Breaking Butterflies

by M. Anjelais

  It was my father who saw it first, when we were five. Cadence and I were out in my backyard, while Leigh and my mother were inside, having tea. My father had volunteered to take us outside and watch us play. I don’t quite remember what we were doing, only that at some point a brilliantly colored butterfly appeared and began to dance over the grass, up and down, up and down. It paused on a flower, and then it fluttered off again, darting this way and that, iridescent blue wings catching the sunlight. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I ran for my butterfly net, but when I came back, Cadence had caught it in his bare hands. When I saw him do it, I was delighted. I didn’t know what was about to happen.

  “Look at that, Sphinx, I don’t think we’ve seen one of those before,” my father said. “Isn’t it lovely? Cadence, open your hands a little so Sphinxie can see.”

  I leaned eagerly over Cadence’s cupped hands. He opened his fingers slightly. The butterfly was calm between his palms, its little sticky feet splayed out, its curly proboscis tasting Cadence’s skin. The wings were shimmering, making me think of stories about fairies. I reached a finger out to touch it.

  Cadence looked up, and the blue of his eyes was so bright. Then he closed his hands together, and I heard the soft sound of the butterfly being crushed. Being broken.

  “Cadence!” my father said, astonished, and I burst into tears.

  At five years old, this was the most terrible act of violence I had ever seen. I’d never been so shocked in my whole life. Cadence just stared at us, at the way I was sobbing into my father’s pant leg, at my father’s wide-eyed face, the mouth turned down in disgust. He opened his hands, and the mess of the butterfly’s body was spread all over his palms. The crumpled wings fell away. Cadence stared at us for a moment longer, his eyes narrowed, as though he were reading a difficult paragraph in a book. And then, all of a sudden, he looked down at his hands and burst into tears, just exactly like I had.

  My father carried us both into the house. Our mothers picked us up and comforted us while my father explained what had happened out in the backyard. I put my hands over my ears. The thought of the crushed butterfly was making me sick.

  “Well, he didn’t mean to kill it, did you, Cadence?” said Leigh, wiping the tears from his face with her shirtsleeve.

  “No,” said Cadence. The tears that Leigh had wiped away were not replaced; while I sobbed on in earnest, he seemed to have run out of sobs. He was as carefree as if nothing had ever happened. “I didn’t know what would happen,” he said. “I was just seeing what would happen.”

  Leigh held him up so he could wash his hands in our kitchen sink. “Now you know what happens,” she said. “Don’t do that again.”

  “Okay,” he said. Leigh handed him a towel to dry his hands on. He dried his hands and dropped the towel on the floor. I was still crying, my face buried in my mother’s neck.

  After they went home, I was watching a cartoon on television when I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. Our kitchen was open, and right next to our living room, so I could hear everything that they were saying — they just thought that I was busy with the cartoon and wasn’t paying attention.

  “There’s something wrong with that kid,” my father said.

  “He didn’t mean to smash the bug,” my mother said dismissively. She was doing the dishes, clinking plates together in the sink.

  “You didn’t see him, Sarah. He meant it. He wanted to kill that butterfly, and he did.”

  “He’s only five years old,” my mother said.

  “So is Sphinx. Does she go around killing butterflies?”

  “No, but she’s sensitive, and she’s a girl. Little boys are odd. I wouldn’t put it past a little boy to smash a butterfly just to see what would happen.”

  “He knew what would happen,” said my father insistently.

  “Did you see how he was crying afterward?” my mother asked. “He felt bad about it.”

  “I don’t think so. When we were outside, Sphinxie started crying first, then he started. It was like he realized from seeing her that he was supposed to cry. Otherwise, I don’t think he would’ve cried at all. Just do me a favor, Sarah — watch Sphinxie when Leigh’s over with him, okay? Can you just do that for me? Don’t let them play alone.”

  I turned slowly back toward the television, fixing my eyes on the bright moving shapes. Even though I was only five, I knew what my father was talking about; I had seen it too. It was something about Cadence’s eyes. They had been burning, shining bright, so bright, and so cold, like sun reflecting on an icy landscape. Everyone loved Cadence’s eyes, people were always saying how beautiful they were, how unusual. How completely out of the ordinary. Sometimes, I thought, ordinary is better. It was the first time in my life that I realized something could be so unusual that it was broken, so out of the ordinary that something was wrong with it.

  Cadence never killed another butterfly, and my mother said that he had learned his lesson. Nevertheless, she watched us carefully, as my father had requested. For a while, it set me on edge; I remember being unable to think of anything but the butterfly incident when I saw her standing near, her eyes fixed on us. It upset me so much that Cadence stopped being my shining friend for a while.

  But before long, the memory began to fade. Slowly, new days pushed the images to the back of my brain like old clothes shoved into the back of a closet, dusty and forgotten. I decided my mother watched me only because mothers were silly like that. And Cadence shone once more — brighter than ever. He had an intensity about him: He wasn’t hyperactive like some little children, he simply had an energy that was alive with some kind of fire. Leigh said the teachers at his school told her that Cadence was definitely going to do something great one day in the future.

