Joe Dugan
Puberty on Polaroid
Your eyes are bright, but all he can see are your freckles. You are a spotted kid, and he loves it. You are only twelve, and he is only thirteen, but something is bubbling up inside of you both.
You might call it puberty—or something else.
You are walking together, barefoot in the park; you stop to pluck a little clover between your toes. You stick it behind your ear. It is silly, but that is okay, because it's July.
Your toenails are burnt orange.
You try to catch a butterfly. It is a monarch; they eat flower fluff, something that has packed you with wonder since the first grade when your teacher kept monarch cocoons in little cages until the chrysalis stage was complete—and then she set them free, and it always made your eyes sting a little because it was raw beauty, and that is hard to grasp at the age of seven, or seventy-seven.
The regal insect lights on a wild violet, and you delicately swoop your net. It struggles, and then you set it free—because you don't want to kill it; you just want to comprehend it.
He's still staring at your freckles; you giggle.
You had your first period last week. It made you cry, not because it hurt all that much or because you were particularly frightened, but because it is a rite of passage. Now you are a woman. You are still twelve, but you are not a little girl anymore. Things are changing, and it's thrilling; you're drunk on it almost, but it's hard, too.
Sometimes, you miss playing in the mud and not caring.
Sometimes, you still don't care.
You step on a bumblebee, and it hisses and lodges its stinger in your sole. You suck in air and your eyes water; he squeezes your hand and leads you to a rusty bench. You feel the light poison coursing through your foot and your leg; it is numbing and it aches, but it is not as painful as you would have expected. A wasp bit you when you were three, but until now you had avoided the summertime curse of bee stings on bare feet.
He says something about tweezers, and you pull a pair out of your purse—your Boy Scout mom never lets you leave the house without your first aid kit. He straddles your ankle across his knee and gropes with the tweezers, plucking the stinger. You gasp—and it's over. You then sit in reverential silence, watching dozens of sister bees gather nectar, humming blithely, unaware of the death of their comrade, unaware of the day of the week, the phase of the moon, the turn of your mind.
You have a sudden craving for blueberries. When your family camps in August, you pick wild blueberries for your mom to jam later—but you always eat them before she can boil them. And you wade along the shore, searching for shells and wishing you looked Seventeen, dreaming up your first kiss. It won't come today. You're not ready. He's not ready, but you know it will happen some day. Soon. And when it does, you will be ready—you promise yourself, and cross your fingers.
The wind is swirling, and the sky is clouding. Summer storms are a cosmic resurrection; they snap to life from flatlined breezes. He walks home with you; you will have sandwiches together. He will make peanut butter, you will make jelly, and then you will slap the bread together like you always do. You will eat your sandwiches, and drink chocolate milk, and watch the lightning streak the effervescent sky.
©2005 by Joe Dugan
