The Summer We Saved the Bees (3 page)

She and Saffy aren’t identical twins: Saffron’s always been way bigger, right from when they were born. Plus Saffy has red hair and pale skin with tons of freckles, like Mom and me. Mom’s family was from Scotland, a couple of generations back, and my friend Duncan says Scotland has more redheads than anywhere else. Curtis’s dad was from Guyana—he was part black and part Indian and part white, Curtis says. So Curtis and Violet and Whisper all have light brown skin and dark eyes and super-long eyelashes. They’re all skinny and athletic-looking too. None of them actually does any sports, but they’re naturally good at that kind of thing, just like I’m naturally terrible. Curtis calls Violet and Whisper his
mini-me’s
, even though they’re girls,
which I think is dumb.
Mini-me’s.
It’d be dumb even if they were boys.

We all left Lasqueti Island and moved to Victoria when I was nine. By that time, Saffron was talking up a storm and Whisper wasn’t saying much at all, and when she did, it was in a tiny whisper so you had to bend your head close to hear her. Mom used to get mad at people for comparing the two of them. She said it wasn’t fair, especially since Saffron was such a chatterbox.

It was around that time that we started calling her Whisper instead of Bean. Then she and Saffy started going to preschool, and their teacher was worried because Whisper wouldn’t talk. She still whispered to us at home, but she wouldn’t say a word to the teachers or the other kids. Mom said that preschool was unnatural anyway. She said little kids belonged at home with their families and pulled the twins out of the program.

But now Whisper was five and in kindergarten, and she still didn’t speak to anyone outside our family. She’d been going to school all year and hadn’t said one word there, except maybe to Saffron if no one else was around. Curtis tried to push her to talk sometimes, to say hi to the neighbors or whatever, but she never would. She’d just stare down at the ground or hide behind her dad’s legs. Mom said she’d talk when she was ready, and that this trip would be good for her.

I wasn’t so sure. Whisper didn’t like change. She only ate six things—macaroni, Ritz crackers, apples, bread with peanut butter, bananas and orange cheddar cheese. Plus chocolate,
which didn’t count because Mom wouldn’t buy it. Whisper hated loud noises, like car horns and people shouting. She had wicked meltdowns. A lot of them. And not to be mean, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to share a tent with someone who still wet the bed on a regular basis.

That weekend we painted the van—all of us except Violet, who had taken off somewhere with Ty, saying that if she was going to have to be away for God knew how long, she should at least be able to spend the weekend with him.

On Saturday Mom and I took the sketches the twins had made and used them to come up with a design, while Curtis sanded old paint and rust off the van. The design part was easy—solid black on the front and back, yellow stripes on a black background for the sides—but the sanding took forever. Mom and I helped. We put on dust masks and scoured and polished until our arms and shoulders ached.

It was warm for May, the sun high in the sky, and Curtis had stripped off his T-shirt. I could see the ropy muscles in his back and shoulders shifting under his skin. I wished I had muscles like that. You couldn’t see my muscles at all. Sometimes I took my shirt off and looked in the bathroom mirror, hoping to see something other than pale, freckly pudginess, but things in that department seemed to be getting worse rather than better.

“You’re burning,” Mom said, touching the back of my neck lightly. “You should put on some coconut oil.”

She didn’t like sunscreen, because of all the chemicals in it, but I wasn’t crazy about smelling like a coconut. “It doesn’t work,” I said. “I burn anyway.”

“Go get a shirt with a collar then.”

“Fine,” I said. I was glad of an excuse to take a break. I headed into the house and poured myself a glass of cold water.

“Is it time to paint George?” Saffron called from the living room. “Whisper wants to know.”

“No,” I said. “Maybe this evening.”

“Want to watch this with us?”

I drained my glass, left it in the sink and wandered into the living room, where the twins were curled up on the couch. “Whatcha watching?”

“
Ice Age Three
.”

I watched the screen for a minute. They had the volume turned down so low I could barely hear it. “Want me to turn that up for you?”

Whisper shook her head.

“We know all the words anyway,” Saffron told me.

I probably did too. They must have seen it a hundred times, since it was the only dvd they owned that wasn’t an educational nature documentary. Mom wasn’t a fan of television, but she wasn’t a fan of rules either, so the twins mostly did whatever they wanted.

“I should get back to work,” I said. I grabbed a long-sleeved shirt from a pile of clean laundry, slipped it on over my T-shirt and was about to head back outside when I heard the phone ring close by. The twins didn’t lift their eyes from the screen.
I looked around, following the sound, and finally found the phone under a pile of blankets on the couch. “Move your butt, Whisper,” I said, grabbing it. “Hello?”

“Hello. Is that Jade?”

I tried to lower my voice. “No. It’s Wolf.”

“Oh, sorry, Wolf. You sound so much like your mom.”

“Uh-huh.” I hate when people say that.

“It’s Susan.”

Violet’s mom. “Hi,” I said. “Did you want to talk to Violet? She’s not here right now.”

“I know,” she said. “She showed up here.”

“She did?” I tried to hide my surprise. Susan lives a good forty-minute drive away, in Sooke. More important, Violet and Susan do not get along. I mean, Violet doesn’t exactly get along with anyone, but she
really
doesn’t get along with her mom.

“With a boy.”

“Oh. Ty.”

“Apparently. She says you’re all going off on some crazy trip.”

