Kitty

The Outside Girl

Junie hadn't minded so much when her friend merely spoke to her. It'd been sort of, almost . . . natural, expected. But she didn't like the girl. The girl scared her.

She'd first seen the girl in the backyard. Junie had been sent outside to the garden to, as her mother had advised, "check the squash plants for squash bugs." Squash bugs were difficult to get rid of, could ruin entire plants if not taken care of quick enough. Her mother had given her a bottle of soapy water to spray the little ones, some scissors to cut the big ones in half. If she found eggs beneath the leaves, she was to scrape them off with her fingernail. Junie knew her mother just wanted her to get outside, to breathe air. After her seizure at Dr. Stukell's, her parents had taken her to several doctors, but nothing appeared to be physically wrong with Juniper (which she herself had tried to tell them). Even with that reassurance, though, her mother had begun treating her differently, a little as if Junie were fragile, but also . . . well, it was difficult to define. If they were in the same room, her mother would find a reason to leave. There'd be something in a look her mother might give her when she thought Junie wasn't watching, or in the way the woman startled when the girl passed by. It was odd, almost as if . . . as if Mrs. Jones was afraid.

Afraid of her own daughter—that was stupid. Of course her mother wasn't afraid of her. She was just worried. But there was no need to be. Junie's friend was (if not quite nice) at least not harmful.

Some of the squash plant leaves were as big as Junie's head, huge green flags, all in a jumble one over the other, each trying to stretch above and fan out to catch as much sunlight as possible. There were four or five plants, though it was difficult to tell; they grew into one another in a waist-high retaining wall, spilled their vines over the edge and onto the grass. The large yellow-orange flowers continued to bloom, though only about a third of them would yield small fruits, most of which would be too small to do more with than display in the early fall. Searching the plants for bugs was not entirely unpleasant; indeed, finding the adult insects and snipping them in half, observing their insides ooze out of their severed bodies, offered a gruesome satisfaction. The small gray ones, anywhere from the size of a pinhead to the length of Junie's pinky nail, were more difficult to kill. Their demise entailed spraying that soapy mixture on them, but the larger nymphs took a lot of liquid, a lot of spraying, before they succumbed and stopped scrambling their spidery little legs. Most of all, Junie hated the eggs, though. She always tore the leaf in her attempt to remove them, and there was no fun in just scraping a bit of crust off a plant.

As she'd carefully shifted the complicated greenery, trying to avoid the prickly stems, Junie had hummed a little to herself, pondered the plant and insect life around her, wondered why she still had a strange underwater feeling even in the midst of the pure summer heat. Perhaps it'd been the humidity, which was always heavy and damp, made her sweat the second she left the house. Or perhaps it'd been something else inside her; it was true that a part of her had begun to sink ever since her friend had introduced itself up there in the attic, after Juniper's sisters had gone downstairs. Even though Junie hadn't been able to sense any particular danger, she couldn't understand that strange feeling, not yet, anyway.

She recalled that just when she'd caught a two-inch-long adult beetle in her scissors after it'd skittered out from under a smaller leaf and startled her, Junie had sensed a prickle down her neck, a line of sweat running from nape to collar, and that's when she'd turned and first seen the outside girl.

In the back-right corner of the yard, beneath a shady dogwood that in the spring was a cloud of white flowers, next to the neighbors' rows of jaunty yellow daylilies, had stood a figure not much younger or older than Juniper herself. At first, Junie had thought she was a neighbor, but then she'd quickly understood the girl was not all right in any sort of way, and for the first time ever, Juniper knew real fear. She'd run inside to leave the squash bug struggling between the scissor blades she'd left on the wall.