  But there was still something wrong, even if I didn’t really understand what it was. It most likely had something to do with my personality, I thought at the time; I tended to follow anyone who wanted to lead. And Cadence was an excellent leader even at six. He always knew exactly what games to play, and they were always the most exciting games, the best games I had ever played, the most thrilling times that I’d ever had. When I left Cadence’s house, I always left feeling exhilarated, as though he had taken me into his own shining world.

  “Cadence,” I would declare, “is my best friend!”

  “I knew he would be,” my mother would answer happily, thinking, I suppose, of her life’s plan. Cadence and I had grown up hearing the story of how our mothers had planned their lives at seven under a fort in a backyard, but we only knew the first parts at that point. I suppose they didn’t tell us the marriage part because they thought it would be too strange. Perhaps she and Leigh even had secret visions of revealing the final part of the story one Thanksgiving, while Cadence’s and my children ran circles around their feet. Maybe.

  He wasn’t always a good best friend, though. There were days when I made a mistake, didn’t play the game according to his rules, didn’t feel like playing at all. On those days the bright eyes would come out, the fierce sun would rise over the icy wasteland of blue, and he seemed so much taller than me, so much bigger. He was powerful and frightening and demanding. And at the same time, he was still my shining friend: I so wanted to please him. I had to do it his way, and only his way. And if I didn’t, that startling intelligence that everyone admired was deadly. He could lie like an undercover agent, get me in trouble, and escape totally blameless.

  “I hate you!” I screamed at him once. Something he’d done had unfolded before my eyes, and I had seen for the umpteenth time how he had used or insulted me. He only stared at me, icy and unmoved.

  “Cadence,” I cried to my mother later that day, “is absolutely not my best friend.”

  “Sometimes we have disagreements with our friends,” she said reasonably. “You’ll work it out.” And we always did, in a way. The next playdate would come, and the memories of the lies and the way he seemed to tower over me would fade away like the memory of the butt
erfly, just as soon as he opened the front door of Leigh’s elegant house and stepped out eagerly onto the porch, waving and calling my name.

  We had a shared seventh birthday party, set in between the dates of our real birthdays. It was our mothers’ idea (they meant it to honor the seventh birthday party that my mother had had, when Leigh had given her the horses), but we didn’t mind it — or at least, I certainly didn’t. I don’t know what Cadence really thought, only that he smiled and hugged me, saying he couldn’t wait for his and Sphinxie’s birthday party. He wanted a real artist’s easel, he said. I wanted Barbie dolls.

  The party took place at Leigh’s house, and stayed with me forever. Even years later, I could remember every detail: the bright colors of the wrapping paper on the stack of gifts by the back door, the huge cake that was half vanilla and half chocolate, the smiles of my mother and Leigh, who stood by and watched us with proud, knowing eyes. Balloons were everywhere, all the colors of the rainbow, bobbing up and down in a soft breeze. Our party guests were swarming over the swings in the backyard, countless boys and girls from school. But when I wandered over to them, clumsily trying to join in the fun, I could see only one person.

  Cadence was on one of the swings, swinging higher than the boy on the swing next to him, higher than I had ever seen anyone swing before. He was glowing from behind, looking as though the sunlight were drawn to him. In that moment, he was ethereal to me, a fairy prince. I marveled at the fact that this was our party, that this day belonged to me as much as it belonged to the illuminated child on the swing. He looked down and saw me standing there, with my head tilted slightly backward, gazing up at him. And then he jumped from the swing, and for a moment, I really thought he was flying, hovering above my head, magic.

  “Let’s go, Sphinxie,” he said when he’d somehow touched down on the ground in front of me. He reached out and grabbed my hand. “I only want to play with you.” And I was led away from the swings, away from the mass of children, and into Cadence’s imagination for the rest of the party, following him around the edge of the yard on a make-believe adventure until our mothers called us over to return to our guests and open our gifts.

  It was shortly after our party that Leigh’s marriage began to dissolve. It hadn’t been very good from the beginning, I don’t think, and it only went downhill from there. They saw a counselor, who helped them stay together for a while, but it didn’t make any difference in the end. They kept fighting, kept struggling, and eventually they filed for divorce. When Cadence and I were ten, Leigh’s husband finally bought a house of his own and began to pack up his things. Leigh came over to our house and sat in our kitchen, which was so much smaller than her own, and she cried into my mother’s shoulder. All her years of struggle and spitfire had led to an ugly, ugly divorce; Cadence would not be visiting his father.

  One day, in the midst of their family chaos, I went over to his house to play. We went up to his bedroom, which was still painted with trees and sky, just as it was when he was born. My mother had by then dismissed the idea of needing to watch us too closely. Cadence sat on his bed, and I sat on the floor. That was a rule he had insisted upon for several weeks: I was not allowed on his bed, I could not even touch the duvet. And somehow, that seemed okay to me at the time, even though now I can look back and see that his rules were just a way of showing his power over me.

  “My dad is moving away,” he informed me matter-of-factly, and swung his legs back and forth. His feet were bare and slender. The subject of his father made me feel awkward. My mother had explained the divorce to me earlier, but I was still leery of the idea. I love my father, I always have, and at ten years old, the thought that fathers could just go away creeped me out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He watched his own feet go back and forth. Then he looked up, and his eyes were burning. “I’m not,” he told me.

