Archive of Our Own ^beta

I.

Isla March had been teaching primary school for seven years. Though there were other teachers who had been at this school for decades, in her short tenure thus far, she felt that she had met just about every type of student, and every type of parent, too. Year one was a time of great anxiousness and excitement, and it brought out the best and the worst in children and adults alike. Children were away from the watchful eyes of their parents for the first time, and they took delight in it, whilst their parents wrung their hands and tried not to worry about every little thing. That was normal. It was the time for a child to grow, to open themselves to the possibilities of learning, of deep observation, of challenging themselves alongside their peers. There was the challenging and the testing of boundaries too, but this was only a precursor to growth, and to a new emotional maturity that parents were privileged enough to witness. By all accounts, it should have been a wondrous time for every child and every parent.

March loved being an educator. It didn’t matter what life deigned to throw at her—she was determined to come out on top. And she had never met a child she didn’t love, even the ones which were poorly-behaved, because they all had something to give, but she had met many parents she didn’t hold in the highest regard. Richard Bashir, sitting impatiently in the chair in front of her desk, was one of these. She rubbed her eyes delicately and stopped herself short of heaving a sigh. It wouldn’t be proper to steal a glance at the chronometer.

“Your son is well behaved.” They were discussing how Jules had tantrums at home, and she was quick to assure them that these were few and far between in class, though there was the occasional incident.

“But he’s not doing well,” Richard said. He had the dour face of someone who had been subjected to meals of replicated tinned soup for a month. They were on something like minute fifteen of this parent-teacher conference, and March wanted nothing more than for it to end.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I understand your concerns. He’s not doing as well as his peers, but—”

“I want to know how we can get him to achieve top marks,” Richard interrupted.

“I want to set realistic expectations for what your son can achieve.”

“So,” he said, “my son is damaged goods, is that it? He’s never going to be bright enough for top marks.”

March stared. The words were so ugly that she could not countenance them. “No. No, to be clear—I believe Jules needs quite a bit of extra support. This conversation is about how we can offer that, both at school, and at home.”

Richard’s nose wrinkled. “Tell me, Miss Marsh—”

“March.”

“March, then. How many other pupils’ parents are you having this sort of conversation with?”

“I’m afraid I can’t share those details. And it isn’t really relevant,” she said, bracing herself for Richard’s inevitable outrage.

“I think it is,” Amsha said softly. March started, and she and Richard both looked at her. It was the first time she’d spoken since introducing herself now sixteen minutes ago. She had been otherwise invisible all this while, letting her disagreeable husband lead the cavalry. “Jules will only fall further and further behind his peers, especially if he cannot connect with them. Does he have any friends?”

It was a legitimate inquiry, but March wished she could melt into the floor. Children never liked what they couldn’t make sense of, and as a result, Jules was a lonely boy. It was as she said—he was well-behaved enough. He sat in the front rows every day (one of Richard’s first questions upon arrival was to confirm this—March assumed it was one of several demands for his son). Sometimes he talked over other students or teachers, but that sort of egocentrism was developmentally typical for someone his age. His attention would wander at times, but it was obvious to any adult who worked with children that Jules Bashir was by no means a malicious troublemaker of a child. For the most part, he was actually a very calm, level-headed boy, a trait which she hoped would serve him well into adulthood. After all, there were all kinds of professions that required almost preternatural ataraxy. But as far as friendship went…

It was obvious that March hesitated for a moment too long, because Amsha shook her head, knowing the answer, and stared down into her lap.

“He can’t recite the alphabet,” Richard added in the protracted moment of silence. “The alphabet.”

“And we will continue to practise that skill with him,” March insisted.

“He can’t spell his own first name. Five letters. Five. Six if it’s his legal name. It’s really not that sodding difficult—I don’t understand what he doesn’t get about it.”

March nodded crisply. “About that—are you practising at home?”

“We are,” Amsha said, looking back up. “Of course we are.”

“Every evening,” Richard added proudly.

There was some fleeting tension in the air—a brief flicker of uncertainty in Amsha’s eyes, some steely resolve in Richard’s, and March’s stomach did a little flip as she wondered about the boy’s home life. For the first time, March noticed that the soft skin under Amsha’s eyes was puffy and her lip was jutted out as if she were holding back tears, or she were on the precipice of some great outburst—and wondered if there had been some kind of quarrel between the two before they had even stepped foot in the building. There was a sort of tragedy in parents who wanted from their children what they could not give, and worked themselves into a lather over when their child would begin meeting their expectations.

She herself knew that like every child, Jules had his strengths and weaknesses. He was absolutely no exception. No, he couldn’t read yet, nor spell his own name—but these were things that could be taught, practised, refined. What the boy did possess was an innate sense of curiosity in the world around him. He was fascinated endlessly by his surroundings, to the point where it drove him to distraction. He asked intelligent questions, even when he didn’t understand the answers. It was impossible to understand how his parents were writing off their son as an unmitigated disaster, or a non-starter. Surely they had noticed these qualities in their son—they were to be celebrated. She was reasonably certain that he needed time and patience. Most children did. Some just needed a little more than others.

But, even if he did turn out all right, she thought sadly, he would likely continue to find making friends very difficult. It was not an easy skill to grasp. It was not the sort of thing one could learn from a book.

“All right, and what progress has he made?”

“Very little,” Amsha said anxiously. “He can’t get past ‘J’ most of the time. Sometimes he makes it to ‘L.’”

“Bloody ridiculous, if you ask me,” Richard said.

“Some children,” she said, “start out a little delayed. There’s no reason to be panicked yet. I’d like for us to continue offering Jules extra support where he needs it, but we have seen this sort of thing before. It’s possible that he will catch up with his peers within a year or so.”

Amsha mumbled something March didn’t catch.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Or not,” Amsha repeated, a little louder. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her. “Maybe he won’t. What if our son doesn’t get any better? What if he’s always this way?”

