To Be a Hero | MLB

8: The Butterfly

My family's Parisian apartment only has three bedrooms, though in configurations like these, my mother always lets me have my own room, claiming she understands how girls need their own space. Then she gets her own room, and the triplets share one, leaving Jakob and Jaxon to sleep in the family room. As for bathrooms, my mom and I usually share one, and my brothers have to squeeze themselves into the other, smaller one.

I'm usually happy to have my own room, but sometimes I prefer to have others around me.

This is not one of those times.

I've rolled onto my side and blinked through my tears to see a glowing purple butterfly coming straight at me. I feel fear start growing in my mind, but it soon changes to curiosity as I realize I've never seen a butterfly like this before. And I'd know—I inherited a love of insects from my dad.

But while he loved bees and wasps, I love butterflies. I studied them obsessively as a kid, and I've learned about dozens of butterfly species. I feel like if there was a naturally-existing glowing butterfly out there, I'd know about it.

I slide off my bed and start toward the creature, holding my hand out for it to land. But it doesn't, and it instead flutters back toward my window. It hovers there for a moment, as if listening, then somehow squeezes between the windowpane and the wall and flits away. I sit back on my bed, confused. Then I remember Antoine mentioning something about glowing butterflies back in the bakery...

Antoine.

I sink back onto my bed and think back to before my evening completely fell apart. To when I spent time with an impossibly attractive boy in a bakery, listening as he explained an impossibly complicated superhero system. My thoughts help to distract me from my mom's disappointment, and eventually, it hardly stings at all.