My obsession with bugs started on a Friday in fifth grade. It had been a rough one. Taelor Tremont told everyone that I was related to Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Since Alice was, in fact, my great-great-great-grandmother, my classmates teased me during recess about dormice and tea parties. I thought things couldn’t get much worse until I felt something on my jeans and realized, mortified, that I got my period for the first time and was totally unprepared. On the verge of tears, I lifted a sweater from the lost-and-found pile just inside the main entrance and wrapped it around my waist for the short walk to the office. I kept my head down, unable to meet anyone’s gaze.
I pretended to be sick and called my dad to pick me up. While I waited for him in the nurse’s office, I imagined a heated argument between the vase of flowers on her desk and the bumblebee buzzing around them. It was one powerful delusion, because I really heard it, as sure as I could hear the passing of students from one class to the next on the other side of the closed door.
Alison had warned me of the day I would “become a woman.” Of the voices that would follow. I’d just assumed it was her mental instability making her say that …
The whispers were impossible to ignore, just like the sobs building in my throat. I did the only thing I could: I denied what was happening inside me. Rolling a poster of the four basic food groups into a cylinder, I tapped the bee hard enough to stun it. Then I whisked the flowers out of the water and pressed them between the pages of a spiral notebook, to silence their chattering petals.
When we got home, poor, oblivious Dad offered to make some chicken soup. I shrugged him off and went to my room.
“Do you think you’ll feel well enough to visit Mom later tonight?” he asked from the hallway, always reluctant to upset Alison’s delicate sense of routine.
I shut my door without answering. My hands shook and my blood felt jittery in my veins. There had to be an explanation for what had happened in the nurse’s office. I was stressed about the Wonderland jokes, and when my hormones kicked in, I’d had a panic attack. Yeah. That made sense.
But I knew deep down I was lying to myself, and the last place I wanted to visit was an asylum. A few minutes later, I went back to the living room.
Dad sat in his favorite recliner—a worn-out corduroy lump covered with daisy appliqués. In one of her “spells,” Alison had sewn the cloth flowers all over it. Now he would never part with the chair.
“You feeling better, Butterfly?” he asked, looking up from his fishing magazine.
Musty dampness blasted into my face from the air conditioner as I leaned against the closest wood-paneled wall. Our two-bedroom duplex had never offered much in the way of privacy, and on that day it felt smaller than ever before. The waves of his dark hair moved in the rattling gusts.
I shuffled my feet. This was the part of being an only child I hated—having no one but Dad to confide in. “I need some more stuff. They only gave us one sample.”
His eyes were blank, like those of a deer staring down traffic during morning rush hour.
“The special talk they give at school,” I said, my stomach in knots. “The one where boys aren’t invited?” I flashed the purple pamphlet they’d handed out to all the girls in third grade. It was creased because I’d shoved it and the sample sanitary pad into a drawer beneath my socks.
After an uncomfortable pause, Dad’s face flushed red. “Oh. So that’s why …” He suddenly became preoccupied with a colorful array of saltwater lures. He was embarrassed or worried or both, because there wasn’t any salt water within a five-hundred-mile radius of Pleasance, Texas.
“You know what this means, right?” I pressed. “Alison is going to give me the puberty speech again.”
The blush spread from his face to his ears. He flipped a couple of pages, staring blankly at the pictures. “Well, who better to tell you about the birds and the bees than your mom. Right?”
An unspoken answer echoed inside my head: Who better but the bees themselves?
I cleared my throat. “Not that speech, Dad. The nutso one. The ‘It can’t be stopped. You can’t escape the voices any more than I could. Great-great-gran never should’ve gone down the rabbit hole’ speech.”
It didn’t matter that Alison might be right about the voices after all. I wasn’t ready to admit that to Dad or myself.
He sat rigid, as if the air conditioner had iced his spine.
I studied the crisscross scars on my palms. He and I both knew it was less what Alison was going to say than what she might do. If she had another meltdown, they’d slap her into the straitjacket.