March clasped her hands as well—whether this motion was to ground Mrs. Bashir or herself, she could not say—and took a serene breath, steeling herself. “I understand it may be a scary thought, but many children have learning disabilities, and with support and remedial or special education, they can flourish—”

“What?” Richard said, cutting her off. “A what? What was that you said?”

“A learning disability.”

“Miss March, I’ll thank you not to insult my boy.” His voice was tighter than piano wire. “He’s not an idiot. He’s not an idiot.”

March opened her mouth, shocked and affronted. “I never said anything like that, Mr. Bashir. I think no such thing.”

“You think my son is an idiot,” he repeated, staring daggers at her. “You think he’s disabled. Well, you listen here, Marsh. Any son of mine will get top marks, or—”

“I think,” Amsha said, standing so quickly that her chair shrieked across the tile floor, “we should go now, Richard.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. Richard opened his mouth to continue his tirade, and she squeezed his shoulder. “That’s enough. I believe our time is up.” She gave March a thin smile, stretched out like saltwater taffy. “We wouldn’t want to intrude on Miss March’s time, or the next conference.”

March, out of the corner of her eye, finally checked the chronometer up on the wall, with an air of polite graciousness. Their time wasn’t anywhere close to up and the meeting after theirs had been rescheduled to next week, but she wasn’t going to protest their leaving. The conversation had been far more about his parents, a sure sign that they weren’t going to get anywhere with it.

Richard snapped his mouth shut and rose. Amsha muttered some words about thank you and sorry and good evening and they hurriedly excused themselves. March supposed that was that, and exhaled the sigh she’d been holding in. Her next parent meeting wasn’t for another hour and a half, and she tried to busy herself with some overdue paperwork. She couldn’t focus on it for very long. Guilt gnawed at her, and she sat at her desk uselessly for a long time, ashamed of herself. She ought to have said something. Anything would have been better than silence, acquiescence. Anger, an impassioned, righteous defence of their son, a comforting platitude. Anything. She didn’t know what to say to make it better. Not for Amsha and Richard, and certainly not for their son, who couldn’t yet spell his own name.

It wasn’t until sometime over twenty years later into her long, successful career teaching primary school in three different cities that Isla March, whose hair had begun to show its grey, curled up in her flat on a rainy, dismal, typical English weekend and found herself comforted to learn she had been right after all. Sleet slapped against the window panes, and she was irritated to think of how the pavements the next day would be iced over. But for the moment, she was safe inside the comfort of her own flat, a hot water bottle pressed up against her.

Jules Bashir had transferred schools before the end of his first year, and she’d wondered occasionally over the years what became of the boy. It wasn’t that she had forgotten him, only that he had receded to somewhere in the stores of her memory. It was on this day that Isla March was confronted with the past, and learnt that the young boy she had known once made something of himself. As she looked down at the oddly familiar name and face on the front page of the news on her PADD, it seemed that the youngest-ever nominee for the Carrington Award really had come into his own, eventually. She smiled to herself. His parents must have figured it out all on their own, then.

She never met a child she didn’t love. Never met a child who wasn’t capable of being extraordinary in some way. All each of them needed was someone to believe in them, and time to grow.

II.

Children are frequently blissfully unaware of the happenings around them. Jules Bashir, in particular, was experiencing the kind of blissful unawareness that meant he was not listening to what his teacher was saying. His father had instructed him to sit in the front of the classroom, insisting it would help with his focus. How this was meant to work wasn’t clear to him, since Jules was able to not listen just as well from the back of his classroom as the front.

Miss March was talking. He knew this, so he reasoned to himself that he actually was listening—just not to each word she was speaking. He wasn’t entirely sure how or why listening was expected of him. The classroom was too bright, and John was whispering something about rugby to Shea a row in front of him. That was distracting. And from here in the second row, he had the perfect view of the courtyard outside, and could see two older students in year five on their afternoon break, volleying a felted tennis ball back and forth across the court. The ball was a blur. He was transfixed.

“Jules.”

At this point, the shorter kid, a redhead girl with pigtails, hit the ball with her racquet at a strange angle. It met the pavement with a thwack, and went promptly flying out of the court like a dove slicing through the air. He heard the peal of laughter from the other kid as she ran after it, her twin tails bouncing against her shoulders.

“Jules.”

He snapped his head back to attention and looked up and away from the window. Miss March was standing right in front of his desk. He hadn’t noticed that the lesson had ended, and that the other children were starting to pack up for the day. A few times a week, he would stay after class for extra tutoring.

She fixed him with her best ‘remember what we talked about’ look. “Were you listening?”

Miss March was too nice to lie to. That, and lying was wrong, no matter the reason, according to Mum. Besides this, Miss March was nice, and she made him want to be nice. She always spoke gently, and he liked the sound of her long skirts. They made a swish-swish sound when she walked. She loved skirts, and wore them almost every day. Each one of them had lots of colourful pictures on them—she called them patterns. Today, on this Wednesday, she was wearing a smart black roll neck paired with a skirt that had animals swirling all the way down. They had oval bodies and wings, like a bird—but they weren’t birds, either. Birds had beaks, which were triangles, and triangles had three sides. These animals didn’t.

It was pretty, he thought, the skirt. And the animals were red—no, he reminded himself, not red. Red was like tomatoes, and the animals were like mangos. They were orange. He mumbled a response.

“Take your thumb out of your mouth,” she said, not unkindly. It was the firm tone that also said no arguing but without any anger behind it. He did so. The air was cool against his damp thumb.

“Were you listening?” she prompted again.

“Yes,” he said, though he knew he was lying. Mum would be disappointed in him, but it was probably worse to tell her the truth because then she would feel bad that he hadn’t been listening.

Slipping a piece of paper on his desk, she asked, “Did you understand what we just covered?”

