“Just pick one—left or right.”
Blister nudges up his glasses on his nose. “Left.”
“OK, let’s get on our bikes and go left,” I say. Blister grins at me.
“OK.”
He stands and puts his hand out to pull me up, then picks up his damp T-shirt and pulls it on. It sticks to his skin.
“I’ll get some water,” I say. He waits as I go back inside and put a bottle of water in my bag. I grab a packet of cookies too, although I know I shouldn’t.
We get on our bikes outside the gate and turn left, down the bumpy path. The sun is already too hot. It sits in my hair.
At the crossroad, we stop. Blister picks up a small stone. He puts his hands behind his back and pulls them out, fists clenched.
“If you get the stone, we go left again,” he says.
I touch the knuckles of his right hand. He uncurls his fingers and his palm is empty.
He smiles. “We go right.”
There’s no breeze at all. Warm touches the back of my throat as I breathe. Our wheels turning is the only sound we make.
When we get to another crossroad, I pick up a stone and without Blister looking I hide it in my palm.
“Left,” I say when he touches the knuckles of my hand.
We head down the straight road. It disappears into the distance, folding into the horizon. There are just fields and fields on either side. Patches of green and dried yellow, spotted with flowers.
“Race you!” Blister suddenly shouts.
“It’s too hot,” I say. But he’s off and to keep up with him I have to pedal fast. My legs ache, but I keep going. I can’t catch him, but I try.
It feels like ages before we stop to drink water.
“Let’s head for there.” Blister points to something in a field, further down the road. It looks like a small building. Maybe it holds some old farm equipment.
“Then we stop?” I’m still out of breath. I need some shade.
“Then we stop.”
We bike together in silence. Our wheels crunch slightly on the road beneath us.
It’s a wooden shelter, with three walls and a sloping roof. It’d fit maybe ten people, lying side by side. Big planks are missing from the walls, and the roof has come loose at one edge and hangs down slightly. It looks like there was some sort of floor once, but the grass has grown through.
We put our bikes on the ground beside it and go in. It’s like being covered in cool water.
“That’s better,” I say as Blister goes to push at the walls.
“I reckon it’s OK,” he says.
I take off my bag and pass him the water. I watch him tip his head back, swallow some and wipe his lips with the back of his hand.
“Thanks.”
As I drink, he disappears around the back of the shelter. I put the bottle on the floor and follow him.
It’s the remains of an old car. Most of it has been burned away and it sits, like a giant skeleton, sticking up from the grass.
Bits of the seats are still stuck inside, like melted old skin.
“Hey, Bonnie,” Blister says in a thick drawl. “Someone here’s gone ’n’ burnt out our car.” He blows the tip of his invisible gun and puts it in his pocket.
“Who’d do such a thing, Clyde?”
“Someone’s after us.” And he grabs my hand and pulls me down low, behind the back of our burned-out car. “Shh, they’re coming.”
We get our guns out of our pockets. Slowly, Clyde crawls around the edge of the hood, but darts quickly back again.
“There’s five o’ them.”
“Five?”
Clyde nods his head seriously and scratches his cheek as he thinks hard.
“I’ll get us out of here, Bonnie. Just follow me.”
We skulk around the car again. He looks at me and counts down with his fingers. Three. Two. One.
We’re running for our shelter, shooting for our lives. I get one of the men, straight between the eyes. Clyde kills two. We dive through the air and roll to safety.
“They’re getting away!” Clyde shouts. The other two have gotten into a car. I jump into the road, lift my gun and aim it at them. I don’t want to kill them, so instead I blow both their tires out and they swerve all over the place.
I put my hand on Clyde’s arm and push his gun down. We watch as the car hobbles off into the distance.
“They won’t bother us no more,” Clyde says, and he throws his arms around me. “We did it!”
I stay holding him. I can feel his heart beating into mine. It feels like we share the same one.
My breath is on Blister’s neck.
He moves his head back and I feel his lips on mine.
I’m kissing Blister.
Blister is kissing me.
Suddenly, it all makes sense. Nothing else matters. Blister wants to kiss me. And I’m wanting to kiss him back.
His lips taste of the warm air. His arms are tight around me.
My Blister is kissing me.
He pulls away and looks at me.
“Oh,” he says quietly. He touches my cheek gently with his fingers. “Did you mind?”
“No.”
He kisses my forehead and pulls me tight to him. My head rests under his chin and I breathe him in. The sun is hot on us. His skin is against mine. There’s no room in me for anything other than happy.
He holds my hand, as we go back to our rusting car and lean against it, finishing the rest of our water. Blister keeps looking at me as though I’m different.
“What?” I ask. It sounds strange in this space, as though the word should echo back from the glass sky.
“Nothing,” he smiles.
I pass him two cookies before I twist the packet around and put them back in my bag. I watch his lips as he crunches them. He wipes the crumbs away with his finger.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I laugh.
But it’s everything. And I know now that if the world stopped spinning, Blister and I would survive it all.
We glance at each other again, before we go and pick up our bikes and begin to pedal down the long, dry line stretching in front of us.
