A Season for Fireflies (12 page)

“I've been into woodworking more than drawing,” he says. It's hard to concentrate on what he's saying, though, because a rush of thoughts enters my head. No wonder I felt a little awkward grabbing onto him today at auditions. I
know
it suddenly without being able to explain it. Wes was always my best friend, but I
think
we were something more. It makes sense why he could barely look at me in the hallway with my stomach exposed. Now I can't help staring at his mouth. A desire to kiss him overwhelms me. “I made the backdrop for
Into the Woods
,” he says. I snap out of my reverie.

“We did
Into the Woods
?! I
hate
that play!” I cry.

“I know,” Wes says with a laugh. “We all did. But Taft was really excited about it.” His smile is so familiar, like he's got a
small joke he's keeping from me, and for a split second it feels like nothing has changed. But as quickly as it came, his smile falls again.

“Anyway, Taft liked my designs,” he finishes. “So I got to do some stuff for OSTC this summer. They paid me a thousand bucks.”

“Wow!”

With my left hand, I grip the armrest and rub my thumb against it nervously. I wish I had been there to see it. Instead, all I can manage to add is, “That's cool,” and I want to smack myself.

“How's your hand?” he asks. The memory of having the spasm by the tables in the outside caf replays in my head. I cringe.

“You heard about that?”

“Not in a bad way,” he says quickly, and I appreciate that he's trying to make me feel better. “Just that it . . .” He seems to choose his words. “That you were in pain.”

“It can happen when I move too fast,” I explain. “It's part of recovery, apparently. It should stop soon. It's not supposed to last, anyway.”

I notice more about Wes as we turn onto my street and pass under the streetlamps: the frayed jeans and the black duct tape covering the top of one of his boots. He's turned into such a theater techie.

“You're different,” I say.

He pulls up to the end of my driveway.

“Should I walk you in?” he asks, ignoring my comment. He coughs awkwardly, and I realize that he is really asking if I need
help walking. He stops the car, but I don't want to get out.

“I'll be okay,” I say quietly. “Thanks for the ride.”

I open the door, but before I'm even out of the car Wes's door slams, and he's helping me out. I know he's only worried I'll fall down. Once I'm upright, I hesitate with my hand on the doorframe. Ahead, in the woods that surrounds the houses, pulses of light, the fireflies, dance in the shadows by the thousands.

“Look,” I say, and gesture with my chin. Wes turns. “I think there's even
more
of them now.”

“I thought it was just media hype at first,” he says, and shuts the door for me. It's unmistakable. Thousands of tiny glowing, yellow dots bob in the twilight. “They're kind of cool.”

We walk up the drive in silence. Then Wes says, “I didn't know what to say, when you called me from the hospital. I'm sorry I didn't call you back.”

“I didn't know what to say either.”

“It must be really weird.”

We're almost near the end of the driveway.

“It is. Sometimes think I know myself. I think for one split second that I know exactly who I am. Then someone tells me something or shows me a picture from a life that I just don't remember. I'm not even sure which version of me is the right one.”

“Do you have to pick?” he asks.

“I don't know anymore. My parents talk to me like I'm split in two. Like there's an old version of me and a new version. Which I guess there kind of is. I just want to feel like me, whoever that is.”

“How is your mom?” Wes asks. “You know, since rehab.” It's
so weird that he
knows
about Mom in rehab, but I don't.

“I haven't seen her drinking too much,” I say. “She's better now that the reporters have shown up and her company is courting her with big paychecks.”

“That's good,” Wes says, and we make it to the part of the driveway where the stone tiles curve around the house to the screened-in porch. “Maybe she's really different.”

“I think maybe she is.”

We share a small smile, and the only sound I hear is our footsteps.

“You seem different too,” Wes finally says. “Even if you're split in two. Penny, you don't have to be a certain way just because people tell you that's who you are. You don't have to listen to them.”

“Well.” I fidget. “Maybe you can help me. Figure it out. Remind me.”

“I'd like that,” he says.

My left leg aches so I take a second to lean on the hood of Mom's car. I can sense the heat from the engine. I glance up at the house, but the lights are out. Good, Mom must be upstairs already.

Wes's eyes widen at something beyond me on the grass.

“Oh my god!”

He runs toward a figure lying on the grass.

Oh
no
. Something dark tugs at my memory. My stomach seizes. I want to race after Wes but can't. I'm messier when I'm trying to move quickly.

“Wait!” I call. “Wait!”

