The Butterfly Clues (36 page)

I knock on Mom’s bedroom door on the way out. The TV goes mute, lamp clicks on, bed creaks slightly; her bony frame and bleached-out face appear in the doorway. “What’s wrong?” she asks, confused, disoriented. She tries to focus her eyes on me, but they seem to slide from side to side, loose, watery. I wonder if she’ll recognize her clothes, on my body, if she’ll remember, even for a second, what she was like when she wore them, if she’ll come back to me.

“I’m going to prom,” I tell her, willing her eyes to go suddenly clear, willing her to smile, huge, willing her to fuss, to run to her jewelry chest and find me the perfect necklace, willing her to pull me to her, to put her hand around the back of my head, to tell me she’s so proud of me for trying to live again.

But her eyes remain hazy and she just rocks a bit, trying to catch her balance, as she puts a hand to my face. “Okay,” she tells me, trying to smile. “Good.”

She walks slowly back to her bed, unmutes the television, clicks the lamp back off again, and slips back beneath the covers.

My butt freezes through my skirt on the porch stairs as I sit waiting for Flynt to arrive. Any minute now. Eight. I didn’t even think when I suggested it—this most hated of numbers, of times. Of course, of course it will all go wrong—he won’t come, I’ll be stood up at the prom, shivering in some ridiculous, retro outfit I never should have worn in the first place. Maybe he’ll come cruising by in some Dumpster-dived scooter to throw eggs at my head as he passes.

Eight
—I brought this on myself.

But, then I see him, rounding the corner of my block in a mint green tuxedo—I notice patched up holes in the elbows and knees as he gets closer—black-and-white-striped cummerbund; big, brown tongue-hung boots; bear-eared hat; a bright red feather stuck out over the left ear. I smooth down my dress and rub my lips together, whispering his name, softly, three times. “Flynt Flynt Flynt.”

Three times for a chance in hell, for a chance to make this right. And then I tap softly against the three cold wooden stairs of my porch; nine, nine, six.
Banana, banana, banana,
finishing (gratefully) just as he arrives.

He bows grandly. I stand; I curtsy, long black hair gathering around my face.

“Lo”—he’s biting at his lip a little as he rises, watching me closely, like he did when he sketched me, like I’m the first thing he’s ever seen before, the sun peeking through the darkest of caves, a basin of water in the desert—“you look beautiful.”

The moon cuts through the trees, his eyes twinkling a hundred different colors as he reaches his hand to me from behind his back, presenting a bouquet of homemade flowers—bits of metal and fabric and paper and leaf tied together with wire and string.

“I brought these for you,” he continues, grinning. “Happy prom. That’s what you say during prom, right?”

“Right, like the terrible, nerve-wracking holiday it basically represents,” I answer quickly, feeling the nervous words bubbling up into my mouth. “Happy prom to you. These are”—I blush furiously—“amazing.”

I turn back quickly to the house, surprised to see my dad’s face, hovering at the front window, watching us. He smiles and gives a hesitant half wave and a thumbs-up. I wave back. I smile back.

And then Flynt weaves his mint-green arm through mine, and I tuck his homemade flowers gently into my purse, and we begin our journey into the great unknown: George Washington Carver High’s junior prom.

“You’re having another Neil Armstrong moment,” I tease as we walk through the even, rat-free streets of the suburbs, windows in every identical stone house fully intact, lampposts spread across lawns and concrete in even ten-foot increments, burning blue-orange electric flames. “Coming all the way to Lakewood. That’s like, beyond the moon… .”

“It’s like going all the way to Pluto, Queen P, which, as I’m sure you’ve heard, isn’t even a planet anymore.”

“So, you’re saying Lakewood doesn’t really exist?”

“Yep. That’s what I’m saying,” Flynt says, gripping my bouquet-less hand in his. “So, if you were to divide your school into subsections of the animal kingdom, or, let’s just say into primates, who would be king of apes and why?”

I laugh. “Well, um, based on hairiness alone—”

“Yes,” Flynt interrupts, “you can do it that way.”

“Well, okay, based on hairiness alone, it would have to be Ganesh Liebowitz—I overheard this guy Kirby in health say that they had gym together and that you really can’t see an inch of skin when he undresses for class.”

“Wow. Gym class. What even happens in gym class?” Flynt muses. “I can’t remember.” He pulls a leaf from each of the three black tupelos we pass, only a block away from school now—boxy red brick, sprawl of green lawn, knot of trees lining the walkway to the front entrance visible now. “Do you have to shower after class?” he continues. “What if it’s against your religion to shower? What if you don’t want the other kids to see your obscenely hairy body because you know, later, they’re bound to use it against you in reference to some absurd primate comparison?”

“No,” I tell him, “you don’t have to shower if you don’t want to.”

“Whew,” he says, running a hand through his dreadlocks.

We reach the driveway that snakes into the back lawn, to the gym entrance lined in twinkling white lights. Flynt’s hand squeezes mine—maybe he’s as nervous as I am—as we walk up the concrete path.

Other kids file past us as we reach the steps to the gym—nearly all the girls in long, studded gowns and too much eye shadow, hair stiff atop their heads and littered with rhinestones, baby’sbreath-and-pink-rose corsages pinned to their pushed-up boobs; every boy in identical penguin-y black tuxedos, patent leather shoes, hair gel, way too much cologne. Everyone too stiff; some people obviously already drunk; some people continuing to touch up their makeup as they walk toward the door, dates awkwardly holding their purses.

