Chapter One
The classroom is silent and the students motionless, seated in rows, rounded forward like eggs in a carton. Anthony sits among them, midway from the front, near the windows. On the desk before him rests a paper; “Presidential Advisors and Executive Agencies.” This is a pop quiz, and he is in the process of failing it. Executive Agencies, he mouths to himself, trying to focus. The spoils system. The merit system.
The farthest thing from Anthony’s mind right now is breaking the promise he made to his mother on her deathbed four years ago. But the 7th grade is a severe and capricious province, where promises of all kinds are made, forgotten, remembered, and broken every day. Anthony’s broken promise begins with an open window.
He doesn’t question it, he simply knows: there is a honeybee in the classroom. That is what is distracting him from the quiz. He wouldn’t be doing much better without the bee, he realizes. There are other problems with this room which make it nearly impossible to concentrate. But the bee is the most immediate distraction.
Facing the students from behind his desk, Mr. Roberts, civics teacher and basketball coach, sits in suspicious readiness. His head sweeps his students like a radar repeater. He sees everything, but he doesn’t see the bee. Anthony peers at the air above the blackboard behind Mr. Roberts. Anthony can’t see the bee either, and he has not heard it, but he knows with absolute certainty that it is pivoting back and forth over Mr. Roberts’s curly brown hair, somewhere between the pictures of Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland.
It is a passive sensation, his knowing. He doesn’t seek it. In fact, he tries to push the feeling away. But his mind is like a dining table draped with a cloth, and right now some invisible, winged creature up near the presidential portraits is tugging one edge of it. Jiggling the silver. Demanding attention.
Focus, he thinks. He squints at his paper; what is the difference between a civil servant and a political appointee? But it’s a losing battle. He feels the bee bank into the room with a sharp left-hand turn; he looks back up and now he sees it, a brown-and-yellow bead whizzing toward him. Diving lower. Passing over Steve Willmeston’s shoulder. And alighting, finally, on Tracy Thompson’s hair, near her bright yellow flower barrette.
Tracy sits one row to his left and three desks closer to the front of the class. Anthony has in the past admired her smooth, perfect, black hair, each day decorated with a new plastic accessory, but now he sees only the bee. It is motionless—attracted, he is sure, by the floral design on her clip, and the yellow color. Bee eyesight is not like human eyesight. A bee draws color information from the ultraviolet spectrum. The yellow of Tracy’s barrette is a color that could summon a bee through a snowstorm. Yellow means nectar.
Tracy has no nectar, of course. The bee will discover her mistake soon enough, Anthony knows, and fly off.
“Anthony,” barks Mr. Roberts from the front of the room. “Eyes on your paper.”
Heads rise all around, stare for a moment, duck again—all except Pam Newly’s head. Pam sits directly behind Tracy. Pam now sees the bee in Tracy’s hair.
At just about the moment Pam begins to point and inhale—a pre-scream breath, it is clear—Anthony feels several more tugs on his tablecloth. More bees, behind him. A lot more bees. He turns to look toward the back of the room.
“BEEEE!” Pam screams, pointing at Tracy. “It’s a BEEEE!” Pam stands, and the classroom erupts.
“Calm down,” Mr. Roberts demands. “It’s just a bee.”
“I’m allergic!” Pam screams. “It’s on Tracy!”
“Okay, get away from it,” he grunts, standing. Tracy paws at her hair and begins to howl.
“Mr. Roberts, look!” Several arms extend, pointing to the rear of the class where a single windowpane, louvered out like a bird wing, spills warm spring air into the room. Anthony is already looking at it, because that’s where the other tugs have drawn his eyes. There are bees. Lots of bees.
Outside the window is a loose swarm of buzzing black wings, and some of them are beginning—accidentally, Anthony is sure—to sweep in through the open window. The rest of the class now stands, and the hysteria rises. It is a forbidding sight, an alien scene, a swarm of bees so close, coming closer. Alien to everyone except Anthony.
“Get out of the way! Let me close that window.” Mr. Roberts, yelling now, is pushing his way through the milling, panicky students. He stumbles, and momentarily disappears below a desk.