•••
I don’t know where I am at first and I lash out with my arms. The light is so bright that it feels like ice.
I’m in my bed. I was asleep. It must be night. The white light sears into me, but I can’t close my eyes. Someone is holding them open. Someone else is sitting on my arms, shining a flashlight deep into me. One eye, then the other.
I try to scream, but a hand goes tight over my mouth.
The pain is like nothing I’ve ever known. I can’t blink. I can’t close the brightness away. My body knows that every part of this is wrong.
I’m going to be sick, but the hand is a wall, bricking up my mouth. My eyes burn. I writhe around, trying to twist my head and yank myself free from the fingers that grip my eyelids open.
Just when I think I can’t bear any more, the flashlight clicks off. I can’t see them as they shift out of my room. The memory of the light is still in my eyes. I press my hands over them, but deep, red flashes are piercing there.
My whole body is shaking. I can’t stop it. I turn onto my side as a headache begins to slice, layer by layer, through my skin and into my skull.
•••
“We’re having a family day,” my dad says firmly the next morning. “I’m not going to discuss it anymore.”
“But I don’t want to,” I say again.
“Well, it’s not all about you, June. There are other people in this family too.”
“Bradley,” Kathleen says gently. She gives him one of her looks that tells him not to be so harsh on me. “It’ll be fun,” she tells me.
“Please come,” Megan says as she holds her toast in front of her mouth. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that she genuinely wanted me to be there.
“She is coming,” my dad says. “She has no choice.”
&nb
sp; And I know I don’t. If I don’t go, he’ll ground me and then I won’t see Blister.
The heat in the car is unbearable. All four of us roll down our windows as far as we can.
“Where are we going?” Megan asks. Her skinny legs are tucked into the back of the car, next to mine.
“Lazy Creek,” my dad says, starting the engine. I look at the back of his head. Has he forgotten that it was Mom’s favorite spot? Where we used to go together. “June loves it there.” He catches my eye in the rearview mirror and smiles.
I did love it there, when it was us three. My dad, my mom and me. Not like this. I don’t want Kathleen there. I don’t want her treading her dirt all over our memories.
“You’ll love it too, Megan,” my dad tells her.
“I can’t wait,” she says. She turns to look at me. “Will you show me around?” I can tell that she’s excited. I just shrug my shoulders and stare out my window.
Blister will be waiting. He’ll be sitting on the steps of our trailer, his legs stretched out in the grass, and I won’t turn up and he’ll think it’s because he kissed me.
I clench my teeth shut, to stop myself from screaming.
My dad starts singing at the top of his voice. He’s tapping the steering wheel and Kathleen joins in, her voice soft and innocent, wrapping around his words like honey. He reaches out and pats her knee and, as she pulls her blonde hair over her shoulder, I close my eyes tight.
I’ll be free I’ll be free I’ll be free, I say in my head, just like Blister told me to. I’ll be free I’ll be free.
Breathe, June, he says. Such a deep breath that it takes ten seconds to get it all in and ten seconds to let it out.
Free free free free.
The car eventually stops and I open my eyes. I remember this clearing as though I came here yesterday: the place to park surrounded by a circle of stones, paths tiptoeing off among the trees. My mom holding my hand and us running off ahead of Dad.
“Shall I carry this?” Megan asks, holding up the blanket.
“That’d be great,” my dad replies. “June, can you grab this?” He passes me the green, zipped bag, before he picks up the basket and slams the trunk. “Do you want to lead the way?”
I shake my head and look at him. I don’t want to be here, but he doesn’t notice at all.
“Follow me, then.” His smile is real. He doesn’t even try to see me.
I stay at the back, close, but behind them all. Megan wants to walk by my side, but I won’t let her. I want to trip her up and watch her tumble to the ground and clog her bleeding knees with dust.
It’s not far to the spot where I’ve been so many times before. A few rocks jut out across the creek, their tops worn flat. They’re big enough for all of us to sit on.
“Shall I lay this on the grass?” Megan asks my dad.
“Sounds good,” he replies, putting the basket down. Megan throws the blanket wide and stretches it at my feet. I don’t help her.
Instead, I go over to the rocks nearest the water and stand at the edge. It’s like rippled glass. I bend down and touch the stones underneath it. When I break its surface, it doesn’t stop. It just changes direction and works around my fingers.
I love the sound of it. The gentle rushing calms me.
“It’s a beautiful spot.” Kathleen has come up behind me and she puts her arm around my shoulder. She leans her head into me. I stay completely still. I can’t pull away, but having her so close is almost unbearable.
I look at the water and concentrate on its movement. On and on. I try to count to ten, but my mind freezes.
Kathleen kisses the top of my head and as she stands up I can breathe again.
Megan says something to her, but it’s as though they’re behind a wall, their voices muffling through bricks, far enough away that they can’t hurt me.
“Do you want to swim?” My dad is standing next to me. I get up and shake my head. “Was it OK to come here?” he asks quietly. He knows our memories. He must see Mom too.
I shrug, because my answer isn’t the one he wants to hear. He faces me, but I stay staring at the creek.
“She’d be so happy that you have another mom who loves you, just as much as she did.”
