Paper Butterflies

by Lisa Heathfield

  He wakes up slowly. He must be confused. I’ve never been in his bed before.

  “Hey,” he says sleepily. He turns and puts his arm over my stomach.

  “Hey, you,” I reply. I’m surrounded by the smell of him, like a blanket.

  He starts to kiss me, stronger than he’s done before. His hands are over the top of my T-shirt. I kiss him back. This way, everything is OK. We can stay like this and he’ll never know.

  “I’ve never kissed you so early in the morning,” he says. In the darkness, I know he smiles. I feel it in every part of me. This is where I want to be, forever.

  Blister kisses my cheek. He touches my hair. And he pulls back, as I knew he would.

  He reaches over me. There’s the sound of his hand on the chair by his bed, a string being pulled and a soft click.

  It’s so bright I instinctively duck my eyes. When I open them and blink in the light, Blister has already put on his glasses and he’s staring at me.

  “What have you done to your hair?” he asks. He hates it.

  I want to fade into the darkness and never come back.

  He touches my head. His fingers are soft on my scalp.

  “I didn’t do it,” I say quietly. Realization crosses Blister’s face.

  “Did she do this to you?” He starts to breathe quickly and there’s an anger in his eyes I’ve never seen before.

  I feel the tears come and I’m too tired to fight them. I let them own me. I curl myself into the smallest I can go and they shake me hard. My tears wet Blister’s sheet, but I don’t stop them.

  He holds me tight as I weep. Deep, deep tears that I’ve hidden for so long.

  Blister kisses my ruined hair.

  And he doesn’t say a word. He just keeps his arms strong around me and lets me cry.

  My throat hurts, my chest hurts, my heart hurts.

  I want to scream, but I have nothing left.

  When I’m still, when I’m quiet, Blister turns me to look at him.

  “Are you telling me everything, June?”

  I don’t blink; I don’t breathe. There are too many years of things left unsaid, and if I begin to tell him now, I’m terrified that my mind will unravel and it’ll never stop.

  “I need to tell my parents that Kathleen did this to you,” he says.

  “No.” I shake my head.

  “They can help you.”

  “No.”

  “Please, June.”

  “I can deal with it,” I tell him.

  “Are you worried they won’t believe you?” he asks. “Because they will.” Will they? Will anyone?

  “Soon I won’t have to be there anymore,” I say.

  “My parents won’t judge you. They’ll help you.”

  “No.” I pull myself up so that I’m sitting on his pillow, my back against the wall. “Promise me you won’t, Blister.”

  I know he’s hurting too and I know what I’m asking him. But soon I’ll be free. It’s easier this way.

  I hold his face in my hands.

  “Please, promise me.”

  He sighs, heavily. But then he says what I need.

  “I promise.”

  •••

  I feel naked, sitting at the Wicks’ kitchen table. Even though Si seems to have forgotten my short hair already, I keep catching Blister looking at me.

  “It’s kind of cheating,” Si says. It’s only us and Blister sitting here. Everyone else is scattered around the house. Through the window, I can see Mr. Wick in the backyard with Tom, fixing a new swing onto a tree.

  I count the triangle toast lined up in the metal rack on the table. Eight pieces left. They’re like shark fins dotted down a backbone.

  “But I never call it origami.” Blister rips off a corner of toast with his teeth.

  “You still shouldn’t use glue,” Si says.

  What if he was Megan’s dad, too? I want to ask Blister. I want him to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong. Instead, I try to force my thoughts away.

  Through the glass, Mr. Wick balances Tom on the small plank of wood. I watch as he yanks at the rope to test it and Tom nods and looks up at the branches.

  “Do you want me to teach you how to do it, or not?” Blister asks.

  Si picks up his glass of milk and slowly drinks it. The line of white moves lower down the glass.

  “I want you to,” he finally says.

  “Then quit complaining,” Blister says. “Or whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “Can we do a dragon?” Si asks.