Then Anthony sees Greyson—handsome, sullen Greyson, who has watched the entire spectacle from his seat in the back of the class—rise. While Mr. Roberts is submerged, and with obvious distaste for the bees but great poise, Greyson reaches for the detachable crank handle, the single long shaft used to service all the high windows. He grabs it, lifts it, but instead of cranking it and drawing closed the window, he jerks the handle free, double checks to make sure Mr. Roberts is still on the floor, and tosses the brown metal shaft out the opening. It drops from view. He sees Anthony watching. He smiles and slides backward, away from the growing cloud of bees in the room.
Someone screams—stung, apparently. Mr. Roberts surfaces off the floor like a whale breaching and pushes children aside with great strokes of his long arms, swimming his way to the back of the room. “Everyone calm down! You’re a bunch of babies!” he yells. “Just close this—” he reaches the window, and finds the crank missing. He searches the floor and the shelves below the window, batting at bees as he looks.
“Everyone out!” he shouts at last.
Before he is through braying those words the doors in the front and back of the room are thrown open and children rush out.
“Slowly, walk—PAM, WALK,” Mr. Roberts screams, but Pam starts a mass exodus of children fleeing the scene of the infestation. Anthony is pulled along with the rest of them, though he has absolutely no desire to leave. In fact, this is the first time since the beginning of 7th grade that he has actually wanted to be in that room, the room where his mother used to teach, before her death.
River Bend Middle School is a curving, two-story building set into the side of a hill, framed by green pine trees and graced with a wide front lawn. Now a group of twenty-five 7th graders, one teacher, two janitors and a principal stand on that lawn, staring up toward the open window on the second story.
Greyson sidles up beside Anthony, and Anthony can see the violent glee in his eyes. Greyson is athletic. He’s good looking. He has a focused air about him. Coaches and teachers salivate when first seeing and talking to him. Here is a kid who could make the difference in my class, on my team, in my program, they always think. But putting Greyson into any program—athletic, scholarly, artistic, or other—is like pouring poison into a public reservoir. Despite this, he has become Anthony’s constant companion in 7th Grade.
The reasons for this alliance are numerous, mysterious, and—Anthony is certain—for the most part bad. A therapist might say that when sorrow has driven you as deep within yourself as Anthony has gone, it can be very helpful to have someone around willing to tell you what to do.
“You were failing that test,” Greyson murmurs. “I saw your paper. I was going to cheat off you. But you couldn’t do it.”
“So?”
Greyson mimes dropping the crank handle through the window. “So you can thank me. Test postponed.”
Anthony turns back to the high window without answering.
“I can’t wait to see it,” Greyson smirks, lifting his own gaze to the eaves.
“See what?”
“The extermination. They’re gonna spray those things dead. The truck’s on its way.” He points. Mitsy Waterman, the principal, is talking to Mr. Roberts. The two of them gesture up at the window, then down at the ground. Tracing the path of dead bees falling to earth? Or maybe of a certain crank handle. Mr. Roberts throws low looks at Greyson and Anthony.
“Kill the bees? Why?” Anthony asks.
“Because they’re bees,” Greyson snorts. “And they need killing. I wish I could do it.”
Anthony shades his eyes. The swarm clings like a smoky blur just below the roof, near the top of a pipe draining the gutter. Shady, north-facing, subject to wind—it’s not a place they’re going to remain for long. There is no need to kill this swarm. Someone has to say something.
“Mrs. Waterman,” Anthony calls. But the principal is too involved in her animated discussion of bee obliteration to hear. Anthony moves closer. Greyson follows.
“Mrs. Waterman,” he says again when he stands beside her. He knows this woman; his mother used to carpool with her when they were both teachers, and once or twice she had come to dinner with them. She hasn’t been around since his mother died.
“What? Yes, what is it, Anthony?” she asks.
“I heard you called an exterminator.”
“That’s right.”
“Those bees aren’t going to hurt anyone.”
“Anthony, we cannot have a bee hive hanging outside the civics room.” She shakes her head. “Please stand back.”
“But they’re not going to stay up there,” he says. “If you leave them alone, they’ll move. They’ll be gone by tomorrow.”
