The Wedding Bees Read Free

don’t wear ribbons and red shoes and have long, slim bare legs, she thought.
    She pulled back from the window and looked down at her own legs. She was wearing an expensive pair of jeans and a sweater her mother had bought her and neither fit her very well. Even her ballet flats looked funny on her feet.
    Ruby bit her lip and scraped her fine blond hair up, piling it on the top of her head with a clasp. Her whole body was a joke, actually. A complete joke.
    She put the sliver of cracker carefully back on the plate next to the other slivers so that it formed almost an entire cracker again. She no longer wanted the sliver. It was distracting her. Besides, if she didn’t eat it then, she could look forward to having it later. Or later still.
    She dragged her chair closer to the window, tucking herself behind the burgundy velvet drapes with their gold fringe. Ruby couldn’t stand those drapes. She couldn’t stand any of the overpriced furniture in her apartment, all chosen by her mom: the rolled-arm sofa with matching armchairs, the writing desk, the dining table with its six chairs. Six chairs! Not one of them had ever been sat on.
    The pictures on the wall were not to her taste either. She didn’t even want pictures on the wall. She would have all white walls with nothing on them if it was up to her, not these dark reds and greens and uptown library hues.
    It was all the same stuff that filled her mother’s apartment on the Upper East Side, so why she’d wanted to re-create it here, Ruby couldn’t imagine. It was not as though she wanted Ruby to think she was still at home. She liked having Ruby away from the Upper East Side as much as Ruby liked not being there.
    Ruby had found the apartment herself about a year ago after seeing a sign advertising it on the noticeboard at the greenmarket around the corner. She’d been out walking after a fight with her mom that was so vicious she had gone from East Eighty-Second Street to Tompkins Square Park before she even noticed where she was.
    She’d rung up straightaway about the apartment, and loony Lola, who lived upstairs, had ended up showing her the place half an hour later.
    Then she’d walked all the way home again and begged her mom to let her move there. She couldn’t pay the rent herself, of course—she’d never even managed to hold down a job for more than a month or two—but her mother was tired of her, Ruby knew that. Why wouldn’t she be? Ruby was tired of herself. And if it wasn’t quite independence when someone else paid the bills, at least it meant they could get out of each other’s hair for a while.
    Of course, her mother had been horrified that she was living in Alphabet City. Back when she was Ruby’s age, the area had been full of drug addicts and pimps and thieves and murderers. But what had eventually won her over was the insanely cheap rent and the apartment itself, which was solid and roomy. And available.
    It had taken a while to adjust to nothing but her own company but Ruby now felt she was almost ready, almost well enough, to start looking for a job and standing on her own two feet. Almost.
    Outside, the van driver and the woman were unloading things from the back of the van. The woman was holding some sort of a cooler, and the driver was carrying a stack of brightly colored square wooden boxes. He did not look like the sort of guy who normally carried stacks of boxes. He had creases in his jeans, as if he’d ironed them.
    The couple came right over to the building so Ruby drew back from the window again, pulling her long sleeves right down over her hands. She was cold, although it looked like a nice enough day outside. She was always cold.
    One of the tiny “penthouse” apartments had been empty a while now, she knew, so she should not have been so surprised that someone was moving in. But, even though it was an unreasonable thing to think, she had somehow assumed she