The Summer We Saved the Bees (23 page)

“Not if she’s screaming until she’s blue in the face,” I said. “That’s less cute. Anyway, the bees are your thing. I think if you want to do it, that’s cool, but I don’t think you should make us do it.”

“I thought you cared about the bees,” she said. “I thought you understood how important this is.”

I hesitated. “I do care about what happens to the bees. Of course I do.”

“But?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to wear a costume. But I could…maybe Duncan and I could develop my website or something. You know?” I pictured Duncan’s fingers flying over the keys, working his magic. “Like, we could use my research and stuff, but make it interactive. Facts and quizzes and links to videos…I bet Duncan could even make a game with bees as a theme. Like a
Save the Bees
game. And we could link it to your website. That’d help, right?”

Curtis gave an appreciative nod. “Good thinking.”

“Have you talked about me staying with him?” I asked.

“Yes.” Mom squeezed my knee. “You know I’m very fond of Duncan.”

My heart sank. “But?”

“We don’t want to just abandon the trip.” She saw me open my mouth, about to protest, and held up a hand, palm out toward me. “Wait. Let me finish.”

I nodded.

“You know how much work it has been, planning this. And maybe we were too ambitious. Maybe we need to scale it back.” She looked at Curtis and then back at me. “We can’t do it without you. Not look after the girls and do the presentations.”

“Yeah.” I’d already figured that out.

“So here’s what we’re thinking. The van—we’ll get it running again, but I don’t think it’ll make it across Canada, to be honest. So we’re thinking…just British Columbia. Two months, max. We’d be back in Victoria for school in September.”

Curtis leaned forward. “My mother’s offered to look after you and the twins, if you want. Or you could go stay with Duncan, and the twins could stay here with their grandmother. But”—he held up a finger—“if the girls aren’t comfortable with that…if they want to stay with your mom and me…”

I finished his sentence. “Then you’ll need me to come with you.”

“Yes. We will,” he said.

“Fine.” It wasn’t though. My heart was beating really hard, and that crazy rage feeling was building up inside me again. They were acting like this was some big compromise when this whole trip was only supposed to be for the summer anyway. What difference did it make if we drove to Quebec or just drove around bc? It would still be a nightmare. The girls shouldn’t get dumped for a whole summer with a grandmother they barely knew. And I wasn’t going to spend two months looking after them, listening to my mom predict the end of the world as we knew it.

I turned back to my mother. “No,” I said. “It’s not fine. It’s not even a little bit fine.”

She and Curtis exchanged glances. “Wolf. Be reasonable,” she said.

“I’m
tired
of being reasonable,” I said. “I can’t believe you’d even consider just leaving the twins here. You just said Whisper’s anxious, and now you’re talking about abandoning her. Just leaving them with someone they don’t even know.”

“No one is abandoning anyone,” Mom snapped.

I didn’t say anything. Mrs. Brooks stood up and smoothed her skirt, her bracelets jangling. “I think I’m going to excuse myself,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

We all watched her leave. You could tell from the way she held her shoulders, all tight and twitchy, that I had offended her.

Curtis sighed. “Well. What are you suggesting, Wolf?” He leaned toward me. “You think we should just go home and go back to our regular lives? Forget about the bees? Is that what you want? Huh? You want us to pretend that the world isn’t heading into a major catastrophe?”

He was jabbing at me with his words, like a kid poking a turtle with a stick. I shrugged, keeping my head in my imaginary shell, trying not to react to his goading. Trying to think. “A week,” I said finally. “I’ll look after the twins for one week. Not all of bc. Just the Okanagan. Short drives, a few presentations.” I folded my arms across my chest. “And I’m not dressing up. And I don’t think the twins should have to either.”

“A week,” she repeated. “And then what?”

“Then we all go home,” I said. “Or I go to stay with Duncan, and you figure out how to manage.” I looked at Curtis. “I don’t see why you can’t look after the twins anyway. It’s not like you even do anything in the presentation.”

There was a long, long silence. Curtis pulled his eyebrows so low they practically met in the middle, and two deep creases bracketed his mouth. Mom was twisting the end of her braid between her fingers and blinking back tears. None of this had turned out how she’d imagined it, I thought.
I remembered how hard she’d worked, getting everything ready for the trip—the website, the costumes, the juggling show, the flyers, the van—and for a moment I felt so bad, so selfish, I could hardly stand it.