“Nonetheless.” Her phone rings; she answers.
Anthony turns to Mr. Roberts. “Those bees are—” Anthony tries.
“Any idea where my handle is, Smith?” Mr. Roberts interrupts
“Listen to me,” Anthony says forcefully, surprising himself, “You don’t have to kill these bees.”
“We’re getting rid of the bees, and I wish I could get rid of a few other things too,” Mr. Roberts says, looking at Greyson.
“But the bees—”
“Enough! The county’s sending a truck, not open to debate.”
Anthony takes a few steps back and bumps into Greyson. Mr. Roberts turns back to Mrs. Waterman.
“Too bad about the bees,” Greyson snickers.
Anthony finds himself trembling. “They’re just innocent bees,” he whispers, knowing he’s made a mistake the moment he says it.
Greyson pounces.“Oh man, I know. Poor bees. Hanging up there. Just trying to be bees. And now somebody’s going to kill them. Horribly kill them.” Greyson watches Anthony as he talks. Greyson is a boxer, dancing around, jabbing at any opening. Anthony is all openings. “And there’s nothing anybody can do. We’ll just have to watch. It’s going to be gruesome.”
Greyson makes no distinction between friend and foe when it comes to weakness. All weakness exists to be exploited. He would no more pass up an opportunity to cause pain than he would step over a ten-dollar bill blowing down a sidewalk. Satisfaction suffusing every angle of his face, he turns to stare upward with Anthony.
Looking at the window, open like a shocked eye in the face of his mother’s old room, Anthony finds himself going back to four years ago, in the hospital room where his dying mother lay before him on a bed. He does not want this memory, but it comes. The bees draw it out.
#
She is skinny, limbs little more than a network of ripples beneath the sheet. It is hard to tell where the sharp furrows of the cloth stop and her bones begin, especially at the hips and knees. Anthony’s dad reads the newspaper in the corner; Anthony sits beside his mother and they play Yahtzee.
There was a time when she could shake the cup so hard and fast it blurred, then slam it down on the table, sudden like a snake striking. She always paused for effect, her long-lashed, mocha eyes shining with excitement. Just about every time she rolled, she would say, “This one feels like a Yahtzee.”
Now, though, he has to help her put the dice in the cup, and she can only manage to shake it once before she spills the cubes out onto the game board to slide, not even bouncing, and stop. Her hands on the cup are like rakes of pale sinew.
His dad stands and sets the paper down carefully, folds it like he never does at home, and says, “I’m going to get a cup of coffee. Can I grab you something?”
And as she does every time, his mom says, “No, dear. Thank you.” Her voice is brown, brown like a grocery bag, a soft sliding sound. She smiles, but her lips are dry and they stick to her teeth.
His dad leaves, and his mom leans carefully back on her bed, looking at Anthony.
Her eyes were always big, but her face has shrunk and now they are huge, like two enormous bronze bruises. Her visage seems made up primarily of her eyes, cheeks, and dry lips. Anthony finds all the individual parts of her magnetic. He still thinks she is beautiful, but he knows that to an outsider, she is not beautiful anymore. She is dry and light as an envelope.
“Come here,” wisps her breathy voice from deep among the pillows. He rises and stands beside the bed.
“We have to talk now,” she says, “before your dad gets back. This is something just between you and me.” She looks above her. She is holding the ceiling up with the sadness in her eyes. For long minutes, she doesn’t say anything.
“Are you all right?” he finally asks.
“Listen, Tony,” she says, “this thing I have. Cancer.” He waits. She breathes through her nose: in, out. It’s as though she can’t believe what she is saying. “I don’t want this to happen to you.”
This could happen to me? he thinks. This is a thing that happens to kids? She can tell what he is thinking. She can always tell.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Just listen. And never talk about this with anyone else, all right? Even your father.”
“Talk about what?”
“You know the special thing we do when we guide the bees?”
Anthony nods. Of course he knows. They do it every day, in the garden with her hive.
“That’s the thing that made me sick,” she says. “It’s a very dangerous power. I see that now. It is too dangerous to ever use.”
