Zinnia and the Bees Read online

  For Todd

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1: Operation Yarn Bomb

  2: Yarn-Bomb Flop

  3: Message

  4: Neighborhood Action

  Bees: We are the Bees

  5: Operation Ice Cream

  Bees: Getaway

  6: Worst Ever

  7: Meet Milkshake

  8: Meet Birch

  9: Brain Freeze

  Bees: Spake the Queen

  10: This is My Life Now

  11: Goody

  12: Upside Down

  Bees: Still There

  13: Operation Starving Artists

  14: Open Door

  15: Loop

  Bees: The Human

  16: Backstitch

  17: Movie Night

  Bees: Hope? What Hope?

  18: Operation Milkshake

  19: Zinger

  Bees: Recreation

  20: Stitch

  Bees: Reports

  21: Click

  22: Dr. Flossdrop

  Bees: Existence

  23: Peace Offering

  24: Operation Flora Bomb

  25: Unveiling

  Bees: Feast

  26: Repeat

  27: Hive

  Bees: Home

  28: Dispatch

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Back Cover

  1

  OPERATION YARN BOMB

  Ronny the Rattlesnake is naked.

  But not for long.

  “Adam, meet Ronny,” I say, motioning to the three-foot-tall rattlesnake statue — my middle school mascot — in front of us. I’m the only one who calls him Ronny. As far as I know, I’m the only one who calls him anything at all. I decided a while back that Ronny needed a name and an outfit. Today he’ll finally get the outfit part.

  My older brother inspects the statue and gives Ronny’s metal tail a shake hello. “Zin, this yarn bomb is going to be the best ever,” he says.

  On Adam’s scale of things being great, best ever is the highest. The very best. And Adam’s never been wrong.

  Most of the neighborhood isn’t even awake yet in the muddy pre-dawn light. It’s five-thirty in the morning, the last day before summer vacation, and as planned, Adam and I are the only ones at school. We’re dressed in dark colors for our secret operation. I wear charcoal gray, like always, and Adam wears all black — except for his blue boots, which he practically never takes off.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  Adam crinkles his eyebrows, making his face look way more serious than usual, and nods. Then he unzips the retro duffel bag he’s carrying and holds it open in my direction before swiveling his head around to keep watch.

  My heart jolts from a combination of nerves and excitement as I dig for my yarn-bombing supplies. I’m so glad I convinced my brother to do this. We haven’t spent time together in way too long. Lately it seems like Adam is only interested in doing stuff on his own, rather than with me.

  Adam’s the one who told me yarn bombing — which is street art for knitters and crocheters — existed in the first place. He helped me do smaller, lesser yarn bombs in our neighborhood the past couple of years. Mostly we covered parking meters in colorful knit cozies I made. We’d wrap a wool cuff around each pole, and Adam would hold it in place while I sewed the seam to keep the yarn bomb on. Once, we made a whole row of parking meters different colors — a rainbow instead of familiar gray.

  But Adam says Ronny the Rattlesnake will be even better than that — he’ll be our magnum opus. Adam says stuff like magnum opus.

  I slip the sweater over Ronny’s head. It’s gold and brown, my school colors and the colors of Southern Pacific rattlesnakes, which Ronny is modeled after. The sweater alone took me two weeks of furious knitting to make — it even has a stripe with a diamond pattern down the back. I push and tug and push and tug until most of the snake’s twisty length is covered in the wool tube. Then I wrap a thick brown scarf around Ronny’s neck so he looks like he’s either home with an epic sore throat or off to a stylish party.

  But when I glance over at Adam, he’s looking off in the distance. And not in a keeping-watch kind of way — more in a thinking-about-something-else kind of way, which is pretty weird.

  “Hey,” I whisper. “Yarn bomb in progress.”

  Adam shakes himself as though he’d fallen asleep and stands up really straight. “Sorry. Momentary lapse. But honestly, you’re such a pro at this. You barely need me.”

  “Completely untrue,” I say, my eyes practically cresting my forehead.

