She’d been dreaming about worms, small white ones burrowing into the space behind her earlobe, whispering messages into her ear. It wasn’t the kind of nightmare she wanted to wake up from, more mysterious in the way that she wanted to hear what the worms had to say. There was a flash of light, and then a loud bang, so she pulled the covers over her head.
“Are you awake?”
It took a moment for Ana to realize her room was flooded with sunlight and someone was at the door.
“What day is it?” she said, speaking to the voice she thought she’d heard in her sleep.
“It’s Saturday morning, almost six fifteen,” Abbie said through the door. “Why aren’t you in the fields?”
Ana sprang out of bed, pulled on jeans and a work shirt, and grabbed her sneakers before throwing the door open.
“Is everything okay?” Abbie asked, standing in the doorway, eyes wide.
“I don’t know what happened,” Ana answered, deflecting Abbie’s concern and heading straight for the stairs. “I didn’t set the alarm because I never need it.”
She ran down the stairs. Abbie followed close behind.
“Slow down . . . are you sure you’re feeling well this morning?”
“I’m fine, I just overslept. Emmett’s going to kill me.”
“I’ve been out in the shed since early morning,” Abbie said. “But I thought you beat me out there, otherwise I would have checked on you. I’m worried. This isn’t like you.”
“I had a nightmare,” Ana said, not wanting to tell Abbie the real reason was that she’d been up most of the night sketching.
“Emmett will be furious.” Abbie sighed. “It’s entirely your responsibility to follow the farm rules, and that begins with being on time. He was very strict about my not intervening in that regard.”
“He’s going to kill me.”
“Probably. But if it makes you feel better, I had trouble sleeping last night too. Must be something in the air . . . but that won’t be a good-enough excuse. You need to run out there and apologize, then offer to work late. Say you’ll do whatever it takes. He’ll be angry, but if you keep quiet and do as he says, it’ll be fine.”
Ana ran out the back door and sprinted toward the fields. Dolly shot out from behind the barn, barking and loping alongside her as if they were in a race. Ana passed Vic and Rolo, already busy with work. They both bowed their heads in unison, signaling the extent of her transgression. René and Joey were at the truck, but there weren’t any other workers in the fields, which had been more typical lately. She couldn’t see Emmett or Manny anywhere, so they had to be in the hoop houses—exactly where she was supposed to be. She’d only very recently earned the opportunity to be working in there with them. She continued running toward the white-tunneled houses, stopping in front of the one with the shadows of two figures inside.
“Grovel,” she told herself, hoping her heart wouldn’t leap out of her mouth. “And then shut it.”
She peeled back the plastic flap. Manny glanced up, then back down again, disappointment mixed with something she couldn’t quite detect. She walked toward Emmett, whose back was turned, his hands buried in the wire tomato cages.
“I’m late and I’m sorry,” she said, out of breath, making a point to be direct yet remorseful. Emmett continued working as if she weren’t there. “I don’t have an excuse because I know you won’t accept one. I usually set the alarm, even though I don’t need it, but I forgot to last night for some reason. I slept deeply, unusually deep, and thus I overslept. I’m willing to work late every day this week—the rest of the summer—weeds and compost duty too. I’ve already spoken to Abbie, who was not happy about my tardiness, either. It’s entirely my fault, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to fix it because I know it’s wrong. Did I say I’m sorry? I’m truly sorry.”
“Is that all?” Emmett said, the small hole in the back of his blue work vest ripping farther apart as he made a point of continuing to do Ana’s work for her.
“I can work every Sunday too. No more afternoons off.”
“You’re an hour and a half late, and I don’t condone tardiness. The one rule you had to follow, without exception, was arriving to the morning meeting five minutes early every day. That rule is for everyone.”
“You have to believe that I had trouble sleeping last night and—”
“I have trouble sleeping, but I’m never late; neither is Manny or any of the workers out there, a few of whom don’t have a comfortable bed like you do to sleep in every night.”
“But what does this mean?”
“It means compost and weeds, no arguments,” Emmett said, pulling his hands away from the tomato cages and wiping his brow. The month was almost over, he reminded himself. If anything solidified his decision to let Ana go, it was this.
Emmett stood up and brushed off his jeans. He looked at her and then looked away. Ana knew there was no changing his mind. Manny gave her the look that meant she should say nothing more. He had an uncanny way of shifting his eyes ever so slightly, enough that the reprimand fell harder on her than words.
