The Hive: A Young Adult Dystopian Romance (The Enigma Trilogy Book 1)

by S. K Munt

  ‘It’s not a ball, it’s just a Gala, and the only reason why I was looking forward to it, was because I’d found a dress I could wear to it that would actually make me feel like I belonged for once mum.’ Finn shook her head. ‘But without it… no. No way.’

  ‘That’s silly!’ her mother admonished her. ‘You’re beautiful! You could show up in the shorts I just tie-dyed for you-’ But Finn groaned, cutting her off. She knew that her mother’s heart was in the right place and like all mothers, probably actually believed that her daughter was the fairest of them all when in actuality, Finn would have been lucky to be classified as being ‘fair looking’ on the best of days. She guessed that she wasn’t ugly, because as far as she knew, that was the one insult that had never been thrown her way, but she didn’t have any features in common with the people that were called beautiful either, and if anyone ever did remark on her looks, it was usually only to point out how short she was.

  Sure, boys had had crushes on her in the past, and she’d even dated one of Aaron’s friends at the end of the eighth grade, and a beautiful-looking Swiss exchange student back at the start of the ninth grade, which had temporarily won her some street cred. However, the guys that had always pursued her had had some major flaw that had put other girls off pursuing them (like because they’d been the cling in their group, or because they’d only spoken broken English) so Finn had more or less assumed that they’d turned to her because like her, they had limited options.

  ‘Ever heard the expression: ‘A face only a mother could love’? Finn straightened up and dusted herself off. ‘Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s my face.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Gladdy scrunched up her face as she examined Finn. ‘You do realise that you’re-’

  ‘Guys- stop. I love you both, but I need you to stop.’ Finn bowled the bag under the caravan where they stored other useless stuff, and then picked up her bag off the road. ‘I’m glad that you both have such high opinions of me, but I don’t want a pep talk right now- I want to disappear. So I’m going to go do that, and if either of you love me at all, you won’t mention the Gala or what happened today to me ever again, understood?’

  The two older women didn’t agree to her terms, but they didn’t protest either, so Finn retreated into her van, stripped off her clothes, sat down in the bottom of the shower and cried, knowing that her mother was wrong. Georgia hadn’t turned her back on her because she’d perceived her as being a threat or because she’d been jealous of her but because she’d known that like those hideous old prom dresses, all Finn Monroe would ever be was someone else’s trash, and never anyone worth treasuring.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Finn filled six, angst-riddled pages in her journal on Friday night for the sake of purging herself of her pain, and then cried herself into a deep sleep by eight, after shutting her door to block out the sound of her mother and Gladdy chattering loudly (and possibly drunkenly) until all hours.

  Finn was a night owl and an optimist, so that behaviour was out of character for her, but when the sound of her chicken’s clucking outside of her window woke her up at six thirty on Saturday, she found it easier to get out of bed than she had in months. That wasn’t to say she felt good, because her heart felt like an anvil that was going to fall out of her chest and through the Outlander’s floor, like in a cartoon… but she was awake and was even looking forward to her shift at the farm and the walk there and back, because she knew that the work would be absorbing enough to keep her from obsessing about Georgia Janks, the Hive girls, and the party that she was no longer attending too much.

  The farm was located at the school and the work there was pretty easy, if not tedious. Finn hadn’t had a pet since she’d been a toddler, so she didn’t know if she was an animal person or not, but she knew she probably would have enjoyed the tasks more if she’d been able to work with the animals more often- especially the horses while avoiding the yard-work side of things all together. But no one in the Pen actually got to pick what they did to earn their keep- they just had to show up at their allotted time and do what had to be done, which changed every weekend.

  The thing was that the communal farm was exactly that something that had been created to benefit the community as a whole, not individuals- so every household that lived in the Pen had to volunteer someone to do six hours of work each a week to keep it going, unless you were a refugee. If you didn’t need anything from the farm, and wanted to waive your right to rations from it then that was fine, but you still had to do the work if you wanted to be counted as part of the community by their hastily arranged council, to prevent a line being drawn between the haves and the have nots.

