Jar

          “I’ve already beat that gym, like, three times,” Haley huffed over the top of Becca’s DS.
It created a wet fog with flecks of spit on the device’s top screen and left the air between them
reeking of bottled Kool-Aid. The older of the two wrinkled her nose and wiped at the screen with
a turquoise sleeve pulled over her hand.
          “Say it, don’t spray it. This is brand new, you know.” Her voice was terse and her eyes
didn’t glance up to meet her cousin’s. They remained trained on the little pixels that represented
her on the little screen, in a big world far, far away from Haley.
          “I’ve had mine since, like, forever. I have Dialga and Palkia and Shaymin. Why didn’t
you just get a DS sooner?”
          “Dunno.” Becca pulled the collar of her hoodie over her nose so she didn’t have to smell
that syrupy odor every time Haley exhaled. The younger girl gulped more liquid from the bottle.
Her lips were ringed red, both from the bright dye of the fruit punch and from the sheer force of
her sucking on the bottle’s waxy mouth. They matched the pink extension in her hair that she’d
bought at Dollar General. Becca had refused the matching blue one, even though they always
wore matching accessories when Haley visited. Slap bracelets, aloe-infused socks. Something
had changed since last summer: Becca felt it deep within her. It pulled her into herself. She
poked her freckled nose back out after the smell of her sticky armpits made her eyes water.
          “Earth to Becca,” Haley intoned in a robotic voice. She moved her arms blockily. “I said
the fireflies are gonna be out soon.”
          “I don’t care,” Becca mumbled. She started another Pokémon battle. “Go out with the
boys. I’m busy.”
          “But I don’t want to go with them,” the younger girl muttered. “Yuck. Why don’t you
like the fireflies anymore?”
          “They’re nothing special.”
          “Well some of us don’t live in the middle of nowhere. We don’t have them in the city and
I wanna see them.”
          “Then do it.”
          Haley was silent for a moment, then gave a dramatic sigh. She hopped off the quilted
bedspread and trod with bare feet across the linoleum floors. Once she was sure Haley was gone,
Becca climbed under the sheets and breathed in the teal scent of fabric softener and moth balls.
She shut her eyes. She felt lonely. She wondered why Haley had gotten so annoying all of a
sudden. She stayed hidden as heavier feet made their way to the door—she could tell the weight
of the walker by the way their steps reverberated through the kitchen china cabinet. This was her
mother, plus the extra weight of Ava. This made her curl into a tighter ball.
          “Becca,” her mother sighed. Becca heard the doorframe squeak under her weight, could
feel the sound of the pacifier clicking in Ava’s mouth somewhere in her neck. She didn’t
respond.
          “Go out with Haley. You’ve been on your game for too long today.”
          “But I don’t want to.”
          “But I’m telling you to.”
          After a few moments, the DS dinged as Becca saved her game. She poked her head out of
the sheets and slid the device into her gingham pillowcase in hopes that none of the other
grandkids would touch it. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother’s head shaking.
          “What’s gotten into you?” she sighed. She didn’t stop for an answer and took Ava, who
now made little grunts of frustration, back to the dining room. Probably without thinking, she
flipped the light switch on her way out and closed the door to a mere crack. It took Becca a few
moments to leave the dusky embrace of the room and its forgiving quiet. When she nudged the
door back shut with her hip, she pulled her hood over her ears.
          “Finally,” Haley groaned when Becca entered the front room. She was leaning on the
sofa’s armrest, trying to bounce her flip flop on her toe and failing repeatedly. Light thwacks of
foam on tile reverberated through the small room every few seconds.
          “Why’d you tell my mom on me?” Becca mumbled once she was sure no adults were in
the room. Haley shrugged and became especially focused on the flip flop. Her results did not
change.
          “Last one to the pond’s a rotten egg!” Ian called as he entered the room like a hurricane,
running over to his sister’s fallen flip flop and kicking it to the screen door. He almost slipped on
it as he bolted out.
