When I laid a trap to catch the thief that was ripping off my dad’s antique store, I never dreamed I’d get trapped, too.
At least we aren’t headed out of town. Not yet anyhow. I catch glimpses of passing street signs, but the names are unfamiliar. The van makes a final turn and coasts to a stop, then I hear a squeal of hinges. We pass through a set of steel gates and move slowly down what looks like an alley lined in garage doors.
Of course! A self-storage facility. Where else to stash stolen antiques?
Moments later, the SUV backs up to one of the units and comes to a full stop. I hear the doors open and shut, and a woman rolls up the door on the storage unit and starts unloading. To my intense disappointment, I don’t recognize her before she drapes a padded blanket over me.
“Careful!” a low voice warns from behind me. Man? Woman? I can’t tell.
At least I’m being handled gently. They ease me down onto the concrete floor. I can’t see through the blanket, and I’m starting to feel claustrophobic. What would they do if I suddenly screamed? I’m too scared to find out.
In no time at all, I hear the door roll down, and the van drives away.
I immediately concentrate all my will to fight my way out of that blanket. It’s pitch-black here and cold, cold. I feel along the edges of the door. If there’s a way to release the lock from inside, I can’t find it. I’m thirteen years old. Way too old to start bawling like a baby, even if I am freezing. Nothing for it but to burrow back into that padded blanket and remember how I wound up in this fix…
I probably wouldn’t be here if my mother hadn’t been struck by lightning when I was three. It was a bolt out of the blue. Literally. No chance to take cover or escape.
Dad’s mom came to live with us, but when she died five years later, Dad decided I was old enough to do without a babysitter. Every morning since then he pours us each a bowl of cereal and drops me off at school with lunch money. After school, I walk the eight blocks to his antique store where I do my homework, then read or help out.
Supper is usually a bowl of canned soup or the evening special at a nearby restaurant. Back at the house, Dad reads one of the many auction catalogs he gets in the mail, or we watch Antiques Roadshow and the History Channel. We’re both in our beds by nine o’clock. At least he is. Lately, I’ve been sneaking back downstairs and out into the backyard to test the limits of what I can do.
He’s a rather absentminded father, a kindly man more interested in the past than the present. He doesn’t care about my As in math or science as long as I make at least a C in history and know that a Chippendale is a desirable piece of furniture and not a desirable male stripper.
Friends? Hey, I’ve got friends.
Lots of friends.
Okay, okay, maybe not close friends. My classmates like me well enough though. I get asked to all the birthday parties, despite being something of a loner. I’m pretty good with a computer, but I don’t do Facebook. I don’t text or Twitter either, so no one’s ever claimed me as her best friend. I don’t mind. Honest. When I was a little kid, the shop was more fun than any playdate, and as long as I was careful and put everything back where it belonged, Dad used to let me amuse myself with the antique toys or the cases of estate jewelry.
In short, I was as normal-or what passes for normal-as any other little girl until the hormones kicked in last spring and I suddenly “became a woman,” as our gym teacher put it. It was not as huge a trauma for me as for some of my older classmates who had to endure sniggers and crude remarks from gorky boys whose voices were cracking like peanut brittle. Mrs. Kim had thoroughly explained what was going to happen to us and I had watched most of the girls in my class become women before it happened to me, so I was prepared. I had begun to wear a small bra, and I had a package of sanitary pads stashed in the back of the linen closet.
Unfortunately, my first period began during the last period of school one warm spring day. Even more unfortunately, I was wearing white clam diggers. As soon as I walked out of the classroom and headed down the sidewalk toward the store, it was as if there were a gang of feral dogs on my trail-three pimply faced boys who jeered and called, “Hey, Laurel! What’d you do? Sit down in ketchup?” and “Oooh, Laurel! Hurt yourself? Want us to call a doctor?”
One of them pulled out his cell phone to take pictures of my backside.
Embarrassed and humiliated, I began to run, which of course only encouraged them. The store seemed miles away, and as I darted around a corner, the only hiding place in sight was a thick hedge of azalea bushes in full bloom. Even as I dived into them and buried myself among the leafy branches, I knew it was a mistake. With nowhere else to look, they would surely zero in on the head-high azaleas.
“Hey! Where’d she go?” I heard one of the panting boys ask when he turned the corner and saw the empty sidewalk ahead.
“There’s her book bag,” said another. “She must be in the bushes.”
I froze as they pushed aside the flowering twigs. One acne-inflamed face was so close to mine, I could have spit on it, yet he didn’t seem to see me.
“What do you boys think you’re doing?” a woman suddenly screeched from her doorway. “Is that you, Thomas Bertram? You break any of my bushes, and I’m calling your mother.”
Tommy’s mother is built like a Humvee, and it’s rumored that she keeps a leather strap hanging in her kitchen. The speed with which Tommy took off down the sidewalk behind his friends makes me believe the rumors.
When the woman walked out into her yard, I wanted to run, too, but every instinct told me to stay still, don’t move. To my surprise, the woman didn’t seem to see me either. Muttering to herself about destructive kids today, she pushed aside the twigs and azalea flowers to look for damage. Her frown deepened. “That’s odd,” she said. “I don’t remember a white azalea here.”
I winced as she put out her hand to me and plucked a flower. It felt as if she had pulled out some of my hair, but I managed not to yelp.
When she walked away, I tried to leave, but I couldn’t move. To my horror, I was no longer flesh and blood. My fingers were leafy twigs. My curly hair, ruffled white flowers. I tried to scream, but I had no voice. No mouth. No larynx.
Eventually, panic gave way to despair. The legend of Daphne and Apollo was familiar to me because of my name: Daphne had turned into a laurel tree to escape being raped by a horny god whereas I, Laurel Hudson, had changed into an azalea to escape that bunch of adolescent jackals. But Daphne had wanted to become a tree while I-?
I suddenly realized that yeah, okay, when I dived into this clump of bushes, I did want to merge with them and disappear. There was nothing in the legend to suggest that Daphne ever regretted becoming a laurel tree and wanted to be human again, but if I wanted it as desperately as I’d wanted to hide-?
“I want to be a girl again. I want to be a girl again,” I chanted mutely.
Nothing.
I was still an azalea.
“It’s pretty, Jean,” said a voice above me, “but I don’t recognize this variety. You really need to water it, though. It’s starting to wilt.”
“I watered this whole bed last night,” said the woman who had chased away my tormentors. Evidently she had brought a gardening friend out to see me. “Maybe it needs more water than usual. Tomorrow I’ll dig it up, prune it back, and move it around to the patio where I can keep an eye on it.”
Dig me up? Prune me back?
As soon as they went back into the house, I concentrated on skin, hair, teeth, toenails-summoning up all the pictures of blood veins and nervous systems in my health and science textbook. To my total relief, my twigs abruptly became fingers again, my flowers were hair, my branches arms and legs. I scrambled out of the bushes, grabbed my book bag, and ran to the shop. Dad was too busy with a customer to notice that I was almost an hour late.