Free The Bumblebee Flies Anyway by Robert Cormier Page A

silence continued, and Barney heard, in the silence, the sound of Mazzo’s quick sharp breaths.
    Barney blinked, and as if by magic, Mazzo’s sister stoodin the doorway. Her beauty struck him like a physical blow. Or like a small explosion deep inside him, shifting his bones and muscles and tissues the way earth is moved deep below by a shock wave. His first impression was of blue everything: dark-blue blazer, powder-blue sweater, eyes startling blue, not the cold and distant blue of the sky but a warm melting blue. Those eyes swept the room, resting for a moment on Mazzo, the bedside paraphernalia of basins and tubes, the machine to which Mazzo was attached, and finally Barney. He lost himself in those eyes, felt lifted and exalted. Maybe she was a witch, after all. Her short blond hair, almost boyishly short, caught the sunlight and spun it into gold.
    She regarded Barney with a sad kind of amusement, shaking her head slightly. “I know who you are,” she said, her voice surprisingly low and husky.
    Barney was startled. His cheeks grew warm, his heart bounced crazily in his chest. He wanted to say: “Who am I?” As if she knew secrets he didn’t know. But he didn’t say anything, felt he’d stammer like Allie Roon if he tried to talk.
    Mazzo rescued him. “And I know who you are,” Mazzo said to her. “You’re the same old Cassie. But what did you do to your hair?”
    She turned away from Barney and directed her attention to Mazzo. Barney, too, looked at Mazzo, surprised at the tenderness in his voice when he spoke to his sister. A different Mazzo suddenly.
    She ignored the question about her hair, shrugging slightly as if an answer wasn’t worth giving. Leaning forward a bit, she studied his wan figure in the bed as if trying to determine whether this was really her brother or an imposter.
    “You don’t look so bad,” she said, the sultry voice emerging again, like the voice of a blues singer Barney had heard one time on the radio. “You’ve lost some weight. Your eyes look like you’re on something. But you look pretty good, considering.”
    “I’m dying, for Christ’s sake,” Mazzo said. “So it doesn’t matter how I look. How I look has nothing to do with it.” But this wasn’t the old Mazzo talking. This new Mazzo used the same old bitter words, but when he spoke them to his sister, they were softened somehow, gentled.
    “I was just trying to cheer you up,” she replied. “Would it make you feel better if I said you look terrible, that it’s hard to believe you used to score touchdowns and hit home runs for good old Stanley Prep?”
    Her own voice had a kind of bantering now, matching Mazzo’s new voice—the voice Barney had never heard before—and it seemed to him that Mazzo’s and Cassie’s voices were more important to them than the words they used, the voices like a code between them.
    Barney studied them as they talked. They were twins, of course, and bore a certain resemblance to each other. Both blond, fair skinned, Cassie beautiful and Mazzo handsome although the disease had ravaged his flesh and features. Mazzo lay in ruins, like someone beaten and robbed and left abandoned, while Cassie’s beauty was vibrant and compelling. Barney felt younger suddenly than his sixteen years. Mazzo and Cassie were probably twenty or so, but Barney felt like a kid beside them. God, he wished that he was older.
    “Time for introductions,” Mazzo said, calling to Barney, summoning him from his thoughts. “Barney, this is my sister, Cassie.”
    “Hello, Barney,” she said, glancing at him. Then back toMazzo: “Still up to your old tricks, aren’t you, Alberto?”
    “What old tricks?”
    She laughed, a throaty kind of laugh, as husky as her voice.
    Looking at Barney again—God, she was beautiful—she said: “You see, Barney, Alberto’s always needed a buffer. Even as a kid in school. He’d get into trouble and bring some kid home with him.” To Mazzo again: “Remember the time