The Bee

Arms folded over the balcony’s creaky railing, Zoe looks down at the dancers. As they stumble in time with a skip in the CD, Zoe observes the lines of their movement with unwarranted awe. As impossible as it seems, she hopes that one day she’ll be just as beautiful.

A bee buzzes near her face, almost lost in the rumble of the bars being cleared from the floor. She steps back, startled, and then freezes, worried it might get scared and sting her if she moves too quickly. It floats away from her lazily to the light of the windows. Fully distracted, she creeps behind it as it lands on the sill and begins to die.

It circles around the crumbling-paint ravines on shaky legs, occasionally twitching its wings but never lifting into the air. Bugs live very short lives—the bee hasn’t had time to learn about dying yet. When its legs do finally crumple underneath it, it doesn’t know that it will never move again.

Its wings twitch one last time. Zoe feels like she has witnessed something she will not recover from.

A puff of breath hits her inexplicably sticky cheek. It’s a girl one year ahead of her, a redhead whose parents always put candy in her lunch box.  “Dare you to eat it.”

“Ew.” Zoe pulls her face back, away from the girl and away from the bee.

“Come on.”

“Why would I do that?”

“’Cause I dared you.” She speaks confidently enough that Zoe wonders if she’s missed something. Some agreement between all children that dares were as good as laws.

But her Mom would be way more mad at her for eating a bee than for breaking the law. “No.”

The other girl sighs dramatically. “I heard in school once that some people eat bugs for actual food.”

“Who?” 

“They eat crickets.”

“No they don’t”

“They put them right in the oven. Just like normal food.”

Zoe imagines the fuzz tickling her throat. “That’s gross.”

“They don’t think it’s gross.”

“Do you think it’s gross?”

The girl is silent. She looks between Zoe and the bee with narrowed eyes. “No.”

Zoe catches a wicked idea. “I dare you to eat it.”

The instructor channels anger towards her ex-husband into a stomp to stop the skipping CD. The middle dancer’s heart cringes at something embarrassing she said three years ago. Out by the gas station across the street, the woman who sews the costumes lights a cigarette, cups her hand over it, and takes a drag. Just as incomprehensibly, the redhead girl picks up the bee between her middle and pointer finger and puts it on her tongue. With a scrunched up face, she swallows it.

She puts her hand to the top of her chest, then the front of her neck, then up to her mouth, where she pukes through her stunted fingers. 

Zoe steps back from the puddle on the floor, jamming her mouth and nosed into the crook of her elbow to keep herself from retching as well. She pinpoints one lump in the vomit as the remains of the bee. Imagines it attempting one last soggy twitch of the wings.

Footsteps rush up the stairs to the balcony. “What’s happening?” A woman shouts. “Can someone get paper towels?”

Downstairs, there’s a flurry of movement.

“She dared me to eat a bee,” the other girl says, her voice whiny and distorted by sobs.

The woman fixes an accusing look on Zoe.

“She started it—she said—”

“Is your mother here.”

Zoe looks around, as if that will make Mom any more here. “She’ll be here soon. She’ll say I’m right—”

The other girl starts to sniffle, and the woman turns to her, cooing “Why don’t we get you to the bathroom, okay? Why don’t we get you cleaned up?”

As she walks away, Zoe calls out, “I didn’t do anything.” With no response, Zoe is left alone and rattled. She prepares her case. The other girl dared me first. She dared me first and I said no. She could have said no. I didn’t think she’d do it. I thought she’d be like me and she’d say no and really it’s her fault for doing the bad thing when I did the good thing.

No faults in her reasoning. She pulls up the front of her leotard so she can take a deep breath protected by the fabric.

Another woman comes up the stairs with a roll of paper towels. “Why don’t you help,” she says sternly.

“Because she ate the bee, I didn’t eat the bee.”

The woman thrusts the paper towels towards Zoe, but she takes a few steps back, unsure why the woman won’t listen to her reasoning. “She dared me to eat it first, so really, I only did the same she did, except I didn’t eat the bee.”

“What’s your name.”

Zoe doesn’t answer.

“Do you need me to call your mother.”

“She’ll—”

Zoe falters. The way the adults act, she’s no longer sure. They must understand something she doesn’t.

She glances down, shudders, and takes a crumpled ball of paper towels in her hand.