Ladybugs

After school, I find the tiny hole behind the house and sit in the dirt and let the first ladybug crawl onto my finger. I don’t recognize any of them, but they’re all named Lucy. Another one marches towards me, and I scoop it up and make them friends in the palm of my hand. A ladybug should have friends, I think. I wonder if all of the colony are friends or if they scuttle past each other and don’t really care like the kids in the lunch line. A ladybug should have friends.

At school, they call me Potty. That’s not my name, it’s Patty, but one time I forgot to write the stem on my ‘a,’ and Sam Fenders yelled out that my name was Potty. I don’t like being called Potty, but at least I have a name. There are some quiet kids in my class, and no one knows their names. Ms. Hadley calls on them just as much as the rest of us, but their names never stick. They don’t have something as memorable as Potty.

The two Lucys in my hand crawl in separate directions, and I try to force them back together. Maybe one of them is a boy and one is a girl, and that’s why they run away from each other.

“It’s OK,” I tell them. “Mom says there’s no such thing as cooties.”

One of them opens its shell, wings fluttering, and flies back to the hole. I’m left holding only one Lucy, but I don’t know if it was the first one I picked up or the second.

***

There are rules when playing with ladybugs:

Ladybugs don’t hurt each other. Ladybugs don’t hurt anything; they’re too nice.

The creek water is holy. It protects the colony.

Spots don’t earn you anything.

Ladybugs are friends with the fairies that live in the wildflowers growing behind the house. It’s a good thing, too, because the fairies would be lonely without the ladybugs and would probably die of broken hearts.

Everything is magical when it’s pink.

***

In class, we write stories. I write about a princess rescuing her kingdom by killing a dragon with a pink sword. Ms. Hadley says that I have lots of good ideas but a poor grasp on basic grammar. Rosie Luper reads my story, and she squints and frowns and says that she doesn’t understand it. What’s there not to understand? I drew a picture to go with it.

“Swords aren’t pink, stupid,” says Sam Fenders.

“Magic ones are,” I say.

“Are not.”

“Patty, dear, why don’t you give your characters names?” says Ms. Hadley.

I rewrite my story but with names. The princess’ name is Lucy. The dragon’s name is Sam Fenders.

***

Rosie and I are friends because we’re the only two kids with red hair. I’ve learned that it’s nice to have things in common with people.

There are two groups of boys in my class: the boys who like football and the boys who like dinosaurs. They don’t like each other very much. Sometimes the football boys beat up the dinosaur boys. The girls are more complicated. We’re all friends, and there are little daily acts of betrayal that we pretend don’t bother us.

Sometimes Rosie says that I act like a baby because I still play with my dolls. Her other friends don’t play with dolls. She likes being around them more than she likes being around me. The other girls like her because she talks to boys, which is a very brave thing to do.

Sometimes Rosie doesn’t sit next to me at lunch even though I save her a seat.

Sometimes Rosie calls me ugly.

It’s all forgivable. I can’t get mad at her, or the other girls will say I’m mean or that I’m weird. So I cry in a bathroom stall and come out with my eyes puffy and my nose full of snot.

“Have you been crying?” Sam Fenders asks when I come back to my seat.

“No,” I say.

That afternoon, I sit with my ladybugs, and they’re caught in a salty storm.

***

My parents call it an infestation. I learn what an exterminator is.

They didn’t tell me he was coming, probably because I could have doused the ladybugs’ domain in holy creek water, and that would have protected them. But I’m too late. When I come home from school, there are a few crunchy red ladybugs lying outside of a hole that isn’t there anymore.

***

I’m in the back of his car, and I can feel his heartbeat, his calloused hands, the music of his breath. Talking Heads cover on the radio, and not a good one. He has bad taste in music, and I cry over mainstream romance novels, and love seems like it has something to do with both of these things.

He twists a strand of my red hair between his fingers. Rosie went blonde in eighth grade.

“It’s getting late,” he says. “We should probably head back.”

“Probably.”

He kisses me again, and I let my cheek rest against his worn t-shirt. He was a dinosaur boy once, but I didn’t know him then. His arms wrap around me. I like to feel his long eyelashes against my cheek when he blinks. My beautiful, beautiful dinosaur boy.

***

Now that the ladybugs are gone, the wildflower fairies will be lonely. It’s nice to have things in common with people. But no wildflower fairy wants to only be friends with other wildflower fairies. I take a pair of scissors and cut all the wildflowers.