He looked down at the piece of paper on the desk. Miss March didn’t like using computer screens for learning. Reaching out, he plucked the paper off the desk and held it in both his hands. There was a picture of the same animal that was on her skirt on it, and some words—labels to describe it. Then he shook his head after a moment and put it back down. He couldn’t read the words. He should have been able to, he thought. The other kids seemed like they could make sense of it, but all he saw was squiggles and curves and lines. He kept waiting for them to transform into the same words he spoke, but they never did. “No, I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”

That was his common refrain—I don’t get it. Or failing this, I don’t know. Adults seemed to leave him alone more often when he spoke those words. When they left him alone, they would stop making the same faces that his mum and dad made at him. Their mouths would twist like the branches of a big tree. He wasn’t sure what to call it, only that the feeling made his stomach twist, too. He knew something wasn’t right. He was fairly certain it was with him, but he didn’t know what, because he listened more than he understood. He could hear it in their low, hushed voices after they put him to bed. Some nights he would crawl out of it and press his ear to the bedroom door, holding his breath. Downstairs, he could hear Mum crying sometimes, Dad speaking in a tone that Jules knew meant nothing good. Sometimes he caught snatches, wisps of conversation that escaped, echoing softly up the corridor.

When one is young, they think that their parents possess every ounce of information in the world, and as one grows, a parent and a child begin to meet each other halfway, until the child knows just what their parents do not. Jules was still most thoroughly bewitched by that unwavering belief in his father.

He was sure that his parents loved him. Mum would sing to him sometimes before bedtime or read books to him, and smooth down the stray hairs that would invariably escape from his unruly waves and curls. She would pick up his small hands and hold them in her own. He looked up to his mother, and he thought she was especially pretty. In the mornings she would hum over by her mirror, brushing her hair in long, even strokes, and spritzing on a perfume that he could smell when they hugged, whiffs of gauzy rosewater and luscious Medjool dates. He loved it when she or Father picked him up and swung him around, or sat him on their laps. He didn’t weigh all that much, and so they did it often. And his father was a clever man, who had lots of thoughts and opinions on everything.

His parents would love him more if he were clever, he thought. He knew that he wasn’t, but he didn’t know how to become clever. It seemed a natural thing that children did, went to sleep and woke up being able to count to one-hundred and back. He fancied that there was a maths fairy and a reading fairy. If there was a tooth fairy, then he saw no reason these oughtn’t exist as well, but though he waited night after night, he was never any closer to understanding either of those subjects, and his parents’ despair only deepened.

Once, he woke up thirsty in the middle of the night. Padding his way down the stairs, he found his parents there in the kitchen, with all the lights but one off, his mother with red eyes sitting on a kitchen stool, his father with his arms crossed. There were mugs of tea in front of them, but he could tell they’d been sitting there awhile; there was no puff of cloudy steam rising from either of them. They both turned and stared at him, and none of them said a word as he moved to fill a glass with water from the tap.

As he reached the corridor, something compelled him, and he looked back at them.

“Mum, Dad?” They stared at him with wide eyes, as if they hadn’t expected him to speak. “Are you cross with me?”

“No, Jules,” his mum said in a choked voice. “Go back to bed.”

Miss March was one of the few adults that didn’t leave him alone, no matter how long it took him to understand things. She crouched down, and pointed at the animal on the paper. “These are butterflies.”

“Butterflies,” he echoed.

“Yes.” She pointed at the various parts, explaining each of them to him. She pointed out the wings—‘like birds,’ he said, and she agreed—the legs, and the eyes, and something called a proboscis, which was a squiggle that wasn’t a word. He tried out that word for size a few times (“Pro-biscuits! Pro-biscuits!”) and found it agreeable. As she went on, he thought about how he had seen those animals, the butterflies, in Mum’s garden. She had a modest one out front—they could only have a big one if they lived out in the country, she said, but the city was where all the good schools were. Butterflies would alight upon the peonies and primrose and wave their wings back and forth like hands, beckoning. They looked like paintings that belonged on the wall of the National Gallery. They had gone there on a school trip last month. He had really liked looking at all the grand paintings, though he couldn’t understand how humans could have possibly made them.

Miss March was asking him a question again, and he tried to draw himself back to reality. “Do you remember what we call that?”

Jules shook his head again. “No,” he said, sheepishly, trying not to give away just how little he had been listening. It was hard to pay attention. He hadn’t meant to be rude, though his mum and dad told him all the time that he was being impolite. “I’m sorry.”

“Metamorphosis. Do you remember when we read the book about the hungry caterpillar?”

He nodded. This, he remembered. “It ate all the food.”

“Can you speak a little bit louder, Jules?”

“It ate all the food,” he repeated, louder this time. “He had a tummy ache.”

“That’s right,” she said encouragingly. He liked that tone of voice. “And did his body change?”

“He got bigger.”

“Yes. And what happened in the end?”

“He turned into a…” he hesitated.

“Yes?”

“A butterfly,” he said, haltingly.

“Yes, that’s right, Jules! Caterpillars need all that food to grow into big butterflies. That process is called metamorphosis.”

He tried to repeat the word, without success. She told him that it was okay. “Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be working with caterpillars. We’re going to be raising them and watching the process of metamorphosis right before our very eyes. Isn’t that lovely, Jules?”

He thought so. “Why don’t humans…” he tried again to repeat it. “Met… met-um…”

“We don’t go through metamorphosis quite the same way—but we do go through many changes to become grown-ups. We need to eat food to become tall and grow strong. Many insects go through metamorphosis, because they’re different from us.”

It didn’t make sense yet. “I don’t get it. Why do they do it like that? And not like people?”

“Unlike us, they go through a total change. Humans usually grow taller, but we don’t change shape entirely. That’s what metamorphosis describes—total transformation.”

As she walked him through it again, it was difficult to understand how the caterpillar and the butterfly were the same creature in two stages of its life. They looked nothing alike. The caterpillar was striped and couldn’t fly, and the butterfly had wings (in a completely different shade, no less), so that should have made it a bird. Except it didn’t have that telltale triangle beak, so it was definitely different. And baby birds were born with wings. Miss March patiently explained again that this was because birds weren’t insects. But that still didn’t explain what the butterfly had to do with butter, because insects weren’t food, either.

“How does it work?” he asked.

“How does what work? Can you be more specific, Jules?”