  Adam smiles at me. “You can do anything, Zin. Remember that,” he says before returning to guard duty.

  I go back to winding the scarf around Ronny’s neck. On the last twist, a car horn honks, and Adam and I both jump. I instinctively hide behind Ronny, and Adam drops the duffel bag to leap behind a shrub.

  But no car pulls up, and nobody appears. Campus remains still.

  Since the honk was a false alarm, I pop back out from behind Ronny. For a moment, I don’t see any sign of Adam. That is, until he emerges from the foliage, pretending to walk up an imaginary staircase. He gets taller and taller, the shrub first at his shoulder, then his waist, then his knee.

  “Hold on,” he says. “I need to go downstairs for a second.” Then he turns around to walk down an imaginary staircase too.

  I laugh as quietly as I can. Watching Adam’s pranks never gets old, but still — we have a yarn bomb to finish before the sun comes up.

  “Want to put on the final touch?” I ask.

  Adam bounds over the shrub and back to the statue. He reaches into his bag to retrieve the last part of Ronny’s ensemble — a length of metallic gold fringe. With a flourish, he wraps it around the rattlesnake’s tail, where it twinkles like tinsel. Then we stand back to admire the new Ronny, almost every inch of him now covered in yarn.

  “What do you think?” I ask Adam.

  “Fancy rattlesnake,” he says. “More than fancy. Spectacular. Amazing.” He balls up the duffel bag and tosses it in the air before catching it.

  The sky is growing brighter now, our signal that it really is time to go.

  “Farewell, Ronny the Amazing!” says Adam as the sun rises over our rattlesnake yarn bomb.

  “Team Flossdrop forever,” I say.

  We spin in a circle, twirling and fist-pumping the air, the sky above us tangerine swirls.

  Adam was right. This is the best ever. The very best.

  2

  YARN-BOMB FLOP

  Adam was wrong.

  Two hours later I’m back at school, and this time I am definitely not fist-pumping the air.

  The rest of campus is happy and bubbling about summer vacation starting. There’s even a table set up with brownies and cupcakes. I’m the only one not happy.

  Ronny the Rattlesnake is naked — again.

  Someone must’ve taken off his adornments. Someone must not understand knitting or public art and has probably never even heard of yarn bombing or anything else cool. I mean, yarn bombers secretly put an exuberant sweater on the whole world. That’s what I wanted to do with Ronny.

  Ugh. Nobody gets this stuff besides Adam. Nobody gets me.

  “Zinnia Flossdrop,” Ms. Amaranth, my vice principal, says as she approaches. “Just who I was looking for. You’ll be spending the day in my office.”

  I close my shocked mouth and breathe through my nose. “What?” I can’t comprehend what she’s saying.

  “Detention. Today.
My office.”

  I’m confused. This is the last day of school. And I didn’t even know you could get detention in the vice principal’s office. I’ve only heard of the normal after-school-in-the-library kind, and I’ve never had that. Pretty sure my mom’s bun would unravel if I did. Dr. Flossdrop is not the kind of person to approve of something that involves sitting around doing nothing.

  “What do you mean?” I ask again.

  “You’re the one responsible for putting a costume on the school mascot,” says Ms. Amaranth.

  I want to tell her it isn’t a costume, but that would be incriminating. “Why do you think I would do that?”

  “Zinnia, I’ve been informed that you’re a knitter.” She says knitter like it’s a bad word.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Someone I can trust.”

  No one comes to mind I can trust besides Adam. Operation Yarn Bomb was our secret, and he was my accomplice.

  I follow the vice principal’s gaze to the brownie and cupcake table. Next to it stand Nikki, Margot, and Lupita — my former friends. The four of us were once a pack. We used to roller-skate and have sleepovers and stay up late talking and laughing.

