teachers and caregivers always said. I’d done research at the library. Moths have a life span of months, certainly not decades.
Thinking about it even kind of gave me the creeps. But it also made me feel special, like my mom and I mattered to someone somewhere—enough to warrant watching. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt like bugs and plants were reaching out to me in a way they didn’t to other people. I’d been hearing their voices ever since I hit puberty close to my twelfth birthday a year ago. Still, I knew better than to share that tidbit with anyone for risk of ending up in a psych ward like my mom.
My stomach growled. I shoved a fist beneath my ribs. Mrs. Bunsby would be serving pickled beet and tofu casserole tonight. Just the thought made my taste buds want to run for cover. I had to stretch out my snack as long as possible. The package of peanut butter crackers I’d saved from lunch lay open next to me. I slid one out and munched on it. Crumbs gathered on the illustration of Alice fleeing from some card guards in hopes of keeping her head, and I shook the cracker remnants off so they fell on my thigh.
A roach skittered out from under one of the box’s flaps and climbed onto my pants to gobble up the residue without so much as a please or thank-you. In my opinion, they were the rudest of all the insects. I’d had conversations with houseflies and mealworm beetles that were civil and interesting. But roaches never had much to say, other than to grumble about the lack of trash piles and dirt now that humans populated their world, claiming garbage bags and vacuum cleaners were the bane of their existence.
I waved my hand, shooing the bug away. It skittered back into the folds of the box and scolded my bad manners.
“I’m trying to help you, moron. You want to get squished?” I gathered up my canvas tote, shoving my pictures and books inside, then bounded into the storm, making a run for the skinny space between my apartment building and the run-down barbershop next door.
The only way in was from the front. Our landlord, Wally Harcus, kept the back door to the building locked for “safety reasons.” Or so he claimed. He just wanted to gawk at all the single moms and young girls who lived in his low-rent building. His door was the first one down the hall from the entrance, meaning he had the ideal situation from any perv’s perspective.
Shards of rain, laced with ice, pelted me. The denim of my jacket and jeans absorbed every droplet, and I felt ten pounds heavier and twenty degrees colder by the time I pushed inside the building.
My hands were too wet to hold on to the knob, and the door slammed shut. I cringed at the sound.
I’d barely skirted by Wally’s room when his door flung open. I backed slowly down the hall toward the stairway, keeping him in my sights.
His sweaty face appeared first, then the rest of him, rolls of flab barely contained within a tight blue T-shirt and grease-stained khaki pants. I could smell his distinctive odor even with my eyes—the scent of rotting cabbage and meat. Pools of perspiration formed uneven circles beneath his armpits, darkening the blue to navy.
He’d always reminded me of a walrus—bald head, deep folds of skin over his brow, double chin, and a handlebar mustache that looked like a half-chewed kielbasa dangling over his sausage-fat lips. The wheezes and clicking sounds he emitted with each breath only added to the illusion of a beached sea mammal.
“Hey there, Alison. Get a little wet, did ya?” His gaze glittered—watery and dark like liquid charcoal—as he took a bite of an overripe apricot. The juices drizzled down his chin and he offered a sleazy smirk. His incisors—two sizes too big for his mouth—hung low like underdeveloped ivory tusks.
My stomach twisted with disgust as he stepped full into the hallway and made an obvious appraisal of my chest where my shirt clung to me. He looked famished, as if he wanted to gobble me up. I snapped my jacket closed and shoved ringlets of dripping blond hair off my face.
“I’ve got some hot chocolate on the stove. Wanna cup?” he asked.
I’d caught him staring plenty of times, but he’d never had the guts to ask me in. I swallowed and held tighter to my bag’s