “potions” on the cat. I had to wash her frequently to get the dried cranberry juice out of her fur.
We had another son two years Micah’s junior named Clay. The two of them couldn’t have been more different. Clay loved sports, Transformers, and eating contests. He had lots of friends and loved being the center of attention. I must have had meetings with the elementary school principal every week because I have every inch
of that office memorized: a brass nameplate with one screw missing; a picture of her kids—two girls, one boy, and a labradoodle—in a five-by-seven-inch frame on her desk; a candy dish that was always full of Reese’s Pieces. I even had a preferred chair—the one with the teal upholstered back—because it was more comfortable than the one with the faux-leather back.
Her name was Nancy, and even though Clay was disruptive, she liked me because the angel, Micah, had also come through her school, so it was obvious I wasn’t the problem. “How do you do it?” she asked the day Clay jumped on his desk and broke it. “How do you live with two boys? One is enough to drive me crazy.”
“I grew up with four sisters,” I said. “I’d take a fraternity over a sorority any day.” And like a frat, the boys were constantly fighting, stuff was always getting broken, they threw up and peed the bed and passed out on the floor. In some ways, it was scarier than a frat because their behavior didn’t require a single drop of alcohol.
It was a strange life we had built for ourselves, my boys and I, and it only got stranger the summer we found Weylyn in the beeyard.
* * *
It was the first day of the boys’ summer vacation. It was eight in the morning, far too early for them to be awake yet, so I used what valuable quiet time I had to get some art done. I opened the garage door to let in the warm June breeze and started by coughing up one of my cutesy dog paintings. I had made one of a Labrador retriever in a bathtub that started a bidding war between two old ladies at the County Arts Fair. Everyone kept asking me if I had more, so I made it a series. The one I was currently working on was a pug in a washbasin.
Bill pulled into the driveway, back from a trip to the nursery to buy some gardenias for the side yard. “You smell that?” he said as he hopped out of the truck, his nose wrinkled with disgust like the snout of that stupid pug.
“Smell what?”
“You really don’t smell that?”
I shook my head and pointed to the trash cans on the other side of the garage. “It’s your turn to take out the trash. I did it the last two times, three if you count cleaning Micah’s invisibility potion off the ceiling.”
“I’m not talking about the trash.” Bill circled his truck, inspecting the tires. “It’s my goddamn tires! I drove through eight steaming piles of Amish horse shit on the way home, and I’m supposed to take it to Hartlaub’s in an hour for a tire rotation!”
“Then hose them down first,” I said, indifferent, and cleaned my brush in a jar of mineral spirits.
“I shouldn’t have to! That’s the point. I swear they do it on purpose to piss me off.” Bill was a paranoid person. He genuinely thought that most people had it out for him. I wanted to tell him to stop worrying because our Amish neighbors didn’t care about him enough to plot against him, but I think the paranoia made him feel important in a world that said he wasn’t. Why do you have to believe that the government mistakenly put you on the terrorist watch list for you to feel good about yourself? I wanted to say. You’re important to me. Isn’t that enough? Instead, I occasionally told him I heard a clicking noise during a call so he could think maybe someone had bugged the phones.
“Remind me why we moved out here again?”
“To get closer to nature.”
“Well.” He sighed. “I’m gonna go hose nature off my wheels.” He grabbed the coiled hose from its peg on the garage wall, then looked over my shoulder at my canvas. “Cute painting,” he said and kissed me on the head.
“Thanks,” I said, pleased. “Oh, and will you take a look at those beekeeper applications today? Rodger said we shouldn’t leave the hives unattended for more than a week, and it’s almost been two.”
Bill hooked up the hose to the spigot. “Bees were making honey long before man knew what honey was. I think they can manage another few days without our help.”
“I’m just saying … he’s the professional.” I packed up my paints and left the garage door open so my oils could dry in the fresh air. While Bill hosed off his tires, I heard the morning bumps and shouts from the boys inside the house and felt the first prick of a headache. It was only the first day of summer.
49
MICAH BARNES
You won’t read about Tarquist the Unseen and his Wand of Fortitude at your local library. If you want to hear about the time he vanquished the Fell Witch of Roch, you’ll have to ask me, because I’m the only one who knows. I am the mighty Tarquist, born from the belly of a blue whale where my mother was trapped by my nemesis, the Warlock Zephidas. First birthed by my mother, then by the Great Whale, they also call me Tarquist the Twice Born. I have over one hundred names, but most people know me by my lay name, Micah Barnes.