“Just for the summer,” I said. “A family holiday.” That’s what Mom told me to say if people at school got too nosy. Susan wasn’t a teacher, but she was closer to that category than the family category. I’d only met her a few times. She seemed a lot older than my mom, and she wore a lot of makeup and had long painted fingernails that Mom said were fake. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t understand our plans.

“It’s hardly a secret,” she said. “I’ve just read your mother’s website. Every wacky word.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. I could picture Susan’s narrow face, her small mouth pursed in annoyance. “Right.”

“Can I talk to Jade, please?”

Susan and Curtis couldn’t talk without fighting, so it was always my mom Susan talked to about Violet-related stuff. “I’ll get her,” I said. Then I covered the phone with one hand and yelled, “Mom!”

“Come out here if you want to talk to me!” she shouted back.

“Phone!”

She came in, dust mask dangling around her neck and a rusty line running across her cheeks and over her nose. “Who is it?”

“Susan.” I handed her the phone.

She wrinkled her nose, wiped her hands on her jeans and took the phone from me. “Susan?” A long pause. I could hear the angry buzz of Susan’s voice but couldn’t make out what she was saying. “Uh-huh. Well, that’s up to you…No, of course Curtis and I want her to come with us…”

Mom dropped to the couch beside the twins, holding the phone a couple of inches from her ear. “I know she doesn’t want to…”
Buzz.
“Well, I think not wanting to leave her boyfriend is a big part of it…She does? Did she say that to you?”
Buzz buzz buzz
. “Let me talk to her.”
Buzz
. “I don’t care if she doesn’t want to.”

At that point Mom noticed me listening and shooed me away. I didn’t move. She put her hand over the phone. “Wolf. Go help Curtis.”

I headed back outside, sat down on a wooden block near the van and watched Curtis. He was using a finer grit sandpaper now, polishing the surface smooth. “That was Susan,” I told him. “On the phone.”

He grunted. “What’s she want?”

“Violet’s over there.”

He stopped sanding and turned to look at me. “She is?”

“Uh-huh. With Ty.”

“What’s that about?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. She really doesn’t want to go on this trip.”

“Yeah?”

“Susan called it a crazy trip. And she called Mom wacky.”

“Crazy? She said that?”

I nodded. Waited. I could see a muscle twitching in his jaw.

“What’s
crazy
is staying here,” he said. “What’s
crazy
is sticking to this whole system of jobs and buying stuff and worrying about what people think.” His voice was getting louder. “What’s
crazy
is buying a new house and paying someone to lay down turf for a lawn, like Susan just did. A bloody lawn! The bees are dying, the world economy is on the edge of total collapse, and she’s thinking about her lawn. That’s what’s
crazy.
”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

He snorted and pulled his dust mask back down over his nose and mouth. “You can’t eat a lawn,” he said, turning his attention back to the van. “Someone oughtta tell her that.”

I picked up a new sheet of sandpaper and watched Mom walk out of the house and toward us. Her hair was in a long braid to keep it out of the way, and she was twisting it between her fingers.

“Wolf tells me Susan’s got her panties in a knot,” Curtis said, looking up at her without pausing in his sanding.
Scritch scritch, scritch scritch
.

Mom sighed. “Violet’s upset about missing school and leaving Ty. She asked Susan if she could stay with her for the summer.”

“Violet’s not thinking straight.” He shook his head. “Susan would have her in summer camps and piano lessons. She’d have her in bed by nine. Vi would have about as much chance of seeing Ty as she would if she was halfway across the country with us.”

“It’s a moot point anyway,” Mom said. “Susan said no. She doesn’t want her.”

“Yeah,” Curtis said.

They were both quiet for a minute. I couldn’t imagine my mom ever, ever,
ever
turning me or the twins away. Couldn’t imagine her not wanting us around. Even if I’d just been at school for the day, when I came in the door she always gave me a big hug and said she’d missed me.

For a moment, I even felt a tiny bit sorry for Violet.

On Sunday, we painted the van. It didn’t turn out quite like I’d imagined. The black was kind of patchy and uneven—I
guess maybe we should have sanded more or used a glossier paint—and the stripes were more neon-lime than honeybee-yellow. Still, it was done, and the twins seemed happy enough about it.

And then we started packing. Even though Curtis had said there was lots of storage, the van filled up fast. There was the tool box, the tent, sleeping bags, dishes and cooking stuff, cans of food, boxes of pasta, toilet paper, Whisper’s night-time diapers, jugs of water…It all disappeared into the space beneath the mattress. Mom said Violet and I could pack a small bag each. I packed a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts, underwear and a couple of T-shirts, a hoodie and my toothbrush. I managed to cram in my ancient iPod and a couple of graphic novels, plus a few pens and a blank notebook in case I had time to do any drawing.

Mom and Curtis were packing up the rest of the house. Most of the furniture wasn’t ours anyway, since we’d rented the place furnished. Stuff we wanted to keep—like our photos and clothes and books and the twins’ toys—we packed into boxes for Curtis to put in our new storage locker. We’d rented it for a whole year with the money we would’ve used for June’s rent. Which was pretty awesome, when you thought about it. If we were ever really broke, we could just live in that storage locker, no problem.

I wandered through the house, looking at each room, silently saying goodbye. We’d only lived here for three years, but it felt like home. It was weird to be leaving. I wondered if we’d ever live somewhere again, or if we’d just drive from place to place forever. Mom wouldn’t talk about what we’d
do once we arrived on the east coast.
We’ll take it as it comes
, she’d said.
One day at a time. We’ll be free, Wolf. Not tied down to any place. We can follow our hearts.