“How does the caterpillar change its shape in there?” He pointed at the picture of the chrysalis. It looked like a lump. “It eats a lot. But how does it change shape? How does it get big?”

“That’s a very good question,” she said thoughtfully, and he glowed. She lowered her voice like they were in on some kind of conspiratorial secret—he liked secrets. “The caterpillar doesn’t actually get bigger. When it makes its little house,” she said, placing her finger on the picture of the chrysalis, “it releases something called enzymes. And the enzymes actually dissolve the caterpillar. It kind of… eats itself and turns into something… gooey and squishy and… soupy. Think of… it turning into mushy peas. And then it rebuilds itself into a butterfly, from scratch.”

Most of what she’d said went squarely over his head, except for the part about mushy peas. A vivid picture took shape in his mind: a caterpillar being smashed up into a pile of green goo. He blanched. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“I… I don’t actually know,” she admitted, half to herself. “It’s less of growing and more like… a remaking. It can’t be easy.”

“Does the caterpillar… die?” he whispered.

“No, Jules—it becomes a butterfly.”

“But does the caterpillar die?” he pushed. “Bye-bye.”

She widened her eyes and laughed as if he’d said something funny. “Goodness. I think that’s rather existential, even for me. Unfortunately, I can’t say I teach philosophy.”

He didn’t really gather what she meant by that, nor why she was laughing; he hadn’t made a joke. The process of metamorphosis sounded downright horrifying, and he thought he might be sick to his stomach, unable to stop picturing green mushy-pea goo morphing into a butterfly. He was relieved humans didn’t do that. “Why? Why does it have to do that? Turn into a butterfly?”

“That has a very complicated answer,” she said, “But the short version is that flying gives it access to more food and to get to safety. It makes it easier for them to find a safe place to find other butterflies so they can reproduce, and lay eggs.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The caterpillar changes into a butterfly so that it can be better,” she simplified.

“Better how?”

“In just about every way,” she said.

“Okay, better better butterfly.” He could accept that as an answer, and he liked the wonderful way it sounded. It made sense in a way. Flying was better than not flying. That much seemed obvious to him. He was silent for a moment. “Does the butterfly remember the time when it was a caterpillar?”

Miss March didn’t answer. She was distracted, looking at the chronometer up on the wall. “I’d love to answer all your questions, Jules, but our time is up. Mrs. Adeoye will be here to pick you up any moment now, and we shouldn’t keep her waiting. Let’s get your coat on.”

Mrs. Adeoye was his next-door neighbour. Her son stayed after school for piano lessons, and she didn’t mind driving Jules home too on days he stayed late, since Jules’ parents were so busy. She had a copy of the key to their flat.

All the way to Mrs. Adeoye’s aircar, and all the ride home, he couldn’t stop repeating himself. “Better better butterfly. Better better.”

III.

He felt, more than heard, the front door slam. Everything in his bedroom shook slightly and the window latch rattled before going still. He paid no attention to it, determined to ignore it. Dad was home, and in one of his moods. The best thing to do was stay out of his way, he had long since gathered. When he got home from school, most days, he would drag the duvet from his bed onto the carpet (the carpet was itchy) and ensconce himself in it like a robin in its nest, ruffling the batting this way and that until he was perfectly comfortable. His parents had long since stopped complaining about it, as long as he didn’t wear his trainers, and certainly no wellies, in his bedroom. Shoes and duvets didn’t mix. He was almost always content to sit in his room like this for hours, his legs crossed, Kukalaka at his side. He was the best company because he did whatever Jules wanted to do, and never complained or asked to do anything else, and right now, he and Kukalaka were listening to something. Only Jules had headphones on, but he reasoned that Kukalaka’s big ears meant he could probably still hear.

Jules was an only child. Clara Adeoye, who also attended his school and was in his year (there were actually two Claras in his year; therefore this was Clara with the plaited hair) lived next door—and she had two sisters and one brother, the piano player—all of whom were older than her. It seemed to him that they lived a very different life; they would run about shrieking in their small front yard or up and down the pavement, and they fought over things all the time. They had a noisy little dog, too, a Jack Russell terrier—almost all white, excepting the ears and a massive black splotch on his flank that resembled an anvil.

Sometimes Jules and Clara would cross paths at the corner shop with the tattered blue awning. Jules was never allowed there on his own, but Clara was, even though they were the same age and the walk from their flat was just five minutes and you only had to cross the road twice. His own mum didn’t like the corner shop very much—it was too dimly lit, she said, wrinkling her nose. Better to just go to the proper grocery shop a short drive away.

He liked the corner shop. It was like a cave of treasure with its crowded shelves, lights that barely worked. He especially liked the packages of crumbly biscuits tucked up beside lemon curd and marmalade. Instant coffee and tea competing for space on a narrow shelf (the tea always lost, since it was in a flimsy cardboard box that would invariably be squished, and the coffee was always in a thick double-walled jar), and beside them, cans of meat and veg stacked up loftily like precarious castles. Warm rolls and baps crammed into a self-serve box, and to the right of that, a small refrigerated area with milk lined up like soldiers, bunches of wet herbs that smelt like garlic and grassy soap, and all manners of cheese. And at the counter, sweets that his mum and dad never approved of him eating, stuffed into the clear case under the till, which he eyed with envy.

The bored teenager at the front most days was the shopkeeper’s daughter and she must have liked him, since sometimes she would slip him a chocolate bar or a box of Smarties when his mum had her back turned, even though he never had any way to pay for it. She would always wink as if they were in on something and draw a finger to her lips—he knew well enough that this meant to keep quiet. What he didn’t know was why they were sharing a secret at all. Maybe the shopkeeper’s daughter—Elsie, her name was—didn’t like his mum. Elsie was a dropout, which meant she hadn’t been clever enough for higher education, according to his father. All the bright kids passed their A-levels and went on to higher education, and the rest had to make do with some kind of boring job to fill their days. It wasn’t necessary, since everyone got clothing and food (Miss March told him there was a time that wasn’t true of the human race), but it was famously said that the English still believed in hard work, and he wasn’t sure that sounded like a very good thing. Maybe that was their secret, he eventually decided. He could see his future in her, the person he was to become. They weren’t clever enough, and he was to be like her, a dropout. He wouldn’t mind working at the corner shop, if it meant he could sit about and daydream. It didn’t seem like a bad life, as long as he could bring Kukalaka.