          “First one there’s dirty underwear!” the much-shorter Hayden yelled defensively as he
chased his older cousin. Both fled onto the concrete front porch with bare toes. They slap, slap,
slapped against the hard material until they hit the soft grass and became silent in the night. The
screen door clasped back shut with a click.
          Becca sat by the door and began to tie her Chuck Taylors onto her own naked feet. “Earth
to Haley. Did you hear me?” Still, she didn’t dare meet Haley’s gaze, so she looked as if she
were talking to her grass-stained shoe.
          “I did. And I’m not saying.”
          Becca exhaled deeply through her nose. “Well, your Kool-Aid stained my hoodie.” She
pulled her sleeve over her hand to show two purplish smears.
          “Get your mom to wash it then.”
          With the sticky sound of Haley’s flip flop finally being donned and the swing of the
screen door, Becca was alone again. She took her time tying her brown, knotted laces then, when
she heard her mother push her chair back from the dining table, made an effort to squeeze out of
the house with as little noise as possible. After picking up a dirty jar from the defunct porch
swing, she made her way into the evening.
          Stars were beginning to poke out of the orange-blue sky. The yard was a smudge of ink
occasionally lit up by small fuzzes of yellow. The three youngest cousins wove between the
fireflies, only perceptible as blobs in the dark. The pond’s frogsong mingled with their laughs
and cries. Becca had to get farther away from the house and its humming lights to actually see
their clothes, their pale feet reflecting dying sunlight. As she neared the kids, she took a deep
breath. The cooling air smelled like impending storm. Haley, Ian, and Hayden swung their jars
through the night and collected nothing but humid darkness. With every third or so failure would
come a whine or a sigh, and then they were back to swinging with vigorous force and velocity.
Becca wanted to scold them for being reckless, wanted to usher them in before inevitable
thunder, but also didn’t want to. She felt tired, exhausted by both what she wanted and didn’t
want. She made her way to the pond and sat on a cold rock. Her fingers made hollow taps
against her glass jar. She ran them over the dull threads of its neck, then wiped the dust and dirt
on her jeans.
          The summer before, they’d finally caught a frog. If catching fireflies was hard, frogs
were expert mode. Fireflies’ delicate wings were nothing compared to muscular frog legs that
seemed to defy the laws of physics. The amphibians disappeared into rings on the muddy pond’s
surface the second that any of the kids passed the magnolia tree in the yard, granting them only a
glance of—if they were lucky—the very tip of a spindly brown toe. It required patience and
dedication to see a frog’s full body outside of the water, let alone capture it in an ancient glass jar
with no lid. Becca traced the lichen on the rock below her and remembered the way the frog
pulsed. Is that its heart or its stomach or its breathing? Haley had asked, and she had confidently
answered Stomach like she knew. Did Haley still think that was true? The frog had glistened
under the barely-there moonlight. It had looked golden, lucky, shiny. Yes, it had been almost
exactly this time of evening—the white edges of the pond’s ripples were exactly the same now,
as the fish nosed up for pondbug dinners. She and Haley had lain on their stomachs for what felt
like hours, waiting for any movement in the unmown grass on the edge of the water, occasionally
getting distracted by the glittering murk. Finally, Becca saw it. Moist, shining, vibrating.
Something came over her—she couldn’t replicate it if she tried, and she had tried in the days
following—and she scooped the small quivering blob up with the lip of the jar at just the right
time, a half second before it would have dove back into the pond scum.
          When they examined it under the porch light, with Haley’s hand working as a makeshift
lid to the jar, they saw the frog had peed itself. They laughed until it wriggled out of a crack
between skin and glass, and until they almost peed themselves, too. Just a year later, the memory
seemed strange and cruel. And yet Becca wondered, watching the three other jars occasionally
catch moonlight, if she could feel that way again, the way she did when the frog was in the jar.
The fireflies floated together and then apart in the night, like words that couldn’t quite get strung
together.

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