Daydreams of Angels

STING LIKE A BEE

1.

Ferdinand was a little boy with black hair who lived on St. Philippe Street in Little Burgundy, a neighbourhood in Montreal. His family lived in a tiny white bungalow that had been in the family for two generations. It had a cast iron fence out front that had been painted light blue. There was a pot of flowers on each step on the front stoop, one of which had a little Quebec flag stuck inside it. There was a little errant rose bush growing next to a gas pipe in the ground, and its lone flower blew in the wind like a child with a sweater stuck over its head. Theirs was the only bungalow on the block. There was a brick building to the left of it, painted bright red, and one to the right that was painted blue. His family was proud because they owned their own property and didn’t have to rent like nearly every other family in the neighbourhood.

Ferdinand was the youngest child of this noble family. He grew his hair long over his ears and his eyes. He was so skinny that his shoes always looked five sizes too big. When he took his shirt off at the swimming pool, everyone was amazed that anybody could be so skinny. It was strange that he in particular was so skinny, because his four older brothers were such strapping teenagers. When they walked down the street, people got out of their way. They were always in fights and some sort of trouble.

But not Ferdinand. He always wanted to be around his mother. He wanted to ride in the baby part of the grocery cart, even though he was nine years old. He would make himself all weepy at night, telling his mother how he was never going to move out when he grew up.

Ferdinand was a sensitive little boy. He didn’t want to eat his shelled peanuts because he said that they were so cute and that they looked like little babies wrapped up in blankets and he didn’t want to disturb them. He pushed a water balloon around in an umbrella stroller for an entire afternoon. He even told the balloon to settle down or it wouldn’t get to watch TV when they got home.

Ferdinand wanted to be left alone to daydream. He lay in his sleeping bag, all zipped up, for an hour, trying to imagine exactly what it would feel like to be swallowed by a whale. He sat in the big cardboard box that the television came in, with his head protruding from a hole. He wanted to take the opportunity to spend one single afternoon being a turtle.

Ferdinand’s most favourite thing, however, was to lie in the sun. He lay like that in the public park, near the statue of a mad French-Canadian general. There were always people with suitcases looking for empty cans and bottles that they could return to the store. They circled around Ferdinand, who paid them no mind. He liked feeling like the sun was melting him, that he was turning into liquid and spreading all over the ground.

His father worried about what on earth would become of Ferdinand, because he had never seen such a lazy child. Ferdinand fell asleep watching television in the evening while squashed on the couch between his brothers, with a chocolate sundae on his lap. He wanted Velcro shoes because he didn’t like tying his shoelaces.

Ferdinand’s father also noticed that Ferdinand showed no disposition toward being an athlete. Everyone in the family boxed. He himself had been an amateur in his day. His other sons all boxed and won prizes and trophies in all sorts of tournaments. Ferdinand’s father ironed the patches that his boys won onto their sweaters. One of the boys was eventually going to be a champion boxer, he was sure. The father fantasized about the day that he would be photographed for the newspaper with his arm around one of his sons.

Ferdinand’s father adored having a big family of boys and he liked how masculine his older sons were. They always had pretty girlfriends sitting on the porch with them. He could never remember which girl belonged to which boy. He liked how rambunctious they were, even though they got out of control sometimes.

He had no idea what to make of Ferdinand. Once he came home from work and Ferdinand was on the porch, sitting on a chair with his legs spread and playing an imaginary cello. His eyes were closed and he was violently twisting his head around, as if in a fit of rapture.

Another time, when he went to take a leak in the bathroom, Ferdinand was in the bathtub. He had a big pompadour of suds stacked on top of his head. “Please, call me Prince Antoine,” Ferdinand said in a Parisian accent while batting his eyelashes.

Ferdinand’s father felt full of dread. Maybe there was nothing wrong. Maybe he was just imagining things, but he didn’t remember imagining things with any of his older boys. He had had no sneaking suspicion about anything with the others.

He had named Ferdinand after his grandfather who was built like a bull and was never affected by the cold. But he sometimes thought they had brought the wrong kid home from the hospital. His real youngest kid was out there winning every boxing match he entered, while Ferdinand liked to take the boxing trophies down from the shelves and play with them like they were Barbie dolls. Still, the father enrolled Ferdinand in a boxing program. He decided to let him do whatever the hell he liked as long as he agreed to join the gym when he was thirteen years old. It was a family tradition.

