The Bees
There were wasps on the playground, a nest in the chain-link fence that separated the overgrown yard from our elementary school campus.
I was afraid of them, my Aunt Jess is allergic to bees and I heard horror stories about her face swelling up like a big red balloon. I didn’t know if wasps were similar, only that my parents had watched that movie about killer bees from Africa and I hadn’t slept for a week, hearing the buzz of bees as I drifted off to sleep.
I hid in the girl’s bathroom with Jackie, we weren’t close friends but we sat a few seats apart and sometimes I would borrow her crayons and I wouldn’t even break them. The bathroom ceiling that had dubious stains and spit wads and the soap was a gross paste-smelling powder but it felt like safety as the group of us huddled there.
Lexi was eight and in our same grade, she had pretty blonde braids and the first time we had a school lockdown she started to cry, I wondered where she grew up that this fear was allowed to be new.
She left the bathroom when the wasps were still swarming and made it to the classroom before any of us. In high school nearly a decade later she would forget her inhaler and die of a heart attack but today she was safe.
I thought about my short life, seven years, I was happy enough of the time, I guess. I liked to read, my mom would pick up Babysitter’s Club books and Nancy Drew and I would lay on my bed and fall in love with the characters, and dream I was more beautiful and adventurous.
At church there was an old man who would hug me too long. He smelled like Polo and those wintergreen Lifesavers and one Sunday he gave me a necklace with a gold bear on the chain and a box full of stickers, my mom made me hug him longer then and I learned that some gifts are not really what they seem.
Anthony was the same age as me and he was beautiful and delicate and funny and I think we were supposed to be best friends for awhile but I didn’t understand how to hold something gently when it was slipping away. Jackie was in love with him, she confided in me that day with the sound of buzzing just outside the door.
I never learned to share, I would break my things before letting them go, it’s easier to say goodbye than see you later.
My friends all went away and I didn’t need anything more than the books I would read, increasingly more complex and likely inappropriate for a sheltered child in our small crime-ridden town.
One day our front window cracked and I screamed, it was a drive-by shooting and the bullet lodged in the glass. I had been sitting there alone, watching Rugrats or Doug or playing with the black Barbies my neighbors handed down to me.
It took me twenty-one years to leave that town but I think about it every day, the way that we became the closest of friends when someone pulled out a knife on campus or on September 11th, all of us excited and terrified by the promise of a world that would never be the same.
I don’t remember when the wasps moved on but weeks later we would hit the empty nest with long sticks, our sweatshirts tied around our waists, waiting for recess to end so we could start the afternoon and go home and then do it all again.