Each and every one of his words picks hard at my chest. I want to scream.
I watch the water. I count to ten.
I bury the hurt.
“Can we eat, Dad?” Megan calls. He turns from me.
“That’s a good idea,” he says as he walks away, his footsteps soft on the rocks.
•••
I’m scared to see Blister again. What if I kissed him wrong and he doesn’t want to do it again?
What if he waited all day for me yesterday and I didn’t come and it was long enough for him to think and decide that it shouldn’t have happened and now we’ve spoiled everything?
My heart thuds in time with the pedals.
What if he’s gone and he doesn’t ever want to come back?
It’s quiet at our trailers. I wait, standing with my bike, hoping for any sound. But there’s no sign of Blister.
The air is the hot before a storm.
Quietly, I climb over the gate and walk down the path. The kitchen is empty and he’s not in the art room.
I open the door to the school trailer and he’s here. He’s cutting a shape from a piece of paper and has all the bits of the body dotted around him on the floor.
“It’s amazing how we all work, isn’t it?” he says, as though I’ve been here all along. He tilts the paper brain he’s holding to show me. I don’t really like the way he’s cutting up a big, old book, but I won’t tell him that. He’s bursting with excitement and seems so young again, just like when I first met him. “How all these bits are inside us and we need them all to work properly, for us to live. How the tiniest little thing can make it all go wrong.”
“It’s clever how it all fits,” I say, sitting down among the bits of paper. There’s so much of it surrounding us—lungs and a liver and veins and a heart.
“See this?” Blister points with the tips of his scissors to the middle of the paper brain. “Just this little bit is the Broca’s area. It helps us understand language, and without it we can’t speak.”
“If it gets damaged, can it ever be fixed?”
Blister curves the scissors around the edges. “I don’t think so. Maybe I’ll discover that too.”
“At the same time as your cure for cystic fibrosis?”
“And diabetes.”
“Dr. Blister.”
“I’ll have to be Dr. Jacob. Or Dr. Wick.”
“Dr. Wick sounds good. Like you’re a bit scary and old-fashioned and might use candles to burn bad bits out of people’s skin.”
“And use those long, burning scissor things,” Blister says, adding the brain to the other cut-outs on the floor.
“And leeches.”
“That suck your blood.” Blister leans in really close to me. He grabs my arm and sucks so hard on it that he leaves a big, red mark.
Then he’s kissing me. He’s kissing me again.
This time I can breathe, this time I can feel it all. Blister’s lips are on mine.
And it’s the best feeling in the whole wide world.
We don’t stop kissing, and inside me my paper heart beats so hard, the sound of it filling me and filling Blister and our trailer and the whole of our place.
When we stop, Blister looks at me.
“You don’t mind?” he asks.
I shake my head and smile and he smiles back and kisses me for the longest time, until he stops again. He looks so earnest that I almost want to laugh.
“I’m going to stop Kathleen being nasty to you, June. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I will. I promise you.”
He’s brought her in here and I want her gone. I lean forward and kiss him again.
But Kathleen is standing here now, hand in hand with Megan.
So I kiss Blister and kiss him again an
d again, until I make them fade away and disappear.
•••
The envelope is stuck to my locker. It’s got my name on it. It’s definitely for me. I take it down, put it in my bag and go to class.
I don’t really want to think about it. I don’t know what’s in it. But my name is in nice writing and it’s clean.
I stay sitting in my place, tucked at the back of the classroom, and concentrate on Mr. Lovell’s description of tectonic plates. People are laughing and shouting out, but I stay quiet. It’s safer like this. I always keep an invisible wall around me now, so that they can’t hurt me. They still try, but it’s hard for them to get in.
At lunch, it’s raining, so I sit with Jennifer and Helen inside. We’re at the edge of the lunchroom, the noise spreading out around us.
“I got this,” I say, putting the envelope on the table.
“Who’s it from?” Helen asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Haven’t you opened it?”
“I have now,” I say, ripping the back off it, pretending that I’m calm, that I don’t care what’s inside.
It’s an invitation. To Cassandra’s sixteenth birthday party. I check the name at the top. June. In clear handwriting.
“Whoa,” is the only thing Helen says.
“Lucky you,” Jennifer says quietly. “She’s nice.”
“Didn’t you get one?” I ask. Jennifer shakes her head. “You might.”
“I doubt it.”
“I won’t go,” I say.
“You should. It’ll be good,” Jennifer says.
I raise my eyebrows at her. “They’ll all be there,” I remind her.
“Maybe they’ve finally grown up?”
“And had complete character transformations?” Helen says.
“Maybe,” Jennifer says. “People change.”
I turn the invitation over in my hands. The back is completely blank. But the front is beautiful, edged in gold, with flower prints bordering it. There’s Cassandra’s name, written in swirly writing. And my name at the top.
“I’m pleased for you, June.” Jennifer squeezes my arm.
“Next time, you’ll come too,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “It’s OK.” But it’s not, so I tuck the invitation back into its envelope and put it in my bag. I won’t take it out again until I get home.
•••
Paper Butterflies Page 10