Ferdinand would never in a million years have signed up for it on his own. He didn’t complain though. He was aware that he was not acting the way that his father wanted, and since he wasn’t willing to give his poetic way of life up, the least he could do was to go to box once a week. It couldn’t be that bad.

Ferdinand walked down the street to the gym, carrying his duffel bag with a drawing of a bull on its side. He limped as he walked, supporting the weight of the bag on his right leg. His silver mesh shorts seemed to be almost as big as pants.

A twenty-year-old drug addict wearing an acrylic vest and jean shorts and moon boots called out to Ferdinand for change. Little Burgundy had always been a lower-class neighbourhood. The houses were all cheaply built and there were no fancy stores or fancy restaurants. There was a religious store that sold statues of Jesus and saints. People liked to buy them and load up their front yards with them. All the saints crowded into the little yards like commuters on a bus on their way to work.

There are certain parts of the world where certain things come from. Oranges grow in Florida; olives grow in Italy. It was the same thing with people. Lots of writers grew in New York City. And, for reasons that weren’t always entirely obvious, boxers grew in Quebec.

The gym was in a red-brick building with an enormous door. The entrance was covered with framed photographs of boxers no one had ever heard of. The smell of sweat hit Ferdinand as soon as he opened the door. The squeak of sneakers was oddly almost deafening. They sounded like someone writing curse words with a magic marker. The sounds all had echoes. This was what it felt like to be a fish when someone was tapping the sides of the aquarium, Ferdinand thought.

Ferdinand walked down the hall and into the huge gym. It was filled with lots of older boys who were constantly moving. They danced around on their toes, jumping back and forth, their feet looking like flies hitting a windowpane as they tried to figure a way out.

After they warmed up, the boys peeled off their oversized sweatshirts. Underneath they had on only tight undershirts or no shirts at all. A lot of the boys started training when they were only eleven years old. By the time they were nineteen, they didn’t have an ounce of fat on their bodies.

Jules Pieton had a lilac tattooed on the back of his neck. Marcel Girard had a tattoo of a group of violets going down his biceps. Paul Miron had a tattoo of a black-eyed Susan between his shoulder blades and you could see it when he took off his sweatshirt for a fight. Claude Archambault had a tattoo of a rose on the back of his skull, right where a bald spot was going to appear in twenty years. Martin LeBlanc had a tattoo of an iris on his right pectoral muscle. He had been raised by his English grandmother, who was named Iris. Phillipe LaMonde had an entire lower tricep covered with red poppies.

Ferdinand found that he didn’t want to fight at all. He only wanted to look at the pretty tattoos on the other boys. The lilacs and the tiger lilies and the roses … all the roses. He wished he could go up and smell them.

2.

The old man’s dog was sixteen-and-a-half years old and had arthritis and was deaf. They walked slowly down the street together, taking twenty minutes to get around the block. The old man had spent his whole life in this neighbourhood. When he was younger and met girls in the big dance halls downtown, he wouldn’t tell them that he lived in Little Burgundy. It had always been working class and poor. And it was literally downhill and on the other side of the tracks. A girl would look for a boy from Westmount or Outremont if she had any sense, not a boy from this part of town.

Still, you would see some very pretty women who lived around here. They were mostly the young single moms who wore miniskirts and high heels and rabbit-skin fur coats. They would carry home bags of groceries from the food bank, smiling whenever drivers honked at them. They would save a little bit of money from their welfare cheques to buy a tube of lipstick. They were still dreaming the same dream that the little kids were dreaming, which was that they were going to grow up and get out of this neighbourhood. They still hadn’t accepted that they were moms now and that their future was already here. They paid the old man no mind even though he stopped to stare at them. He had cataracts in his eyes as if he were looking up at the full moon.

In truth, when he stopped to look at the women, he really was pausing just to take a break from the long walk. When he and the dog would get to the foot of the stairs, they would stand there trying to muster up the courage to climb them.

The dog was a golden retriever and everything in the apartment was covered in its long white hairs. The curtains and the chesterfields, his clothes and hats, all the floors, even the dishes were plastered with white dog hair too. The old man had stopped waging war against the dog hair though, because you had to choose your battles in life. Then, one sad morning, his dog passed away in its sleep.

The old man was lonelier than he had ever been that week. He made several trips to the supermarket, buying only one thing at a time so that he would have an excuse to come back again. He dressed like many of the old people in this neighbourhood. He had on an old suit jacket that had survived from the 1950s. It looked as though he had made the pinstripes on his jacket with a ruler and a piece of soap. He also sported a checkered tweed hat, matched with a pair of bright green jogging pants that he had got from the Salvation Army.

