After dark, outside the Springs at Golden Eagle Campground, I sat on a tire in the middle of the playground, waiting. Summer was dying. Half a moon squinted from the blackening sky. I rewound the tape in my Walkman, screeching and hiccupping it back to the place I wanted, and cut my eyes up at the moon, scowling as I put on my headphones and pressed play. Quiet to start, empty air, then a slow build: guitar, drums, and finally Robert Smith’s voice, familiar and mega emotional. I squinted harder at the moon, trying to make it–or me–disappear.
“It goes dark
It goes darker still…”
Taptaptap on my shoulder. I jumped out of my skin, off the tire, and landed on my feet, smacking Corey on the arm. He was mouthing something as I hit him. I pushed off my headphones to hear what he was saying.
“…freaking out! Yo, April, chill… Stop it.”
I dropped my hand, realizing what I’d been doing. “Sorry.” I said, “I was listening to something. I didn’t know you were here.”
He stuck his hands in his bomber jacket pockets and eyed me cautiously, making sure I wasn’t about to wig out again. He said, “It’s cool.”
Corey was cool, too, I decided. I’d met him four days earlier at the campground. He’d been 14 since February, and I’d turned 14 in July. We were both majorly bored and over our families, so we’d been hanging out.
“Come with me,” I said, and headed up a dirt hill to the pine trail behind the campground. I eyed the Pace Arrow where my mom and little brother were settling in for the night.
“What were you saying back there?” Corey asked. “Something, something darkness?”
“What?” I took out the pack of cigarettes, snagged from my mom’s purse, and offered him a Kool. “Oh. Nothing. Just song lyrics,” I lit my cigarette, handed Corey the lighter. Smoke set fire to my lungs and my eyes watered, but I blew it out smooth. Corey took a drag and immediately collapsed in a fit of coughing.
Ten minutes later we were peering in the window of the May Natural History Museum, a short concrete building with a gift shop, off the dirt road leading to the campground. The sign promised, “One of the largest private displays of tropical bugs in the world! Over 7,000 exotic specimens inside.”
“Have you seen the bugs?” Corey asked.
“No,” I said. Because it cost money to see the bugs and mom didn’t have extra. We’d left Denver two weeks ago, taking the Pace Arrow and whatever clothes we could grab, trying to outrun my father. I’d only seen the man twice in my whole life. Mom said he wasn’t safe. When he did show up, that’s when she made us pack and run. The first time, I was too little to understand. This time, though, school was starting not to suck. I might have been making some friends. But then everything got thrown into darkness.
Corey’s lips were moving again. “…I think we could get into the exhibit room if we went around back and tried the door.”
“Okay, awesome. Let’s go.”
It was easy to get in, but not through the door. A window was open.
Inside the museum, it was too dark to see. It smelled like old wood and time. The exhibit cases loomed. My imagination was catching up to reality when the case in front of us was suddenly illuminated. BAM! A giant frozen spider wrapped its wooly legs around a hummingbird, the bird’s iridescent green feathers and sightless eyes shining in the glare from Corey’s flashlight.
“Dude,” I shouted. “Oh my god,” and we both laughed.
Slowly we walked along the rows of exhibit cases. There were beetles of all sizes and colors, delicate dragonflies, a mind-numbing collection of moths, millipedes the size of small dogs, giant monster sticks, all with hand-lettered signs and pins lining their motionless bodies, holding them in place. My brain numbed out on the bugs. It was starting to get hot in the close space.
“Are you not burning up?” I asked Corey, suddenly irritated. “You wear that jacket all the time. Don’t you ever take it off?”
“I can’t take it off now,” he said, smoothing his fingers over a red and white fabric patch on the sleeve. “I don’t want anything to happen to it.”
“What’s the weird patch thing anyway?” I asked. “It doesn’t go with the rest of the jacket. It looks kinda lame.” I didn’t know why I was being mean to him. I was tired of the bugs and their pins. Their shadows bristled on the walls all around us.
Corey said it quietly, “This was my dad’s parachute. Part of it. He was an aerobatic pilot. One day he was flying in an airshow and there was a problem with the plane. He ejected, but his parachute didn’t work. It got pinned around the wings. When I was twelve.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Do you miss him?”
“Yeah,” said Corey. “He was my hero.”
I looked at Corey not knowing what to say. But he smiled back at me, and something about the look in his eyes made me think–maybe–he and I could be friends for real.
Both of us laughed again, for no particular reason. Corey flicked his flashlight onto a case of brilliant butterflies rising with an impossible sky-blue light of their own. Blue morphos.
“Wow,” we said together.
Like rainbows, I thought. Rainbows in the dark.
Words and photo © Jaime Greenberg, 2022
