Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything (7 page)

The Buzz. (Also self-congratulatory, if you think like a buzz is a hot topic.)

I guess there's a reason superheroes rarely name themselves. They're usually given their titles by the news media or the adoring public, so they can be called stuff like Superman without having to say, “Yeah, I just looked in the mirror and thought, wow, I am just a super man, aren't I?”

What about:

Vermin. It's got a nice ring to it. But it sounds like a villain. There are a lot of villains named after bugs of some kind. Black Tarantula. Regular Tarantula. Scorpion. Beetle. Dragonfly. Spider-Wasp. Actually, wasn't there a Vermin in some of those old
Spidey
and
Captain America
comics? And maybe in
Wolverine,
too. Vermin was a man turned into a cannibal humanoid rat by some evil experiment, and the wicked Zola used him as a tool to battle Spidey; then he went into psychotherapy to uncover his childhood abuse.

Well, I'm obviously not him. I'll be the new Vermin. A good one. I've been warped by whatever changed me into this fly body—and now I'm going to use my superpowers for world salvation
,

or citywide salvation
,

or salvation of my parents' marriage
,

and by extension for the permanent eradication of all
weirdness and confusion between boys/men and girls/women forevermore—

or if I'm not quite up to that, at the very least salvation of my high school from all the poseur artist-types that make this place such a living hell.

Cammie will be my nemesis. She's out there, talking about stuff she read in
ARTFORUM
and turning boys into drooling idiots with the power of her tremendous biscuits, and she must be neutralized. Here comes Vermin to—

I could buzz in Cammie's ear, I guess, and track my dirty fly feet across her art projects. I could find out stuff about her by crawling in her backpack or coat pockets, or spy on her when she doesn't know I'm looking. But that's not the stuff of actionadventure comics. Marvel would never publish stories about a goth-slut girl being annoyed by a housefly.

Really, I can't do crap.

I'm so tiny that anybody of normal size could defeat me with a swatter or an aerosol can full of Fly-B-Gone.

The only thing I'm really likely to do is battle a mosquito for domination of this stinky old locker room.

Now, if I could only figure out how to switch back and forth at will, THEN maybe I could get something accomplished—find out top-secret information and then use it for the good of all humankind. (And insectkind, too, of course.)

Vermin. I could wear this great leather jumpsuit, and it would zip up the front from crotch to turtleneck. Then I'd have big shiny sunglasses that made me look the tiniest bit like a fly when
I'm in human form. I'll retain some of my fly powers in my human body—like I'll be able to see things out the back of my head, and walk up walls—but to fly, or to sneak into secret places, or to appear to disappear and flummox my enemies, I'll turn into fly form. Just by snapping my fingers.

I spend a few minutes trying to snap my forelegs together to change back into a person.

It doesn't work. I get a snap going, but nothing happens when I do.

Then I try to
will
the change to happen.

No.

I try lying on my back and going to sleep like a person. I buzz back over to the windowsill and lie in the exact place where I first woke up, in case that makes any difference. I try a lot of little rituals—hopping up and down three times, twisting my head a funny way, kicking my legs out.

Nothing works.

I buzz over to one of the mirrors above the sinks, crawl up next to it and have a look at myself.

I am really, really ugly.

A monster. My body is dark gray with black stripes running along it and little wiry hairs sticking out all over, especially on my legs. My face is dominated by two giant composite eyes, and my lower lip is nothing but a tube.

It's hardly a face at all.

I can see now why people swat flies. They are insanely horrific looking.

I'll never get a boyfriend, looking like this.

Oh hell, that is the stupidest thing to think. I cannot believe I just thought that.

If I can't change myself back, then I'll be an insect forever, buzzing against the windowpane, living out my now-puny life expectancy confined to a freakin' locker room.

I should be worried about that—not about whether this nasty-lookin' new body scorches my chances with Titus.

I am not a superhero at all. I am a garden-variety housefly.

Hell, I don't even have teeth.