Kukalaka went everywhere with Jules, even in his school bag so he could talk to him during playtime. His mother had told him time and time again that it wasn’t a good idea to bring him to school, since he would fall apart at the seams. This wasn’t especially a deterrent to Jules, once he had found where his mother kept her sewing kit—in a biscuit tin inside his parent’s bedroom. She had been frightened when she found out that her son had got his hands on her needles, and was even less pleased to learn that the only time her son had a steady hand was when he was in possession of a small, sharp object. She only allowed it because the alternative was binning Kukalaka or having someone else sew the bear up, and either option resulted in non-stop screaming. She complained about how unsafe it was to his father, who didn’t look up from his tea and only said, “Splendid, I suppose he can always be a tailor if all else fails.”

He lay back on the duvet and shut his eyes, letting the sound of what he was listening to wash around him. The duvet was soft beneath him. At that very moment, he heard his bedroom door open, and knew it was his father. Right away, he sat up. His father was mouthing something that he couldn’t hear through the sound. Reluctant to be drawn away from what he was doing, Jules lifted the headphones off his ears and placed them in his lap, blinking up at him.

“What is that… thing?” his father repeated, with a half-hearted gesture.

“An audio-book,” he said slowly. He had to sound it out. “Miss March showed me how to use it.”

His father made a disapproving sound. “So, you’re listening to a book. You wouldn’t need that if you could read,” he said. “Then you could read properly, like regular children your age do.”

“But I don’t know how,” he said. Miss March had told him that people of all ages listened to audiobooks. But he couldn’t deny that they were his only option, because he had no other choice.

“If you just try, harder to, then maybe—”

“But I can’t,” he said, tears of frustration prickling hot and uncomfortable in his eyes. He didn’t want to cry, and he rapidly blinked them back. They wouldn’t help. “I just… can’t.”

“Then you’re not trying hard enough, are you? Don’t you want to be able to read? Don’t you want to be clever?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “I’m trying.”

“And what,” Dad said, “is this audiobook of yours about, exactly?”

He knew Dad was hoping for a certain kind of answer. Something that made him sound like he was learning something. Something that made him sound clever or bright. Something that made him sound like he was trying. He wouldn’t have known what sort of answer would have pleased his father, though, as he hadn’t managed to before, and so he could only resort to honesty.

“Tennis.” The protagonist had just secured the match with a flawless ace.

“Oh, tennis, hm?” he repeated. “This obsession again? Well, Jules—you can’t. You can’t. You can’t play tennis.”

“But I really want to.” His throat felt tight. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, and it wouldn’t be the last. Even many years later, his father would turn up his nose at the idea of his son playing tennis for anything more than a hobby.

Dad shrugged haplessly, as though he were greatly put-upon. “All right. You tried. You went to a tennis class, and what happened, Jules? Remind me?”

“I couldn’t hit the ball.” There was a painful feeling in his abdomen, and he thought that he would be sick. When he was seven years old, he would learn that the word for this feeling was humiliation. He grabbed his knees and curled up defensively.

His father threw up his hands savagely. “That’s right. And you couldn’t serve the ball. Couldn’t hold the racquet properly, either. Couldn’t forehand, nor backhand. And when you could do all these things, the ball went flying right into the net. That’s the truth of it,” he said. “You weren’t made for tennis.”

“What was I, then?”

All the ire fled out of his father’s body language, and he lowered his hands. “Er, now just what kind of a question is that?” He sounded exasperated. Richard Bashir was suffering under the impression that children thought very little, and that his son thought even less.

“I don’t know,” he said in a small voice, wishing he hadn’t said anything at all. He began to rock back and forth, wound up tightly. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Well, neither do I,” his father replied irritably, perhaps having been caught quite off guard by the disarming frankness of the question, and by his son staring up at him, his eyes tinged with ingenuous bleakness. “Never mind about that, then. And stop repeating yourself. And for god’s sake—don’t say you can’t. Stop doing that motion! Stop it!”

It took all his effort to stop rocking where he sat. “Right then,” his father said softly. “Dinner will be in an hour.”

Once his father had closed the door to his room, Jules stuck his thumb in his mouth and collapsed into a heap and lay there atop the duvet until it was dinnertime. Mum wasn’t at the table, which meant she was working late again. He wished he could teleport away from the dinner table. He knew transporters existed, but he had never seen one, except on the holo-vee when he was watching a show. He had seen an up-close of the consoles once, and had wanted to run his hands over all the knobs and slides. Spacefarers and long-distance business travellers used them mostly, so he had no business being near one. But if he could get up close to one, just once—

“Julian!”

This voice and the use of his full first name meant he hadn’t been listening again. He willed himself to concentrate on what his father was saying.

“You’re not paying attention, are you? Did you hear what I said?” his father asked, sitting across him, gesticulating with his fork as he chewed. “Eat your peas. You’re a growing boy.”

He looked down at his plate, and his stomach did a little leap like a ballerina executing a clumsy pas de chat. A pile of mushy peas sat untouched on the ceramic plate, which had a design of bluebirds circling the rim. Mushy peas had never seemed less appetising than they did now. All he could think about was dreadful metamorphosis. There was no way to be certain that he wasn’t eating hot, squashed caterpillar.

“You’re too skinny, you know,” Dad remarked, scrupulously cutting up a fish finger in a self-important manner (although Jules had recently learnt that fish didn’t have fingers, and they were actually just fashioned that way by people). “And too short. You need to eat more. You’ve got to put some weight on.”

