Penny Hale was perfectly sane. At least she'd thought so. She hadn't recently questioned her soundness of mind until she woke to find the imaginary friend she'd played with as a child perched on the end of her bed.

The air was hot. Choking. The fan overhead turned lazily, doing little to stir the heavy air that filled her bedroom. She kicked off the sheets tangled around her ankles and slid from the bed that took up most of the space in the attic bedroom. The bed that now held a boy who was hardly a boy anymore. Funny how the attic had seemed so much bigger when they were both too short to ride the Ferris wheel at the Brambleberry Carnival.

Penny took two strides to the window and hefted it open. A cool breeze and the music of spring peepers eased into the room to sing in time to the rhythmic clicking of the old fan. No one had told them it was no longer spring.

There was thunder on the air when a very corporeal hand touched Penny on the elbow.

"Look at me," said Leander.

Penny couldn't so she went out the window instead. In the midnight air, the metal roof was still warm from the beating July sun, but the breeze was cool enough. Leander followed, pulling his long, lean frame through the too-small window. Penny settled herself between the seams of the green-tinged copper roof, her feet braced against the drain pipe.

She finally obliged Leander's request as she recalled the summer nights they'd spent gazing at the stars from that roof. Leander, who was very much as grown as she, looked at home sitting at her side. He looked real—though Penny still wasn't fully confident that he wasn't a hallucination. The sleeves of his white linen shirt were rolled past his elbows, his beige linen pants cuffed at the ankle. His blonde hair had darkened to something more sandy brown than what Penny remembered from her childhood. His eyes, though. They were the same warm brown. She shook her head and pressed her eyes shut. This was a terribly inconvenient time for a mental breakdown; she was supposed to be going off to college in August to study atmospheric science.

"Penny," Leander said, his voice as gentle as the breeze against her cheek. "This is real."

She'd been ten when her parents first took her to a therapist. Ten was apparently too old to still be playing with imaginary friends.

Penny took him by the hand. Dream or hallucination or figment of her imagination, he sure felt real. She turned it over to touch his palm, to trace the lines. His arms were dusted with freckles and his fingertips were stained purple from picking her mother's blackberries off the vine. Eight years had passed but so much of him was the same as she remembered.

"If you are real," she said, "then why did you go away." A sad lump swelled in her throat.

The lazy half-smile fell from his pale lips. "You needed me to be imaginary."

It had been an overly hot summer's day like this one when a ten-year-old Penny had returned from her therapy session. She'd slammed the minivan door shut, sprinted through the rows of her parent's berry patch, clambered over the fence into her grandmother's garden next door and found Leander where she always found him.

He'd been sitting with his back to one of her grandmother's hives, talking to the bees. In teams, they had carried long-stemmed wildflowers to him and dropped them in his lap. The Prince of Bees. Her prince. As he prattled on, his fingers twisted the delicate blooms into a wreath of flowers. At the sight of Penny, he'd jumped to his feet and dashed over to meet her. He'd moved to place the flower crown on her head of white-blonde curls when she'd swatted it away.

"They say you're imaginary!" Penny had said with anger sending tremors through her limbs.

Leander had looked like he was about to cry. "Of course I'm real." He'd even grabbed her by the hand to prove it.

Penny had squeezed his fingers as she'd tried to hold onto him. "Why don't you show yourself to them? You have magic," she'd yelled as tears streaked her tanned cheeks, "Use it."

Leander's eyes had fallen to the flowers scattered between their feet. "I'm not allowed. Only people who believe in the fairies can see me. But I thought you didn't care if it was just us?"

"I don't, but people think I'm crazy when it looks like I'm talking to myself. And I don't know, maybe I am."

"I'm real!" He'd exclaimed.

"That's just what my therapist said you'd say."

"Penny..."

"What am I supposed to do?" she'd asked. "They think something's really wrong with me."

Leander had sighed. "Then it's probably best I go." He'd moved fast. One moment he'd kissed her cheek and the next he had disappeared in a flurry of wind and wildflower petals.

"I came back," the eighteen-year-old Leander said.

He reached to brush a strand of hair from Penny's face and his scent clobbered her in a wave of memories. Warm pecan pie. The Brambleberry patch after spring rain. Honey right off the comb. Best friends. Fairy Prince. Prince of Bees.

"So you have," she breathed as she tried to come to terms with the idea that her childhood not-so-imaginary friend had grown into a not-so-terrible looking teenage guy. "But why?"

"I'll tell you," he said, as a youthful smile crept across his lips. "After you tell me why you dyed your hair pastel pink."

"It's a long story, but I lost a bet." Maybe it wasn't such a long story, but Penny wasn't quite ready to tell him. "Now it's your turn."

"Well..." Leander said following a short sigh. "Sugar Falls is in trouble."

"Trouble?" Penny almost laughed. The residents of Sugar Falls were not well acquainted with trouble beyond errant Brambleberry vines, missing garden gnomes, and garage roofs that were built two inches above the town's permitted height. There hadn't even been a colony collapse since the McGregor's forgot to tell their bees they were having a baby and Hattie McGregor was just as old as Penny.

Penny could laugh at her silly little town, but she couldn't laugh at Leander. Genuine concern marked his rich brown eyes with a deep sadness. "What kind of trouble?"

"The town is vulnerable."

"To what?"

"I don't know," Leander said with a shake of his head. "It could be anything, but the wards that form a barrier against those who wish to harm it have been weakened."

Penny felt tension squeeze her brows together as she listened to Leander talk in his strange, familiar way, with an accent that didn't quite fit in suburban Ohio, and like all of Sugar Falls' little superstitions were true.

"I can't," she said. Tomorrow was the first day of the Brambleberry Festival, and with Leander there or not, she had more than enough worries to get her through the week. "I just can't," she reiterated before clambering back through her bedroom window and locking it behind her.

Thank you all so much fo reading Bumble! This story has been on my heart for so long and I am so excited to share this with you! Please share your thoughts! I'm still in the beginning process of creating this novel and I would love any feedback you have! Be sure to vote and share this by adding it to your reading list!