In the warm, wide barn where dust floated visible in the air, Eva prepared to meet the bees. Three days had passed since Burl had promised to show her the inside of a hive. First there was Saturday, when she and her mother drove to a big discount store to get bathing suits and stuff for the house, and then to a lake where Miriam thought Eva might get a swimming lesson and meet other kids. The lake had been nice but there were no lessons and the kids all hung around in groups. What was Eva supposed to do, walk over and say, "Hi, I have no friends"? At one point, she had waded in above her waist and her mother had called out to her - Careful, Eva, don't go too deep! - so then the whole world knew she couldn't swim. On Sunday they had driven into town to get the paper and sit in a cafe. Just like in the city, Eva had eaten a bagel and drawn on the Sunday New York Times, putting eyeglasses, tattoos and mustaches onto the models in the ads, then adding animals, kids and cartoon bubbles filled with words. As she sat there covering a model's white dress with dots, she had almost wanted to tell her mother about the bees, offer to show them to her even, explaining all the things she'd learned. But her mother was so suspicious lately, so nervous and ready to get mad. You'll get stung, she might say. Or: Who is this beekeeper and why aren't you home with Mrs. Flynn? Or even (worst of all):

Bees? You want to show me bees?

Now, in the barn, Burl asked her nothing, just told her what to do: Step over here, one leg in, that's right, good, now the other - it's a little big, we'll roll up the extra once it's on. The bee suit was made of stained white cloth and smelled old like the barn and sweet like honey. In the city, Eva had learned to be careful, walking fast past alleys and keeping her gaze flat and straight ahead when boys or men called out to her - Yo, baby doll, hey, chica - or even muttering "Fuck off, loser" in her most scornful voice. Now, though, here she was somehow, alone in a barn while a grown man knelt fiddling with her cuffs. She knew her mother wouldn't like it, but she didn't care; she trusted him, she just did. Maybe it was stupid, but she trusted that he wanted what he said he wanted - to cover her so she wouldn't get stung, to show her his bees. That was all, except how to explain the shiver of excitement, or was it fear, passing from her stomach to her chest?

Burl's grandmother, he told her as she stood there, had worn this suit for years. For an instant she saw a body rotting in the dirt; then she blinked the thought away. She had come prepared, done everything he had told her. She wore pale cotton pants, white kneesocks, her high tops, a long-sleeved pale yellow shirt which she thought, with her black hair, made her look a little like a bee. For once, that morning, she had given Mrs. Flynn something to do, asking her to put her hair into two thick braids and pin the escaping curls to her head. She wasn't sure that Mrs. Flynn bought her stories about I'm-going-to-see-my-new-friend-Lissa, but the old lady didn't seem to care what Eva did, as long as she didn't stay away too long.

"So you asked your mom and she said it was all right?" Burl crouched at her feet, winding string around her ankles so the bees couldn't get inside.

Eva nodded. She didn't know if he believed her either. Even when he talked like a grown-up, he sounded, somehow, as if he might be kidding. Also, he told her things, like they were friends:

This is the hay chute I used to slide down. This is where my grandmother nicked my height into the wood. Here's an old honey extractor I need to fix. Listening, Eva felt the thick past of the place everywhere, like something she could cup inside her hands.

Before he got out the bee suit, he had stood her against the wall, cut a notch in the wood and carved her name alongside it with a knife, a few inches from the column where his own growth had been marked by his grandparents, year by year. See, he had told her. At eleven, I was just a little taller than you are now. Eva had tried to picture him as shorter, younger and without a beard - a red-haired, sunburned boy. Watching him bear down on the straight edges of the "E," she had remembered the height chart inside her closet door in New York. Most of her was there still: Eva 2, 4, 9. The mark on the barn wall looked too high to her, too grown, floating by itself as if she'd only ever been eleven.

He zipped and snapped the bee suit up to her chin, cuffed the sleeves until her hands appeared, and wrapped twine around her wrists. Inside the suit, she started to sweat.

She squirmed. "It's really hot in this thing."

"Wait until you put on the hat - it turns into a sauna. You don't faint from the heat, do you?"

She didn't bother to answer. Burl put two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle, and Lissa appeared at his side.

"Ready guys?" He jerked his chin toward outside. "Oh wait a second - I might as well put on a suit, too."

"I'm broiling," Eva said. "I'm melting in here."

And then she was running, feeling the bee suit bulky on her legs, seeing Lissa wheel around and follow her. Outside, she stopped, threw her head back and filled her lungs. The air was like a present, clear and cool.