  Like with Finn’s after school job, the amount of effort that they put into the farm wasn’t really worth the reward, but at the end of the day, every member of the community got given just enough food to make survival easier as a thank you for their hard work. Enough was always left over to sell to the refugees and the visitors from the Shards who came over at the markets every Saturday too, and the proceeds of all sales went back into the farm. There were a few kinks in the system still, but no one had ever lost money from it either, because all anyone had to invest in it was time, which was one commodity that everyone had in spades.

  Finn was a bit devastated when she rocked up that day to learn that she was going to be spending the next few hours removing runners from the strawberry patches... but she was suddenly one of those people that was filthy rich as far as time was concerned, so she told the supervisor, who was actually Dr Banik that morning, that she planned on staying an extra three hours that day to cover her mother’s shift as well. Dr Banik looked impressed by that and even gave her some gloves to make the task easier, so she ended up getting so lost in her work that she didn’t even hear her mother approach when she did at eleven, demanding to know if Finn knew she was an hour late, or of how worried she had been.

  ‘I’m fine mum,’ Finn said, shielding her eyes against the sun and squinting up at her mother, whose hands were now stained blue, yellow and green. ‘I just thought I might as well do your shift too- to give you more time to tie-dye, now that you seem to be on a mission.’ She yanked out a weed, imagining it was Georgia’s bangs. ‘Plus, it’s keeping me distracted, you know?’

  ‘Well, that’s very thoughtful of you,’ her mother’s face puckered a little. ‘But you skipped dinner, cried all night and then were nowhere to be seen when I came out this morning, so-’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Finn repeated, and she meant it. ‘But I’m not the suicidal type mum, and if I was, you would have found that out back in year eight,’ she wrestled with a rooted knot of purslane for longer than seemed necessary before eventually yanking it out and shoving it into her weed bucket, thinking that she needed to start working out for real before anyone learned that she was too weak to contend with a weed! ‘Or possibly after the world like, ended.’

  Sair’s frown deepened. ‘Be that as it may, I don’t think you’ve had enough sleep or enough to eat to be out in the sun for this long. So how about you come home now for some lunch? You’ve already saved me an hour of work- you don’t need to do all three.’

  Finn smiled weakly, knowing that her mother wanted her home so she could convince her to go to the Gala rocking something she’d just tie-dyed in lieu of a dress. It was a thoughtful gesture, but it wasn’t gonna happen, and Finn didn’t know how to explain to her mum that fussing over her was only prolonging her pain.

  I know mum wants me to go, just so I have more of a shot at feeling special for once, and maybe even meeting a nice guy… Finn thought sadly, wondering if she was a big disappointment to her mother, who’d always raved about how adored her dynamic eldest sister Willow had been from the day she’d been born right through high school, until she’d married the love of her life at the ripe old age of nineteen. But I think it’s time we both face the facts- that I’m not even ordinary- I’m less than that! And probably always will be!

  ‘I�
�m really not hungry yet,’ Finn gestured around her. ‘Besides, I’m happy here. The sun, the fresh air, the silence… I think it’s exactly what I need today, you know?’

  ‘Fine!’ her mother threw up her kaleidoscopic hands. ‘But you come straight back at one-thirty! I want you where I can see you, so I know you’re all right.’

  ‘Fine,’ Finn said, and then got back to her work, smiling despite herself as her mother stomped off, because it was kind of nice to have her mother playing the role of the cheerleader for a change- even if Finn was pretty sure that she was done with positive thinking for life!

  *

  Finn stuck it out until one, and by the time she was finished she felt so cramped up and sweaty that she decided to treat herself by going down to the beach for a quick dip. She still wasn’t hungry yet, but the swim revived her, so by the time she dripped her way back to the park at one-thirty on the dot, just as the market stall-owners were beginning to pack up for the day, she felt as prepared as she could be for a full afternoon of being fussed over.

  Finn had braced herself to return to find her mother had attempted to tie-dye something old of hers to wear to the Gala, and had squirmed at the very idea of trying to get out of it without hurting her mothers’ feelings or wasting her precious time. However, what she had not prepared herself for, was to return and see the dress of her dreams drip-drying for her in the sun, which was why she came to an abrupt halt while she was still at the very edge of the circular road that ringed the inside of the park.

