Tommy saw it first, the writhing mass of bees. They'd been hovering as a cloud when he'd scootered past on his way to Ben's, and the buzzing had caught his attention, stopped him. By the time the things had zeroed in on and begun accumulating on a low-hanging tree branch, he'd brought Ben back with him and the two boys stood at a reasonable distance, staring at the pulsing sac of insects.

"How do they do that?" Ben wondered, his mouth hanging slightly open, large front teeth hovering over a split lip.

An extemporaneous expert, Tommy shook his head slowly, his sight plastered on the monstrosity. "Well, they gotta make a new hive, obviously. Probably looking all day and they finally found a spot. I bet their queen is somewhere in the middle of all that."

"They're just holding onto each other, though—you see that?"

"Yeah, dumbass. Course I see it."

Ben narrowed his eyes, entirely unmoved by the affront. "You said that queen is in the middle?"

"Probably. It's like a big giant bee orgy."

At twelve years old, Ben had heard a lot of words he didn't quite understand and, as an only child with cautious parents, he had few sources of information at his disposal, so Tommy was his encyclopedia of all things adult. Tommy had two older brothers as well as nearly unlimited access to the internet. "What's that?"

"What?"

"An orgy?"

Happy to be wiser if not older at his eleven years, Tommy smirked. "When are you going to learn, Benny? An orgy is when all these people have a giant sex party. My brother told me."

Ben nodded, unwilling to reveal his continued ignorance by admitting he still had only a dubious understanding of what sex was (though not for Tommy's lack of misguided explanations). "Yeah," Ben breathed, some degree of hypnosis reclaiming him as he glanced back at the branch, "a bee orgy." They were both silent for a mesmerized moment, and then a hint of altruism struck Ben. "You think we should tell Mr. Jordan? It's in his yard. What if he doesn't see them?"

Tipping his head to one side, Tommy thought. "Nah," he eventually concluded. "How wouldn't he see them? He'd have to be blind. Besides, it's summer."

That made sense enough. Mr. Jordan was the gym teacher at the elementary school and, as teachers didn't exist during the summer, seeing the man (let alone conversing with him) just seemed rather impossible. And anyway, they had stuff to do. The boys' electric scooters whizzed along the streets of their small, well-traversed suburb, up through the schoolyard, along the secret paths connecting the backyards of strings of houses, past the strip of competing gas stations and small businesses and the ever-busy Walgreens, past the Schnucks grocery store and then up through the nicer part of town, where the bigger, older houses—some of them century homes—were, replete with lush mature trees and landscaped gardens, where there were wrought-iron gates and privacy fences and invisible fences for all the dogs who wanted to lounge in the massive, shady emerald front lawns. Even in the dead heat of summer, this area maintained a certain coolness, whether from the vegetation or the sort of people that lived there, the boys couldn't grasp enough to contemplate. This was their favorite area to bike, though neither admitted it to one another. They'd always just sort of happen upon the neighborhood, where people had things like medieval-looking lampposts and swimming pools and hot tubs and stone yard paths with koi ponds and trellises and a lot of architectural features they couldn't name but enjoyed looking at.

This older part of town was a stark contrast to their neighborhood, a smattering of brick ranch houses, sidewalk-free streets, and humble cars. Though it shimmered beneath the boys' understanding, it was a manifestation of a world from which they were excluded, not necessarily due to a disparity of wealth so much as a dissonant mindset, one instilled in them by their parents: they weren't of that world. They were the stuff of chain-link and vinyl siding, screen doors (no glass) and dandelions. One wasn't better than the other—they were just different.

"You coming? Hurry up!" Tommy called over his solid shoulder. He was a bluff, confident child, heavier set than his coeval, and he had no fear of the world or anyone in it. His buzzed head, the result of one too many bouts of lice for his mother to handle, glistened with the perspiration of an early Missouri July. The armpit of the world—it's what Tommy had heard his brothers call the midwest, and the moist humidity of the air, the smell of damp heat, was enough to have convinced the boy for some time that there was some literal truth to the offhand remark. Young boys were often subject to the misinformation of their older siblings.

Ben had no such luck. His misinformation came secondhand through Tommy, the unreliable middleman. This was probably why, on the cusp of middle school, he was still dragging his tail through a protracted childhood rather than leaping with both feet into the eager liminality of adolescence. He was still fear-of-the-dark and teacher-pleasing, life-jacket-when-he-swam and kisses-for-his-mother.

Speaking of his mother . . . she wasn't going to be happy about this.

The two had scootered beyond the century homes and past the old part of town (where boutiques, coffee shops, and a wine bar appealed to the particular sort of person who lived nearby) and over the railroad tracks, down toward some green space that was not quite a park and yet large and unfamiliar enough to compel local tweens to roam it. Ben's mother didn't like him playing in this area. For one thing, it was on the edge of town, near the freeway, and unsavory characters had been known to hover at the fringes from time to time. For another thing, the woman thought the area itself precarious. To her point, the expanse wasn't well-kept; there were downed trees and bracken where ticks surely hung out in search of a juicy leg, refuse left from the occasional teen deviance, and, of course, the creekbed.