  “Try doing that without glue,” Blister says, shoving back his chair as he stands up. He carries his plate in one hand to the dishwasher, his last bit of toast in the other. “You going to come, June?”

  He’s looking at me differently. I know he is. It must be like looking at an ugly stranger.

  “I’m going out to see Tom,” I say. Blister glances out the window.

  “OK.” He seems awkward, as though he doesn’t quite know how to be with me.

  I’m still here, Blister. It’s still me.

  The back door is open. Outside, it feels unsettled. The warm sits on my skin, but doesn’t quite go in.

  Tom is alone on the swing, staring at the sky. He hears me walking across the grass, and when he sees me he can’t hide that he’s shocked.

  “You’ve cut your hair.”

  “Yes.” I almost touch it, but I don’t. If I can’t feel it, I can pretend it doesn’t look so bad. Maybe it’s longer than the mirror told me.

  “I prefer it long,” Tom says.

  “So do I.”

  “Will you grow it again?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will,” I say.

  He smiles at me, but he looks sad. There’s a silence surrounding him on the swing, like his thoughts are circling and they’re not happy.

  “Shall I push you?” I ask. Tom screws up his nose a bit. “You’re never too old to be pushed on a swing.”

  I walk around behind him and carefully pull the wooden seat high. Tom would normally laugh, but he’s silent.

  “Hold tight,” I say, and I let him go. He swings down and up the other side, his toes tipping up to the sky.

  I push it again and Tom swings higher. And again. It releases something in me, as I swing my arms and push the seat as high as it can go. The branch above us creaks slightly, but I don’t stop. It’s taking a bit of my anger with it and I’m beginning to feel free.

  “It’s too high, June,” Tom says.

  I grab the ropes and slow the swing down. Tom’s feet scuff the ground.

  “Shall I spin you?” I ask, but Tom doesn’t answer. I walk around to the front of him. His face is still, but big tears are falling down his cheeks.

  “Tom.” I kneel down in front of him and put my hands over his. “What is it?”

  He just looks at me, wide-eyed, crying silently. I want to make it all better—I want to take away his sadness, but I don’t know what to do.

  “Do you think the swing will take my weight too?” I ask. The branch above us looks strong. Tom nods and I help him up, so that I can sit down and he can sit on my lap. He’s too big for it, really, but he’s so light. I hold my arms across him and hug him to me.

  The ropes stretch, but I don’t think the branch will break.

  I push my feet on the ground, so that we’re moving, just a bit.

  “Do you still have the ring I gave you?” Tom asks quietly.

  “Of course. It’s one of my most special things. So it’s in my most special things box.” Tucked away, where no one else can see.

  “What else is in there?”

  “Just best things. A paper angel Blister made me. And a paper tulip and a dried arrowhead flower. I keep my compass necklace in there, when I’m not wearing it. And a scarf of my mom’s. When I really miss her, I take it out and smell it. If I close my eyes, I can imagine she’s in the same room as me.”

  “Do you miss her a lot?”
>
  “Sometimes,” I say.

  And suddenly Tom starts to cry again. He’s louder now. Real unhappiness is cracking up from his throat. It breaks my heart to hear him.

  “It’s OK, Tomski,” I say, and I hold him tight. I let him cry. I don’t tell him to stop. I want the hurt to go out of him.

  We both wipe the tears from his cheeks.

  “I’m scared,” he whispers.

  “Why?”

  Tom looks up at me. “Because I’m going to die.”

  His words hit into me, one by one.

  “We’re all going to die.” I squeeze him so tight. There’s nothing else I can do. No magic hope. He’s going to die before all of us and the thought crushes my heart.

  “But I don’t want to die the way I know I will,” he says. “I’ll be really hurting and they’ll have to help me breathe.”

  “Maybe it won’t be like that? Maybe one day you’ll close your eyes and wake up on the other side.”

  “With your mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like that,” he says, resting his head against my arm. “And one day you’ll be there too?”