Wes stops short in the grass, making the car keys in his pocket jangle loudly.

I freeze next to him, trying to put together who I am seeing and what it means.

Mom lies on her side, her black hair framing her face. The cream-colored sweater she wears contrasts sharply against the bright green grass. Ropes pull at my stomach from each side in an invisible tug-of-war. I reach for Wes's arm and our skin touches, finally. He looks back to me; his eyes soften.

“Your mom—” he starts to say but doesn't finish. I don't want to know what he would have said.

“This is the first time I've seen her like this since I've been back,” I say.

“You've seen her like this before?”

“In tenth grade. Just before
Much Ado
auditions. It was really bad then.”

An understanding passes over his features and he nods.

Wes squats to be closer to Mom. She sleeps in the fetal position. The lawn hose runs next to her, bubbling water onto the base of the hydrangea plants and pooling in the grass.

I walk to the side of the house, squeeze between some other hydrangeas, and turn off the valve. When I come back, Wes is checking Mom's pulse. She snorts, and he stands quickly.

“Well,” he says. “Shit. What do we do now?”

Wes frowns at the ground, at Mom sleeping, and the shiny pool of water drowning the grass. Fireflies pulse around us, but even though I am in the yard, I stand in the center of a stage, a spotlight on me. My cheeks burn, rooting me to my body and
the ground where my mother remains passed out. The way her face is positioned on the grass, the skin of her cheek pulls down, making it seem as though it sags when it doesn't naturally.

“She was doing so much better,” I whisper. “I don't know what . . .” I search for the reason. It's sick but in a weird way I almost wish she had tripped or fallen or hurt herself. It would be a better reason for lying here than being too drunk to walk ten feet to the house.

“Where's your dad?” Wes whispers. He can talk in his normal voice, she's out, but he speaks softly anyway.

“He's in Boston for a dinner meeting.” I look down at my right foot. “I have to get her inside,” I say.

“You think
you're
getting her inside? Penny, I've seen you at school since the strike. You can only carry two books at a time. Your textbook and some journal thing.”

“Please, Wes, just go. I'm already completely humiliated.”

Being out here with Wes and the moonlight, and the beautiful fireflies, should have been an important moment. It should have been special. Instead, it's all about Mom.

Wes lifts Mom under her arms so her back rests against his chest. He lifts her enough so that her heels don't scrape against the ground, and carries her the rest of the way down the stone path toward the house. I open the door for them, and help them onto the screened-in porch.

“Put me do
wwwn,”
Mom groans. “I'm sleeping.”

I grab an extra pillow from the porch swing and place it under Mom's head, as Wes lays her lengthwise on the couch. Thank god she's wearing black dress pants and not a skirt. I pull her
sweater down a little so it doesn't rise up and show her stomach.

She snorts again and rolls into a fetal position. Truthfully, since the strike, I've forgotten about these nights. My head has been so full with everything else. I had just been so happy that she was better. Maybe I saw it because I wanted it to be true.

Mom tucks her hands under her cheek and curls her knees in to her belly. Good. If she's on her side I don't have to sleep out here and watch her. We learned in health class that drunk people can choke on their own vomit if they sleep on their backs. The one thing I learned in that class that applied to my actual life.

“I can bring her inside,” he whispers. I am grateful that the moonlight shines onto the floor, hiding my face. I don't want to make eye contact right now.

I cross my arms over my chest.

“No, it's best if I let her think she chose to be out here.”

I bring my hands up to cover my face.

“I am so sorry,” I say, and I've never meant anything more. “Sorry for everything. For this, and for ignoring you, and even the things I don't remember. I was horrible.”

“You're not horrible,” he says after a pause that takes too long.

His features are hard and chiseled, yet the look in his eyes is soft. He has a face of contradictions. I miss him and he's standing right in front of me.

A tremble runs through me.

“You're shaking,” he says, and the concern in his voice makes me shudder again. I can tell he wants to say something else. He opens his mouth but then closes it quickly.

“I should go,” he says, and in the silence that follows, we both
know that's not what he wanted to say.

We walk back to his car at the same pace, even though I'm being slow. The fireflies pop in and out of the darkness in a syncopation of light.

“Want me to stay to make sure she's okay?” he asks, and bends down to grab something from the driveway. It's the bag that I brought with me to auditions. The journal has slipped out, along with my brush and makeup case. He picks them up and hands back the journal last.

“What are you always scribbling in this thing?”