  ‘Oh…!’ the whispered exclamation was swallowed up by her gasp before it could run its course. ‘Guys…! What did you do?’

  Sair and Gladdy had both been rinsing out buckets when Finn had returned, but both she and Gladdy spun and beamed when they saw Finn standing there, gaping at the creation. ‘Don’t look at me!’ Gladdy said, holding up her hands. ‘Your mother did all the work- I just assisted.’

  ‘Ha! You put in just as much time as I did woman, and don’t you deny it!’ Her mother turned to her, looking nervous. ‘Do you like it?’ She hurried over, wiping her stained, wet hands off on her faded jeans as she did. ‘It’s still going to need an hour or so to dry but-’

  ‘Like it?’ Finn felt her heart skip a beat as she eyed the dress, which looked like something a manifest had ripped out of her imagination! ‘Mum! It’s like the Brownie mat all over again!’

  ‘The what?’ Gladdy demanded, looking horrified. But Finn’s mother knew exactly what Finn was talking about, so she ducked her head and blushed. ‘A brown mat?’

  ‘My Brownie mat!’ Finn clarified, creeping closer to the dress nervously, overwhelmed by the ludicrous fear that if she stared at it too hard or wanted it too much, it would evaporate before her wide eyes. ‘Years ago, I joined the Brownies, every Brownie needed to bring along a special mat- one that we were supposed to sit on during floor activities and sew our badges onto after we’d earned one.’ Finn swallowed harder as she zoomed in on the dress, trying to work out which ‘rag’ dress it had been before her mother had gotten to it. ‘Some girls had old Persian rugs, and some had towels- which the girls that had the better mats made fun of. Those girls, like Georgia, had the official Brownie ones, which were covered in badges.’ She stepped back as the wind made the dress flutter Finn’s way, like it was already dancing. ‘We couldn’t afford one of the official ones, and I didn’t have any badges of my own yet, but my brothers had been really heavily involved with the Scouts as kids, so mum got all of their old badges together and then had hand-stitched them onto a mat she’d made just for me, leaving room on the inside border for the ones I earned to eventually go on.’

  ‘Naw,’ Gladdy said, sounding relieved that Finn hadn’t actually been comparing the dress to a brown mat. ‘That sounds nice…’

  ‘It was more than nice- it was Extra, with an uppercase ‘E’!’ Finn wiped a damp lock of hair off her face as her eyes traced over the lines of the dress, which had gone from being something that belonged in a bag of rags, to something that belonged on her. ‘She’d used brown leather for the underside and brown velvet for the top, and even a bit of padding on the inside, to plump it up. Then she sewed all of those vintage badges onto the border, so it looked like a tiny, tailor-made quilt.’ Finn’s smile broke her face as she looked over at her mother, remembering how Georgia had called Finn ‘pathetic’ for having a mat full of badges that she hadn’t earned herself, even though everyone else had been in awe of it. ‘It was a work of art! I didn’t feel like I belonged there, and I only earned three or four badges myself before I quit, but boy, did I feel better walking into that hall once I had that mat; like I had a magic carpet or something!’ She shook her head, feeling her eyes begin to burn as it hit her: ‘Which is how I’m gonna feel tonight, walking into that kingdom in that dress!’

  ‘Oh stop,’ her mother scoffed, waving like Finn’s praise was a pesky fly that she needed to swat away. Still, her face was flushed, and her denim-blue eyes were shining. ‘But… you really like it?’

  ‘It’s perfect!’ Finn stepped over to her mother and wrapped her arms around her neck, squeezing her tightly like she could transfer all of the elation that she was feeling from her and into her mother. ‘I don’t even know what to say! How did you do this?’

