A Season for Fireflies

  “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.

  Kylie meets my eyes as we pass, but raises her chin. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s hang the rest of these. Some of us aren’t getting pity votes.”

  It feels like a kick to the gut.

  “Nice, Castelli,” May says. “You’re a real gem of a person.”

  “Mind your own business,” she snaps back. “You’ve got your bestie back.”

  “Don’t let her bother you,” May says quietly, linking her arm tighter through mine. I wince at the pressure on the figures. They’ve definitely eased but they’re still there and they still hurt.

  You’ve got your bestie back.

  I fight with myself to turn around and see if Kylie is watching us walk away.

  “She is so petty,” May says, and we turn into the hallway with the science classrooms. I tell May that I agree even though something in my gut tells me that she is wrong about Kylie.

  As we walk, streamers hang in blue and gold from the ceiling; the school colors. Homecoming posters and pep rally reminders cover nearly every inch of the wall. But new posters, official school posters, have come up as well: FIREFLY SAFETY TIPS, followed by long lists of how we should close doors, turn off unnecessary outside lights, and do more to help hinder the “spread of the bug population.”

  We have to walk through the hall where the woodworking studios are to get to the science labs and classrooms on the second floor, in the new wing of the building.

  “You successfully dodged my question about homecoming,” May says. “I thought you were supposed to be getting better at that, per our agreement.” She raises an eyebrow. “Why do you think you were nominated?”

  I shrug. “You heard Kylie. People feel sorry for me.”

  “Maybe,” she says, “but that seems kind of convenient. People like you. They always have. You were always fun to be around, always the life of the party. Even when you were going through your Mean Girls, Invasion of the Body Snatchers phase.”

  I nudge her. “Stop.”

  She laughs. “Sorry, but I don’t think you should just assume that people are pitying you.”

  We stop outside one of the woodworking rooms. I peek in the door. It’s Wes. He’s standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by a forest made of wood. Tall wooden trees tower over him, with branches stretching out in all directions. It takes me a second before it clicks: they look like the sketches of my Lichtenburg figures that I saw in Wes’s car. They’re a beech wood, light in color, and unfinished.

  “I’ll see you at lunch,” May says with a grin, and keeps walking down the hall. I’m going to be late to class, but I don’t care. I knock but Wes doesn’t seem to hear over the noise of the handsaw. He puts it down and runs a sander along one of the tree trunks. I step inside and hesitate.

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” I say. Wes yelps, jumping back.

  “Penny.” He’s breathless. “You scared me. I almost dropped the sander on my foot.”

  “I tried knocking, but you were in the middle of . . . all that.”

  His face softens. A few fireflies dart around the room; it’s hard to see their pulsating lights under the bright fluorescent school bulbs. Wes follows my eyes.

  “They’re everywhere,” he says. “During the day too.”

  “Did you see the news trucks outside the school this morning?” I say, and I’m grateful we can make small talk about something going on that’s weirder than being struck by lightning and not remembering a whole year of your life.

  I walk among the trees he’s built.

  “These are amazing,” I say.

  “Thanks,” Wes says, and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Aren’t you going to be late for class?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “I have a free period,” he says. He smiles just enough so the corner of his mouth lifts. A warmth spreads through me from my belly up to my chest. Wes uses a regular piece of sandpaper and his muscles strain as he pushes it against one of the branches. My heart betrays me. The damn thing slams. Longing feels like an old wound that’s been reopened, just below the solar plexus.

  Could what May told me be true? That he loved me, and I broke his heart?

  I guess he’s not going to bring up what happened the other night with my mom. It felt like we got somewhere closer, a place I could understand, and a place that I knew. Wes continues to work. I can’t help myself.

  “Thank you,” I say. “For my mom. For what you did.”

  He doesn’t say anything but keeps sanding. Maybe I just have to let it go. Maybe I’ve gotten May back in my life and that needs to be enough. I turn to leave when Wes says, “Homecoming nomination, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I grin. “You should probably bow before me.”

  Wes laughs. “Don’t push your luck, dollface.” A rush rolls over me. A memory whispers at me in the back of my mind. I see Wes in my head in a white tunic and I know with certainty that this memory is from a rehearsal of Much Ado.