  But that was months and months ago, at the beginning of seventh grade. And before that, in sixth. And before that, in fifth. We used to be Nikki, Margot, Lupita, Zinnia — NMLZ, like animals, for short. Nikki was the funniest and most outgoing, prone to random cartwheels. Margot was a dancer and super confident; she’d started wearing thin headbands this year, a few of them all at once. Lupita was the sweet one; her favorite color was purple, and she hiked every weekend with her family. I was the one known for wearing only charcoal gray and having massive, curly hair.

  But something changed this year. Now they’re NML. One animal. Without me. I’m a lone Z off on my own.

  NML stare in my direction. Their faces wear smiles — fake, innocent ones. The smiles of ex-friends who can’t be trusted. The smiles of people who spy on you and, when the time comes, spill it about all the stuff you thought you’d kept under wraps.

  I can’t smile back at them. I want to. I want to smile like I don’t care at all that they’ve betrayed me. But I do care. And if I try to smile, my eyes might betray me and cry.

  I take one last look at Ronny over my shoulder. Poor Ronny the Rattlesnake without so much as a pair of underwear, much less a fabulous yarn-bomb outfit.

  I know exactly how he feels — exposed.

  Ten minutes later, while the other kids are outside devouring baked goods, I’m in the vice principal’s office.

  The administrative assistant is eating a cupcake with chocolate frosting and yellow sprinkles — school/rattlesnake colors — at his desk. He hands me a pencil and paper and tells me to write an essay about what I plan to do on my summer vacation. Then he goes back to eating his cupcake. Slowly. Frosting with sprinkles first.

  I figure since I’ve already been betrayed as a knitter, I might as well work on my never-ending scarf. That’s better than writing an essay no one will ever read.

  Sitting down, I open my backpack to retrieve my scarf and the wooden knitting needles attached to it. It’s my never-ending scarf because, well, it never ends. I’ve continued knitting it long after it became an appropriate length for a scarf. Every time I get to the end of a skein of yarn, instead of binding it off and being done, I join on yet another skein in a different color. I’m on bright red right now. At this point the scarf barely fits in my backpack and would probably be better suited for a fashionable giraffe than a human. But I don’t want to stop.

  I knit and knit, getting lost in all the loops. The administrative assistant doesn’t say anything about my lack of writing — maybe because he feels bad for me.

  With each knit, each purl, each loop, each stitch, detention and NML and all that stuff gets further and further away. That’s why I can’t stop knitting. It’s so much better when all that other stuff disappears.

  I daydream about what I’ll do this summer instead of writing it down. I want it to be exactly the same as last summer. Me and Adam again. The way it should be.

  That’s part of why this morning’s yarn bomb was so great — it was a way for us to hang out, like we always used to. Just like we will this summer. We’ll eat ice cream at Scoops together. Watch French movies at Aunt Mildred’s. Do the five-dollar-bill trick at Dr. Flossdrop’s office.

  Adam and I did that trick a million times last summer. It involves taping a five-dollar bill to some clear fishing line, putting it in the middle of the empty waiting room, and waiting for someone to walk in and reach for the money. That’s when Adam yanks it away.

  When that someone realizes they’ve been tricked, Adam always does this ridiculous over-the-top bow — he waves one arm around all silly, twirling his hand and gesturing, and sticks one leg out in front of him. It’s his signature. Admittedly it’s pretty weird, but that bow makes people laugh every time instead of being mad.

  I sit in detention, knitting and purling and daydreaming. I can’t wait to see Adam to tell him all about this whole horrible yarn-bomb flop. He’s the only one who’ll understand.

  3

  MESSAGE

  When I’m finally released from the vice principal’s office, the day’s June gloom has lifted; it’s hazy and hot on my walk home after a miserable last day of seventh grade. At least I can look forward to commiserating with Adam about the injustice of it all.

  But first there’s a message from my mom. A sticky note with the words FROM THE OFFICE OF PHILOMENA FLOSSDROP, D.D.S. greets me on the door when I get to our side of the duplex.

  The sticky note is the most common form of communication my mother and I have. She leaves them on the front door for me all the time. Almost our entire relationship fits on these tiny sheets of paper that could easily blow away in the wind.