Desperate to do something, anything, I try to get out of the locker room. I buzz over to the door and bang against the crack for a while (which hurts), then try to crawl under, but it's got one of those rubber sealers across it and there's no way to get through. Then I try the door that opens into the gymnasium, and I can smell the gym-smell of basketballs and dirty sneakers coming from the other side, but I can't get through that one either.

Maybe I can make a break for it when people come in for class on Monday, but there's nothing I can do at the moment. I'm stuck.

I buzz around in a flurry of anxiety, as if moving constantly will somehow burn off the panic that is welling inside of me.

Buzz
Buzz

Fuck
Fuck
What to do, what to do?
There is nothing to do.
ZZZZZZzzzzzzz
Can't get out
Can't change back
Can't get out
Can't change back

There's a spiderweb in one corner of the locker room, and in my panic I almost fly into it, veering back only at the last second and seeing the huge, hungry body of the spider sitting in the corner, eyeing me with silent fury as I zoom away.

Fuck. She could eat me.
Wrap me up in silk and suck my blood out.
Stay out of the corner
Stay out of the corner
Stuck
Stuck
Nothing to do
Nowhere to go
ZZZZZZzzzzzzz
ZZZZZZzzzzzzz

Jacked up with fear, I fly around the other side of the room in circles, my mind electric and unfocused. I go for hours upon
hours, frantic, unconscious of anything except the desire to fly as fast as I can—as if I could fly myself farther from the spider, out of this room and out of my own fly-body.

Finally, after Saturday has faded into Sunday, which fades into night, I stop flying and go into a trance. Not exactly a sleep; more like my brain shutting off for a while, and my body going still out of complete exhaustion.

m
onday morning, I feel a bit better. Sunlight is streaming through the frosted glass, making pretty squares on the tile floor, and I quickly realize that what woke me up is the sound of a door swinging shut. The clock reads 7:40, twenty minutes before school starts.

A senior I know only by sight, this guy called Hugh, is in the room. He's African American, light skin, with short dreadlocks and a pair of supersize sunglasses always plastered on his face. I think he's in the sculpture program, and I know he used to go out with this girl Dawn.

Anyway, Hugh marches on in, bangs open a locker, tosses his leather bag on the floor, kicks off his sneakers and
drops his pants.

He drops his pants!

How did I not think of this before?

I was so busy pretending to be a superhero
,

and freaking the hell out about my situation

and hoping that any minute I'd be turned back
,

that I never considered the obvious:

a locker room is for naked guys.

And when the school week starts, they're all going to come in here and take off their clothes.

It's happening now!

Naked guys!

Oh my god!

Hugh throws his pants into the locker. He's wearing little white undies on the bottom, a yellow T-shirt on top and argyle socks.

He takes off his shades and tucks them carefully into the bag, then pulls his shirt over his head. Then in nothing but his Calvins and socks, he pads over to the minilockers, unlocks his little drawer and pulls out some gym shorts and a pair of Nikes. He rummages in the leather bag for some sweat socks, a jockstrap and a gray T-shirt, then pulls down his underwear entirely.

Naked, except for argyle socks.

Now, this Hugh has an extremely fine body. He's a pretty coffee-with-milk color, and he's got a small waist and muscles rippling across his chest and back.

Seeing him naked, I feel a jolt of what I can only describe as lust.

I don't think I've felt lust before. Not like this.

If you'd asked me, I would have said I had—but now I think I hadn't.

Like with Shane: I was excited, I was into it and everything, and however far we went I was glad to go there—

but that was all in the context of us making out. I felt it when stuff got hot. Especially that time in the back of the movie theater. But I wasn't shot through with an urge to pounce on him when he was in the middle of doing something else. I didn't want to throw him on the tiles of the locker room
,

and stick my tongue down his throat,
and run my hands across his chest,
and rip off my shirt.

But that's how I feel now, when Hugh gets naked.