“Do you think I’m sweet enough to buy some of these sweets?” he said to the cashier, trying to be funny.

She smiled weakly. She looked bored out of her mind and he knew that she was looking forward to him walking away.

On the way back to the apartment he tried to talk to the neighbourhood children. They were all over the place. They were dressed in faded Cookie Monster T-shirts or heavy metal T-shirts that had shrunk in the laundry. They had little broken arms and scabs on their knees. Their chronic lack of supervision led to them doing things like falling off roofs on a regular basis.

They would grow up to be criminals: the unacknowledged drug dealers and burglars of the world.

A future car thief hurried by with a tiny Matchbox Porsche in his hand. The old man tried to ask him about his car, but the child continued on. He saw a skinny boy with long hair who was carrying a duffel bag that looked bigger than him. For a second he thought that the boy was wearing sunglasses, but then realized that he had two black eyes. He stopped to wave at the boy, who responded with a sad smile and a tiny little wave but kept going. It was a shame, he thought, that children were not allowed to talk to strangers anymore. He would like to pass on his wisdom about old TV shows that had gone off the air, and the price of hot dogs before the war. He could tell them about scandals that had ruined the careers of politicians in the 1950s.

A bus zoomed by, coming so close to the sidewalk that it seemed to grab hold of the old man’s jacket. One day he would get dizzy and he would teeter over and fall into the street and be run over by a bus, he thought. He imagined everyone gathering around to look at him in the middle of the street, crushed and dignified.

He knew not to talk to any of the men, because anything could set them off. You would see groups of them yelling at each other and flashing knives. They were at an age when they enjoyed endangering their lives, but the old man was careful with his life. As though it were an egg balanced in a spoon in a children’s race.

In the coming days, he found that he couldn’t deal with the loss of the dog. It made him feel terrible to wake up in the middle of the night and go for a pee and not trip over his buddy. It made the hallway seem to go on for miles and miles. Even though the apartment was tiny, it was amazing how much emptiness fit into it.

Finally he thought that getting another dog would be the only thing that would cure him of the loneliness. He called his daughter, asking her to get him a new dog. He said that he was miserable without one. She didn’t seem very concerned, probably because she wasn’t listening.

The old man had been too strict with his children when they were younger. Now they resented him. He knew this, but he could not go back into the past and change the way he had been. He was even alone on Christmas Day. Each year, he sat in front of the one channel that he got, waiting for the Charlie Brown special to come on. “It’s starting!” he would call out and then he would realize that no one was there.

In this world, there was no one, other than dogs, who could love him now. Putting aside his preconceptions, he talked to all the aggressive-looking young men about getting a new dog. Those guys had a way of making just about anything happen. One of the old man’s neighbours, a twenty-year-old guy who wore a shiny silver track suit, said he had a cousin who wanted to unload some Rottweiler puppies.

“They usually go for eight hundred dollars. But it so happens that he’s worried that the girl he broke up with is going to tell the police he had a puppy mill. So I can get you a dog for two hundred.”

At first the old man was completely taken aback by the price and couldn’t speak. That’s the way he got when he was faced with almost any amount these days. He still couldn’t get over the fact that things weren’t five cents and a dime anymore. Still, he surprised himself when he went into his old Chinese tea box, where he hid all his money, and took out two hundred dollars. The money in the tea box was for a rainy day, and there had been a storm cloud following him around for a month. The tea tin rattled like a Gypsy’s tambourine, as he was off for a new adventure.

He named the dog Ferdinand after a man who had sat next to him in a cubicle at work. They had worked together for twenty-four years. It was the only job that he’d ever had and he had felt so lucky to get it too. His father had been a construction worker, so for him there was something so elite and classy about working in an office. He and Ferdinand had been friends, eating lunch and talking about politics in the park together. It seemed strange to remember that he had had a friend once.

Ferdinand the dog grew bigger and bigger each day. But he also grew gentler. Mothers would move their babies away from him even though the old man would swear over and over again that the dog wasn’t violent. If Ferdinand pulled, he would be able to knock the old man over and drag him down the street. But he never pulled. A grey striped cat, looking like a skinny British aristocrat in a topcoat, gave Ferdinand his sourest, most conceited look. But Ferdinand didn’t growl or make any aggressive motion. He followed the cat’s drama as though it were a late-night foreign film on television, having nothing to do with him really.

