me, but they didn’t confide.
Most of the time I was satisfied with that. I had Cincy, after all. My only other friend—besides Petey Small, my science buddy—was the athletic, red-haired Samantha. Like me, Sam existed mostly in her own world, where sports filled her brain space the way science did mine.
Samantha talked Cincy into running track. If our small school was weak on academics, it was huge when it came to sports. Sam said Cincy was a natural athlete. Her long legs pumping around the cinder oval that ringed the football field reminded me of waves on the ocean, rhythmic and tireless, though I’d seen the ocean only on TV. My own legs were far too short for speed. At five-two, I refused desserts, fighting the natural resemblance to a pear that defined my mother’s figure.
Cincy ran, but she didn’t care about running. Coach Hastings said she could have won any of the long-distance events if only she would concentrate. He put her in sprints, which he said were better matched to her short attention span, and when she won without half trying, he just shook his head. “She’s amazing,” he said to me once. “I love to watch her run.”
She didn’t care about her studies, either. In fact, aside from hanging out with me, only one thing interested Cincy. While I was preoccupied with books and butterflies and the gray dread of going home at night, Cincy’s curiosity turned to boys. How could it not? Whenever she walked down the hall at school, their adolescent lust followed her like a cloud of gnats.
Sometimes she seemed oblivious to their attention, and other times she’d flirt outrageously. Usually she just got that knowing smile—the one I’d first seen in the lunchroom during second grade—and gave me a wink.
I grinned back. “There’s a mean streak in you, Cynthia Jaines. I like that.”
One guy after another began to walk or bike up the hill to Rockhaven, and Cincy would go off with him to a football game or a movie at the Mount Hood Theater. The movie house was the only entertainment in town during cold weather. Cincy and I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons at the Mount Hood, with our feet sticking to the floor and the aroma of stale butter prickling our noses.
If a boy had asked me out, which none did, I knew Ruth would say fourteen was too young to date. But Cincy never asked Lenora’s permission, she just floated away with a jaunty wave. The first time Cincy left on a car date with a guy who was sixteen, Lenora frowned in silence, and I foresaw trouble in paradise.
I’d always envied Cincy and Lenora’s easy relationship. Lenora believed in letting Cincy make her own decisions. They were on the same team, she said, partners. Whereas Ruth and I were perpetual adversaries. My mom criticized everything I did, it seemed to me. But in truth, our arguments traced directly or indirectly to two sources: her drinking, or her resentment of my friendship with Lenora and Cincy.
I suppose the friction that developed between the Jaines women was inevitable. But I knew nothing then about adolescent psychology; what I saw was the crumbling of an ideal. And with so few ideals to believe in, the loss made my stomach hurt. Without being asked, I tried to mediate by voicing the worries I read on Lenora’s silent face.
“Cincy, Danny Soames is too old for you,” I told her as she stood in front of the warped, full-length mirror on her closet door drawing dark red on her lips. “And too fast.”
Cincy cocked her head and undid one more button on the front of her blouse—a sort of barometer of how much she liked each boy she dated. Her hair shone like glass.
The red lines widened into a smile. “You think he’ll take me into the woods and have his way with me?”
“If he did, what would you do about it?”
“Well, Grandma, I’d poke out his eyes and kick him in the balls, just like you taught me.”
“Get real. He’s on the football team. If he decides to rape you, you’re dead meat.”
“I think the expression is hot, red meat.”
“Yuck! Cincy!”
She laughed. “Stop worrying, Rapunzel. I can handle Danny Soames.”
“Oh, yeah. He’d love for you to handle him.”
In the mirror, Cincy’s eyebrows wiggled up and down.
“Aren’t you going to brush your teeth?” I reminded.
“Naw. Kisses don’t taste right when your mouth’s too clean.”
We laughed it off, but secretly I wondered if it were true. I had no way of knowing.
“If your father were here,” I said, “he’d meet Danny on the front porch with a shotgun.”
She dropped her lipstick into a tiny shoulder bag and snapped it shut. “Well, he isn’t here. But I’ll tell Danny that if he lays an unwanted hand on me, you’ll hunt him down and see that he makes an honest woman of me.”
“Making you honest is too big a job for anyone, let alone a jockhead.”
Cincy smiled and shot me the bird.
I watched them drive away in Danny’s dad’s new Chevrolet, feeling that I’d failed as a parent.
That semester my science teacher, Mr. Jenkins, directed us to choose a research project. For me there was no question about a subject. I consulted Lenora, and she handed me an issue of Nature magazine with an article about Old World swallowtail butterflies. One of them was Pharmacophagus antenor, found only on the island of Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa. It was the only African swallowtail known to feed on pipevine, and its evolution was speculated to reveal links to the age when the earth’s plates shifted and separated to create the continents.
In the photos, the antenor’s black wings appeared delicate and narrow. The forewings were marked with white spherical spots that melded along the bottom of the hindwings into rounded crescent-shapes of pale yellow to red-orange. The antenor had a wingspan of five to six inches and a life cycle virtually undocumented by science.
“This is neat,” I said, returning the magazine, “but I don’t see how I could make a science project out of it.”
Lenora sat on a tall stool on the sunporch, methodically examining the leaves of a willow branch for eggs. The porch was warm with rare November sunlight, and butterflies fluttered overhead. Most species couldn’t fly unless the temperature was near eighty.
“Remember Zoroaster, the Morpho rhetenor?” she asked.
I recalled the iridescent blue beauty Cincy had introduced to me on my first visit.
“It was from French Guiana in South America,” she said. “That red-and-black one up there,” she pointed, “is from Asia.”
I looked up, nodding, but I still didn’t get it.
“How would you like to be the first American ever to raise a generation of Pharmacophagus antenor and document its complete life cycle?”
The light came on. “You could get one of those?”
Her eyes sparkled. “The university research facility obtains lepidoptera specimens from approved foreign sources under a special permit for scientific study. That’s what the quarantine area is for,” she said, nodding toward the one end of the porch sealed off by a glass door. “I have an acquaintance in Florida that I met at a conference who’s offered to fund research to investigate the relationship of that species to other members of the swallowtail family.”
I loved it when she talked like a scientist to me. Ever since I’d learned she did actual scientific research on her sunporch, I’d spent more and more time there. And made straight A’s in science class. I knew her income depended on grant money from various sources.
“You could be my research assistant,” she said. “I want to put the immatures—caterpillars and pupae—under the dissection microscope and compare them to some specimens we could get on loan from Sarasota or maybe