He's already seen the truth of my life, seen my crying at auditions. I don't
want
to hide anything from Wes ever again. I flip through the entries and show him what I have so far. I show him the hospital bracelet and Panda's card. Tonight I'll add the memory I had earlier, about the constellations in the theater. It will help if I have it written down so I can reference it if and when more of my memories return.

He leans over to get a better look at the book and I inhale his scent; a sweet but woodsy smell that I can't quite identify. My whole body hums. I want him to tell me that he misses me as much as I miss him—that he misses our jokes and our friendship. He leans on the back of Mom's old Lexus, my car, and crosses one ankle over the other. I pick one of Mom's hydrangeas from a flowering bush when he asks, “Have you been able to piece anything together?”

“Some.” I gesture to the journal. “I paste in important documents or items like my hospital bracelet. Sometimes I just scribble stuff down. Like today at auditions.” I decide to be daring
again. “I remembered something—or, I think I did. And I wrote it down.”

“What?”

I inhale slowly. “We were lying on our backs on the stage. The ceiling was a constellation of stars.”

He looks at me sharply. “You remembered this?”

“Yeah,” I spin the hydrangea flower nervously between my fingers. “But that couldn't be a real memory, right? How could there be stars on the ceiling of the theater?”

Wes gives me a strange look. Then he gets into the Mustang without another word.

“What did I say?” I call after him.

The car engine revs and he pulls out of the driveway so fast that dust kicks up around the tires.

“Wes! Wait!” I cry, but he doesn't stop.

I watch the red taillights as they burn through the blackness at the end of the street and pull away.

LATER THAT NIGHT, I'M HALFWAY THROUGH
revising my English paper on
Beowulf
. I would have been done hours ago but I keep getting distracted, alternating between thinking about Wes and checking in on Mom. The look on Wes's face keeps running through my head. Finally, around 11:30, Mom moved herself from the porch to her bed, and I could finally stop worrying and concentrate.

Now, I replay the awful moment when Wes got into his car like it's a video on loop—
you remembered this?
—when there's a knock on my patio door.

My room has two doors, one that leads to the rest of the house, and one that leads to an outside landing with a staircase going
down to the driveway. Only two people ever use that entrance, and one of them couldn't get away from me fast enough earlier.

I have to squint, but when I flip on the outside light May stands on the landing, batting fireflies out of her face. This is where she used to always come in the house whenever it was past “appropriate hours.” The door is locked, but she tries the knob. She's in pajama bottoms and an EG Private T-shirt.

I unlock the door and she bursts inside, her arms crossed over her chest. “In light of your emotional outburst at auditions, I've been doing some thinking. Here are the terms of our
relationship
.”

I jump on my friend, holding her close to me, and squeezing tight.

“Can't breathe!” she squeals.

“Sorry!” I say quickly, and pull away. May tucks her long black hair behind her ears. I wonder if she's here because Wes told her about Mom's lovely show on the lawn tonight, but then I stop myself. It doesn't matter why May's here. I'm just glad she is.

“The terms are this,” she says. “Complete and total honesty.”

“I promise,” I say.

She paces my room, ticking things off on her fingers.

“No more bullshit. You tell me when something is wrong. Don't shut me out.”

I salute.

“Now close that door, because you're about to have a lightning bug colony take up residence in your bedroom,” she says, and I rush to close the door behind her. A handful of fireflies are already bobbing around the ceiling.

May looks about the room. “It looks the same,” she says, “except . . .”

“What?”

“It's gone,” she says, and gestures to the window, empty except for dots of light from the fireflies outside.

In a flash—I see a ghost of a memory—May and I work together to hang a mobile made from geode slices, right there in the center window.

“The mobile,” I say. “That's right. It was my fourteenth birthday. You helped me put it up.” I can't help but smile. “I looked for it, when I got home from the hospital. I can't find it, though.” May is not smiling, so I add quickly, “Who knows what pre-lightning Penny did with it.”

She nods and sits down on the edge of my bed.

“I'm glad you came,” I say, and sit down on my desk chair. “And don't worry, my mom hauled herself inside about an hour ago.”

“From where?” May says, but I can tell she's playing dumb.

“Come on,” I say with a raise of an eyebrow. “I know Wes told you.”

May frowns. “Okay, maybe.”

This is my chance.

“May,” I say quietly. “What happened?”

“I only know my side of the story,” she says. But she talks, tells me everything—all the things I haven't been able to remember for myself. The party when I made fun of her—the day I quit the play, and the expression on my face. That she had to find out about her best friend's mom going to rehab from the Channel Six news.