That year the old man found himself getting older and more tired than ever before. He couldn’t hear anything at all.

He found it too difficult to go to the corner store to get groceries. He would settle on eating out of an old peanut butter jar for dinner. He didn’t change his clothes. The old man went to get his mail wearing a sweater vest and his underwear. He came down to make conversation with the mailman but he wasn’t sure he was making any sense.

“Do you know that my father built the funeral home around the corner? No kidding. Of course he did. He painted it too. It wasn’t there since the beginning of time, you know? Don’t you believe me? Yes or no, man? Yes or no?”

He couldn’t walk the dog much anymore. Sometimes he wasn’t able to take the dog out on time and it would pee on the floor. The neighbours called the health inspector because of the smell. The old man answered the door in a dirty sweater and his jogging pants and with his white hair looking greasy. The inspector was surprised to see a giant dog that looked the picture of health, standing behind the man. He didn’t seem to be the right sort of dog for a man his age at all. He had expected a blind Shih Tzu or a toy poodle with Alzheimer’s.

To appease the health inspector, the old man looked for a dog walker. The dog was so gentle that he was able to pay the four-year-old boy who lived next door a dollar to walk it around the block. Four-year-olds were always good if you were looking to hire someone under the table. The little boy strolled in nothing but his slippers and jean shorts next to the dog, making it look like a giant from some place like the bowels of hell. He ran into his cousin — a troublemaker — on the corner. The older boy had a handkerchief tied on his head and was wearing a terry cloth baby-blue track suit. He was always on the lookout for dogs for fights that he organized in secret spots for interested gamblers. He had a gold eye tooth that you could see as he smiled at Ferdinand.

“Not this dog,” the little boy said. “He’s a good dog.”

The old man would simply open the door and let the dog spend the day in the small back courtyard of the building. There were flies and bees everywhere from the garbage in the alley. Ferdinand liked to lie and watch the little patterns that they made, even though they were too complicated for him to understand. The flies were like mathematicians at Harvard standing on ladders and drawing wild equations on enormous chalkboards.

One day Ferdinand was sitting in the yard, but he was restless now because he was hungry. The old man had no sense of time passing by anymore and Ferdinand hadn’t had anything to eat in almost two days. When a tenant from the third floor dropped a garbage bag out the window into the lawn, the dog started to root through it immediately, smelling a hot dog somewhere in the great darkness of the sack.

When the bee stung Ferdinand, he was suddenly filled with a terrible pain that flooded through his skull. He tore around the yard, trying to make the pain go away, terrified that it would happen again. Who could be so angry with him? He had always minded his own business and now someone was trying to kill him. He didn’t know where the invisible villain had come from, so he didn’t know in which direction he should flee. He was like the old man when the bank teller asked him too many questions instead of just cashing his cheque. He smashed his head against the fence.

Coming down the alleyway, the little boy’s cousin and his friends could hear Ferdinand barking and growling before they even saw him. The alley was filled with garbage and old furniture that people had thrown out. The young men spotted a pile of vinyl kitchen chairs with giant green hothouse flowers exploding on them. They pulled the chairs over to the fence so that they could get a look at this dog.

The men stood perched on the chairs, wild and hyperactive and excited, their eyes opening wider when they saw Ferdinand. All they saw was a dog shaking his face wildly like a fist. Its muscles heaved like lava coming down a mountain. They could see all its enormous teeth and black gums and they could smell its angry breath. The men looked at one another happily, thinking that fortunes were about to change on their block. The little boy’s cousin opened the door of the fence slowly, whispering for the dog to chill out and that no one was going to hurt him.

3.

All the women in Isabelle Ferdinand’s family were loud. Her father had left when she and her sister were both still in diapers. Her aunts were always over, because there were no men to toss them out or put them in their place. They would fight with the kitchen windows open, and everyone in the neighbourhood could hear their business. They didn’t care. They put the TV out on the sidewalk and ate their dinner with their plates on their laps, screaming at the game show.

Even their style was loud. Her mother wore high-heeled slippers and tight jeans that had patterns of roses on them. Her sister would walk to the store to buy a carton of milk wearing a striped bikini. Her sister was attracted to all the boys, especially the ones that made a lot of noise. When a car of boys slowed down next to her on the sidewalk, she leaned in the window and wiggled her butt back and forth as she talked to them, like a bumblebee getting nectar out of a flower. She and her mom liked talking to everyone, popping into different doors, pollinating the neighbourhood with fantastic gossip.