Ana nodded, turned around, and pushed the flap of the house open to walk back out into the fields. She scarcely felt her feet moving forward, but let them carry her back to the composting station. She kept her eyes focused ahead, ignoring the looks from her fellow workers in the periphery, ignoring the barks of an enthusiastic Dolly, who darted to and fro behind her knees and paid no mind to the odd chicken wandering by itself through the cauliflower. “This is it,” she told herself. “You’re done.”
Ana thought about the evening before. She’d been hanging out with Rye Moon on the front porch of the farmhouse drinking lemonade and talking about their favorite band for an hour. It was what Rye called a proper hang session. Della Moon dropped by ostensibly to bring Abbie some new tea she made, but Rye divulged to Ana that she’d been begging her mom to bring her over ever since the day they’d met on Main Street, not that Ana had had much time off since then.
“You’re the only person I’ve met who cares about this stuff,” Ana said, hoping she hadn’t said too much. Any time she’d opened up to someone before, they eventually fled in the other direction. “The Hex is something I’ve always kept to myself. That and pretty much every other band I like or book I’ve read.”
“Ditto, woman,” Rye said, twirling a strand of purple between her fingers. “No one in my stupid school gets the impact of a monochromatic ensemble onstage, or the power of the goddess who is Rosa Hex. We were meant to find each other.”
“Fated.”
“Belated.”
“And maybe possibly related.”
They both laughed and pushed on the rocking chairs, rocking in opposite tandem as they watched the golden moon peek over the treetops. “Seriously, you’re the most interesting person in this town by far,” Rye said, pushing the chair back with the heels of her oxford shoes. “You’ve seen more than most people in this pinprick of a place.”
“I’ve only ever lived on the east side of Los Angeles. It’s not like I’ve traveled the world or anything.”
“That’s more than anyone else I know, except for Abbie, of course.” Rye went quiet and stopped rocking. “So, now’s probably the best time to tell you that I’m the big L.”
“Huh?”
“Lez. Lesbiana or whatever your people call it.”
“Okay.”
Rye waited for another response, but Ana continued rocking. “That doesn’t bother you or anything?” Rye asked.
“No, why would it?”
“Because it’s something everyone in this town seems to not understand. Not that anyone would in Hadley, population Homo sapiens zero. My parents are fine with it thus far, but they don’t ever ask me any questions. And it’s not like I’ve had a girlfriend before, not that I’d ever be able to have one around here. I’m not professing anything major to you FYI—”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Good. It’s just . . . I don’t need to explain myself to people, you know? Still, I’m not exactly popular in the amigo department since word was blasted all over school last year.”
“Well, you’re popular with me,” Ana said. “But you and I should never go anywhere near Monarch Mansion. Deal?” Ana put her hand over her left breast.
“Deal,” Rye said, doing the same. “So, tell me about the Lolita girls hanging out in Little Tokyo again. I need details on their ruffled dresses, if any of them carried parasols, and if you were ever compelled to squeeze one of them like an overstuffed human doll baby.”
Though they’d spoken for only about an hour, Ana knew she’d quite possibly found a friend. It was the first time she’d ever had a visitor at the house she was living in, someone who came over to see her for good reasons rather than bad. She couldn’t help it if she’d been amped up enough not to be able to sleep the night before. But Emmett would never understand. The very thought made her churn the compost harder.
• • •
Abbie tried to pay attention to the road, but she was distracted by her own noisy thoughts replaying her latest meeting with Will Carson. She had walked into the café that morning to drop off a selection of fruit he’d requested, along with a new batch of smoked tomato jam. The back wall had been painted charcoal gray since the first visit, and there were new black leather booths installed along one of the walls with windows. Though Will was nowhere in sight, his music of choice, late eighties heavy metal, blared from an unseen stereo. Abbie knew the song all too well. She’d sworn off ever listening to it following her lost decade. But hearing it had so surprised her, so uprooted the suppressed memories, that she had left the box of produce on the counter without a word. She sat in the van for a moment cursing herself, seconds away from going back in, when Will appeared in the window across the street with a furrowed look of confusion on his face. He held his hands up as if to say, “What gives?” and then waved at her to come back in. And with that, Abbie sped away, the image of his dark features, perplexed and shaded in morning stubble, playing on a constant loop ever since.
Forcing herself back into the present, she focused on the road. Ana sat beside her staring out the window. Ana’s tardiness that morning was ammunition for Emmett. Abbie knew she’d eventually have to fight him on whether Ana should stay. She drove up over the forested hills behind Garber Farm, nearly forgetting where to turn. Abbie jerked the van onto an unmarked road, slowing the vehicle as it bounced up and down erratically along the slippery rock path.
