by Valerie Thompson

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I learned about sex the night I beat up Billy Sims for picking on my younger brother.

I was eleven and was spending the summer with my grandparents in Porterdale, KY, a coalmining town in the foothills of the Appalachians. It was such a small town that children had to find ways to entertain themselves. Sometimes my brother and I sat on the porch swing and counted the wooden planks in the floor. Other times we leapt over the boxwoods surrounding the porch, hoping we’d break a leg and get to wear a cast to school in the Fall. But by far, our favorite activity was chasing fireflies.

In the evenings, while my mother and grandparents sat inside and discussed oil profits, Coca Cola stock, and my cousin Denise’s Neiman-Marcus wedding, we waited breathlessly with the other neighborhood kids for the lightning bugs to arrive.

Fireflies would sweep through town in swarms and follow the same illuminated path each night through the old town cemetery into the hills. We pursued them amongst tilted tombstones and sun-bleached plastic flowers. The legend was that whoever caught the most would be granted one wish, so we caught as many as we could. We’d put the captured bugs in a glass jar and spend half the night watching them, hoping they lived until the following evening, when we would open the lid and watch them join the swarms overhead until our world was streaked with beams of yellow light.

On that night thirty-two years ago, I felt obligated to beat up Billy Sims, even though both my parents told me repeatedly that a little lady does not fight under any circumstances. Little lady was something I was supposed to be, although I bore no resemblance with my frizzy hair, pale skin, buck teeth, and legs covered in chigger bites. Those same features made me a prime target for bullies. Whenever they struck, I’d go toe-to-toe with them, losing almost every fight.

I was a tomboy through and through, something neither of my parents understood or appreciated. They worried about my future marketability if I didn’t shed my tomboy ways.

My mother was a beautiful only child, so she found it hard to relate to her only daughter. If I had resembled her more, instead of hitting me, the neighborhood boys would have popped wheelies on their bikes in front of my grandparents’ house, or they would have bought me soda fountain cokes at the Big Sandy Pharmacy.

On that night so many years ago, Billy, the meanest boy in Porterdale, hit my brother on the back of the head for no reason. I saw Billy do it, so I jumped up and punched him in the kidney. Unfazed, Billy reeled around and kicked my leg, then he ran away while I grabbed my throbbing shin and hopped on one foot. I didn’t catch him until we reached Mrs. Harris’s front yard. By then, both of us were holding our sides, gasping for air, too exhausted to run farther. We flailed at each other with skinny arms until I managed to trip him and push him to the ground.

I envisioned myself standing on the ropes of a wrestling ring, then I launched into the air and landed on Billy’s stomach with the full force of my seventy-five pounds. Even though it knocked the wind out of him, he still tried to hit me in the face — I slipped his punch and bit him in the armpit, a wound that later got infected, required stitches, and got me in a heap of trouble.

Immediately after I bit Billy, Mrs. Harris walked onto her porch and caught me stuffing clumps of grass into his mouth. She was squinting, and I hoped she couldn’t see what I was doing, but I knew she did when she nudged her glasses high on her nose and shook her index finger at us.

“Lord have mercy, I never thought I’d see a girl in a fist fight in my own front yard. You two, get out of here. Go home or I’ll call the police.”

My brother and the other kids scattered like BBs from a BB gun. I ran past the old Methodist church with broken windows and past the Porterdale National Bank. My right side burned and felt like Billy had ripped out one of my lungs. I stopped in the cemetery and realized my nose was bleeding and my best jeans were ripped, bloody, and muddy. My mother was going to kill me. She thought I was on the porch playing with dolls.

My legs didn’t stop until I got to the bridge over Porters Creek. My parents had forbidden me to cross that bridge. On the other side was where the coal miners lived.

In the safety of our moving car, whenever we passed a coal miner, my mother would call him a “dirt magnet,” or she’d laugh and say, “I wonder what the poor people are doing.”

Unlike my mother, I didn’t think coal miners were funny. Sometimes I would sit by the creek and watch them trudge home from work. Except for the white of their eyes, the miners were hunched over, soot-ridden figures. Their children played in dirt streets, and the sight of their wretched lives pierced the sunny walls of my imaginary world.

