The Hornet Girls: Courtney Barrett, Clementine Cohen, Lulu Mendes, and Heather somebody are propped on the big rock beside the trailhead when Brian and I come out of the woods the next afternoon. At the sight of us, Courtney leaps from her perch, lands with hands on hips, creating a pink-bikini-clad human roadblock in our path, thereby cutting short my diatribe about the genius of the blobfish, the world’s most underrated waste-of-space animal, forever in the shadow of the three-toed sloth. This followed Brian’s breaking news about a boy in Croatia he read about on the web who’s magnetic. His family and friends throw coins at him, which stick. As do frying pans. He says this is indeed possible for a gobbledygook reason I didn’t follow.
“Hey,” Courtney says. She’s a year older than the other hornets, going to high school next year, so the same age as Brian. Her smile’s all scarlet lips, sparkling white teeth, and menace. The antennae on her head are pointing right at him. “Wow!” she exclaims. “Who knew you were hiding those eyes under that silly hat?” Her bikini top, two pink strips and a string, covers very little of her. She plucks the string, revealing a secret line of white skin that wraps around her neck. She’s plucking it like a guitar string.
I watch Brian watch this. Then I watch Brian being watched by her, knowing Courtney’s registering the way his T-shirt falls like water over his broad chest, registering his tanned strong baseball arms, registering the totally cool space between the teeth, the squint, the freckles, registering that there’s no word in her hornet head to describe the particular color of his eyes.
“Think I take offense on behalf of my lucky hat,” Brian replies with a smoothness and coolness that drive spikes into my eardrums. Another Brian’s emerging, I can tell. One I’m certain I’m not going to like at all.
It occurs to me that Jude does this too, changes who she is depending on who she’s with. They’re like toads changing their skin color. How come I’m always just me?
Courtney fake pouts. “No offense intended.” She lets go of the bikini string and flicks the rim of his hat with two long fingers. Her nails are the same purple color as Jude’s. “Why lucky?” she says, tilting her head, tilting the whole world so everything flows in her direction. Without a doubt, this is the girl who’s been giving Jude flirting lessons. Hey, where is Jude? How come she skipped this ambush?
“It’s lucky,” he says, “because good things happen when I wear it.” It’s possible Brian glances at me for a nanosecond when he says this, but lots of things are possible and extremely unlikely, like world peace and summer snowstorms and blue dandelions and what I think happened on the roof last night. Did I imagine it? Each time I think of it, every ten seconds or so all day long, I faint inside.
Clementine, posed on the rock not unlike the girl model from CSA—her body in three triangles—says in the same hornet dialect as Courtney, “Fry’s cousin from LA says he wishes the rocks you threw at him didn’t miss so he could’ve charged people to see the scar when you’re in the major leagues.” She tells all this to the purple-polished nails on one of her hands. Jesus. How blown away must Fry and Big Foot have been by The Ax and his bionic arm to admit defeat like this to a bunch of hornets.
“Good to know,” Brian replies. “Next time he acts like a jerkoff I’ll aim to maim.”
A wave of awe at Brian’s comment ripples from girl to girl. Barf. Barf. Barf. Something alarming’s occurring to me, more alarming than the fact that Jude’s joined this purple polish cult. It’s that this Brian is cool. His alien kin have not only prepared him to pass but to surpass. He’s probably supernaturally popular at that boarding school. A jock and popular! How could I not have noticed? I must’ve gotten thrown off by the endless geek rants about globular clusters orbiting galactic cores, rants that I see are being kept under wraps in present company. Doesn’t he know popular people are covered in flame retardant? Doesn’t he know popular people aren’t revolutionaries?
I want to grab him by the wrist and head back into the woods, tell these guys, sorry but I found him first. But then I think, no, that’s not true: He found me. He tracked me like a Bengal tiger. I wish he’d choose that self and stick to it.
Clementine, still talking to her nails, says, “Should we call you The Ax? Or maybe just Ax? Ooooo.” She squeals exactly like a warthog. “I like that.”
“I’d prefer Brian,” he says. “It’s the off-season.”
“Okay, Brian,” Courtney says like she invented his name. “You guys should totally come hang out at The Spot.” She looks at me. “Jude does.”
I’m shocked to be acknowledged. My cabbagehead nods without my consent.
She smiles at me in a way that could just as easily be a scowl. “Your sister says you’re some kind of prodigy.” She plucks on the bikini string. “Maybe I’ll let you draw me sometime.”
Brian crosses his arms in front of his chest. “Ah, no. You’d be lucky if he lets you pose for him sometime.”
I grow sixty thousand feet taller.
But then Courtney slaps her own wrist, mewing at Brian. “Bad girl. Got it.”
Okay, time to torch the neighborhood. And the worst part is, her lameness breaks out his half smile, which she’s mirroring back at him with one of her radiant own.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy in Plastic Bag Turning Blue)
A few sandpipers skitter down the road toward Rascal’s stable. I do wish I were a horse.
