But that didn’t happen today.
Instead the father giant put down his bag and came walking straight toward them. Cricket jumped off the big plastic bubble onto the neck of the yellow rubber duck, clasping it with all six legs. Firefly joined him, hovering just behind the duck’s rump, shivering in fear. But the father giant didn’t seem to notice them.
“Hey there, little guy,” he said, and he crouched down on the sand next to Peter.
“Hey, Dad.”
“What are you up to this morning?”
“Just working on my raft with Cricket and Firefly.”
The father giant smiled. He reached out and rubbed Peter’s head. He didn’t seem to hear the part about Cricket and Firefly, which was a relief to both of them. They stayed as motionless as they could, hiding behind the bright yellow duck.
“They’re right here,” added the boy.
Again the father giant didn’t seem to hear. Cricket and Firefly snuck a look at each other, a look that meant, Do giants not even hear their own miniature giants?
“Peter, school starts in three weeks.”
The boy didn’t say anything. He tied some driftwood together. The ball of twine was shrinking.
“And we need to get some things straightened out,” the father giant said.
He picked up a stick and dragged it through the sand. Then he reached out and rubbed Peter’s head again.
“Are you scared to go back to school without Charlie?”
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Yup.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going back to school.”
“Hang on,” Cricket whispered to Firefly, “the father giant’s going to sigh.” Cricket was right. The gust of wind swept over them, but they were ready. The father giant opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, then opened it again. He chose his words with care.
“What are you going to do instead?”
“Stay here. Teach Cricket to play catch. Keep track of Firefly’s endurance flying.”
“Your imaginary friends?”
“They’re not imaginary! They’re actual.”
Firefly turned to Cricket.
“See?” she whispered. “We’re actual.”
“Watch out,” whispered Cricket. “The giant’s going to sigh again.” He flattened himself against the ducky’s neck, and Firefly huddled closer to its behind. The father giant shook his head, stood up, and brushed off his pants.
“Okay then, kiddo,” he said. “We’ll figure this out later. I’m off. Another day, another dollar.”
“Dad. They’re actual. They’re right here.”
But the father giant was already walking away.
CHAPTER TWENTY
EVERYTHING GOES SOMEWHERE
They spent the day working, Peter on the raft, Firefly on her upward zooms and endurance laps, and Cricket on fluff catching.
An empty plastic peanut butter jar sailed by, and Peter snagged it with a stick and bound it underneath a corner of the raft. Cricket, next to him on the sand, crouched low. Every time a piece of dandelion fluff drifted by on the wind, he leaped up and clapped it between his wings.
“Let it come to you,” he whispered to himself, repeating what Peter told him during Catch a Flying Object lessons. “Wait for it.”
Firefly, meanwhile, did forty-two endurance laps as a warm-up and then began zooming straight up and then straight back down again. Over and over she practiced her upward zooms. It wasn’t easy, because fireflies were drifters by nature. But she was getting better and better at it.
She eyed the river, sparkling next to the three of them. She remembered the feel of the wind when she raced Cricket to the shore, and how it swept her up and carried her out to the middle of the river. She remembered how it felt to fly higher and higher, to leave Firefly Hollow behind.
She snuck a glance behind her.
Cricket was oblivious, jumping up and down, chanting baseball phrases to himself: “Keep your eye on the ball! Let it come to you! Can of corn! I got it!”
Firefly snuck a glance to her right. Peter was intent on the task of binding the rubber ducky to a piece of driftwood.
Firefly snuck a glance straight up, into the blue sky. A single puffy white cloud floated above the river. It didn’t look that high.
“Yes!” That was Cricket, another dandelion fluff clutched between his wings. The puffy little cloud was farther than she’d ever flown before. But it would be good practice for the day she flew all the way up to the top of the sky. Should she? Could she?
Only one way to find out.
Swoop!
With a single powerful stroke of her wings, Firefly zoomed up. She lifted her wings and pushed them down, down, as hard as she could.
Swoop!
She fought the pull of gravity and kept going. It took all her powers of concentration to rise straight up like this. She was probably close to the cloud by now. Better check. She tilted her head back for a second.
Hmm. That cloud really didn’t look any closer.
Now she looked down. Far below, Cricket was making frantic little leaps back and forth on the sand. Peter was waving with both arms. Now he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted something. Firefly couldn’t even hear what he was shouting, she was so far up. Aha! So she had made progress.
Show them what you’re made of, Firefly, she told herself, and she gathered her strength for another mighty stroke.
Whew. All this gravity fighting had tired her out. She looked down again. Now Peter circled both arms in the air, a motion that meant, Come back. Cricket leaped from the raft to the sand and back again.
They were worried, that was obvious. And she was tired. Very tired.
“Okay, boys,” she called, although neither could hear her. “Incoming!”
She lifted her wings high, let her head droop, and aimed herself toward the shore in parachute formation. This was so much easier than trying to fly against the pull of gravity. Down and down she fell, finally pulling herself up a few feet above Peter’s head.