When I was nine, a coal miner’s daughter named Doris crossed the bridge each night to play fireflies with us. Doris was skinny even for a kid. She could sprint short distances but couldn’t run far, and she was always hungry. I’d sneak Colonel Sanders chicken out of our house and give it to her, because I liked her.

That night, even though I hadn’t seen Doris in two years, I remembered where her house was. I tentatively crossed the bridge. Dogs with ribs that pressed against their skin ignored me while they dug through a capsized garbage can. Trash was strewn everywhere, probably by the dogs, and a group of kids played in the dirt in front of Doris’s house. Eyes bored into me as I walked past a rusty car on cinder blocks in the driveway. I knocked on the door. Minutes passed. I looked back at the kids, who had stopped playing and were still staring at me. Finally, the door creaked, and Doris poked her head through the crack. Blowing cigarette smoke from her mouth, she stared at me for a few seconds, then she flung the door open.

“Lord have mercy. What are you doing here?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Just thought I’d stop by while I was in town.”

“It’s a little late, ain’t it?” Dressed in a worn cotton housecoat, pink house slippers and wearing what looked like a crown of pink foam rollers in her hair, Doris said, “I was hoping it was John Luke, or maybe a prince, but I guess you’ll do.” She motioned for me to step inside.

When I stepped through the door, she pointed at my nose. “Who did that?”

“Billy Sims.”

“Billy Sims is a big, fat turd. I hate him. I hope you kicked his butt.” Doris took another drag off her cigarette and blew smoke from the side of her mouth.

 “I knocked him down and bit him, and I think I was winning. Then Mrs. Harris came out and said she was gonna call the cops, so I ran.”

Doris laughed. “So … you’re here cuz you’re gonna get a whupping when you go home. Well, come on back. Look out for that hole.” She pointed at a rotten place in the floorboard. We walked through a narrow hallway to her bedroom.

Fashion magazines were strewn haphazardly throughout the room. A flimsy mirror hung crookedly on a fake wood panel wall. A large porcelain doll in a wedding gown was toppled over on the bed; Doris picked it up and set it upright. Even though Doris was two years older than me, this was the first time I was aware of our age difference.

She patted the end of the bed. “Sit down,” she said. “What’ve you been doing with yourself?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you still live in Atlanta?”

“Yeah,” I replied, looking down at my feet.

“I wish I lived in Atlanta,” she said wistfully.

 “Why?”

“More boys!” Doris exclaimed. She picked up a magazine and flipped through the pages until she stopped at one and thrust the magazine at me. “I wish I looked like that and had clothes like that.”

I grimaced. “Gross. That’s the kind of stuff my mother wears.”

“Your mother has clothes like that?”

“Yeah.” I answered vaguely, distracted. I looked around the room because I sensed something was off. “Why don’t you play fireflies anymore?”

“That’s a kid’s game,” Doris replied scornfully. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. “You’d look better if you had a tan,” she said.

I glanced at my arm. It looked fine to me. Doris stood and hovered over me. “How’d you like to do it in a bed like this?” she asked, pointing at the bed.

“Do what?”

She laughed. “Don’t tell me a rich girl like you don’t know about doing it?”

Not again, I thought, sighing loudly. I’m always the last to know. I yanked a loose thread from my torn jeans and rolled it into a ball.

“Have you ever seen a boy dog jump on the back of a girl dog?” Doris asked.

 “Of course. Everybody’s seen that. So what?” I didn’t understand why she mentioned  dogs.

“So that’s what people do, dummy.”

“No way! People don’t do that!”

“Yeah, they do. You’ve seen your brother’s thing, right? What do you think that’s for?” She cupped her hand over my ear and whispered. “Think about it.”

On my way out the door I didn’t stop to look at dogs, kids, or trash on the ground. My sole objective was to get across the bridge as fast as possible.

Once I did, my pace slowed considerably. My thoughts were consumed by what Doris had told me and what my mother would say, so I dawdled. I peered into the dark windows of downtown shops, but my stomach started to churn when I saw the empty lunch counter at the Five & Dime. Hunched over, I wondered if I might pass out.