  “Yes,” I say. “And everyone who loves you. We’ll all come and join you.”

  “I’ll make it nice for you all.” Tom’s voice is like a wisp of dust, drifting up to me.

  “You’re not going anywhere for a long time, Tom,” I say.

  I wrap my arms tight around him and push my feet onto the ground, so we can swing together to the clouds.

  •••

  “Left or right?” Blister holds his hands out to me. I tap the right hand and he uncurls it. The stone sits snug in the palm of his hand.

  “Left it is, then.” He’s trying to pretend that nothing has changed, that my hair is all right and I’m still me.

  I feel lost.

  “Ready?” Blister asks. I nod and we bike off together.

  The air feels blurry around us and it’s hard work going against the wind. It’s warm, though. There’s that feeling that the sky is trapping us in, that it’s waiting to storm on us but it won’t tell us when.

  It takes longer than usual to get to the first crossroads. Blister bends down and picks up a white stone and passes it to me. I go to take it from him, but he pulls his hand away. And he kisses me. It’s a kiss filled with something I can’t name. The road has gone, the fields have gone, our bikes have gone. Just us.

  My hair is short, but Blister still wants to kiss me.

  He pulls away and gives me the biggest smile.

  “You’re still beautiful,” he says.

  And I want to shout to the horizon. Because Blister still loves me. Kathleen tried to break me, she tried so hard, but she didn’t manage it. She couldn’t. And she never will.

  Blister passes me the stone. I hide it in one of my palms.

  “Left or right?” I ask.

  “Straight ahead.”

  “That’s a field,” I show him.

  “We’d better go in it, then.”

  “It’s against the rules.”

  Blister takes the stone from my hand. It leaves a chalky mark on my skin. He throws it far into the distance.

  “We make the rules,” he says.

  I follow him as he wheels his bike through the knee-high grass. I try not to trample on the flowers, but it’s difficult. When we lay our bikes down, we do it as softly as we can.

  We push the stalks aside, so we can sit down together. If anyone drives by, they’ll be able to see the tops of our heads peeking over the grass.

  “I wonder how many miles we can see,” Blister says.

  “Ten?”

  “More, I think.”

  “I’d like to touch the edge,” I say.

  “What do you think it feels like?”

  “I think it’s jelly-like.”

  “I think your hand would sort of disappear,” Blister says.

  “Into another world?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d like another world.”

  “What if I’m not in it, though?”

  “Then I’ll stay in this world,” I tell him. And I mean it. I’d live all the bad bits, just to have the good bits with him.

  Blister leans over and kisses me again. A fire begins to burn just underneath my skin when he touches me. His hand on the back of my neck makes the field around us dissolve into nothing but Blister.

  As he kisses me, his fingers touch my head. Under his palms, my ripped hair starts to heal. Somewhere, bit by bit, Blister begins to put me together again.

  The noise makes us stop. It’s a low rumbling in the distance, in the air and somehow in the ground too. We see it as soon as we look. Far away, a muddy corkscrew tumbles from the sky and drills into the ground.

  “A tornado,” Blister says. It moves quickly, kicking up the roads and fields underneath it, mesmerizing us. It’s like a strange tower, beating its way across the land. There’s something about it that’s beautiful. I want to go to it and have it twist me up in its chaos, just to see.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Blister says. I was so caught up in the dusty tower that I didn’t realize how terrified he is.

  “It’s not coming toward us,” I say, but he looks panicked.

  “It’ll change direction. They always do,” he says.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “But if it makes you feel safer, we can go back a bit.” I stand up calmly, take his hand and we start to walk away.

  The tornado is getting louder. I don’t look back, but I’ve got a feeling that it’s turning. That it’s suddenly got us in its sights.

  “Come on,” I say. We start walking more quickly, with Blister glancing behind us.

  “It’s getting closer,” he says.

  “We’re fine.”