“Where are we going?” Ana asked.
“The Honey Pot,” Abbie said. “We’re dropping off and picking up.”
Not many people knew the whereabouts of Alder Kinman’s honey farm, and those who did kept it secret. Alder was a man dusted in mystery—by his own choosing, of course—and his business, though modest, resulted in the kind of profits that garnered many a head scratch. He never explained beyond “My bees are hearty.” His family owned a portion of the land adjacent to Garber Farm, and the two families had been neighbors for generations. Abbie and Emmett grew up running to and fro in the shared woods, and Alder was often a willing playmate. Children loved him, however odd the adults in Hadley found him to be. Both families had suffered misfortunes over the years, so they’d agreed together to sell a portion of their adjoining land. It had pained Abbie’s father, she remembered, and quite possibly catalyzed his death. Alder, a faithful friend to the Garbers, was the only real family Abbie and Emmett had left.
The road twisted and turned as they drove farther down into the trees, which were covered in dust and were an eerie shade of grayish green. They finally made it to a wide clearing. At the bottom, surrounded by the tallest of redwoods, an ominous cabin sat lopsided in the middle.
“Don’t let the creep factor scare you,” Abbie said. “He built this place for that very purpose.”
They got out of the van, and Abbie watched as Ana took in the wall of antlers lining the front porch. Abbie waved to Alder, who rocked back and forth in an imposing high-back chair as he puffed on a pipe.
“What’s doin’?” he called to them as they approached.
“We have your pickles and veggies, came for some honey,” Abbie said. Ana trailed behind her. “Thought you might give us a peek at the hives before we’re on our way.”
“Who’s that?” he said, scrutinizing Ana, who was hiding behind Abbie.
“Ana, this is Alder Kinman,” Abbie said.
“We’ve met,” Ana said. “I mean, I saw him on Main Street on my first day.”
Alder rose from the chair. His whole body rattled from the various necklaces, dangling arrowheads, and beaded chains hanging off his overalls.
“Where ya from, Squirrely?”
“Los Angeles,” Ana said, assuming he was speaking to her.
“Thought so,” he said with a huff. “Why don’t you leave the box on the side steps, and I’ll meet ya ’round back.”
He opened and shut a noisy screen door and headed inside.
“What’s it like inside that place?” Ana asked.
“More antlers, heavy wood, books, tobacco, and some unusual paintings, if I can remember correctly. He hasn’t let me inside in about thirty years.”
They walked around the side of the dark house with a box of produce and pickles and set it on the steps leading up to a chipped door with a hand-painted sign that said KEEP OUT. Ana thought it strange that the sounds of birds were much louder than what she heard regularly at the farm, even though the atmosphere was much gloomier. It was like the place existed on its own, separate from the world, a planet in and of itself tucked back into the forest. There were more than a few signs marking the area as private property. Abbie and Ana came to a tall wooden gate and pushed it open, walking out into a much larger field, which was clear and open to the sky, covered in multicolored flowers and several towers of white boxes.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Abbie said.
“I feel like the Ewoks are going to emerge from the trees at any moment,” Ana whispered. “What are all these boxes?”
“Those are the beehives.”
“Get in costume, m’ ladies!” Alder called out as he lumbered across the field wearing a netted helmet. He handed one to each of them, along with a couple of pairs of gloves, taking a moment to look deep into their faces. “You afraid?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Ana answered.
“I can see it all over ya. Ever been around honeybees before?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Not surprised. Cities need more bees. Don’t we all. But, listen; they’re not here to harm, just here to do their job for the queen and the flowers. Even so, we don’t want to get in their way. They’re miracle creatures, like the butterfly and the ladybug. Miracles often come in small packages.”
He led them out to one of the hives, along the way scratching his beard through the netting and humming a tune of his own making.
“What happened to all those deer?” Ana asked.
“What do you mean?”
“All the antlers. Do you hunt them?”
“Never killed a deer in my life,” he said. “That’s not true. Killed one once, but that was out of mercy—poor thing been hit by a truck off the highway. Believe you me, I still think about it.”
“Then why do you have so many antlers hanging on the front of your house?”
“Bringing ’em back to the land, so to speak. I rescued most of those from garage sales or other folks who didn’t want them in the house anymore. Few I rescued without anyone even noticing.”