  “Toots?” I say, and Wes pulls back.

  “Honey?” he says.

  “You’re lucky you have access to power tools or I’d challenge you to a duel.”

  “Do you remember?” he adds, and doesn’t respond to my jab. “That day?”

  He holds my eyes and the whisper of the memory evaporates as fast as it came.

  “Not the whole thing.”

  His eyes drop to my covered arms but he quickly busies himself with the last couple of tools and scattered pieces of sandpaper. He cleans up and it looks like he is heading out. If he asked, I would show him the figures.

  “Are you going to the homecoming dance?” I ask, and the question has left my lips before I can think through if I should even be asking it.

  “Oh, um.” Wes fumbles. “Yeah.”

  “With that girl I saw you with the other day?” I know I’m fishing. Even though May told me he ended it, I want to hear it from him.

  “Who?” he asks, and replaces the tool in a plastic safety box.

  I try to be very casual. “You know, blond. Tall. Annoyingly high voice.”

  Wes grins. “Were you spying on me, Berne?”

  “What! No.” Busted.

  He shakes his head and grabs his book bag. “No,” he says with emphasis and joins me at the door—we’re so close our shoulders touch. “She told me she thought theater was boring.”

  “Ouch,” I say. “You need better taste, Gumby.” He smiles but it’s not to my face. He sticks his hands in his pockets. We hesitate, shoulder to shoulder at the door—only inches apart.

  “You aren’t her,” he whispers, and it feels like we’re talking about something else entirely. It takes me a second to catch up.

  “What?”

  “You’re not your mom. You know that, right? I need you to know. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Why do you sound like you’re apologizing?”

  He doesn’t say anything else, but leaves the studio and lumbers, calmly, down the hall. Like the other night, I feel like I’m chipping away at the ice around him, though I can’t be sure. Before I walk away, he glances back and I nearly call out to him. He nods just once before turning the corner.

  A week later, when I’m about to lose my patience waiting for the cast list, someone screams just outside my math class. “The cast list is u
p!” I’m almost positive it’s Karen.

  I grab my books and limp to the door.

  “Penny,” my teacher, Mr. McKenney, says, “class isn’t over.”

  I survey the dozens of eyes watching me and grip my books tighter. People are packing up because no matter how much Mr. McKenney wishes we could stay beyond class time, it’s ridiculous. As I am about to make an excuse, the bell rings. He rolls his eyes and I head out to the hallway as quickly as I can, past the stage entrance to the auditorium, the radio broadcasting center, and finally the theater department office. A huge crowd has circled outside the bulletin board. I think I see May’s black hair in the middle of the group.

  “Yes!” she cries with a jump. “I’m Helena!”

  I could still be Hermia. Maybe Taft gave me the other noble part.

  Richard sprints by and jumps at the edge of the crowd, trying to see over their heads.

  “Will you bastards move!” he cries. “Who am I, May?” he calls.

  “Puck!” May’s high voice calls back. She moves through the crowd and jumps into his arms. He swings her around and around in his purple button-down shirt and jeans. “I knew you would get it!” she cries.

  “What fools these mortals be!” Richard’s great stage voice echoes over the din of the hallway as he recites Puck’s famous line. When he places her on the ground, May sees me, and her smile cracks just a bit. Disappointment hits me square in the chest. I had to expect that Taft wouldn’t give me a lead role after what happened. Definitely not. Still, I’d been holding out hope.

  “I didn’t get a part, did I?” I say once I get close to them.

  “Of course you did,” she says, and it’s too chipper, too high. She’s out of breath. “You’re Hippolyta.”

  “I am?” My heart soars. Taft let me in. I’m back. And I get to play the fairy queen! “So I’m Titania too, right? Taft said she would be using doubles for the roles of the human queen and the fairy queen. You know? To connect to the idea of opposites—city versus forest, yadda, yadda.”

  May shakes her head. “It just says Hippolyta. Karen got Titania.”

  “Oh,” I say, and now I’m the one whose voice is way high. “That’s awesome.” I know that Taft split up the parts when that wasn’t her original vision. I’m not trusted to stick it out; why would she give me such a huge part?