It's like he's suddenly this lust object to me, not a person at all. And I'm now this person who can look at other people like objects—not objects to draw, but objects to have my way with.

Which is a new feeling.

But then I remember that I am not a human girl. And even if I were, Hugh would never look at me—probably doesn't even know who I am. He goes out with people like Dawn: tall confident girls with some junk in the trunk.

And besides, don't I actually find him an annoying poseur? Don't I actually think he's an airheaded slickster who doesn't care about anyone but his crew of tough seniors and the babes who follow them around? What am I doing lusting after someone I don't even think is a nice person?

Or is that the nature of lust? It's like an urge that disregards all the stuff that your brain knows you actually think.

I wonder if guys feel like this all the time. Or maybe if everyone feels like this all the time—everyone besides me—and that's why people act like such half-wits.

Anyway, although it sucks that I can't have my way with Hugh, at least I can buzz over and check out the goods in some detail.

Really, the only undressed man I've ever seen is my dad, and he stopped letting me in the bathroom with him about ten years ago. Since then, I've seen not one fully naked guy—although I have seen:

the movie
The Full Monty
, where you see a lot of guys in their underpants but never see the actual Monty itself, if you know what I mean,

several movies in which Ashton Kutcher or Josh Hartnett or some other star takes off his shirt,

lots of Greek and Roman sculptures with fig leaves covering their gherkins,

people at the beach, including one European guy whose bathing suit was so small it looked like nothing more than a little orange hammock for his package,

swimmers and divers on television, who are nice to look at but you can never look for long before they hurtle themselves into the water,

black-and-white illustrations in our biology textbook from last semester, which showed the gherkin circumcised and not,
plus one of it being erect, which surprised me since I had figured it would stick out perpendicular to the body but really it turns out to point upward at like an eighty-degree angle,

and

Shane with his shirt off last fall, but nothing showing below the belt.

Oh, and we sometimes have models for drawing class, but because we're underage they always keep most of their clothes on.

I fly down to have a closer look at Hugh, who is taking off the argyles. I'm ashamed of myself, but I go in for close-up gherkin-information-gathering right away. I mean, I don't consider Hugh's privacy at all.

I'm a total Peeping Tom. Or Peeping Sally. Whatever.

Hm.

It's a blob of skin and hair.

It looks floppy and kind of humorous, actually.

You know how there are all these phallic symbols? Like giant skyscrapers and cannons and swords and things that are big and macho and shaped like a gherkin, supposedly, and they're symbols of masculine power?

Well, the actual gherkin doesn't look anything like a phallic symbol. Honestly, the idea that Spider-Man and Orlando Bloom and the president of the United States all have these blobs of skin and hair flopping off their midsections underneath their clothes and bouncing around when they walk—it's actually funny. Worse than biscuits; those bounce a bit when I run but it's
really not a problem. Honestly, if I had what Hugh has got between my legs, I don't know how I'd ever even sit down or pull on a pair of pants, much less play dodgeball.

It's a major liability.

I think he's medium-size, though I don't have anything to compare it to. It's floppy and even shrively-looking. Like in this state, at least, none of those words people use seems to fit.

My sword,
my torpedo,
my pink trombone,
my rocket,
my Longfellow,
my voodoo stick,
my staff of life.

It's nothing like what you'd think when guys are bragging about being well hung, or sticking it in some girl, or some crap like that. I mean, it's got a kind of magnetism about it, like it's ugly and good-looking at the same time.

But not what I had imagined.

It's more human, I guess.

Hugh swats at me vaguely as I buzz around his midsection. I fly up to the top of the lockers and keep staring at him.

It is interesting to see a boy's body up close. My own body has a thousand imperfections; I mean, my human body did, when I had one. Fuzzy-looking eyebrows, no muscle definition, thickish ankles, bitten fingernails—but I never gave any thought to the idea that a popular guy like Hugh would have imperfections,
too. I mean, overall he has a great physique. Girls look at him all the time. But he's got a spray of zits across his shoulders,