She fiddles with the blanket she's sitting on. “I know you probably threw out my mobile,” she says. “Does that mean you also threw out the planetarium Wes made you?”

Wait. “What? He made
me
the planetarium?”

She tells me Wes spent nearly eighteen hours making a revolving star light show for me. It makes so much sense now why Wes freaked out when I brought it up.

“Why would he do that?” I breathe.

“Penny,” May says with a familiar raise of her eyebrow. “Wes loved you. He'd always loved you. You broke his heart.”

Wes
loved
me?

“Come on, he can barely look at you now. He was seeing some girl. Sabrina something? He ended it the other day. We all know why.”

We talk for a couple of hours. At two in the morning, we're still sitting in my window seat with steaming hot mugs of tea. May let me go down on my own in case Mom got up.

“I forgot how much I missed London Fogs,” I say.

“That's one thing I thought you'd
never
forget.”

The fireflies dot the night sky by the hundreds. They make it seem like the stars are lower tonight, strewn about in the green foliage instead of the sky. “It's weird though,” May continues. Her eyes seem pensive. “What you're blocking out.”

“Blocking out?” I say.

“Well, it's just the last year or so—you know? Maybe it's . . .” She searches for the right word. “Denial?”

“Maybe,” I say, and take a deep breath. “But I'm getting some of my life back.” I smile a little at my best friend. “So maybe
that's a good start.” We clink mugs.

“I should go to bed,” May says, and gets up to go.

“I'm sorry about my—” I say, intending to rehash it all again, but May holds up her hand.

“You can't keep apologizing, Pen.” She is about to descend down the patio stairs when she turns to me. “It wasn't just what Wes told me tonight about your mom. I knew at auditions.”

“What?”

“That you were still you.”

She offers to pick me up in the morning to drive to school. Even though it's now less than thirty-six hours until I can drive again, I've never been happier to say yes.

The next morning, I text May and tell her
I'm
going to drive us.

“I'm feeling brave,” I say when I get to her house. “I didn't want to wait.”

“Reckless would be more accurate,” she replies.

“Maybe driving will help jog my memories.”

I haven't been back in this car since before the strike; the evidence of my old life is overwhelming. Coffee cups with names scrawled in messy barista handwriting litter the passenger-side floor: Lila, Eve, Kylie. I turn the ignition and my hand reaches instinctively for the gearshift. I press on the gas too hard and we lurch in reverse, sending cups flying. I slam on the brakes and the glove box flies open, spilling papers, mouthwash, and a strange tangle of plastic string and geode slices.

May leans forward, picking it up from the floor. I note her foot is crushing one of Kylie's old coffee cups.

“It's my mobile,” she says, delicately untangling the many strings and geode slice ornaments. The morning sunlight makes the four crystals glint golden and silver light in the palm of her hand. It used to make little rainbows all over my bedroom floor. There are no rainbows at my feet now, just the coffee cups and discarded college brochures. I don't have any idea why it's shoved in my glove box. Once it's untangled she leaves it in her lap.

“I can totally cry again, if you want,” I say, and she can't help laughing.

“Just don't kill us on the way to school, okay?”

We pull into the parking lot around 7:20 with fifteen minutes until homeroom. Except, when May and I get to the senior lot, there are three news trucks up near the entrance to school and people are swarming outside the double doors. Fireflies bob and weave between them, looking strange and surreal in the morning light.

May and I share a frown and get our school bags.

“What's going on?” we say at the same time.

I zip up my light jacket, happy to have another layer between the Lichtenberg figures and the news trucks. We walk up to find Panda, Richard, and Karen at the outskirts of the crowd. Panda's eating from a bag of barbeque chips and sitting on the hood of Richard's ancient SUV.

I can't help but notice that across the lot, Kylie consoles Tank by rubbing his back. In her other hand is a to-go coffee cup. I recognize the familiar barista's scrawl on the side. Her long braids are hidden under a baseball hat with the band name NIRVANA on the front in white block lettering.

“I am so tired of this town.”
I hear Kylie's voice in the back of my mind. I hesitate and bring a hand to my temple.

A memory! When did I hear her say that?

“What's happening?” May asks Panda, and I blink and turn back to the group.

“They have to cancel the football season.” Richard grabs a chip from Panda's bag. “We're like totally devastated,” he deadpans, and pretends to flip his hair over his shoulder in a pretty spot-on imitation of Kylie.