  ‘It was actually pretty easy!’ Sair said, returning Finn’s fierce embrace before she dragged her closer to the dress, which was a cross between a nineteen-fifties prom dress now, and a sleek tutu. Very simple, and very obviously made with just the framework of the original gown, but with just enough extra touches to make it memorable. ‘This was that wedding gown, with the horrible puffy sleeves, remember? I just unpicked the sleeves, and then the taffeta overskirt too because let’s face it, the whole lot was um… whatever the opposite of suave is.’ Her mum reached down and hitched up one of the layers of exposed tulle that now made up the skirts of the dress, showing her the lining beneath while Finn giggled at how tragic the word ‘suave’ sounded rolling off her mother’s articulate tongue. ‘The sleeves were big though, so I cut them up and sewed one into the waistline, so it would be like an underskirt, and used the other for the fabric gathered there at the hips, see?’

  ‘We took out the scratchier tulle, and thinned out the chiffon layers too, so it wouldn’t stick out too much,’ Gladdy put in, coming over to join them while drying off her own stained hands. ‘And then we unpicked the lace off that horrid lilac dress, dyed it that darker colour, and then added it there to cinch in the waist.’ She chuckled. ‘It was a long night, and your mother and I both thought were going to go cross-eyed from stitching all that white on white-’

  ‘And we weren’t even sure if it was going to be worth it, until we dip-dyed it this morning and finally saw it all come together.’ Her mother exhaled a heavy, cathartic sigh then winked at Finn, jostling her shoulder slightly. ‘But there it is- your Cinderella dress, for your Cinderella moment!’ Finn was getting much too choked up to cry- so moved that she was trembling- but before she could respond, Gladdy piped up with:

  ‘When we say Cinderella dress though, we mean it Finn. It looks pretty now, and it will last until midnight…’ she winced. ‘But we had to use food colouring to get that yellow colour, so for the love of god run for cover if it rains, all right? Cos I doubt it’ll survive a wash.’

  Finn was disappointed to realise that she wasn’t going to get more than one wear out of it, but she only really needed it to last one night, so she extended her other arm to pull Gladdy into her three-way embrace. ‘Thank you-I love it! And it even looks like it’ll fit!’

  ‘I had to take it in, especially in the bodice,’ her mother said reaching out to untwist one of the tiny satin straps so that the lemony colour would dry evenly. ‘But it laces up in the back, so I just brought it in there at the darts. Oh, and then added those pearls and well… Voila!’ she clasped her hands together and turned to beam at Finn. ‘Now, there’s only one thing left for me to do!’

  ‘What’s that?’ Finn asked, wiping a
way at her tears.

  ‘Hand you over to Gladdy!’ Sair exclaimed, turning her shoulders and giving her a little shove in the direction of their van. ‘After you’ve had a shower, that is...’

  ‘Why…?’ Finn asked nervously, glancing back over her shoulder at Gladdy, and waving when she saw Maya watching her from behind the screen in her window. ‘What’s she gonna do to me?’

  ‘Make that Georgia Janks girl wish she’d left your old dress alone!’ Gladdy declared, grinning happily as she tossed Finn a bottle of body wash Finn had never seen before. ‘So hurry! We’ve got less than four hours to flush out all of your potential, girl and make your ex best friend rue the day she crossed Finn Monroe!’

  Finn doubted that a bit of hair and make-up was going to flush out the kind of potential she needed to demonstrate to truly make Georgia Janks quake, and her steps faltered a little bit at the idea of actually trying to be extra on purpose, after all the time she’d already invested in trying desperately to blend in.

  But she rushed inside anyway and immediately started pulling off her wet tankini, thinking that she’d tried and failed to blend in so maybe, the time had finally come, for her to do her upmost to stick out instead.

  *

  Finn had the most thorough shower of her life, and used products that Gladdy slipped through the door to her, including a scrub and a body wash that smelled so intoxicating that she actually moaned out loud as the aroma of sweet spices, dark honey and incense filled the air. In fact, she liked the soap so much that she washed her hair with it, before adding some of the creamy conditioner that her mother had unearthed from one of her little bags of sample sized keepsakes- some offering that had come with an old box dye.

  As soon as Finn was clean, dry and detangled, Sair slipped into the cramped bathroom and indicated for Finn to kneel on the bathmat by the base of the shower. Finn knotted her towel under armpits and did so, closing her eyes and breathing in deeply as her mother repeated one of Finn’s favourite rituals from her childhood: pouring warm, flowery chamomile tea over her blonde locks for the sake of making them as shiny and fragrant as possible.