At the front of the bus, he glanced over as he passed Jenny’s bench. His sister’s friend turned and smiled. Jeff’s breath caught. He smiled back, started to wave, and managed a, “See y…” before he registered that she was smiling, not at him, but at Peter Johnson behind him.
His wave caught her attention. Jeff saw her eyes move from Peter to him. Her brow furrowed.
He panicked. “See ya later…Bus driver!”
“What’s that?” the bus driver asked. “Oh. Yes, I’ll see you tomorrow.” She gave him a grandmotherly sort of smile.
“Ha!” Peter laughed from behind him as he gave Jeff a shove. “Jeff’s in love with the bus driver!”
Jeff ducked his head and hurried out onto the street.
He kicked a pebble home, trailing his sister, who didn’t look up from her phone once. By the time he walked through the front door of his house, she was already in her bedroom.
Jeff patted his old mutt Dusty, dumped his backpack, kicked off his shoes, and collapsed on the couch.
“See ya later, Bus driver,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head.
So dumb.
He unpinned the “Suzy for President” button from his own shirt and stuffed it between the couch cushions.
He needed to get to his homework, but he felt too antsy. His mind rebounded painfully from the glares of his math class this morning to the awkward moment with Jenny on the bus. He turned on the TV for a distraction, waving away a black housefly that was buzzing around his head.
Why hadn’t he just said bye to Jenny? Even if they weren’t friends, that would have been way less weird than shouting goodbye to the bus driver. He shook his head in disgust, then shooed away the fly again.
He scrolled through Netflix for something to watch and paused at a gameshow. Jeff pictured himself on the show and wondered if winning it would make him more or less cool in the eyes of his classmates. More cool, he concluded, and pulled out his phone to search for how to get on a gameshow.
The fly landed on his head.
Jeff tried to ignore it, but he could feel it walking on his hair, and for one insane moment, his brain associated flies and the brown of his hair with manure, and he thought the fly was going to lay eggs in his hair.
He jumped up and swatted furiously all around his head.
Jeff stood panting, looking around the room, just daring the fly to try and land on him again. As he picked his phone back up, he felt hungry and walked to the kitchen for a snack. Coming back to the living room, he smelled a strange spice, an exotic smell, and he looked suspiciously down at his potato chips.
He licked one. It was salty.
As he started in on his snack, the fly buzzed back over. Growling, he went back to the kitchen for the fly swatter. It better not lay eggs on my chips, he thought.
When he returned with the fly swatter, he paused, staring. The fly perched on his bowl of chips was very green.
He blinked. Vivid, bottle green. And the shape was wrong, more pokey than it should have been. Jeff ran back to the kitchen, to the junk drawer, for the magnifying glass, which wasn’t there.
“Suzy!” he yelled, “Where’s the magnifying glass?”
“Yeesh. You don’t need to yell,” Suzy said as she walked into the kitchen. She pulled an apple from the fruit basket and began washing it.
“So do you know where the magnifying glass is?” Jeff demanded.
“No.”
“You don’t have ANY idea?”
“No.”
“Could you be less helpful?”
“Probably.” Suzy took a bite of the apple, chewed slowly, swallowed. “Why do you want the magnifying glass?”
“There’s this weird fly in the living room, and I want to look at it.”
“Weird how?”
“Well, it’s green and kind of spiny or,”
“Gross.” Suzy cut him off. “Weren’t you and Nacho burning stuff with it last week?”
“Yeah, but I put it back in the junk drawer,” Jeff lied. As soon as Suzy had said “Nacho,” Jeff remembered.
“Well, I don’t know where it is then,” Suzy said. “It goes in the junk drawer.”
“Yeah…” Jeff said. He waited until Suzy looked down at her phone and then ran out the sliding door to the backyard. The magnifying glass was lying in the dirt of the garden, water-spotted and rusted around the rim. He felt a twinge of guilt as he walked back in, polishing the lens with his t-shirt.
“Sure you put it back in the drawer, huh?” Suzy said, looking smug.
Jeff shrugged. “You wanna see this cool fly?”
His sister checked her phone, gave a longsuffering sigh, and followed Jeff into the living room.
The fly was back on the chips, eating. Jeff didn’t think you could usually tell when flies were eating. He eased forward with the magnifying glass.
“What the...” Suzy breathed as she squinted through the lens with Jeff. “You know what that looks like?”
“Yeah,” whispered Jeff.
He could see the tiny jaw open, snap down, chew. He saw it toss back its head to swallow. He could see the minuscule talons gripping the edge of the chip. He could see the wings, dark green, folded, pointing up from the spiked back. He could see the tail twitching back and forth.
Suzy put her hand on the magnifying glass and pushed it forward. Jeff pulled back. The fly flew away.
“Jeff, you dork! You made it fly away!”
“Look! It’s there. Shhhh! Don’t scare it off.” They froze. “Suzy, go get a cup. Let’s catch it.”
“Uhhh… No.” Suzy straightened up, recovering from the enthusiasm of the moment. “I’ll leave that to you.”
“Come on! Just help me for a sec.”
Suzy grumbled something but stepped to the kitchen, reached around to the little basket of paper
