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  For Kevin, who makes me laugh until my stomach hurts and always shows up when needed

  PROLOGUE:

  THE BEEMOBILE

  I was seven when I took my first ride in the Beemobile. It was the most beautiful car I’d ever seen—a bright-yellow hybrid with sleek black stripes down the sides and fuzzy bee antennas bouncing around on top. A honeypot air freshener hung from the rearview mirror, and the minute I breathed in that sticky-sweet smell, I realized everything Mom had ever told me was true. If you set a goal, work hard, and stick to the plan, you, too, can win a car shaped like a bee.

  The summer Mom won the Beemobile, we got to fly all the way from Chicago to St. Louis, Missouri, for the annual Beauty & the Bee convention. The awards ceremony was held in a hotel ballroom with gold flowers in loop-de-loops on the ceiling. Mom and I stood backstage in matching yellow dresses while the CEO of Beauty & the Bee gave a speech about how Mom’s stick-to-itiveness had helped her sell more honey-based beauty products than anyone else in the Midwest region. I peeked out at five hundred people fanning themselves in the audience, and my knees turned to Jell-O.

  “It doesn’t matter if you feel brave. It matters if you act brave,” Mom whispered.

  She took my hand, and we walked out onto the stage slowly, one foot in front of the other, waving at the audience like we’d rehearsed. Mom’s hand was shaky and sweaty against my palm, but her hair glowed under the lights like a superstar’s.

  When we got to the podium, the CEO held up a set of keys and jangled them in the air.

  “Young lady,” she said to me. “Your mother has been promoted to Chief Pollinator. Do you know what that means?”

  My tongue wouldn’t work, but it didn’t matter. All five hundred people in the audience shouted the words for me:

  “BRAND … NEW … CAR!”

  Mom and I made a spectacle of ourselves, jumping around and screaming at the top of our lungs. We couldn’t help it. It was a great day.

  * * *

  After the trip, Mom and I didn’t sit around and bask in the glory of her promotion. We got right to work on our next Five-Year Plan. We filled her whiteboard with sales goals, timelines, and Action Steps. We created a list of Next Hive Destinations and I put the pins on the map: Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Grand Rapids. The cities sounded exciting and exotic, guaranteed to be filled with new friends and adventures.

  When everything was planned, Mom let me stand on a stool and erase the words “Chief Pollinator” from the GOAL section of the whiteboard. She spelled the new words slowly so I could write them one by one in my thick, uneven scrawl: “Queen Bee.” The letters squeaked with promise.

  Mom and I knew that the best way to reach a goal is to have a good incentive—a reward that you want so badly, you’ll work extra hard to get it. The B&B reward for reaching Queen Bee status was a diamond honeybee with golden wings. It was so glitzy that in St. Louis we’d seen a woman in a red pantsuit cry buckets of tears when the CEO pinned it to her lapel. But next to her new Five-Year Plan, Mom didn’t put up a picture of a diamond bee.

  Instead, she taped up a dusty old postcard of a white building shaped like a boat sitting in a field of daisies. The building had a black smokestack and porthole windows, and a wide blue lake sparkled in the background. On the deck of the boat, a smiling, pigtailed girl stood on her tiptoes and waved at the camera. Above her head, bright, happy letters announced:

  The Showboat Resort: Where True Blue Friends Meet.

  I turned the phrase around in my mind. It sounded old-fashioned and magical. Like a fairy tale. Goose bumps tingled down my arms.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Our new incentive,” Mom said. “I put a deposit down today. To keep us on track.”

  I nodded. A deposit on an incentive is a deposit on success.

  “We’re going to live there?” It was the greatest idea I’d ever heard, but Mom shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “But in five years, when I get promoted to Queen Bee, we’re going to spend summers there. Like I did when I was a girl.”

  “On the boat?”

  “The Showboat.”

  * * *

  Back then, there were a lot of things I didn’t know.

  I didn’t know that the Beemobile’s antennas would lose their fuzz or that the honey-orange air freshener smell could fade away. I didn’t know that cars and Five-Year Plans sometimes fall apart. Or that moving to a different city and being the new girl in school every few months was nothing like an exotic adventure.

  What I knew when I was seven was that I would find my True Blue Friend at a magical boat-shaped resort in a picture-postcard. And that driving around in a car shaped like a bee would never, ever get old.

  1

  OFF WITH THE OLD AND ON WITH THE NEW

  Mom threw her hands in the air and slapped them back on the steering wheel. “S’mores!” she cried. “I can’t believe it’s been twenty years since I had a s’more!”

  We’d been driving for three and a half hours, and Mom could not stop talking about The Showboat, the family resort in Eagle Waters where she had the Best Summer of Her Life—six years in a row. She chattered on about the time her water-ski team pranked the new kid by putting his swimsuit in the freezer, and the campfire tale that was so scary it made her True Blue Friend, Mary Pepper, pee her pants.

  “Did I tell you about the time we found a skunk in the bathtub?” she asked. “A real live skunk. I screamed so loud someone called the fire department!”