The creek flooded from time to time, during particularly rainy weather, and the past two weeks had been nothing but rain; it was why the humidity was worse than average (though who could tell the difference at ninety-five degrees?). Not being the strongest swimmer, Ben had always been forbidden to be near water without an adult. If she'd known he and Tommy frequented this area, she would've flipped out, and unlike his schoolmate, Ben experienced remorse for hiding his excursions from his parents.

But he couldn't tell Tommy that.

"Would you look? Down there, you see it?" Tommy had hopped off his scooter and walked it to the bank of the creek. This area wasn't the nicest; there was much overgrowth they'd had to wade through to get to this bend of the creek, which was also beneath a small overpass. Cement pillars rose up from the ground, connected to an infrequently traveled two-lane road above.

Ben hadn't ever followed the creek to this location, and he wondered what Tommy was getting at. He dropped his scooter and waded through the knee-high weeds to reach him, then peered down into the depths, where he saw only the expected stepping stones and low waterline. Scrunching his nose, he replied, "What?"

Tommy huffed in exasperation. "You serious? Here, look over a little more." He grabbed hold of Ben's shoulders and pushed him a bit farther from the ground, so his friend could see over the edge.

At first freaked out at the thought of falling, Ben yelped in protest, but when he realized Tommy wasn't going to let go and actually looked down there, he saw what he was meant to see and immediately shut up.

"You see it now, huh?" Tommy lowered his voice, let the awe sink in, then yanked Ben back onto solid ground.

"What is it?"

"A cave, stupid!"

Ben considered the hole he'd spotted. It hadn't looked like anything ancient enough, well-formed enough to be a cave, and yet, what else would one call a hole in the earth? Still, when the two found an incline and clambered down into the creekbed, found an irregular path toward the main event, they stood in bewilderment at the thing's appearance. It was probably six feet in diameter, though its circumference was by no means smooth, and its rim was made more of mud than stone.

"My brother told me about it," Tommy informed Ben. "He said he saw it from up there, when he was riding his bike." The boy waved a hand at the overpass. "Must've opened up from all the rain."

As of yet, Ben had no reason to feel anything other than mild interest. "Cool." He watched a trickle of water move through the creek and down into the oblivion of the cave.

"You know we gotta explore it, right?"

The interest morphed into dismay. Forgetting his desire to remain impassive, Ben snapped toward his friend. "No way! I'm not going in there."

"Not today, of course! I don't have any flashlights or anything, but we can come back tomorrow."

"I don't want to go in there. That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

"It's a cave, Benny! There could be something in there! And we're the first people to find it!"

"Like what?"

"Like I don't know, but that's the whole point of going in there."

Ben found he was shaking his head. "We could get trapped, or something. Or flash floods. What about those?"

"Not supposed to rain for the rest of the week. Sunny all day tomorrow. And we'll do that thing, you know, from the maze story about the bull? You know what I'm talking about? Mrs. Clumke had us read about it?"

Yes, Ben remembered. He'd consumed several large books of Greek mythology (it's what one did when one's parents strictly monitored screen time). "Theseus. He had the string of Ariadne, and it helped him so he didn't get lost in the labyrinth."

"Yeah, Theesus. See? We won't get lost. Besides, it's probably only ten feet back or something."

Staring into that black hole, only feet away from the opening, Ben was taken by his inability to see anything at all in it; no light whatsoever seemed to cross its boundary, illuminate pebbles or roots. That blackness . . . there was something more to it, something deeper than he could quite understand. The boy's vision began to tunnel almost imperceptibly, the corners of his eyes pulling the sight of stone and grass and earth up and away, so only the obsidian of what was directly ahead crossed through his pupils and into the recesses of his mind, to spread itself there like an opalescent oil slick.

"Hey."

The sudden hand on his shoulder caused Ben to whip around.

"Whoa! Whoa, there. You all right? I was talking and you didn't hear me."

Ben blinked, forgot what he'd been feeling a moment earlier, and nodded. "Yeah, yeah. We can come back tomorrow. Might be something cool in there."

"That's the answer, Benny! Now let's get the hell out of here. Pool's opening in half an hour."

The boys climbed out of the creek bed and back to their scooters. Tommy rambled the whole while, but Ben's thoughts were troubled. He was unsure what exactly was moving through them, only that he felt a little cold, suddenly, and that he did in spite of his reservations want to come back tomorrow. But there was another, more concerning thought, as well. A heavy sinking inside assured him, as he scootered across the park and back over the railroad tracks into town, that Mr. Jordan hadn't been aware of those bees in his yard, after all, and that when he'd left his house, they'd swarmed him. Ben knew, too, with a dark certainty, that the man was allergic.

He hadn't known it when they'd first seen those bees, but he knew it, now.