  He did that every so often, looked you right in the eye and blurted out something that sounded absolutely awful. He had told me once before that he wished a boy at his school would die, that a girl who’d taken one of his pencils during art class would get her fingers cut off. And it always made me shiver slightly when he said things like that, but I never told on him, because wishes were different from something real. Sometimes, I too wished for someone to leave and never come back, for something bad to happen to a child who’d wronged me. Was that any different from the things that Cadence said? I didn’t know.

  “You’re not?” I asked quietly. “I’d really miss my dad if he moved away.”

  “I won’t miss mine,” he said, and hopped lightly off the bed. “He yelled at me one time.” That was another thing about Cadence: He never forgot, and never forgave. Your trespasses against him were written in permanent ink inside his head, never to be washed away, not in a million years.

  “Oh,” I said, unsure of myself. Cadence was over at his desk, rummaging around in one of the drawers. “So, Cadence,” I piped up, eager to change the subject. “What are we going to do today?”

  Cadence turned from his desk and faced me. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “Right now just look at this.” He had something in his hand. When he pressed a button on the side, a silver blade flicked out. Click.

  “Are you allowed to have that?” I asked, staring at the knife.

  He returned to his bed and sat again, swinging his legs just as before. I should have run away at that point, but suddenly my body wasn’t under my command. My limbs felt heavy. I remember feeling glued to the floor of his bedroom, as though he’d paralyzed me by whipping out that blade.

  “It’s my dad’s,” he said.

  “Does he know you have it?”

  He cocked his head to one side. “Yes.”

  I knew he was lying, but I also knew from experience that it was better not to argue with him. He pressed the button again and the blade disappeared. Click.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked him. I wasn’t scared right away. I was a pretty sheltered kid: I wasn’t allowed to watch violent shows on TV and my father didn’t leave the news on when I was around. I couldn’t imagine Cadence really doing anything bad with that knife. It was just a heavy feeling of something being wrong that had me frozen, a discomfort brewing in my gut.

  “I don’t know,” he said carelessly.

  “You should give it back to your daddy before he notices it’s missing,” I blurted, then realized — too late — that this particular sentence revealed that I thought he was lying. He looked up from the blade, and the blue of his eyes contracted, tighter and tighter, brighter and brighter. They were like a camera flashbulb going off, bright enough to hurt your eyes.

  “It’s not missing, Sphinxie,” he said. “My dad knows that I have it.”

  “I —” I tried to begin, but he cut me off abruptly.

  “You’re so stupid, Sphinx,” said Cadence firmly. “You’re so dumb. That’s the only reason you think I’m lying, because you’re too stupid to know any better. You’re too stupid to even think up games for your own party.” His perfect little face was suddenly ugly. This, too, I had experienced before: his sudden rants, insults, and put-downs hurtling down on my head like missiles. “Nobody likes you, Sphinx, because nobody could ever like someone like you. Not even your daddy likes you, Sphinx. Not even your mommy likes you.”

  I was frozen, stinging all over, stunned as always that such horrible things could spew forth from someone … someone who I still somehow managed to think was absolutely perfect. Then suddenly, I remembered something from school: A woman had come into our classroom to talk to us about the dangers of bullying. Bullies, she had said, might hurt you by hitting you — or they might do it by saying bad things. They might lie to get you in trouble. They might make you feel like you weren’t worth anything. You had to stand up to a bully in order to make them stop.

  “And this knife, Sphinx,” Cadence went on, “it doesn’t matter if I took it. I deserve to have it. I’m better than you, Sphinx. That’s why. I�
�m better than you. I can do anything I want. I can do anything to you. You’re mine, Sphinx.”

  He was talking quickly, so quickly, and leaning forward toward me. Growing every minute, taller and taller, like a skyscraper rising over a rural countryside. I shrank backward from him, my head spinning. You’re mine, Sphinx.

  The most important thing about bullying, said the woman who came to my classroom, was to tell an adult. An adult would make the bullying stop, and so the most important thing was to tell an adult. I got up from the floor and stood under the skyscraper.

  “I’m telling,” I said, my voice shaking. “I’m telling you have that knife.”

  His eyes flashed. He clenched his hands, the slim fingers curling in anger. He leaped from the bed, and the fury left his face, to be replaced by a stony blankness like the face of a statue. Click. The switchblade popped open, and for a split second I saw the reflection of his bedroom wall in the blade’s shiny surface, gleaming in the sunlight that streamed in through the window.

  I did not move when he came forward, did not move when he grabbed a fistful of my hair, holding my head captive. I did not move when the icy coldness of the blade was dragged across my cheek, barely an inch down from my eye.

  It didn’t hurt at first, and in that void of nothing before the searing pain took hold, I was looking up into Cadence’s eyes, into his blank and beautiful and terrible eyes. He was staring at me like he never had before, and his fingers were gripping my hair so tightly that it felt like he would never let go. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears. I thought he was going to hold on to me forever.