Dinner went by slowly. It always did when it was just the two of them. Mum had a way of filling the room with her lively chatter about work, and her questions, and her that’s nice, Jules. His father seemed happier when she was around, as if he were uncomfortable being in the same room with his own son. As if he were looking at an alien, maybe a blue one, with antennae. They were eating alone together more often than not, because while his mum had work to do, his father was out of a job again. He was interviewing daily, but without much success. Jules had once suggested he apply for a job at the corner shop with the blue awning, but his father had shouted, asking if his son thought he was a layabout and an idiot, and that was the end of that conversation.

When the plates were finally cleared, Jules rose to leave, and his father told him to wait. He immediately felt anxious as he sat back down in his chair, his legs dangling. They didn’t touch the ground, and the paediatrician was hoping for something called a growth spurt to right that. He was also hoping for a spurt, so that he wouldn’t have to go see her as often anymore.

“Spell your name,” Dad said. It was always either spelling or the alphabet. His parents had tried maths, but had given up on it.

Jules took in a deep, long breath. He knew where to start. “J…”

“Good…”

Your name, Jules, he thought. Jules. Sound it out, just like the teachers said. J-ooh-lz.

“O…”

“No!” Dad said, his face twisting again, always twisting into that scowl, and Jules cringed away from him. “No, damn it all. No. U, why don’t you ever get it into that thick head of yours? U, Jules. J-U-L-E-S. It’s not difficult. Try ‘dog.’”

“D-O-G.”

“Right you are. Now spell ‘cat.’”

“K—”

“C. C, Jules. C. Again.”

“C-A-T.”

“Name. Er, the word, not yours.”

“N-A-Y—”

“There’s no ‘Y.’ You know this. We discussed this last week.” Jules didn’t respond. His father placed his head in his hands and mumbled mostly to himself, “God. You’re not well.” When he looked back up, his shoulders were as stiff as a traffic bollard, his mouth still warped into that perpetual moue.

“I’m trying to get better,” he finally said, his voice shaking. He didn’t like how his own voice sounded. Like the window latch, rattling all the time when it was windy in the winter.

Dad sighed and rubbed his nose. He looked more tired than he ever had before. “I know you are. I know. What are they teaching you in school?” he muttered.

It was a rhetorical question, mostly, but he couldn’t have known that. “We’re going to grow up butterflies,” he said. “Better better butterfly.”

“Say that again.”

“Better better butterfly.”

“No, the first bit.”

He said it again.

“Butterflies,” Dad said. His tone had taken on a quality Jules didn’t like very much. “You’re raising butterflies.” His face reddened, and Jules wanted to run upstairs and hide under his duvet. He stayed where he was, staring up at his father, bewildered. His dad dug his nails into the palm of his hand. Standing up and pushing his chair, his father began to pace back and forth, muttering to himself. “Not to read or write. Do you have any homework tonight?”

“No.”

“Those… teachers… they must be mad. And that’s why you’re like this, I suppose?”

The disappointment wasn’t lost on Jules. He said the only thing a child could, under such circumstances—though it would not be enough. “I’m really sorry.”

“I don’t want apologies,” he said. He disappeared from the kitchen and returned shortly with a pencil and paper. “I want you to be able to spell your own name. To write it.”

He looked helplessly down at the paper, and up at the disapproving face of his father. “I can’t.”

“Right, then figure it out. I don’t care how long it takes you,” he said. “Sit here until you can spell your name. Sit here until you can. Your full name. All three of them.”

“But—”

“No buts,” he said. “None. There is no reason for you to be like this. You are six—almost seven years old in a few months. You know what other little boys are doing?”

“What?”

“Learning. Learning maths—reading, history! And now your mother and I have to spend our time worrying about whether you’ll make it to secondary education, to say nothing of higher ed. You want to think about extracurriculars? You want to play tennis? Start thinking of your education first, and then we’ll talk about tennis. Now sit here, and write your name.”

Jules sat there well after Mum got home from work. He didn’t succeed that night, or the next.

IV.

The caterpillars had finally arrived. Apparently, it was possible to put caterpillars through the post. He wondered if they got bored like that, waiting about in a box. He asked Miss March why they couldn’t have used a transporter to get the caterpillars there in an instant, but she told him that the caterpillars weren’t important enough to warrant the use of a transporter, and that it would be a waste of resources and energy. He thought she should say that to the caterpillar prime minister’s little face, if there was one. On this particular day, he was determined to pay attention, even from the second row seat he had managed to get. Everyone was squirming anxiously in their seats, straining to get a closer look at the two cardboard boxes that sat upon her desk. Miss March was still giving everyone instructions about handling the caterpillars carefully and to not shake them about—it would hurt them, she said, since they were such small creatures. They were to be very gentle with their caterpillars, and opening the cup was strictly forbidden—doing this would get your caterpillar taken away, she warned. There were enough caterpillars for everyone, so they wouldn’t have to share. She began to pass them out and there were oohs and ahhs.

He studied his. “How can they breathe inside there?” he asked, eyes fixed on the cup.

“There’s holes in the cup, see?” Miss March said. “Look closely.”

He squinted. “They can breathe?”

“Yes, they’re very small, and don’t need as much air as we do.” With that, she moved on.

“Yours is really small,” someone said beside him. It was Noor. She was wearing a bright pink t-shirt with a horse mid-gallop in the centre. A little bit round, she had an endearingly pudgy face, with two dark, perfect eyebrows that all the other girls were jealous of. She was very nice, though some of their classmates thought her awkward and unseemly. He liked her a lot, and blushed when she spoke to him, though he never knew why he felt that way.

Noor liked horses a great deal and had brought a book about ponies to show-and-tell last month, and she liked to play pretend as a horse. They didn’t have uniforms, so they could dress however they wanted within reason, and as such, Noor’s wardrobe featured quite a few horses. There wasn’t any reason not to like horses, Jules decided. Maybe it would be nice to be a horse.

Noor thrust her cup forward to show him—her caterpillar didn’t seem perturbed. Jules looked at it, and then back at his. His was only half the size of hers, and hers was latched firmly onto the side of her cup, its six stumpy pencil-dot legs proudly on display, while his was only resting upon the substrate. He wished his caterpillar would climb the walls of the cup so he could see it better, but it was just sitting there like a lump.