Several moments pass and then Lulu slides off the rock and stands beside Courtney. Clementine follows, slipping in next to Lulu. The hornets are swarming. Only Heather remains on the rock.
“You surf?” Lulu asks Brian.
“I’m not much into the beach,” he replies.
“Not into the beach?” Lulu and Courtney cry at once, but this inconceivability is eclipsed by Clementine, who says, “Can I try on your hat?”
“No, let me,” Courtney says.
“I want to!” says Lulu.
I roll my eyes and then hear someone laugh without a trace of hornet hum. I look over at Heather, who’s looking back at me sympathetically like she alone can see the cabbage on my neck. I’ve hardly noticed her over there. Or ever. Even though she’s the only one of the hornets who goes to the public middle school like we do. A mess of black curls, similar to mine, falls around her small face. No antennae. And she looks more like a frog than a lollipop, a chachi tree frog. She’s the one I’d draw, perched in an oak, hidden away. I check her nails: They’re light blue.
Brian’s taken his hat off his head. “Hmm.”
“You choose,” Courtney says, confident she’ll be chosen.
“I couldn’t,” Brian says. He starts spinning the hat on his finger. “Unless . . .” With a quick flick of his wrist, he tosses the hat onto my head. And I’m soaring. I take back everything. He is a revolutionary.
Until I realize they’re all laughing, including him, like this is the funniest thing ever.
“Cop-out,” Courtney says. She takes the hat off my head like I’m a hat rack and hands it back to Brian. “Now, choose.”
Brian smiles fully at Courtney, showcasing the space between his teeth, then cocks his hat over her brow, like she knew he would. The look on her face is unmistakably mission accomplished.
He leans back and regards her. “Suits you.”
I want to kick him in the head.
Instead, I let the wind at my back scoop me up and toss me over the cliff into the sea.
“Gotta bounce,” I say, remembering that’s what I heard someone say to someone sometime somewhere, at school or maybe it was on TV, or in a movie, probably not even from this decade, but who cares, all I know is I have to get away before I evaporate or crumple or cry. I think for a hopeful moment that Brian might follow me across the street but he just says, “Later.”
My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier.
Because I imagined it. Last night, this is what happened: He adjusted a lever on the telescope, that’s it. I just happened to be standing in the way. Noah has an overactive imagination, written on every school report I’ve ever gotten. To which Mom would laugh and say, “A leopard can’t change its spots, now can it?”
When I get inside the house, I go immediately to the front window that frames the street to watch them. The sky’s overflowing with orange clouds and each time one floats down, Brian bats it back up like a balloon. I watch him hypnotize the girls as he does the fruit in the trees, the clouds in the sky, as he did me. Only Heather seems immune. She’s lying on the rock, looking at the orange paradise above instead of in his direction.
I tell myself: He didn’t find me, didn’t track me. He’s not a Bengal tiger. He’s just some new kid who saw someone around his age and mistakenly befriended him before the cool kids came along and saved him.
Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Keep Out)
I hear Mom’s footsteps only a moment before I feel the warm press of her hands on my shoulders. “Beautiful sky, huh?” I breathe in her perfume. She’s changed kinds. This one smells like the forest, like wood and earth, with her mixed in. I close my eyes. A sob’s rising in me as if it’s being pulled up by her hands. I keep it down by saying, “Only six months now until the application’s due.”
She squeezes my shoulders. “So proud of you.” Her voice is calm and deep and safe. “Do you know how proud I am?” This I know. Nothing else. I nod and she wraps her arms around me. “You’re my inspiration,” she says, and we rise together into the air. She’s become my real eyes. It’s like I haven’t even drawn or painted anything until she sees it, like it’s all invisible until she gets that look on her face and says, “You’re remaking the world, Noah. Drawing by drawing.” I want to show her the ones of Brian so bad. But I can’t. As if he heard me thinking about him, he turns in my direction, all silhouette in the firelight, a perfect painting, so good it makes my fingers flit at my side. But I’m not going to draw him anymore. “It’s okay to be addicted to beauty,” Mom says, all dreamy. “Emerson said ‘Beauty is God’s handwriting.’” There’s something about her voice when she talks about being an artist that always makes me feel like the whole sky is in my chest. “I’m addicted to it too,” she whispers. “Most artists are.”
“But you’re not an artist,” I whisper back.
She doesn’t respond and her body has tensed up. I don’t know why.
“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”
This untenses her and she laughs. “I have a feeling Ralph is on his way,” she says. “The Second Coming is at hand.” She kisses the back of my head. “Everything’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” she says because she’s a people-mechanic and always knows when I’m malfunctioning. At least that’s why I think she says it, until she adds, “It’s going to be okay for all of us, I promise.”
Before we even land back on the rug, she’s gone. I stay, staring out the window until darkness fills the room, until the five of them walk off in the direction of The Spot, Brian’s lucky hat on Courtney’s lucky head.
Paces behind the rest, Heather glides along, still looking up. I watch her raise her arms swanlike and then lower them. A bird, I think. Of course. Not a frog at all. I was wrong.
About everything.