Isabelle, on the other hand, didn’t like to draw attention to herself. Even when she was in grade school, the teachers would write on her report cards that she didn’t play well with other children. The kids asked her if she wanted to play Red Rover or soccer or baseball and she would say no, no, no, no. She was always by herself in the corner, flipping through picture books.

Now she was in high school and her name was at the top of the honour roll list when you entered the school. She didn’t really have any friends though. Now that they were teenagers, it was like the other girls carried around bullhorns that they held up to their mouths when they laughed. She liked to go straight home after school and go to her room and read books until the sun went down. They lay scattered about the room, open to hold their places, like drawings of seagulls by little kids.

One of her aunts drove them to a wedding on a Saturday. When she was there, relatives she barely knew kept asking her whether or not she had a boyfriend yet. That’s what they wanted to talk about all the time. They used to be interested in her marks and all the awards for academic excellence that she had won. Now the bigger news was that one of her older cousins was engaged to a millionaire who owned a spaghetti restaurant franchise. They were all worried that Isabelle would be unlucky in love, like her mom.

There were things about herself that Isabelle knew should be evolving. She was fourteen and she still had a school bag with Kermit the Frog on it. In the winter, she wore big moon boots and a Canadiens toque with her curly and frizzy hair sticking out from underneath it. She figured that she would have to make a concerted effort to change. Things just weren’t happening naturally, the way they were for everybody else.

The next Saturday, as she was walking home, her path was blocked by ambulance workers pulling a stretcher across the sidewalk to the truck. The body was covered, but she knew it must be the old man with the big-assed dog. She crossed herself as she wondered what had happened to the dog and about how life is short. When she got home, she went straight into her sister Corinna’s room.

“I’m going to a house party,” Isabelle said. “This girl in my class said that I should not be a ninny, and come. I think I need a makeover, though.”

Corinna jumped up and down on her bed, clapping her hands. She handed Isabelle a T-shirt with a print of a unicorn on it and one of her jean skirts that she had cut ludicrously short. Her sister fixed Isabelle’s hair up with dozens of little butterfly clips and she put the reddest lipstick in the world on her. Her mouth was the colour of Superman’s cape when he was standing in his ballet shoes, about to jump off the roof of a building.

Corinna said attitude was also important when it came to boys.

“You should crawl on your hands and knees across the bed. Men get crazy when you go at them like an animal.”

Most boys liked it a little rough, she assured Isabelle.

“You should try to slur when you talk too. Guys are like crazy about that speech impediment thing.”

The way that a cheetah would go after a gazelle with a broken leg, boys would go after stupid girls.

Her mother was playing cards in the kitchen with two of her sisters. They all made such a fuss when they saw Isabelle.

Isabelle’s stomach was fluttery, and she felt like she had to pee the whole way over to the party. The yellow reflective lights on the pedals of the bicycles passing by looked like the eyes of wolves catching the light. She passed a store that gave massages and had all its windows painted silver. There was a jewellery store that sold huge hoop earrings and rings that had giant gold lion heads on them. The moon looked like the Day-Glo face of a wristwatch. Everything had Saturday fever!

It was near the first of the month, when people got their welfare cheques, so they were out. She saw some men that looked familiar from the neighbourhood, but they had a wildness about them now, as if they had been infected, like pet dogs who had got rabies. They all turned to stare at her in her party outfit, as if they were wondering if she wanted in on their secret. Did she want to join them and be a vampire and live forever?

There was a little boy, carrying a paper bag with milk in it, stuck outside his house because he had forgotten his secret knock. A piece of newspaper flitted by in the breeze like Mikhail Baryshnikov in the frenzied finale of a ballet.

The party was on the third floor of an old triplex. There was a big gargoyle of a demon on top of the building, looking down. Most of the gargoyles had committed suicide, falling to the ground like the rest of the old masonry on the buildings. When they leapt, they would hit the pavement like an asteroid and you would feel the ground shake while in your bed.

She went up the steep staircase that led to the top apartment, where all the windows were lit up. It was like someone had propped a ladder up to the moon and had told her to go ahead and ascend. People had locked their bicycles to the outside of the staircase, like they were magnets stuck to a fridge. There was a familiar little piece of paper next to the doorbell, saying it didn’t work. There was a sign like that on everyone’s doorbell. There was one at her apartment and it made her feel at ease.