It was finally summer. I had spent nine months scratching days off in my calendar, leaping out of my desk at the sound of the bell one hundred and eighty times. I had watched leaves fall, then snow, then flowers bloom through my classroom window. Yesterday was my last day of the eighth grade, and while my classmates hung around in hallways signing yearbooks, I ran straight for those double doors and hoped that none of my “friends” caught me. That’s what Ms. Mahoney called them when she saw Josh Peck shove me into a trash can. “Micah! Tell your friends that we don’t roughhouse in the halls!” To be fair, I was the only one whose name she knew, and calling them my friends was better than calling them my bullies.
I didn’t really have any friends in the traditional sense. I considered my parents my friends, though I wouldn’t have dared to say it out loud. Clay, my brother, was probably my best friend. Or at least, he used to be. In the last year, we had drifted apart. He started playing soccer while I played wizard, and slowly we had less and less in common. When we weren’t fighting, we ignored each other. If I’m being honest, I preferred the fights, because at least we were talking. It was the silences I hated, because it meant we had stopped trying.
I would most likely spend the summer alone, but that was okay. I’d rather be alone than surrounded by five hundred other kids and Josh Peck. My freedom was temporary, that wasn’t lost on me, but three months seemed like a long time back then. The summer stretched out in front of me like the road to some strange and distant land. All I had to do was keep my wits about me and keep walking.
* * *
“When are you gonna quit that wizard stuff? It’s really stupid,” Clay said while practicing kicks in the backyard.
“It’s not stupid,” I snapped back. He had interrupted my training with his soccer practice. I was having trouble concentrating on my immobilizing spell with the sound of that stupid ball smacking against the back fence. “Can’t you do that somewhere else?”
“Can’t you do your lame magic tricks somewhere else?” he said as he kicked the ball in my direction, hitting the fence next to me with a deafening whap!
“Stop it or I’ll…” I pointed my wand at him threateningly.
“Or you’ll what?” he said, amused. “Turn me into a rat?”
I was really angry now. I marched toward him, wand outstretched. “I’d do a lot worse than that.”
Clay laughed. “Then do it, Frog.”
Frog. That’s what the kids at school called me. It started when Andy Jarvis found me practicing my water manipulation spell in the bathroom and called me Finneas Frog after the main character of the Wandering Wizards book series. Finneas is brave, selfless, loyal, and one of the best wizards in all the Seven Earths. I know it was meant as an insult, but I took it as a compliment.
Except this time. Clay had never called me that before. He was friends with kids that did, but he had never stooped to that. Maybe that’s why I hit him.
My wand struck him on the cheek, barely missing his eye. A glossy red comma appeared on his skin and with it came a pause while Clay considered how the next clause would read. He snatched the wand out of my hand and launched it over the fence into the beeyard. “Fetch!” he shouted gleefully. I lunged for his soccer ball, planning to throw it over the fence, too, but he was too fast. By the time I
pulled myself up off the grass, he was already at the back door to the house.
I turned toward the gate. It was unlocked. I’ll just run in, get my wand, and run out, I thought. Plus, I was fourteen and two months, older than Mom said I needed to be to help Rodger. I pulled the beekeeping helmet out of the utility shed and put it on. It was too big, but it would have to do.
I swung the gate to the beeyard open and stepped inside. The hives were bright white, assembled in neat little rows like a military graveyard. Each had a set of three filing cabinet–style drawers and a flat wooden top. I could hear a soft, steady buzz, but I didn’t see any bees, not even one returning to the hive, furry with pollen. I figured they were all inside their boxes making honey for my Sunday morning pancakes.
The Wand of Fortitude was only a few feet away, but my curiosity about the bees got the better of me. I walked up to the first hive and lifted the top. No bees flew out. I pulled out one of the honeycomb frames, expecting to see a few crawling around in the tiny hexagons, but I only saw pools of fresh, gooey honey. I ran my finger across it and sucked at the ochre syrup. It was warm and sweet.
I returned the file to its drawer and continued along the rows. The buzzing got increasingly louder. Then I saw the beating of tiny, wafer-like wings from behind the last of the hives. I ran to the end of the row, then stopped abruptly in my tracks. Behind the last hive there were bees, thousands of them, but it wasn’t the bees that surprised me; it was what they were hovering over. A man lay on the ground, still as death, with long limbs and a tumbleweed of hair. The bees didn’t swarm him or crawl into the folds of his crumpled clothes, but they hung in the air around him like a force field.
I stayed a second too long, because that’s all the time it took between the first bee noticing me and the attack that followed. They descended upon me like a mushroom cloud, jabbing every inch of exposed skin on my arms and legs with their stingers. “Moto Finalus!” I shouted and swatted at them, but that only seemed to make them angrier. I started crying, I’m pretty sure of that; then I got tired of fighting and curled into a ball on the ground while my attackers stuck me over and over like needles in a pincushion.
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