Alder approached one of the stacked white boxes, which was faded and splintering with age, and began pumping small puffs of smoke from a silver can around it.
“Put the nets and gloves on, you two.”
“What are you doing?” Ana asked.
“Giving ’em a little smoke. Calms the nerves, makes everyone a little less aggressive. Come take a look, but stay on that side of the box.”
Ana and Abbie wandered over in their nets and gloves. Alder lifted one of the boxes to reveal rectangular pieces of wood inside with a few bees crawling in and out of them and several flying out and into the air before making their way to the wildflower field. Ana remained motionless.
“Don’t worry. I guarantee you they don’t want to waste their lives stinging you.”
“What do you mean?” Ana asked, terrified to move.
“They die once they sting ya,” Alder said, which made Ana even more rigid. “Get a little closer; I want to show you the queen.”
Ana shook her head no and refused to budge. “I’m fine over here.”
“I promise nothing will happen to you,” Abbie said. “It’s something special to see.”
“If they die when they sting you, then they should definitely stay away from me. Far away.”
Alder and Abbie exchanged a look that Ana couldn’t see beneath all the netting.
“Your choice,” Alder said, dipping into the box delicately and pulling out a rectangular frame covered in bees. “Might’ve taken you for a squirrel, but never a chicken.”
Abbie had no fear, as she spent her days with bees in the garden, so she took a frame to inspect.
“Extraordinary,” she said.
They continued to ignore Ana, who stood there looking at the ground, then the trees, until she worked herself up and headed over.
“If I get stung, I get to take a pair of antlers,” she said.
“Fair enough,” Alder replied.
He tilted the frame for her to see.
“Check out this gang of wise guys right here,” Alder said. “Been around longer than the rest of us. They have much to teach about a working society. Can’t say that about most of the rest of us, but these bees know exactly what they’re doing right down to communication and community spirit. They even dance better than we do.”
“You said they’re like gangs,” Ana said.
“And they are! They gather socially to protect and defend what they hold most dear.”
“Do they kill each other, though?”
Abbie looked at Alder again, but he didn’t look back.
“Well, you’ve got your drones and your worker bees, which work together for the protection of the queen bee and her eggs. Sometimes, when the drones are no longer needed and pose a threat to the hive, the worker bees will kill them. It sounds brutal, but it’s all to serve the betterment of the hive.”
“Sounds exactly like a gang,” Ana said.
“Yes, and what’s fascinating is that in the land of the bees, it’s the sisters taking the brothers out. Come over here and check out the honeycomb. Fascinating hexagons!”
Without hesitation, Ana came around to the other side of the hive, so Abbie moved out of the way.
“What do you mean, ‘hexagons’?”
“See here, that’s the shape,” Alder said, delicately running a gloved finger over the wax-covered combs crawling with bees. “Eventually, we’ll take these frames out and extract the honey from ’em. And if you’ve tasted my honey, you know it’s the best in the area.”
“And some of the best surrounding crops too,” Abbie said.
“What else do you grow?” Ana asked.
“Oh, just wildflowers and such and so on,” Alder said, coughing into his netting. “Shall I send you on your way with some fresh honey?”
• • •
Rocks and pebbles ricocheted around the van’s wheels. Abbie maneuvered the van back up to the road, trying and failing to pick up speed. Ana stared out the window, a pair of antlers in her lap. The sky had gone dark with incoming clouds.
“It’s weird isn’t it,” Ana said.
“It is,” Abbie agreed, though she didn’t know to what Ana was referring.
“How if you listen, sometimes the signs present themselves to you, like those moments when someone else randomly says what you’re thinking. Or when you’ve been thinking about someone and you see them, or you’ve had a dream about something that doesn’t pertain to anything in particular, but then you see that thing or that image in real life? I think those are signs pointing you in the right direction, or at least toward the way you’re supposed to go.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Abbie said, knowing full well what Ana meant.
“My abuela was into signs. On this one particular morning, a pretty good one, my birthday actually, she said she hoped we didn’t see any devil piñatas. But then we did. A whole group of diablos.”
“Coincidence, I guess.”
“Or something more. You know when we were leaving and Alder said he thought bees were really angels on earth?”
“Yes . . .”
“Maybe they have stingers for that very purpose. To give life, take it, and also to maybe keep the rest of us from realizing how good they can be. And maybe when we see one, away from any others, nowhere near a hive, maybe it’s there to remind us that goodness in disguise is always buzzing around in the periphery.”