“What do you think you were doing!” yelled Cricket.
“You scared us,” Peter added.
“If I’m going to fly up to the moon,” said Firefly, “I’ve got to start somewhere, right? Like with that cloud.”
She flipped on her back and pointed up with her wing—but the cloud was gone. What? It was there just a minute ago. Had it disappeared? Oh . . . there it was. Way downstream, floating high above the river. This fly-to-the-moon business might be more complicated than she’d thought. But she kept that to herself.
“Why do you want to fly up there so much?” said Peter. “I’m serious.”
What a dumb question, thought Firefly. “Wouldn’t you want to?” she said, pitying him for those heavy arms of his and his lack of wings. “If you could?”
He shook his head. She stared at him and then turned to Cricket. He shook his head too, but he was staring at the puffy little cloud far downstream now. He had tilted back on four legs and half raised one wing. Was Cricket pretending that her cloud was a baseball? Yes. He was. She felt a little sorry for him. She felt sorry for them both. Peter was still looking at her.
“Well, I do,” she said. “I want to fly up to the moon. Even if no one else in the firefly nation wants to, I do.”
“And I want to learn to catch,” said Cricket. “Even if no one else in the cricket nation wants to, I do.”
“And even if everyone else wants me to go back to school,” said Peter, “I’m not going.”
He looked down the river. Firefly’s tiny cloud had vanished.
“That means that we’re our own nation,” said Peter. “We’re the nation of Peter and Cricket and Firefly.”
It was late afternoon now. The sun, that big orange ball, was low in the sky. The mother giant had finished her work for the day and closed her computer. Now she tromped about inside the kitchen, clattering those noisy pots and pans. Firefly and Cri
cket and Peter stowed the raft safely for the night under the big overhanging rock. The father giant came roaring back in his car. Soon it would be dinnertime, and the mother and father giants would call Peter to come eat. Peter stood up and stretched. Then he looked at Cricket and Firefly.
“Where do you go when you die?” he asked.
They stared at him. What a strange question.
“What do you mean?” said Cricket. “Crickets don’t go anywhere.”
“Everything goes somewhere,” said Peter.
“Not crickets. We stay right here. We turn into music.”
“You can’t sing when you’re dead.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Peter tilted his head in the way that meant he was trying to figure something out. How could Cricket explain to him?
“After we die, we turn into music,” he said. “And we’re everywhere.” They turned into the sound of the wind, rustling the leaves on the trees.
The crunch of an acorn in the fall.
The tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker’s beak on a tree.
All these sounds were music. Crickets and the memory of them were still part of the world, even if they were invisible.
“We’re everywhere,” Cricket said again, but he could tell that the boy didn’t really understand.
Peter turned to Firefly.
“What about fireflies?”
Firefly spread her wings wide.
“Elder told me that when we get very old, we turn into stars,” she said. “So we’re still here too, I guess. Up there.”
The three of them looked up at the darkening sky, just beginning to glimmer with the light of the fireflies of the past.
“What about people, then?” said Peter. “Where do we go when we die?”
This was a question that neither Cricket nor Firefly had ever thought about before. Cricket shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Peter,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Me either,” said Firefly.
Peter stood there on the sand, waiting for more. But they had no idea what to tell him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SOMETHING NEW
The days were shorter now. The sun rose on the far side of the pines later every morning, and it sank below the far side of the river earlier. The leaves of the big maple tree by the giants’ house were not quite as green as they had been, and they looked a little tired.
Peter and Cricket and Firefly spent their days on the shore, each of them busy both separately and together.
“Cricket!” Firefly would yell. “Time me!”
She waited until Cricket was ready, then took off from a hovering position. Vertically if it was a day for upward zoom practice, horizontally for endurance laps. In either case Cricket, with his superior sense of counting, was her timer. He was getting tired of it, though. The stronger Firefly got, the longer he had to count. It reminded him a little too much of Telling Temperature class.
Cricket, meanwhile, worked and worked on his catching technique. Peter patiently watched as fluff after fluff drifted down from the sky and Cricket reared back or leaped forward, wings extended.
“Not bad,” he would call. “A little more extension on your right wing and you’ve got it,” or, “Good try. Let it come to you next time.”
And Peter worked on the raft. Day by day he made it more seaworthy, tying and retying flotation devices, adding more driftwood, letting the entire raft out on a rope a few feet into the river to check for watertightness and then hauling it back in.
Every night the fireflies gathered in the clearing, lighting the Hollow with their glow. And every night the crickets filled the forest with music as Firefly and Cricket made their way to Vole’s boat. He was always there, waiting with leaves full of chopped carrots and cattail tubers, wild dandelion greens and morsels of fried fish.
When they were full, they sat next to Vole in the living room while he mended his fishing nets or practiced his sailor knots. Sometimes he showed them the knots, his paws carefully twisting and tying the worn lengths of rope into intricate patterns. He explained what each knot was used for—to tie two lines together, to secure an anchor, to attach a line to an object.