  I look back. Blister is right. The tornado is thundering toward us, tunneling into the ground.

  Blister pulls my arm and we start to run. The noise behind us is crashing closer, blocking out the thud of my heart. We’re heading for a cluster of trees.

  “Will they protect us?” Blister shouts.

  “I don’t know,” I yell back.

  The wind is hard against my back as we trample through the long stems of bitterweeds. We get to the first tree, both of us searching for breath. I know Blister wants to go further, but I need to turn and see it.

  The tornado is roaring across the land. I’ve never seen one this close. It reaches down from sky to earth, its power and sound like nothing I’ve ever imagined. It smashes through the field, scooping up chunks of grass.

  And it’s trying to find us, to hunt us out.

  Blister’s face is streaked with fear. I want to tell him that it’ll be OK, but I don’t know if it will. I don’t know whether it’s safer to stay here, with some protection from the trees, or to try to sprint away. Could we outrun it?

  I see the wheel first. The wheel of Blister’s bike. Then mine. Both of our bicycles plucked from the ground and taken into the spinning cloud.

  “No,” I whisper. Without thinking, I start to run toward it. Blister pulls me back just as our shattered bikes are spat out by the tornado and fly tumbling to the ground. “No.”

  The tornado seems satisfied. It juts in a different direction again, running away from us.

  “It might come back,” Blister whispers, as though it can hear us. He has both his arms tight around me and we watch the tornado stalk off toward the horizon.

  Quiet creeps in to take its place.

  “Our bikes,” I say.

  “They’re just bikes, June. We’re safe,” he says. We stand still together. Blister is shaking. “We could have died.”

  I move away from him and start to walk to where my bike fell. I don’t want to see it.

  But I find its wheel ripped from its body. A few feet away lies its twisted frame.

  Blister is across from me, holding up his buckled bike. He examines it, as though it’s something rare and precious. He looks out toward where the tornado was. The a
ir is so still that it’s hard to believe it was here.

  I sit down next to my bike and hold the tattered wheel up to it. I know it’s useless. I know it’s gone.

  Blister kneels down next to me.

  “It could’ve been us,” he says.

  Part of me wishes it had been. That I’d stood in front of it, faced it head on and waited with open arms. It would have ripped my roots as it picked me up and thrashed my head in its swirling brown smoke. It would’ve taken me and made me free.

  “Maybe Dad could fix it?” Blister holds up the skeleton of my bicycle. I just shake my head, because he already knows.

  And he knows that, without my bike, I’m trapped. His house, our trailers, are too far for me to walk to. My bike meant me and Blister. It was Blister and me.

  “We’ll figure something out,” he says, as though he can read my mind.

  But if he really could, he’d see so much more. He’d see an anger building from a speck on the horizon, gathering everything bad in my life. Ripping it all up and binding it in an ear-splitting thundercloud. If Blister could see any of it, I don’t think he’d love me anymore. I don’t think he’d even want to know me.

  •••

  We leave our broken bikes nestled in the grass. Blister says his dad will come with the trailer and pick them up. I don’t tell him that I’d prefer to leave them here, lying twisted together on the earth.

  It’s calm now. The road we walk on is the same as when we left it. Through the fields, there’s a zigzag of devastation where the storm walked, but nothing else is touched.

  We hold hands tight.

  “I thought it was going to get us.” Blister sounds excited now. “I’ve never been so close. Tom will be so jealous. He wants to be a storm chaser when he grows up.”

  Little Tom, in the eye of the storm.

  This is how the end could be. Together, we could stand in the twisting tunnel and it could take us away.

  “I wonder where it is now,” Blister says. “Does it just burn out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It must. It’ll lose its strength and then turn to nothing.”

  The sky is clear now. It’s cooler too, as though a lid has been lifted and the trapped air has found its way out.

  “Blister?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think Megan is Dad’s real daughter.” I just blurt it out.

  He looks at me strangely. “What do you mean?”