“That’s the runt,” John said, inserting himself into their conversation. He was sitting in the row in front of Jules and suddenly turned to perch on his chair backwards with the unearned confidence of a well-heeled child, and Jules thought it might tip right over like a wheelie bin on a windy day, taking the boy with it—right onto his desk. “It’s perfect for you.”

“Thanks,” he said, eyeing John’s chair nervously. John flashed him an unselfconscious smile that he couldn’t read. He had a gap between his two front teeth, which Jules didn’t like very much, though he couldn’t place quite why. Everyone in class liked John. He was taller than the rest of them, but not scrawny, and he was rather well-read for a child. He could read the books the rest of the class couldn’t, and he claimed that their local librarian let him go into the grown-up section of the library. He sat in the front of the classroom because he wanted to, not because his parents instructed him to. All of this gave him an intoxicating air of authority, as though he were an adult like Miss March. His mum and dad had prestigious jobs, and he spoke of them often. When he wasn’t talking about his parents’ jobs, he was talking about the riding lessons he was taking with a private tutor, or the sports he would play with his father. It was a given that he was the head of the class.

“You don’t know what a runt is, do you?” he asked. It wasn’t a question, even though he phrased it as one.

“No.”

“It’s smaller than all the other ones. It’s weaker than the rest.”

“Why? Is that bad?”

“Probably,” John said. “My aunt is a dog breeder. Labradors, actually. Sometimes she gets runts in the litter. She had a runt in the last one. She named it Barney. But it didn’t make it.”

“John,” Miss March called. She had been helping another kid and had just noticed the way his chair was precariously tottering. “Sit properly in your chair!”

He shrugged at Jules. “Well. My mum always says, you get what you get, and you don’t get upset.” With that, John turned around and plopped back down into his seat.

“What happened to the runt?” Jules asked. John didn’t answer—maybe he hadn’t heard. “What didn’t it make?”

“Look, Jules. Mine isn’t moving,” Noor complained to him.

“Maybe it’s just sleeping,” Jules suggested. “Mine isn’t moving, neither.”

“It’s either. And maybe,” she said, doubtfully.

“That’s perfectly normal,” Miss March said, walking past their desks. “The caterpillar needs two things: rest and food. Put the cup down, please, be gentle.” To the class she said, “You’ll notice that each of the cups have tape on the front of them. Please take a pencil and carefully write your name on the tape. This is how we’re going to tell all your caterpillars apart.”

Jules picked up his pencil, but didn’t move to write his name, intently and acutely conscious of his inability to do so. Miss March came by and asked if he needed any help.

“That’s all right, Miss March,” John said, interjecting. “I can help him. You have lots to do.”

“That’s very kind of you,” she said, glowing as though John had bestowed a munificent gift upon the school’s treasury. “I’ll leave you to it.”

“First,” John said, when Miss March had moved halfway across the classroom, “you have to stop holding it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that,” he said, with a vague handwave. “That’s not how you hold a pencil. It’s not a lolly. Hold it proper.” He held up his own pencil. “Like this.”

Jules tried to imitate him, but he was too clumsy to manage it, and he only managed to drop the pencil. It clattered against the desk and rolled onto the floor. John gave a long-suffering sigh as he reached down to scoop it up. “Here, give me the cup,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

Guilelessly, Jules handed over his caterpillar cup. “It really is small,” John said, once it was in his possession. He turned the cup upside-down and gave it a little shake. The caterpillar didn’t move. “Kind of dodgy.”

“Don’t do that!” Jules said fervently.

John raised both eyebrows and turned the cup right-side up. “All right, fine. Sorry. Don’t have one of your freak-outs.” He scrawled on the tape and promptly returned the cup to him. The scrawl on the side didn’t look all that similar to how he wrote his own name, but he was never able to do it correctly.

Noor chose that moment to lean over. “I’m putting my caterpillar’s name on mine. Rose the Caterpillar.” She saw his cup and frowned. “That’s not how you spell his name, John.”

“Yes it is,” John said urgently. “Come on, Noor. And you forgot an ‘L.’ There are two in ‘caterpillar,’ and it’s one word, by the way.”

“No,” she said, still staring at Jules’ cup. “That’s not right. That’s mean.”

“He doesn’t need his name on it. He can’t read,” John said. “We know which one is his. Look how small it is. Poor sod.”

“If you don’t fix it, I’m telling on you.” She raised her hand into the air to make good on her threat, but Miss March currently had her back turned.

“Okay, fine!” John hissed. “Put your hand down, Noor.”

“What does it say?” Jules asked anxiously.

“Nothing,” John said, rolling his eyes. He looked at Noor for elucidation, but she just looked at him with a sort of enormous-eyed sad stare, like she couldn’t or didn’t want to explain, like he was a puppy or some kind of animal that could hear but couldn’t really understand English save for a few key phrases, and he decided maybe he didn’t like horses after all; they were stupid creatures anyway, and all they could do was gallop very quickly and poo.

“Tell me,” he said. His voice started to quiver. “Please tell me what it says.”

“Look,” John said. “He’s going to cry. He’s going to have a freak-out. Oh, god. Don’t do that.”

Noor snatched his cup off his desk and worked her eraser over it for a minute. Now the tape looked ugly and worn-out, just like his ugly, small caterpillar. She wrote over it, and placed it back on his desk. “There,” she said, in a soothing, strained voice. “I fixed it for you, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, with a sniffle. “Thanks. Okay.”

“Your caterpillar is fat,” John said to Noor. “Rose needs to eat less, or it’ll grow up to be a cow instead of a butterfly. It’s probably a boy, anyway.”

She said nothing, but glared at him with slightly wet eyes. John gave them both one more penetrating once-over, then snorted, and turned back around. Jules looked down at his cup and the ruined tape-label, the top right corner of which was sticking up dreadfully and would no longer stay flush against the cup, and wished he was somebody else. It was okay, he told himself. Okay, okay, okay. All the caterpillars would grow up and become big, better butterflies, even if they were small now. His caterpillar was going to be one, too. Better better butterfly.

