Greenhouse Gore

CHAPTER SIX: PRETTY IN PINK

Micah and I made the highest grade in our history class for our presentation. Despite my plea to work on the project on my own so I could be alone with my thoughts, he insisted on sharing the workload. It took us two and a half hours to complete everything and rehearse with our notecards in front of an audience of my old stuffed animals that I embarrassingly hadn't given the thought to put away before his arrival. Just as he was heading out the door, my mother came home. She looked at me with her questioning eyebrows, exchanged greetings with Micah, and then asked me if I had already eaten dinner. After he left, she said nothing more about it, but I still found it necessary to tell her it was for a school project.

I couldn't sleep that night. The storm followed me all the way back from Hi-Ho, through the tunnel and Creaky Woods and crossed over the Veil and into my house where it rained and rained as Micah and I worked on the project and poured and poured as my mother and I made a pasta dish that she liked more than I did. As much as I didn't want to, I worried about Asa out in the woods all alone. Maybe the dogs had already gotten to her.

On nights that sleep seemed impossible, I always changed the position of my body on the bed to where my toes lie where my head should have been and my head rests where my feet usually hung off the edge of the mattress. I stared at the ceiling fan for a while and then turned my head to the left, my eyes trailing up the glass of the window to the upper right corner where enough light from the streetlamps exposed the body of a spider clinging to its delicate threads of silk.

I had seen this spider before. I watched it one day a few weeks ago, weaving its web on the other side of the window. After that, I never saw it during the day. It only came down from the roof at night, going to bed the same time I would. The weather the past few days was unstable, sometimes drenching everything in heavy rain and battering winds, remnants of a hurricane from the coast. Once a storm ceased, I would stand eye to eye with the window, searching for traces of a web and never seeing one. I assumed that the storms had destroyed the web and killed the spider. But then, every night, eight long legs would wiggle down to the upper right corner.

How does that happen? How does a storm tear down branches of trees and demolish the roofs of homes, but not touch a web crocheted of invisible silk?

"Were you the sole survivor of the Great Flood?" I'd ask the spider. "Did the lack of invitation to Noah's ark scorn you into immortality?"

So, it was raining on the night of Dress Like Mr. Mobley Day. Just a light rain with no cracks of thunder or flashes of lightning zig zagging through the sky. It had woken up the spider, the rain did. At first, the spider remained in its position, but when the wind started shaking the web, the eight legs desperately tried to pull the spider up to the roof where it could hide from the gloomy morning weather. Just when the spider reached the top, the wind and rain pulled it back down from the web and the arachnid had to begin again. I thought about that nursery rhyme, the itsy-bitsy spider. I felt bad for him, but I felt worse for me.

An hour passed with me lying upside down on a bed in the night, watching a spider desperately climb up its web to escape the storm only to be brought back down again by the wind and rain. Eventually, the clouds ceased dropping the rain and the spider hastily pulled itself to the roof, leaving its invisible web swaying in the upper right corner. I hadn't noticed that the sky was no longer black, but a damp shade of blue before I fell asleep. A while later, the alarm clock woke me up.

It was Friday, the last day for Spirit Week, and everyone was dressed in pink for Pink Out Day. Everyone, but Micah. Between every class period, one of the ladies who worked in the front office would crackle onto the intercom speaker and remind us to stop by the football field in the evening to walk around the track and raise money for breast cancer research.