Freak: The True Story of an Insecurity Addict

I was also fascinated by bugs. I love butterflies. I’ve got my own weird stories about them, how they like to fly up my shirt sleeves and light all over me, how they sit in my hand and drink sugar water I’ve mixed. My favorite personal story happened when I was around ten-years-old.

I was walking home from school one day, swinging my Snoopy lunchbox, when I inadvertently encountered butterfly enchantment. There was a big old abandoned house in town that I coveted with all my heart. I passed it every day on the way home. It was grand and cupola-ed, with a round tower and a once magnificent flower garden, now choked with weeds and wild roses. There was peely white paint with gray wood underneath, broken windows from neighbor kids’ rocks, and a moss-covered sidewalk to stroll along. Magic.

It was late summer, too early for the trees to start turning. I was walking with a happy spring in my step, tipping my lunch box so the handle would clatter, a sound I enjoyed. When I reached the house, I saw that the leaves on the trees lining the sidewalk were all dead; not just turning, but dead and brown. I looked at the trunks to see if there were any worms. Nothing. Grubs? No.

A Monarch butterfly drifted past my nose. I noticed an unusually large amount of Monarch butterflies flitting about. The house had a big flower garden, so butterflies weren’t uncommon, but this was a lot. My eyes followed one up into the trees, where he landed and folded his wings, making him look like a dead leaf.

I took a stick and tossed it up into the trees. They exploded in color. Thousands of Monarch butterflies, everywhere. The air, my clothes, the trees; everything was bright orange with silent flutters. They were even flying in and out of the broken windows of the house. I imagined rooms of butterflies in there, a kitchen with living wallpaper and Monarch soup for dinner, a stairwell alight with tissue wings. Their house. This was their house. The butterfly mansion. Laughing out loud, I shoveled as many as I could into my lunch box.

Too bad I forgot to warn Mom about it when I got home. You could hear her screech all the way from the backyard when she opened the box.