I’ll never do it, so what does it matter? I asked myself.

Yet it did matter. A lot. As much as I tried to convince myself it was inconsequential, it mattered.

When the dizziness passed, I picked up my pace slightly and before long, I ambled into my grandparents’ front yard. I didn’t know if anyone had called my mother yet. Leaning against the oak tree in front, I slid to the ground and absent-mindedly shredded a piece of grass. I thought about the time my brother and I almost ran over a tiny dog obscured in a pile of leaves in the woods. She had just given birth to four puppies. She lay on her side, panting, and her stomach rippled madly, like fish in a net. Suddenly she stood up and we were stunned to see a bloody sack move out of her bottom. She ripped the sack open with her teeth and licked it until a tiny puppy materialized.

My attention jolted back to the present when I felt bugs crawling up my back. Not more bug bites, I thought. Tears welled up in my eyes, and with a new self-consciousness, I looked in all directions before I yanked off my shirt.

Only the day before, I had walked downstairs in my bathing suit, and my mother had pointed at me and said, “Look at her! You wonder why I want her to behave like other girls and tell me to give her time. If I give her much more time, she’ll never get a date because she’ll have so many scars from bug bites.”

“I don’t want dates! Why don’t you leave me alone?” I yelled as I slammed the back door. But at the pool, I glanced at the other girls’ legs and realized they didn’t have hard, red dots on them, and I felt ashamed.

I knew I couldn’t stall much longer, so I plodded up the porch steps. From the corner of my eye I saw something move, and the gauze curtain in the front window shifted to one side. My brother pressed his face against the windowpane and grinned when he saw me. Seconds later, he opened the front door.

“Shhhh,” he whispered, putting his finger to his lips to indicate I should be quiet, which was unnecessary. I had every intention of sneaking into the house undetected.

We tip-toed up the stairs to his room. He locked the door behind us – it hardly made a sound – then he laid on his stomach and slid halfway under the bed. He shuffled through my grandfather’s Playboy magazines and pulled out a mason jar filled with lightning bugs.

“I’m gonna stay up late, ‘til mom’s asleep, and let them loose in the room,” he said solemnly. He handed the jar to me. I grasped it firmly and checked the lid for air holes.

“Do you think they can breathe?”

“Sure,” he answered with certainty in his voice. “We can turn on the air conditioner, so nobody hears us. If someone comes in, we can pretend like we’re asleep.”

I froze, remembering the red sheets on Doris’s bed.

“No, we can’t do that anymore,” I said flatly.

“Why not?”

“Cuz.” I said, not knowing what else to say. For years we had been bulwarks for one another, a forcefield against our unreasonable parents. We often goofed off until late at night in our bedrooms.

“I’ll open the jar in your room if you want.”

He handed the jar to me. I looked at the shimmering lights for a long time before I passed the jar back to him. Then I shook my head no. His face blew up like a red balloon and he started to cry. “I don’t understand,” he said, gasping between sobs.

I felt like crying, too, but fought the urge. It would only make things worse. I rubbed my torn palm in his curly hair. “See you in the morning,” I said, then turned and left.

The next evening, I watched as my brother took the jar outside and removed the lid. Only a few fireflies flew out. He gazed into the container’s darkness, then turned it upside down and shook it. Lightning bug carcasses tumbled to the ground. That was the last time I played fireflies.

The following summer I spent my days drenched in baby oil in search of a tan, but all I got was a sunburn.

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Valerie Thompson is a Southern writer who spent much of her misguided youth wiping grits off the pages of whatever book she had at the breakfast table. In this story, the quirky protagonist must outfox her mother’s attempts to mold her into a little lady. 

Valerie graduated from the University of Georgia with degrees in English and newspaper journalism. After that, she worked for several years as a crime reporter. Valerie took a thirty-year hiatus and now is at a point in her life where she can pursue her love of writing.

An active member of the South Carolina Writers Association, Valerie considers the members of the Columbia 1 and Short Fiction groups to be her writing mentors. She plans to further develop her craft by taking creative writing classes at the University of South Carolina Aiken beginning in the Fall.