“Why?” I ask, and am surprised how much I care. I know that Tank will be disappointed. All three of them look to me. “Well.” I shrug. “I mean, it's a big deal. They've never done that before.” I care because something
else
is
bleeding through. Tank will be devastated and I feel genuinely sorry for him.

I want to find out what's going on. I squeeze through some of the crowd. People stand behind the news anchors so they can wave at the cameras. One of the journalists looks familiar—she's the blond chick from my house who interviewed Mom! She's in a bright pink suit and holding the microphone in front of one of the science teachers, Mr. Pierce.

“Well, it's unprecedented,” he says, and a firefly lands on top of his head. “But for the safety of our students and for the protection of the insects themselves, we will temporarily cancel our football season until the fireflies clear.”

Alex James lifts up his shirt and jumps behind Mr. Pierce, dancing around like he's got a huge Hula-Hoop around his waist.

“You!” Headmaster Lewis cries, pointing a long finger at Alex. “My office!”

“They should migrate or die out once the first frost hits,” Mr. Pierce explains over the spectacle as Alex is led into school.

The journalist turns to the camera.

“Just more fallout from these light-bearing insects that have inundated our little town. Reporting from EG Private, I'm Carolyn Norris for Channel Six News.” Once the red indicator light on the camera goes out, the students disperse just as our first bell rings. We have five minutes to get to homeroom. The journalist is turning my way. A dash of panic runs through me.

I bend over and scoot toward the doors. The crowd is still pretty thick so I can hide.

“What the hell is Penny doing?” I hear May ask with a laugh.

I scoot into school undetected, surrounded by my classmates, all grumbling about the fireflies, which only a few weeks ago seemed so magical, so strange.

In homeroom, I'm finalizing my checklist for college applications when the morning announcements come over the loudspeaker.

“Sally Renson here. Homecoming is just over a week away and since we're all disappointed about football, make sure to show your school spirit and wear your school colors to our pep rally this Friday!”

“Whoop-dee-doo,” a girl drawls from the back of the room. Everyone laughs but the room goes silent quickly at the next announcement:

“In true EG Private tradition, the top three homecoming nominees are automatically the members of the homecoming court. The results are finally tallied. But first our word of the
day! Lampyridae,” she says. “The scientific name of the
lightning bug.
”

A chorus of groans echoes in the room and even Ms. Reley, at her desk, laughs with us. We have to listen to a few minutes about the Latin origins of the word “Lampyridae,” before Sally Renson finally gets to the announcement everyone is dying to hear:

“And now your homecoming court!”

Whoops and cheers echo down the hall from other homerooms, even though it's loud in here too. The girl on the loudspeaker reads the names of the guys in homecoming court, two whose names I recognize: Alex James and Greg Anderson, or “Tank,” as we know and love him. There's also someone named Kurt Leonard. The homecoming queen is going to be obvious. There were dozens of nominees—hell, even I was nominated before the strike.

“The final three nominees for homecoming queen are: Kylie Castelli, Angela Wilson, and Penny Berne.”

People squeeze my shoulder. Some pat me on the back—they whoop and cheer my name, and it all seems so silly. I say thank you, as I should, but I really,
really
don't want to be homecoming queen. There's more yelling and cheers out in the hallway. Even Ms. Reley congratulates me as I close up my planner and head out of the room.

“Penny!” May cries, running up to me after homeroom. “You never told me you were nominated.”

“You mean you didn't run to the original nominations list and check the other twenty names weeks ago? I only know
because Lila and Eve texted me when I was in the hospital.”

“I didn't even vote,” she confesses. “Come on, aren't you the least bit excited?” May asks, and loops her arm through mine.

“I'm blocking it out.”

I hitch my books closer as we make our way down the hall, me toward marine biology, or science, and May to AP chemistry. I'd be going that way too, if not for the accident.

“And no, I'm not excited,” I say, and mean it. “You know I was only nominated for one reason.”

“And what's that?”

I go silent as we pass by Kylie, Lila, and Eve putting up a poster by one of the girls' bathrooms. It's a campaign poster. I pause at the picture she has chosen. I know it because I've seen it a zillion times online. Except, for this poster, I have been edited out—on purpose. It looks like Kylie, Lila, and Eve are standing, just the three of them, in a sea of people on the dance floor at the Joint, a local live music club that Kylie likes. In the original picture, I was right there next to Eve, her arm around my waist, but I've been digitally taken out of the picture. When I got home from the hospital, it had been taped up on my mirror. Now it sits in a pile on my dresser with other artifacts from a life I can't remember.