This is hard to understand. Touching the bees is the best thing in his life. When he reaches with his mind into a colony, when he gathers a hive-mind inside his own, it feels better than anything else in the world. It feels better than riding a bike. Better than eating cheese and pickles on white bread.
“How did it make you sick?” he asks.
“I can’t explain it now. But I did things. I used our power in a way that made this cancer grow inside me.”
“Am I going to get cancer too?” he asks.
Now she starts to cry. She holds back the tears so she can talk.
“No. You are not. You are very special, Anthony. Every mom says that about her boy. But you are truly different. And it’s just . . . it’s a dangerous thing.”
This is turning into a conversation he doesn’t want to have. He glances behind him, hoping his father will come back with coffee, hoping a nurse will come in with a pill, or some sheets. His mom grabs his hand.
“I want you to promise me something. Will you?” He nods, yes, of course, anything.
“Promise me you won’t touch the bees. Not anymore. Not with your mind. Will you do that?”
He is not sure he has heard correctly. He hopes he has not understood. He turns the words back and forth, looking for alternate meanings, trying, by force or guile, to mold the sounds into a different shape, but he cannot.
It just does not make sense. Unless—a sudden stab of hope. “If I don’t touch the bees, will you get better?”
“No—” she gasps a breath and holds very still, like she’s trying to balance a glass of water on her chin, holding in her tears.
“No,” she goes on finally, “I won’t get better. We’re the same, Tony, only you’re so much farther down the path than I am. Than any of us. You’re only eight, and the things you can do . . . Oh, promise me. Because I won’t be here to protect you.”
He is silent, except for the quick, hard sobs that rack his own little body. For the first time, it is real for him. His wall of careful denial collapses. If his mother is asking him to do this, then it must be true, something must be wrong with her, something terribly, terribly wrong. His mother, who is everything to him, who is his solace and companion, his light, the only person who understands him, will not leave this hospital.
“Tony, promise. Promise. Don’t touch the bees. Promise!”
And he promises.
#
“The truck’s coming,” says Greyson, startling Anthony back to the present.
His limbs feel heavy. He tries to shake himself into focus. He feels like he is swimming in syrup. Something pulses inside of him, something he has submerged for four years. Something that is desperate to come out into the open.
The students on the lawn all turn at the sound of the approaching vehicle, low gears grinding as it hauls itself up the hill. Anthony looks as well. Pulling into the parking circle in front of the gym is a white county jib truck, the kind they use to get cats out of trees and reach to the tops of telephone poles. It stops by the front door, and Mrs. Waterman and Mr. Roberts hurry over to meet the driver.
Anthony’s eyes fly back to the hive. “It isn’t fair,” he whispers. “They can’t help being what they are.” He is looking at the bees, but the face of his mother in her hospital bed is the image blooming in his mind. What is going on? It’s been years since he thought about that hospital conversation.
Greyson studies him. He steps closer, just a foot from Anthony’s face. He watches Anthony’s eyes, then follows his gaze to the eaves. Something in Anthony’s stance, in his trembling, motivates Greyson. “If only somebody could go up and rescue them,” he offers softly.
An inspired guess. A body blow. Anthony shudders, and Greyson sees. “But who would do that? I guess they’ll just have to die.”
Before he even knows what is happening, Anthony finds himself moving. The conference by the jib truck has the adults occupied. There is a clear path down the side of the cafeteria to the set of doors opening onto the quad. If he can get to those without being spotted, he can—
“Anthony, where are you going?” he hears Mr. Roberts shout. He freezes.
“Uh, to the bathroom,” he says, amazing himself with a calm, even voice. “I have to go.”
“All right, three minutes.” Mr. Roberts waves toward the door in irritation. “We’re moving the class to the B wing.”
In a moment, Anthony is inside, and the door is closed. He huddles by the soda machines. It is the middle of the last period of the day and the halls are empty. He pictures the route to the civics room. He’s not sure exactly how this is going to work. He knows he doesn’t have a lot of time. He heads for the second floor.
At the top of the staircase he pauses and listens, then peeks around the corner. He’s doesn’t know what he thinks he will find—armed guards posted outside the civics room door? The hall is empty. He steps silently forward, past other classrooms untroubled by insect visitors and still filled with students, until he stands before the door. Room number 31.