When she walked through the front door of the girl’s apartment, the sound system was making so much noise that Isabelle couldn’t hear herself think. Everyone was dancing while they held their plastic cups of beer over their heads. The kids had formed a tight circle around the carpet, watching a boy dance. He was rolling his fists around each other as if he was rolling up a ball of yarn. He swapped spots with another boy who put one hand on his heart and the other in the air and jumped up and down. A different boy pushed his way in and kept tucking his hands into his armpits, leaning his torso back and strutting in a circle like a rooster at a cockfight. Then he dropped to the floor and moved his hands around like he was trying to put together a puzzle at record speed.

The girls gathered in clusters, like horses worried about a storm. Their long skinny legs looked impossibly vulnerable.

She saw Luc, a boy from a grade higher, coming toward her. He had on a bolero jacket. He was legendary. He’d become quite the player since he had had his braces taken off. No girl was able to resist him, and a huge number had lost their virginity to him. He liked girls that were hard to get because he needed a challenge.

She was glad when Luc took her hand and led her down the hallway, away from the party. He opened a door and led her into a bedroom. Isabelle knew that if she let Luc go all the way, when they came out of the room, everyone would be happy and congratulate her. Everyone would want to hear about it in school the next day. She would finally have a subject of conversation that they were all interested in. They would applaud her, go nuts, and sit with her at the cafeteria table. They were like a coliseum full of people waiting for her to take off all her clothes.

He gave her a sip from a bottle of beer and it made her feel warm and glowing, like there was a spotlight on her. Like she could open her mouth and a song would come out and everyone would be entranced by her. She laughed. The laughter sounded strange. It didn’t sound like herself laughing at all. It was like she was listening to her own voice on a tape recorder.

“Come on, sweetie,” Luc said. “You’re so pretty. I can’t keep my eyes off of you. You’re like the best-looking girl in the room. And you’re so smart too. I just want to hold you. I was watching you when you were giving a science report and I thought, That’s the kind of girl that I would want to wrap my arms around. You’re the kind of girl that a guy gets serious about.”

Each compliment was like a spear right in the heart that was meant to take her down. So that she would be lying on the bed, waiting to be slain.

Luc pulled Isabelle’s shirt off over her head. As it was coming off, she felt as if she was going through a dark tunnel. There she was with a tiny white training bra with a blue bow in the middle, sitting on a bed at a party. He was able to see all the birthmarks and moles on her belly. No one but her family had ever seen those before.

She had nothing to say to him. This boy didn’t know a thing about her. She was going to make love to somebody who didn’t even know her. He might get her pregnant and then not return the baby’s calls for the rest of his life. She would end up getting the cheque like her mother and trying to make the best of it. She didn’t like the way his hands felt on her. She turned her face away when he tried to kiss her. Her body went stiff when he tried to put his hands around her hips.

“Aww come on, Isabelle,” Luc whispered. “Don’t be a frigid bitch, okay?”

All she could think about was home. Her mother was probably singing along with the radio while turning the pages of a magazine with her ridiculously long fingernails. She made her face all crazy with longing when she sang Céline Dion. The scratch of his zipper sounded like the arm of a record player suddenly being jerked off.

Isabelle opened her mouth and yelled a rather preposterous and loud, “No!”

She had learned to project her voice like that from her family. It was like her whole family and all the different generations of loud people were helping her assert what she needed to say. The only thing that they were blessed with was lip, but they didn’t know how and when to use their gift.

“Get the hell off of me, would ya!” she shouted. “You think I’m going to put out for a bum like you. Let me out of this shithole, pleeeze!”

And so Isabelle Ferdinand changed her mind. Isabelle still wanted to be a kid and to be loved the way that a kid who has a future is loved. She put her shirt back on quickly, causing butterfly barrettes to fly every which way, and stood up and left the room. She went down the hallway and pushed through the crowd of wild teenagers to get to the front door. She hurried down from the moon and got back to earth.

Sneaking down the hallway of her apartment, she passed her mother in the kitchen, humming along to the radio. She walked really quietly because she didn’t want to attract anyone’s attention. She flopped onto her own bed. The quilt was covered in flowers and smelled like her childhood. She wanted to bury herself in the ground, like a mustard seed, until she was ready to grow up wild and enormous.

The next day she was at the library in her bell-bottom corduroys and a sweater with a rose on it, reading paperback novels. And wherever she is now, she is probably still doing her own thing.