My mom comes outside and sees me collecting the flowers. “Are those for anyone special?” she asks.

“No.”

After I’m done collecting the wildflower fairies, I toss them into the creek. They’ll find better friends somewhere downstream.

***

When Ms. Hadley teaches us about the food chain, I pay extra special attention. I like learning about animals. She tells us that there are animals like mice and rabbits and worms at the bottom of the food chain. These animals get eaten by other animals. There are animals like lions and sharks and hawks at the top of the food chain. These animals eat other animals. I learn that sharks really are that mean.

I hear a snicker behind me. Rosie is showing a piece of paper to Sam Fenders, and they’re giggling. Rosie folds the paper and passes it to Jennifer. I turn back to Ms. Hadley.

“But here’s the fascinating thing about food chains,” Ms. Hadley says while pointing to a picture of a hawk. “When a hawk dies, its body breaks down and provides nutrients for the plants. Which the animals like the mice and rabbits eat.”

I raise my hand.

“Yes, Patty?”

“What do ladybugs eat?”

“Other smaller bugs.”

Oh. Ladybugs aren’t as nice as I thought they were.

At the back of the classroom, Lucas laughs hysterically.

“Lucas, would you like to share with the class?” says Ms. Hadley.

He keeps laughing. He has a piece of paper in his hand. Ms. Hadley starts to go over to him.

“It’s not his fault, Ms. Hadley,” says Rosie. “Patty wrote the note.”

I whip around. “I did not!”

“Yes, you did! You wrote the note and told me to pass it to Reggie!”

“I didn’t!”

“Patty, we have rules about passing notes,” says Ms. Hadley.

“I didn’t write it!” I insist. “I don’t even know what it says!”

Before anyone can stop him, Lucas reads out the note to the class. It says:

Dear Reggie,

I like you. Do you like me? Check yes or no.

Love, Potty

Ms. Hadley snatches up the note.

“I didn’t write that!” I scream. Tears are forming in my eyes.

“No one likes a liar, Patty,” Rosie says. “Who else would have written it?”

“You did!”

“Don’t be silly! It’s OK if you like Reggie.”

Ms. Hadley looks between us. I think she believes me, but it won’t do any good even if she does. Everyone else believes Rosie.

“Potty likes Reggie! Potty likes Reggie!” Sam chants.

“No, I don’t!” I cry.

“Potty likes Reggie!” he presses on. “Potty’s gonna cry like a girl!”

I get up and run out of the room, hearing the laughter of my classmates die behind me.

***

It’s been seventeen hours. Muscles are aching that I didn’t know I had. I see my reflection off a metal surface, and my red hair is brown with sweat. But it’s all still now.

The earth has stopped moving.

Or rather, the earth is still moving, but the hospital room is the axis, the motionless point at the center of everything.

Twenty-seven years feel like they’ve reached zero again. What were those twenty-seven years before this moment?

“Do you want to hold her?”

I nod, and the nurse gives me my baby for the first time. Her name is Lucy. She makes a sound that I can only describe as the sound of my own heart.

Dinosaur boy gazes at me with all the love and pride in the world.

***

At recess, I sit in a patch of grass away from the other kids. I can’t play with Rosie anymore. But it’s not so bad because I found a colony of roly-polies. They’re not pretty like ladybugs, but at least they can’t fly away. I’m pretty sure roly-polies follow the same rules as ladybugs, so I play with them the same way. One of them curls into a ball in my hand.

“It’s OK,” I tell him. “You’re only scared because you think I’m at the top of the food chain. But I’m not. I’m not someone to be scared of.”

After a few more seconds, the roly-poly unfurls and scurries across my palm to my thumb.

She sits down a few feet away from me: one of the nameless ones. I smile, and she shyly smiles back, but she doesn’t say anything. She reaches over and grabs a roly-poly, but it curls into a ball like mine did. She takes a blade of grass and pokes at it, but it doesn’t open up. Silly. The roly-poly would open up if she used something pink.

The girl drops her friend and decides to pick at the grass instead. She plucks a tiny red wildflower and hands it to me.

“Thanks,” I say and tuck the flower in my pocket. “I’m Patty.”

“I know,” she says.

We sit in silence, and she picks flowers and I count and name roly-polies until the bell rings.

published in Kodon, December 2023.