It is the most familiar door in the world, as familiar as the front door of his own home. When his mother was alive, Anthony would take the bus from River Bend Elementary School every day, get off at the middle school as the older kids got on, climb these stairs, and pass through this door. Every day, from kindergarten to 4th grade, until she died. And now, feeling as though he is once again seven years old, he puts his hand on the knob and enters.
His sense of being dislocated in time is so great that he almost expects to see the walls hung with pictures of plants and frogs and the kingdoms and phyla of the animal world, as they had been when his mother taught biology here. But George Washington and John Adams still gaze down at him.
The open window is at the back of the room. As he walks closer, he begins to feel the bees tugging gently at his mind. There is nothing he can do about this. It’s not the same as touching the hive-mind, not like he and his mother used to do. That required effort, and focus. This sensation is like sight, or smell. For a time, after he made the promise to his mother, he was desperate to rid even these traces of bee union from his life, but eventually he gave up. There is no way to block it out.
He pushes a desk over to the wall and stands on it so he can crane his head up and out of the window. Bees buzz near him, and land on him, but they do not sting. Anthony has never been stung by a bee; if it ever happened, he would be amazed. Bees have always accepted him as one of them. Even his mother occasionally got stung, if she startled a hive or accidentally hurt a worker. But not Anthony.
Down below he can see the students on the lawn. The BEEP BEEP of the jib truck backing into position rises up to him. There is not much time left. He ducks back inside.
The swarm is hanging up under the eaves, several feet down the wall from the window. Anthony scans the room for an implement, something long enough to poke into the tight ball of bees. If he can reach it, he’s sure he can dislodge it. He might even get stung a few times, because this is a pretty clear violation of bee etiquette, but it would be worth the pain. Physical pain like that would be a relief in some way.
The longest thing he can find is a yardstick. He grabs this and hops back onto the desk. Then he levers his torso up and slides his arm and upper body out of the window.
From below her hears a familiar voice, “Yeah, baby! Look at Smith—you’re a badass, Smith!” It’s Greyson, of course. Below, all eyes shift off the boom operator climbing into his metal basket and shoot aloft to find Anthony. Time’s up, he knows. It’s now or never.
He lifts his hand carefully up and extends the yardstick, but it’s a good four feet from the swarm. More and more bees are settling on him, the curious creatures crawling into his ears and nose. He lowers his arm and brushes the insects gently away, then stares at the swarm.
It’s small. No more than five thousand bees at most, clustered in a ball with guards and foragers swirling, landing, and crawling around it. He can see scouts coming and going out over the landscape. Within the ball of bees must rest a queen—a very new queen, Anthony knows, probably only a few days old. This little globe of bees is looking for a home. The fact that that it’s so small means it is the last of what was probably a series of four or five other swarms pitched out of a primary hive that outgrew its home, each successive swarm growing smaller and weaker as the colony broke apart under the crowded conditions.
He reaches out as far as he can, holding the edge of the window with his left hand and sweeping with his right, but he is nowhere near close enough.
“Scat,” he yells at the swarm. “Get, come on, move it!”
Mr. Roberts cups his hand around his mouth on the lawn and bellows, “Smith, what do you think you’re doing? GET OUT OF THAT WINDOW!”
There is only one way he can get himself close enough. Outside the window is a ledge that runs all the way around the building. If he can squeeze himself through the open window and step down, then scoot along the ledge while holding onto the open louver, he could probably get close enough to swat the hive.
There is no time to think about it. Twisting both arms through the opening and putting the yardstick in his mouth, he wriggles up and through, lifts his left foot out and lowers it down, toeing the ledge. Then he draws out his right leg, until he is standing, face against the glass, high up on the side of a building. Slowly, he turns around.
Now he is clinging to a six-inch ledge, heels pressed against the dirty stucco, forty feet above a concrete walkway with a yardstick in his mouth, looking out over the trees and hills of the town of River Bend. He begins to inch to his left.
“SMITH!” he hears Mr. Roberts yell. “Get off that ledge!” No one else says a word except for Greyson, who is hooting and doing a kind of dance.