Near the hives, she held out first one arm, then the other, and he gave her his grandmother's long canvas gloves, which were only slightly too big. Then the bee hat. A veil, he had called it the week before, and although she had seen his own hat and should have known, she had pictured herself dressing up as a lacy queen bee bride, all white froth and gauzy frill. This thing was made of yellow and black nylon and looked more like a construction worker's hat, or like the bag onions came in. He lowered it over her head and looped more string around her, wrapping her up like a package. Hotter and hotter, Eva felt, but now (the shiver in her stomach come and gone) safer and safer, too - from the bees, yes, but also in a bigger way, for though she couldn't have put it into words, she felt like an infant being swaddled in yards of sweet-smelling fabric, close-fitting as a cocoon. Suddenly she was sleepy and wanted to plop down in the grass and watch the sky through the scrim of veil.

"All right," said Burl, and she looked up and saw that he, too, had put on a bee hat and long leather gloves. "I'll take off the honey supers, and then we'll go into the hive bodies and make sure everything's in working order. They haven't been flying in and out much so I want to take a look. Sound okay?"

"Yes." Her voice seemed small and muffled to her. Inside the hat, she could feel the close heat of her own breath.

He knocked on the top of her hat. "Everything all right in there?"

Eva nodded.

"If you get stung through the fabric - it's unlikely but it could happen - just walk away slowly. Remember, this is their house we re breaking into, so they might get pi - they might be irritated."

"Pissed." Eva pointed at the hive. "I don't think I can reach."

"Oh." He looked her up and down. "True. It'll be shorter than this because I'm taking a few supers off, but I'll get you something anyway.

He found a cinder block in the grass and brought it over to the side of the hive. In the air all around her, she could see bees coming and going. He had told her how they went off to the flowers, filled their stomachs with nectar, got pollen on their legs and came back to show the other bees where to go. But he was right - this hive didn't have nearly as many bees coming in and out as its neighbors did. Now she was about to see inside, but what if he lifted the lid and the bees, like in that other hive, were lying crisp and dead? She wanted to see the whole family inside - nurses, cleaners, guard bees, babies, a whole bunch of sisters (and Eva without even one), plus the drones. And the queen - especially the queen. Eva pictured her wearing a crown made from flowers, sitting proudly, everbody's mother, while the other bees fanned her with their wings.

What she saw, when finally Burl managed to remove the top boxes and pry the lid off one of the boxes farther down, was a mess. Bees everywhere - in the air in front of her, crawling on her veil inches from her eyes, covering the box like a piece of moving velvet. Eva had envisioned something much neater - little nurse bees in one corner, dropping things into the babies' mouths, bees dragging garbage out, a queen in the center keeping watch. This was more like being dizzy, like a fever, more motion than she had ever seen in one place, even in the city. Watching, she felt as if something had gone wrong with her eyes, brown spots appearing out of nowhere, movement she couldn't make sense of, and then the sound - a rising, falling metallic whine, airplanes diving in and swooping off, the noise so close, so full and everywhere that it seemed to live in her own head.

"You okay?" Burl was asking her, and she nodded, but was she okay, she wasn't sure. Something felt wrong inside her, all buzzing, and the bee suit was suffocating and how were you supposed to tell anything from anything in here? This was their home? Why hadn't Burl told her it would be like this? I am, she thought, I am about to faint. She shut her eyes and took a long, deep breath. When she opened them again, he was handing her a metal stick with an L-shaped hook on each end.

"I want to take a look at some frames. You can help me," he said, and she realized that he had probably been talking to her the whole time.

Like a good girl, like a grown-up, like someone not hot, tired and disappointed, Eva took the tool. With her mother she would have cried out now, torn the hat off, stormed away. Even when she was only sort of mad, she did that, threw tantrums and then felt bad about it. But Burl was different from her mother, didn't expect her to be a spoiled brat, hardly knew her. And here he was, puffing smoke at the bees, leaning over them, asking her to help. She stood on tiptoes and leaned forward. He wedged the end of his own hive tool beneath a piece of wood at the top of the hive.

"Like this," he said. "You do it on the other side and we'll lift the frame out."

Eva moved the tool toward the bees, then took it back. "I can't. They're in the way."

He bent across and brushed a few bees away with his gloved hand. There were dead bees among the live ones, Eva noticed&emdash; on the edges where he'd taken the lid off, in the middle where two bees were trying to drag a dead one away. One bee lay on its back with liquid oozing out of it. She steeled herself, then wedged the tool in and felt it catch on an edge of wood.

"Now straighten it up and pull. That's great," said Burl.

And then together they were lifting, something was rising, a piece of the hive, fat with some kind of growth and covered with more bees. Burl grabbed it from the top and held it up.

"Look," he said. "A full honey frame. Isn't that beautiful? Take a look at that."