  “I’ve never had a s’more!” I said, and flipped a page in my issue of Wolverine and the X-Men. I hadn’t stopped grinning since Mom had shown up in the parking lot of Milwaukee West Elementary, stuck her head out the window of the Beemobile, and yelled, “Off with the OLD, on with the NEW!” loud enough for half the school to hear.

  I was so glad to be done with fifth grade, I almost didn’t notice the country music blasting from the car radio. But I definitely noticed the back seat of the Beemobile—packed to the ceiling with all our stuff. I hugged my backpack and gaped at Mom.

  “We’re moving?” I asked. “Today? Right now?”

  Mom gave me a happy poke in the arm as she put her foot on the gas and pulled out of the parking lot. “Surprise!” she said.

  I shrugged. Wherever we were headed, it couldn’t be lonelier than Milwaukee. I’d been there since March, and hardly anyone knew who I was. Even Mr. Smith still looked around at the boys when he called “Anthoni Gillis” for roll. I tried to remember the next spot on our list.

  “Minneapolis?” I asked. I hoped we could get an apartment with a shower that didn’t leak. Or a landlord who didn’t stop by every few days to argue about electricity and rent.

  “Nope.”

  “Duluth?”

  Mom tried to make her face look deadpan, but the corners of her mouth kept sneaking up.

  “How about … The Showboat Resort?”
She said it like it was any boring old town. Akron, Ohio, or Grand Rapids, Michigan. “It should take about four hours to get there.”

  My jaw hung open and Mom’s laughter burst out like it had been killing her to hold it in so long.

  “You did it?” I asked. “You got promoted to Queen Bee? How?”

  I’m not a Negative Nelly, but as far as I knew, we weren’t anywhere near reaching our goal. Sales had been down, and we hadn’t signed up a new Worker Bee in months. Lately, Mom had been so desperate she’d been crashing conferences at hotels, trying to recruit Worker Bees in between breakout sessions. My lips spread into a grin.

  “Was it the air-conditioning conference?”

  Mom took a breath and smiled. Her eyes were tired and puffy even though I knew she’d gone through two jars of B&B’s Royal Radiance Eye Cream (made with Royal Jelly!) in the last month.

  “I told you that was a good idea,” she said. “Air-conditioning manufacturers care as much about looking nice as anyone else does.”

  I had a thousand questions: How many Worker Bees had she signed up? Fifty? We needed forty-five to reach Queen Bee. What did the CEO of Beauty & the Bee say? Were they going to fly us to St. Louis for another awards ceremony so they could pin Mom with a diamond bee?

  Before I could ask any of them, relief hit me, and suddenly I couldn’t stop laughing. It was like a comic book. For months, we’d been stuck at that moment when Wolverine’s a goner, backed into a corner by a guy whose skin is impervious to metal, and you can’t help but wonder if this really is the end. But I should have known. That dark, all-is-lost moment is exactly when Storm shows up with a tornado to save her friend and blast the enemy off the page.

  The air-conditioning conference was our tornado.

  “We can get take-out pizza again!” I said, and laughed some more because I hadn’t even known until that minute that I cared about take-out pizza. “I can taste the pepperoni!”

  Mom fiddled with her earring and gave me a funny look.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Of course! I just … It’s overwhelming, you know?”

  “I know,” I said. “You worked really hard.”

  Mom reached over and squeezed my knee. “WE worked really hard.”

  “True.” I did a robot dance in my seat to make her laugh. “I am the best promotional products packer on the planet.”

  “Ha!” Mom turned the radio to earsplitting volume. Just the way we like it.

  “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!” she shouted. “And we’re going to The Showboat to have the Best Summer of Our Lives!”

  2

  NEXT HIVE DESTINATION: EAGLE WATERS

  The website for The Showboat Resort hadn’t changed one bit since I was seven. It only had two things on it—the photo from the postcard, and four lines of text that Mom and I knew by heart. The minute we drove past the Welcome to Eagle Waters sign, we put on our best radio-announcer voices and traded lines.

  “THE SPECTACULAR SHOWBOAT RESORT: Where True Blue Friends Meet!”

  “EXPERIENCE the pine air—a TREAT for your lungs!”

  “The resort of your DREAMS—AWAY from the modern world!”

  A glimpse of blue water glistened between the trees on the left side of the highway.

  “That’s Thunder Lake!” Mom said. Her eyes sparkled like Christmas Eve.

  We shouted the last line with gusto as we drove past a yellow church, a gas station, and a small blue house with a sign that read Anna Lee’s Little Store.

  “Don’t DELAY! Call TODAY: 555-SHO-BOAT!”

  Mom pointed across the street from Anna Lee’s. “There’s the public beach. If they still give free swim lessons, I’ll sign you up.”

  “That’s a beach?” It was an empty patch of sand the length of a school bus.

  And then the trees closed in again. The branches got thicker and closer together until we couldn’t see Thunder Lake on the side of the road anymore.

  “Where’s the rest of town?”

  “That’s all,” Mom said. “Quaint, right?”

  A pang of disappointment poked at me, but I pushed it away. There’d be so much to do at the resort, we’d never need to go to town.