“When in doubt, use a bowline,” said Vole. “That’s what my grandfather always told me.”
“Why?” said Cricket.
“I have no idea,” said Vole. “But that’s what he said. He told me that a sailor has to know all the sailing knots.”
“But you’re not a sailor,” said Firefly. “Are you?”
“Not yet,” said Vole. “But I am the last living river vole. And all the river voles who came before me were sailors.”
It was hard for Cricket and Firefly to imagine Vole anywhere but here, on his boat moored to the white birch. This was where he had been as long as they could remember.
“Vole?” said Firefly.
“Yes?”
“Does this mean that you want to sail away from Firefly Hollow?”
“Someday,” said Vole. “Someday.”
Firefly and Cricket were silent. Neither of them wanted to think about a day when Vole would not be here. They watched his paws moving swiftly on the rope. And when they couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer, Firefly hoisted herself into the spiderweb hammock and Cricket leaped to the table and lay down next to the ancient paper boat.
The darkness of the forest was darker now, and the crickets’ voices sounded fainter than they had in June, when the light was long and the air soft and tender. When Firefly and Cricket woke in the morning, they were grateful for the fire that Vole lit now in the fireplace.
“It’s still summer, you know,” said Firefly to Cricket.
“Yes,” said Cricket. “It’s still summer.”
“It is,” insisted Firefly, who could hear the lack of assurance in his voice.
“And our practice is paying off,” said Cricket. “You’re getting better at high altitude and endurance laps, and I’m getting better at catching. I’m about to move up to oak seeds, you know. I’m going to try, anyway.”
“I know,” said Firefly.
What were she and Cricket going to do, though, once they’d mastered the arts of flying and catching? They had left their nations behind. When Firefly finally flew up to the moon, there would be no fireflies to admire her. When Cricket finally mastered the art of catching falling objects, none of the other crickets would know.
“Do you think we’ll all stay together when summer’s over?” she said. “You and Peter and me, the nation of three?”
Cricket stretched his wings in the pale early morning sunlight on the deck. He thought about it.
“What else would we do?” he said. “Where would we go?”
“I don’t know,” said Firefly.
Now was the time when other little creatures began to think about warm places to sleep the winter away. Some of the other little crickets even eyed the giants’ house, which was always warm. This was the time of year that the elders stepped up their warnings. Cricket could just imagine the scene taking place nightly in the cricket nation and at the School for Young Crickets. He had lived through it before.
“If you enter their giant homes,” the elders would drone, “they will hunt you down and sweep you out the door with their giant brooms.”
Their dark eyes glared around the circle of listening young crickets.
“And that’s if you’re lucky,” they hissed.
Cricket used to imagine what a giant broom would feel like, crashing down on his carapace and flinging him out a giant door.
“They cannot bear the sound of our music,” the elders said. “They call it ‘chirping.’ ”
“You don’t want to know what the giants are capable of when they’re in a mood,” they said.
But Cricket now knew they were wrong. He and Firefly had spent the summer with a giant—a miniature giant—and no harm had come to them.
After warming up by the fire and eating the breakfast Vole had made fo
r them, Cricket and Firefly headed for the giants’ house. Cricket crouched on the kitchen window frame, while Firefly hovered just above the windowsill. Peter was eating his cereal—clink, clink, clink—and the mother and father giants drank their dark, steaming liquid out of their giant mugs. The mother giant tapped her fingers on the edge of her mug.
“So,” she said, leaning forward. “School starts in two weeks.”
Peter said nothing.
“We know it won’t be the same without Charlie,” said the father giant.
“But there are lots of other kids there,” said the mother giant. “And guess what?”
Clink. Clink. Clink. Peter kept eating his cereal. The mother and father giant waited, but he didn’t say anything.
“There’s a new family moving in down the road,” said the mother giant.
“Yeah,” said the father giant. “A new family!”
Clink. Clink. Clink.
“Aren’t you a little bit excited?” said the mother giant.
“Nope.”
Clink. Clink. Clink.
“I already have friends.”
The mother and father giants looked at each other above Peter’s bent head.
“They’re imaginary friends, Peter,” said the father giant.
“They’re not imaginary. They’re actual.”
Firefly turned to Cricket and gave him a See? We’re actual look. Then she spied some unfamiliar things in the corner of the giants’ kitchen.
“Hold on,” she said. “What’s that over there, Cricket?”
Cricket gathered his strength and—
Sproing!
—up from his perch on the window frame he leaped. He clung to the wire mesh of the kitchen window screen and peered in. Everything looked the same as it always did.
Tall wooden counters. Yellow-painted cupboards. The enormous circle of tick, tick, tick on the wall. The wooden table with four chairs and woven place mats. The pitcher filled with hydrangeas and wild roses and tiger lilies. The fireplace, its dark unlit hearth holding a grate filled with pieces of wood.
“Over there,” Firefly said, pointing with one of her spindly legs. “See?”
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