But I couldn’t back down.

“If we go home, I can finish school,” I said. “And…well, maybe Violet and Ty would come back. If they had somewhere to come back to.”

“A week,” Mom said again. She brushed the back of her hand across her eyes. Then, surprising me, she started to laugh. “My little bees are more like little rosebushes. You all just want to put down roots.”

I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t think I had much in common with bees or rosebushes. “Does that mean we can go home?” I said. “Just one week and then we can go home?”

She looked at Curtis and then back at me. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, okay. One week, and we’ll go home.”

“We’ll figure out some other way to do this,” I said. “Save the bees, I mean. Going home doesn’t mean we have to give up. We can write letters; we can organize all kinds of stuff. Duncan and I, we’ll do stuff online. And I can do more, later on, when I finish school.” Maybe I’d even become a scientist, I thought. Maybe I’d find out what was killing the bees and save them for real. Or maybe I’d do something entirely different, like studying distant galaxies.

I couldn’t make my mom trust in the future, but she couldn’t stop me believing I had one. I knew I did.

“I spent my whole life in one ghastly suburb,” Mom said. “Until I was almost twenty. And all I wanted was to pull
up my roots and get away. To be free to travel and explore and not be tied down and stuck in a place full of mindless consumers. I wanted to make a difference in the world, you know?”

I nodded. “I want to make a difference too, Mom. I just want to do it in my own way.”

“You will,” she said. She put an arm around me and pulled me in for a hug. “You already do, Wolf. You make the world better just by being here.”

Upstairs, the twins were fast asleep. Whisper had pulled the blankets right over her head, and when I folded them back, her face was flushed and her hair sweaty. Bath tomorrow, for sure.

I switched off the light, stripped down to my undies and T-shirt and snuggled into my own bed on the floor. There was pale moonlight streaming in through a gap in the thin curtains, and my sheets smelled fresh and clean, like fabric softener. I stretched my legs out, enjoying the coolness of the sheets, and wondered where Violet was sleeping tonight. I wished I could talk to her. And I wondered what Saffron and Whisper would say about all our plans when we told them in the morning. If they’d be happy to stay with their grandmother or if they’d want to go with Mom and Curtis. And George the Van, of course…

I really hoped I could go to Duncan’s, but either way, I thought, it’d be okay.

I’d
be okay.

Last fall there was this weird thing that happened not too far from where we lived. This family—tourists from the States, I think, with a couple of little kids—got lost in a corn maze and couldn’t find the exit. It was pretty huge, and they ended up going around in circles, getting more and more desperate, getting hungry and scared and practically freezing in the maze all night long, until the farmer saw their car sitting in the parking lot the next morning and realized they were still in there.

Anyway, when I looked back at the last few months—since I did my bee project and Mom started planning the trip—it sort of felt like that. Like we were lost in our own crazy maze. I think I’d almost forgotten there was a whole big world outside the maze—a world where most people weren’t obsessed with this one thing. A world full of people who believed that there was a future, who didn’t think bees dying meant the world was ending, who didn’t talk about
these last doomed years
.

A world full of people who saw a future.

And right now, lying here in the moonlit darkness, I felt oddly hopeful for the first time in ages. Just knowing that there was a whole world outside the maze made it all more bearable. It gave me hope.

And that made all the difference.

Acknowledgments

MANY THANKS TO
all the wonderful people who helped me to write this book: my partner, Cheryl; my son, Kai; my parents, Ilse and Giles; my coffee-shop writing buddies, Kari and Alex; my always-inspiring students; and my editor and friend Sarah Harvey. Thanks also to everyone at Orca—I couldn’t ask for a better team to work with.

ROBIN STEVENSON
is the author of numerous books for kids and teens. Her previous middle-grade novel,
Record Breaker
, won the 2014 Silver Birch Award and was a finalist for a bc Book Prize. Robin lives on the west coast of Canada with her partner, son and two cats—an elderly one-eyed pirate cat called Noah and a floppy, purring heap of fluff called Mojang. Robin sometimes edits books and teaches creative writing, and she always loves hearing from readers. For more information, visit
www.robinstevenson.com
.