  After another mile, the GPS beeped. On the left side of the road, a wooden arrow with black hand-painted letters announced: THE SHOWBOAT RESORT.

  Mom put on her blinker and winked at me.

  “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “Remember Maddy Quinn? Mary Pepper’s daughter from Chicago? You two used to…”

  She turned the Beemobile onto a gravel road and the rumble of rocks under the wheels drowned out her voice, but I knew exactly who she was talking about. I didn’t remember much about Chicago, but I remembered Maddy Quinn. We used to make forts out of pillows and hide while Gramps pretended to be a fire-breathing dragon.

  Another sign led us onto a dirt path so narrow that pine branches scraped the sides of our car. Mom shouted over the din like it was perfectly normal to drive straight into the heart of a forest. “I heard the Quinns still spend summers in Eagle Waters. Think she’ll remember you?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It was a long time ago.”

  It was a long time ago, but the thought of the Quinns at The Showboat made my brain buzz with hopeful possibilities. Since Chicago, Mom and I had moved nine times. I’d used up boxes of stationery writing to girls I’d known, and not a single one wrote back. But I’d never moved to a town where somebody knew me.

  We made another turn, and Mom had to slow to a snail’s pace to avoid ripping the bottom off the car.

  “Gillis Girls Don’t Believe in Maybe. If she doesn’t remember you, remind her!”

  She had a point. Quickly, I reached into my backpack and pulled out my notebook, turning to a dog-eared page in the center:

  I added a new line to the list:

  The bumpy road made my handwriting all jiggly until suddenly, Mom stopped the car. My pencil jerked, dragging the tail of the “y” right off the page. I looked up. The road had split again, but there was no arrow to guide us. Thunder Lake was nowhere in sight. The voice on the GPS said, “Recalculating…” and Mom’s phone started to blink a new message: No Service.

  Mom laughed. “Away from the modern world—as advertised!”

  We got out of the car and Mom made wide, sweeping circles with her phone, looking for a signal. The website was right—the air smelled exactly like the pine-scented potpourri Mom always kept in the bathroom.

  “I forgot about mosquitoes.” Mom swatted her hands in the air.

  It was only four in the afternoon, but in the woods, it felt like twilight. Branches filtered the sunlight so only small patches of ground were lit up. When I imagined The Showboat Resort, I never pictured trees. Mom’s stories were about waterskiing and sunbathing. Not wilderness survival. I glanced around to make sure there weren’t any wild animals waiting to pounce.

  Something rustled in the trees. I stiffened and tugged Mom’s sleeve. Near a scrubby trio of baby pines, a crouched figure crept in slow motion away from us.

  “Hello?” Mom called.

  The figure froze, one leg suspended in the air. It was a boy. With branches sprouting from his limbs.

  “We’re trying to find The Showboat Resort.”

  “We can see you,” I added. A mosquito bit through my sweatshirt and I slapped at it.

  The boy let his leg drop to the ground, then shifted some of the branches around and crouched lower. “How about now?” he asked. “Can you see me now?”

  The bugs must have caught a whiff of Mom’s Honeycomb Highlighting Shampoo. A full-on swarm formed around her head.

  “We need to know the way to The Showboat,” she said, hopping from foot to foot.

  The boy trudged toward us, yanking branches out of his T-shirt collar. As he got closer, I could see mud caked to his hair, his right arm, and his face. His left arm was in a cast.

  “Camouflage never works,” he said sadly.

  I stared at hi
m. Either there was something in the woods scary enough to hide from, or testing camouflage was a thing kids in Eagle Waters did for fun.

  The boy walked a slow circle around the Beemobile. Mom was already back in the driver’s seat with the windows rolled up tight.

  “Cool car!”

  “We’re getting eaten alive!” Mom shouted through the glass.

  The boy pulled one last pine branch out of the waistband of his pants and waved it in the direction we’d come from. “Turn right at the fork, but…” He wrinkled his dirt-caked nose in my direction. “Why would you want to go to The Showboat?”

  “We’re staying there,” I said.

  “Like, overnight?”

  “Of course.” This kid was bizarre. What else would you do at a resort?

  I got in the car, and the boy watched us back up the whole way to the fork. He stood covered in mud, with sticks and leaves in his hair, and waved his branch at us with a goofy look on his face. Like he thought we were the ones who were strange.

  3

  THE SPECTACULAR SHOWBOAT RESORT

  In some ways, The Showboat looked exactly like the postcard. The building was boat-shaped. It had round windows, a black smokestack, and a blue lake that sparkled behind it.

  But there were no daisies in the field, only tall weeds and dandelions.

  The paint on the hotel was dull and peeling—more dirt-gray than white—and two of the grimy porthole windows were cracked.

  Instead of a smiling girl waving from the deck, there was a sign hanging from a broken railing: DO NOT ENTER—Upper Deck Temporarily Closed for Repairs. Except the sign looked old and faded, too, like there was nothing “temporary” about it.

  A red light over the front door blinked on and off: Vacancy. No kidding—the only thing in the parking lot besides the Beemobile was a rusty basketball hoop with no net.