  Today’s note informs me that my school called to report the mascot incident and that we’ll discuss my punishment later. Of course Dr. Flossdrop wants to talk about punishment without knowing I’ve already been punished. Betrayed. Detained, etcetera, etcetera. She’s probably going to want to give me a cavity for this.

  I whoosh open the door to the duplex. It’s dark inside, despite the heat of the day. Down the hallway, Adam’s door is open, which means he’s probably not in there. He doesn’t leave his door open when he’s in his room anymore. Not since he started turning into more and more of a loner, always carrying his secret notebook and keeping me out of the loop.

  Wait a minute. Down the hall, my door is closed. And a pair of boots sits outside it. Blue work boots.

  Dad’s boots.

  Those boots are part of a story I’ve heard my whole life.

  Dad was a carpenter, but he had to stop working right after he built my crib because he got sick. Once I was born, he had to stop doing pretty much everything. When he wasn’t in the hospital, which wasn’t often, he could only lie in bed. But those boots were still his prized possession. When Dad died, he left Adam his boots as a way of saying goodbye and also as a way to remember him.

  I was just a baby, so I don’t remember anything about my dad on my own, but Adam was six. He remembers. Thanks to him, I’ve known about those blue boots forever. And I know Adam loves them more than practically anything. As soon as he turned sixteen a couple years ago, they fit him perfectly. He wears them almost every day. He was just wearing them this morning.

  But Adam’s not wearing them now. They’re sitting right here outside my door.

  Then it hits me.

  The boots are a message, just like Dr. Flossdrop’s sticky note. Except this message is heavy. So heavy it could never blow away in the wind.

  It says goodbye.

  And you only say goodbye when you’re about to be gone.

  The skin on my arms and legs bristles with cold, and I run into Adam’s room. Some of his clothes are missing from
his closet. His bike is still in here, which is pretty weird considering he basically rides it everywhere. Despite driving big trucks at Starving Artists Movers, where he works, Adam doesn’t ever drive a car.

  In a frenzy now, I search the duplex for a note to tell me where he is and when he’s coming back and why in the world he left without saying goodbye in person.

  I don’t find anything.

  Maybe Adam didn’t leave. Maybe he put his boots at my door for another reason. Maybe he left the boots for me to shine them. Or to yarn bomb them. Or as a way of telling me we’re going to have exactly the same summer I daydreamed about during detention.

  But none of that makes any sense.

  Dad said goodbye with those boots twelve years ago. And now Adam has said goodbye to me.

  But where could he have gone? And why? And why in the world would he not tell me he was going?

  Dr. Flossdrop won’t let me have a cell phone, so I use the phone in the kitchen and call Adam’s number. It rings and rings. When it finally goes to voicemail, it’s not his old message. His old message was him talking like a robot, saying, “Adam Flossdrop, human on planet Earth, looks forward to communicating with you. Beeeeeeeep. Beep-beep-beep.” And then the phone would actually beep.

  Now all I hear is an automated message saying this number is no longer in use.

  I check the number and try again. Same automated message. So either Adam has been kidnapped or he’s canceled his phone service or changed his number. And I don’t think he’s been kidnapped if he left me goodbye boots.

  I fling open the door to my room. Then I grab the boots and hurl them under my bed as hard as I can, like I never want to see them again. But that doesn’t feel right. These are Dad’s boots that Adam loves. And even if this is the meanest thing Adam has ever done — which it is — at least he tried to leave me something of himself, something to hang on to, the way Dad did for him.

  But Dad’s goodbye was permanent, and Adam’s can’t be. Adam’s coming back. Adam has to come back.

  I duck down and stand them up straight instead, their blue spines neatly in line. Then I collapse on my bed, unzip my backpack, and cuddle my never-ending scarf. I count the squares on my bedspread, hoping for the soothing effect counting always has on me. I get to 24 before giving up. It’s useless to think about anything but my brother.