The Butterfly Girl
an excerpt

A rather extremely long flashback sort of thing, from somewhere in the middle of the story:

It was dark. It was raining.
The house was warm—our old house on Bethany, with the brick fireplace in the front room and the thick red curtains. It was October, and after dinner, so the dark was normal. It got dark early, late in the year. The rain was normal, too, for the area and the time of year. It had been raining on and off for the past few weeks. It wasn’t really all that ominous at all.
Looking back, there were no warning sighns, no big red flashing lightss to prepare me for what would happen that night. It wasn’t like a terminal illness, that slowly creeps up on you day after day until you expect the outcome, you’re ready and waiting for it. No. There were no signs for me that my mother would die that night. Maybe if there had been, I would’ve acted different. I wouldn’t have done what I did. I would have stayed with her and agreed with her and nodded and hugged her, pressed up close to her warm body and buried my face in her and breathed in the smell of her hairspray and the sweet vanilla perfume she always wore to work. I would have let her hold me close, and been her baby forever. Maybe, if there had been a sign, I could have stopped it all.
But I didn’t.
We were in the kitchen, mom and I. Dad was down the hall in the living room: I could see him on the couch, out of the corner of my eye, with a laptop on his knees and the fluffy orange kitten curled up next to him. There were no warning signs for him, either.
I was angry, really boiling over, like junior high girls do. I was sitting on the kitchen stool, leaning over the countertop as mom stirred the soup on the stove. She was still in her work clothes.
“This isn’t fair,” I told her. “You guys just aren’t being fair!”
“It’s not about fairness, sweetheart,” she said calmly, tucking a strand of chestnut hair carefully beind her ear. “It’s about safety and age and family rules. You just can’t go.”
A concert. I wanted to go to a concert, wit KK and a few other friends, including some boys. I was still twelve, nearly thriteen but still twelve, and mom didn’t think I was old enough to go to an unsupervised rock concert with a bunch of twelve and thirteen year olds. She didn’t think I was old enough to stay out till midnight.
I wasn’t.
“Mom, I told my friends I could go! They’re going to think I’m a total baby because of this! And mom, I love this band, you don’t understand, they never play on the west coast, this is a once in a lifetime chance and KK has free tickets, and—”
“Bridget, honey, I’m sorry, but you can’t go,” she repeated. She took the soup off the stove and dipped her little finger in it to test how warm it was.
“Mom, I’m not a little kid anymore!” I protested. “You always treat me like I’m still a little kid, but I’m not. I’m a teenager now, mom, and my friends are all getting to do things that you won’t let me do!”
This was, of course, not entirely the turth, because for one thing I still had a month or two before I was even thirteen, and for another I had plenty of friends who weren’t going to the concert tomorrow. But I wasn’t thinking that way.
“Honey,” said mom soothingly, putting a hand on my hair and smiling in that sentimental, mom-ish sort of way. “You are getting older, but you’ll still always be my baby.”
She meant that kindly, but I didn’t take it how I would have, if I had known what would happen.
“I will not be your baby!” I objected. “Just cuz you can’t have another kid doesn’t mean you can just keep me from ever growing up!”
“Sweetheart, I’m not—” she began calmly, but I jummped down off the stool and tore away from her before I heard the rest. I paused in the next room to grab my jacket off the hook, and slammed the front door behind me as I escaped into the rain.
So began my continued policy of running away.
I hadn’t meant to actually leave, or go anywhere, or anything like that. I was going to stay in front of the house, maybe walk around the block, but that was it. I would be back before the soup got cold. I just knew that if I tried to escape up to my room, mom would follow me upstairs, and I didn’t want to talk to her. I wanted to be alone, and I didn’t figure on her following me out into the rain to make amends.
I skittered down the cement steps down to the driveway, drops of rain clinging to my palm and fingers as I slid my hand along the metal handrail. I flipped my hood down and let the spray of water mist my hair. The air was wet and icy cold inside my lungs, shocking and calming. It cooled my anger slowly with every breath I took in. I stood under the maple tree, just next to the sidewalk in the front yard, licking the raindrops off my fingers. The street was empty, the glare of streetlights creating halos of murky gold in the puddles. The world smelled of fresh rain, and I just stood there with my back to the house and breathed.
Rain. It was so ordinary, so refreshingly, wonderfully routine. It fell, it gathered, and it evaporated and fell again. Perfect circle, perfectly balanced.
I heard the door open behind me, and turned to see a crack of warm light escaping into the night as it was shut. Mom stood there on the top step, wrapped in dad’s brown leather jacket, looking for me. I turned angrily back around when she set eyes on me and faced the street in twelve year old definance.
Her footsteps were soft and watery on the wet pavement. She stepped up beside me on the sidewalk. I didn’t look at her.
I heard her sigh.
“It’s too bad there’s so many lights around here. From the city. Otherwise it’d be beautiful, the stars right now. Our man-made lights block them out, but—there. There’s one I can still see.”
She pointed, and rather unwillingly, my eyes followed her finger into the sky.
“Remember when you used to wish on the stars, Bridget? You were so little and cute. You wished for a pony every time.” Mom laughed, and I looked at her face, but now she was only looking up at the sky, misty raindrops clinging to her eyelashes.
“You can grow up,” she told me. “You’re still pretty young now, and you’ve still got to listen to your mom, but I’m not trying to keep you a child forever—I do want you to grow up. That’s why kids are born. But I don’t ever want you to get too big and old to make wishes, okay?”
She looked at me and smiled.
“Okay, mom,” I agreed. “But when—”
That was when it began. Or rather, that was when it ended.
There was a loud screech, a blaring horn. There were two bright, blinding lights, and two panicked hands pushing me away. There was a scream, and a crash, and the dark, and the rain, and the night suddenly shattered into a million sharp, chaotic little glass pieces and came clattering to the ground, leaving me lying alone in the wet grass with a broken wrist and salty raindrops of shock pouring down my face.