“I know. Hold up.” Ronan paused to kick off his own shoes and stuff his socks in them. Leaving them by the side of the track, he continued alongside Adam with matching bare feet. All of his dream creatures were slowly starting to assemble in the fields, more sound than sight in the darkness. Opal increasingly thought these animals were stupid. They were simple creatures, not as excellent as her. But Ronan seemed to like them anyway. Opal was a little worried that they would tell Ronan about the lady they had chased but then she remembered that things didn’t work that way in the animal world. In any case, when the creatures saw that Ronan didn’t have any buckets in hand and that Opal was close, they remained at a distance, cropping the grass or rooting in the dirt.
Adam and Ronan only stopped walking when they got to the rearmost field. Adam was never there when Ronan went out to drive his car in circles there and he seemed surprised to see what Ronan had done to the landscape. He stared at the flattened grass and muddy tire tracks for a good long time without saying anything. Possibly he was feeling excluded. Opal had ridden with Ronan once when he drove in the field, not because she wanted to ride in the car, but because she didn’t like being left out. The experience had been jostling and loud. The car complained the entire time, and the stereo sang along with electronic chirrups. Ronan had told her she was not allowed to ride with him anymore after she had been sick behind the passenger seat, but she found she didn’t mind. She would rather be excluded.
“You’ll get into one of the others,” Ronan told Adam eventually. “You’re not going to have to make another list. It won’t be what you imagined, but it’ll be just as good.”
“Remind me of that later.”
“Count on it.”
Adam looked a little less crumpled. He prodded a clod of mud with one of his bare toes. “Is the new Cabeswater going to have a place to do this?”
Adam wasn’t looking at Ronan and so he did not see the complicated expression that flitted across Ronan’s face, but Opal did.
“It’s going to be a one-stop shopping experience,” Ronan said. “I’m living the dream.”
This made Adam laugh, and then he let out a deep breath. He appeared a lot less crumpled now. They held hands and it all became less exciting. Opal waited to see if there would be any more raised voices or discussion of her usefulness, but they remained quiet until they turned back around to return to the farmhouse. Then the only thing they talked about was how their feet were sore and dirty, which wouldn’t have been a problem if they had been made with hooves.
Summer arrived. Summer made things hot, and both Adam and Ronan smelled more in the summer, though they didn’t seem to notice or care. Ronan accidentally started a fire in one of the smaller outbuildings, and although this started out shouty it ended up wild and joyful, with both Adam and Ronan hurling things into it while music galloped in the background. Adam’s car got off the blocks and almost immediately returned to them. There were a lot of mice, which Opal enjoyed catching and occasionally eating. The cloud lady continued bringing books and foods to the bench by the creek and also began to bring a suitcase with tubes that went in her nose, which was interesting and made Opal stick things up her nose for a few days after she first saw it. Adam got one of the Lynch family’s old backhoes running again and dug a strategically placed hole out in one of the fields. A natural spring slowly began to fill it and an unnatural hosepipe finished the job; the boys stripped and leapt into the resulting body of water on the hottest of days. Opal did not want to swim but Adam taught her until she was fearless, and then Ronan threw buoyant objects for her to fetch until he got tired of being on the shore. He had dreamt himself a pair of tattered black wings that did not quite hold him and he used them now like a temporary diving board, letting them lift him half a dozen feet over the water before dropping him with a muddy splash. Opal floated on her back and kicked her legs like Adam had shown her to do while the boys clung to each other in the water and then separated. The heat in the air made everything smell and look more like itself. Everything was very good.
Summer had animalness in it, though, just like a human, and so it too eventually had to die.
The end of the summer was good and bad. Good: Adam invented a ball game that used cricket wickets but that was better than cricket, and Ronan played it with her sometimes while smoke from the grill drifted past them and made Ronan’s clothing smell delicious. Bad: Ronan and Adam had more and more conversations about whether or not they’d find the cure for shitbox before Adam went away for the fall and whether or not Adam should just take Ronan’s car. Even though Opal went away herself plenty, she did not like the idea of Adam going someplace because he might get old and die without coming back. Good: Ronan spent less time in the long barn doing dreamstuff and instead spent time repairing other outbuildings and cleaning the house and typing away at the computer the lady had looked at, which meant Opal often got full days of him, only having to share with Chainsaw, who Opal resented hugely and sometimes daydreamed of eating. Bad: Twice Ronan got a phone call from his Ganseyfriend and both times he did not say anything to the phone, just listened to the ebullient patter on the other end and made grunting sounds in response. Both times after this Ronan went and lay down, once in his own room and once in Aurora’s room; the first time, he was very quiet for a long time, and the second time he held his parents’ photograph and cried a little without making any sound.
By the end of summer, Opal could not remember the last time Ronan had been to the long barn. The dreamstuff sound in him was becoming a different one, a scratchy one, one she had heard long ago, back when she was still in a dream. Once Adam asked, “Are you going to do it before I go?” and Ronan answered, “Not if I can’t get rain.” Adam started to say something then instead said only, “be that way,” and let it go. They went on more long drives and Adam stayed at the Barns more than ever, but Opal knew this was only because he was about to go away for a long, long time instead. She raged around and stole everything from the kitchen cabinets and buried all of it in the upper field where she had intended to put the dreamstuff lady’s body if it came to that. When Ronan and Adam returned and told her this was unacceptable, she bit Adam and ran away.
She was filled with so much bad feeling that she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wanted to make Ronan and Adam feel as badly as she did. She wanted to break rules. She wanted to break anything.
The long barn came into view before her, dark and hulking in the evening. As she made to skirt it, she was, as always both attracted and repelled by what it contained. Every evening before this one, the repulsion had won out. Tonight, though, she thought about the rule of not entering the long barn and she thought about how it was a very large, old rule, and it would be very noisy and satisfying to break.
She had half a thought that she might smash everything she found inside, too.
The long barn’s door would not say yes to her, but a small window that wouldn’t have fit a human did, so she slid inside.