It reminds me of Tens—the smells and the show, the promise of sex in the air—and I can’t help but giggle.

Camille Allen catches my eye and pauses at the entrance, swaying her pin-straight hair over her shoulder, straightening her pearls. She leans over to Carly and Taylor, whispering, too loudly, “Guess some bitches can’t take the hint and not show up where they don’t belong.”

Carly and Taylor crack up, clutching matching pink handbags with matching French-manicured hands. Camille continues, “Which would be pretty much anywhere.”

Back off, bitch.
The words, scrawled across my yearbook picture. On my locker. I gasp, understanding—she wanted me to back off from Keri, from Jeremy, from the precarious balance of popular life. Maybe she thought she was doing Keri a favor.

As she turns away to walk inside, still smirking, I burst out:

“Hey, Camille.”

She turns back to me, hand planted on her hip. “What?”

“You’re right,” I say, feeling the
urge
grip my throat, needing to say it again, and again. “You’re right. You’re right.” I pause, clench my fists, blink six times. “I shouldn’t have come. Because some
bitches
actually don’t
want
to belong in a place where people like you
do.
” There’s tittering laughter from the crowd of people around me. I catch a glimpse of Camille’s face as she turns away—nostrils flared, glossy lips set in a straight, hard line—and she and her army advance into the grating blare and glare of Prom World.

The thought of it—my own classmate, threatening me, going to such lengths to terrify me—brings the
urge
back. The need: to
tap tap tap tap tap tap
. People are looking, watching, but I can’t control it, can’t help myself now. They will all know what I am. They’ve always known: Penelope Marin, thigh tapper, word repeater, all-around freak.

Just as I’m feeling all my will drain away—my will to be here, to participate, to not
back off
—Flynt’s fingers wrap around my own, his thumb rubbing gently along the lines in my palm. “You wanna just skip straight to the after-party?” he asks, trying to keep his voice light. “That’s the best part, anyway.”

“Yes.” Relief breaks through my chest like a wave and suddenly it hits me, what I’ve just done. I just told off Camille Allen in front of half the junior class. And it felt great. “The after-party is exactly what I need.”

“Follow me,” Flynt says, whisking me off the stairs, weaving us between soccer fields one and two, past the little stream that marks the end of Carver’s campus, always clogged with crumpled metal soda cans. It’s fully dark now, moon low and yellow behind the silhouetted trees, as we follow the stream a few hundred feet to where it ends, to the beginning of a little bridge across a slightly wider river, this one clear, slick with glassy water and twisting reeds.

He grips my left hand tighter as we step across the wooden planks of the bridge. I can smell the water below us, a warm wind lifting it to us, tiny molecules of wet and grass and the memory of recent sunlight.

The
bump-bump
of prom is still audible in the distance when we reach a small rusty watchtower at the end of the bridge. Its door is slightly ajar. Flynt reaches his arm over my shoulder and pushes the door open farther. I
tap tap tap, banana
softly but not so softly that Flynt won’t hear. He already knows about my rituals. Still, I turn to him, cheeks flushed, anxious for a moment. But he just smiles at me and motions me inside.

I gasp as I enter—a woven blanket is spread across the floor, a kerosene lamp burning beside it, reflecting orangey shadows against the grate set up by the little window with a view of the river below. I turn to him, wide-mouthed, unable, for the moment, to speak.

Thankfully, he speaks for me: “I thought this was more our style,” he says. His voice is low and soft.

“But how did you … find this? And set it up?”

He smiles shyly. “I did a little research. Turns out Gretchen’s cousin grew up in Lakewood, and he told me about this place, and how to get here.”

“Flynt—you’re—”

But he cuts me off before I can say,
absolutely utterly impossibly amazing.
“I have another surprise for you, Queen P.”

He turns to the wall, lifting a hulking square object over to me—a canvas.

A painting of a girl.

Smooth, newspaper-mâché skin, tiny twigs painted black for eyelashes, smudged, dark coffee grinds streaming around her face for hair, red flower petals for lips, neck and torso a collection of soft yellow-green leaves and scraps of colorful fabric, in the crook of her pale arm, a cityscape shadow in charcoal. A moon hangs in the background, reflecting against her hair in small, perfect triangles of glass.

It’s, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. My chest begins to rise and fall, heart beating so fast, understanding. “It’s me!”

“My major new work.” He bites his lip. “Do you like it?”

“It’s—it’s incredible, Flynt. I—I can’t believe you made this for me.”

“I made it from the sketch I drew that night, when you fell asleep on my couch. You looked so beautiful. You
look
so beautiful, right now. You—you are so beautiful, Penelope.”

I stare back at the girl in the painting, at myself, through Flynt’s eyes, and then see something in the lower left corner—a signature—
Aaron Benjamin Greeley.

“Aaron Benjamin Greeley?” I ask, confused.

Flynt smiles nervously. “Aaron Greeley, at your service.” He bows, with a little flourish of his hand.

I think of Sapphire and Oren, then. They never got the chance to tell each other who they really were—she never knew his name, was never able to find him. But
I
can; Flynt—
Aaron
—and I can. We get the chance they never had—to be together, to know each other, good and bad.

All of it.

Flynt kneels beside me on the blanket and our knees touch and our arms touch—tingles run up and down my body—and the sounds of prom—a slow, twinkly song now—reach us from the distance.

“Aaron Benjamin Greeley,” I say, my voice catching in my throat, “this night is perfect.” Our eyes meet, and we’re both smiling. “The best anti-prom ever.”