Anthony takes the yardstick in his left hand, presses his chin into his left shoulder and his left cheek into the wall, and, gripping the window edge with his right hand, he eases farther and farther out, inch by inch, until his right arm is extended as far as it will go. And then, slowly, he raises the yardstick up toward the hive and swats.
And misses. He is still eight inches shy. There is no way he can get any closer. He knows if he lets go of the window he will fall. He is stuck.
Across the surface of his mind he feels the thousand tiny tugs and pulls of the swirling bees. They are landing on his face and head again, but this time he doesn’t have a free hand to brush them off. He tries shrugging his shoulders, but they cling. They are blinding him, unintentionally, covering his eyes. He feels vertigo settling onto his shoulders, a goblin pushing him away from the wall, off into space.
He hears the arm of the jib truck jerk and squeak and begin climbing upward. He can feel his legs losing strength. His fingers on the window are wet and beginning to weaken.
And without knowing when he has made the decision—as much to save himself now as to save the bees—he realizes he is about to break his four-year-old promise.
The force that has been building inside him thumps his chest, beating him like a drum, calling him. He closes his mind to the outside world and follows it down, into darkness, probing, below his shoulder blades, beneath his heart, to the spot that only his mother ever knew about. And he draws out the shape he finds there, already boiling hot. A glowing, golden hexagon rises up from the darkness. Anthony opens his eyes and the luminous hexagon is there, superimposed like a tattoo upon his optic nerves.
The rest is easy. He flicks his thoughts up to the tight little swarm above him. He positions himself beside the hive-mind and impressions flash though him: the lightest scent of lavender; a flickering heat, like a candle newly lit; the image of fresh, new-formed comb. This is an uncertain, infant intelligence, less than a day old, frightened and confused. He touches the hive-mind. And melds with it.
It’s as if the last four years never happened. He’s back at home, in his mother’s bee yard, sitting in the flowers and talking to her private colony. He feels something rushing up out of him, a long-dammed river, loosed in a moment, roaring back into the world. It is so easy to reach into this hive. How is it he ever stopped?
Go, he tells it softly.
Instantly, the workers on his face lift away and hover before him in a cloud. Go, he tells the hive again. Go west, go to the forest, find a warm place. Go.
And without hesitation, the swarm breaks from the eaves, lifts into the air, and flies west. Not a single bee remains.
As he watches the hive stream away, he sees his mother’s face again, thin with fear, pale, fading. He has done the thing he promised her he would never do. And he has no idea what will happen next. Sadness overwhelms him. The glowing hexagon floats before him, following everywhere he turns his head. He knows that it will remain for an hour or so, fading slowly now that he is not touching the bees. In the past, this fading time was an interlude of utter peace. But today he feels only desolation.
In lifting this bright hexagon from its hidden place, Anthony has also raised its counterpart, a dark companion. It is cold, like death. Like a black bell it peals out sobs of grief. Is it a real thing? It seems made of sorrow. Buried along with his gift for four years, and clinging to that hexagon as Anthony drew it up again, this dark corpus now spreads its arms, and heartache breaks upon him. The pain of his mother’s death. Sadness for the promise he’d made and has now broken. Anguish buried that day in the hospital and exhumed on this ledge, four years later. He feels this monster settle behind him. Keening sorrow. It rocks him, gently rocks him, forward into empty space.
The hills and valleys of western Idaho sweep away in front of Anthony, stretching beyond the bounds of the town of River Bend and out, bursting skyward in the distance to become what he thinks of as his mountains, the Selkirks, and beyond them the distant, thrusting peaks of the Rockies. It is a wild panorama, a green, verdant fastness. This might so fittingly be his final vision; it would be so easy to let go of the window, to loose his weakening fingers, release his hold on the room that once was his mother’s, and plummet.
And then a hand is grabbing his wrist, and a strong arm is pulling him, and a voice is shouting from inside the room. Someone snatches at the front of his shirt as he slips, and then some instinct he did not expect makes his own hand grip the other, pull himself back, fight for footing. This is not the time for him to fall. That time is still to come.