They were all told to place their cups on the worktop at the back of the classroom, away from any direct sunlight that might errantly find its way into a classroom in England. Then they were to wash their hands at the sink, since they’d been handling insects. When it was his turn, he slathered the soap all over and placed his hands under the frigid water for a long time, until they were like the too-cold hands doctors always placed on him, and kept scouring his skin as though he might scrub the stupid out.

V.

By next Monday, Noor’s caterpillar had long since woken up from its nap and was eating everything in sight, and John’s caterpillar had tripled in size. His caterpillar was eating too, but it was still small, outpaced by its hungrier peers. They were supposed to observe, take notes commensurate with their age and skill (‘the bug is big and green.’). John had a ruler in his school bag which he used to measure his ‘to the millimetre.’ Jules found a way around the note-taking requirement, by drawing the cup the same way on every page, as well as he could, and then holding it one arm-length away from himself, so he could see the caterpillar the same way each time, then drawing his caterpillar in it. He could tell that it had gotten a little bigger, because it had started out about the length of his pinkie nail, and now it was nearly as long as his thumbnail. It hadn’t left the same telltale trail of moults inside the cup that the other children’s caterpillars had. Caterpillars shed their skin regularly, like it was an itchy, too-big jumper. Noor’s caterpillar, Rose, had moulted three times already. John’s caterpillar, which he claimed he was above naming, five times. His own, just once.

Like the rest of his classmates, he couldn’t tell if his was a boy or a girl. The type of butterfly was called a Painted Lady, even if it was a boy, which all the girls in the class thought was funny and felt superior about. He named his Patter. He worried for his small insect instinctively, as nearly any creature given something much smaller than it to protect does. Like the others, Patter was moving about, albeit a little sluggishly. He couldn’t help but be disappointed. Eating and growing bigger was the caterpillar’s only job, after all, he thought resentfully—there was no maths for it to do, and certainly no spelling exams. It was only responsible for growing up.

All the boys had made a contest out of counting how many balls of poo each of their caterpillars produced. Whoever’s caterpillar produced the most frass, as it was called, would get a bag of sweets, funded by Charlie’s mum. Nick’s caterpillar was winning by a sizeable margin; his caterpillar was named Godzilla after some old film from Japan, and it was already incredibly rotund and gorging itself more every day. Patter was in second-to-last place, since Em’s caterpillar had stopped eating over the weekend, even though hers was bigger than his.

“Give it time,” Miss March said. “It just needs time.”

VI.

Something was a little different that afternoon when Mrs. Adeoye dropped him off. He slipped off his bookbag and padded softly through the corridor—Dad’s shoes were in the hallway, which meant he was already back, although that wasn’t usual for the hour.

He found him in the kitchen. Father was sitting up on a stool at the worktop, working on something on a PADD with his usual brusqueness. When he saw that Jules was back, all he did was look up from his work and greet him. There was no agitation in his voice, no questions about how school was, or what he had or hadn’t learnt. Jules placed his school bag on the floor and looked up at him, trying to decipher what was different.

His father got up and opened the fridge and pulled out the milk and poured a glassful, then stuck that in the microwave and hit some buttons. The room was silent, except for the soft hum of the microwave.

“You like tennis, right?” his father suddenly prompted, still staring at the mug pirouetting round and round on the microwave plate. The kitchen smelt sort of warm and plasticky—his father swore that the thing was breaking down and that they ought to just replace it with a modern heater that could do the job three times as fast, but his mum swore up and down that the microwave did its job just fine and there was no need to bin something that still worked.

Jules, who was unpacking his bag, looked back and perked up right away. “Tennis?”

He nodded, still not turning to face his son. “That’s right, Jules. You’ve always wanted to play tennis, yeah?”

“Yes, tennis,” he said excitedly, waving his arms. “I—”

“Now, just hold your horses. There’s no need to go into it,” he said gruffly. “Do you want to be good at it or not?”

“Yes,” he said, a little hesitantly. He wasn’t sure if this was going to lead to his father telling him he couldn’t. He already knew it.

“All right.” The microwave beeped, and he smacked the button to open it harder than necessary. He took the mug out and opened the cupboard and removed a tin. He pried that open and placed a generous spoonful of a malty ecru powder into the milk, briskly stirring it—it was purported to have a lot of vitamins in it, but was quite dubious on that front, since it tasted like dessert. “Sit down. You can unpack later.”

Jules abandoned the school bag and hoisted himself up onto the stool at the worktop with some difficulty. His father placed the mug in front of Jules, who eyed it with some measure of suspicion. Rubbing his moustache thoughtfully, he finally said. “I have some exciting news. I’ve got a new job.”

“What sort of a job?” he asked, taking a tentative sip of the milk. It was hot.

“I’m going to be a diplomat,” his father said, without the characteristic puffing-out of his chest. He just sounded tired, as though he hadn’t slept very well. “Something worthy of my station. And decent wages, too. I’ll get you tennis lessons, all right? Proper ones.”

Jules immediately forgot about the milk. “Really?”

“Really. We’ll try again; have a do-over.”

He couldn’t contain his excitement, and flapped his arms. “When tennis?”

“Don’t flap, you’ll knock the mug right over. Not now,” he said. “In a few months. We have to move for the job. Er, it’s not here, actually—it’s on Invernia II. Do you know what that means?”

“No,” he said. It didn’t sound like any part of England that he knew very well. His father explained that it was on another planet, and that yes, they would get to use a transporter at the spaceport, and if he behaved himself, maybe the engineer at the console would let him look at—but not touch—the buttons and the slides. They would take a ship to get there, and they would see lots of aliens. The blow came when his father told him that he wouldn’t be finishing his school year, which would end in just over a month. They would be leaving in two weeks, and this meant that they had to start packing immediately.

“They need me to start right away,” he said, when his son protested. “That’s how it works, when you’re a grown-up. You have grown-up responsibilities.”

“But what about school?” he asked.

“That doesn’t matter, and it’s almost summer, anyway,” his father said. “You’ll get caught up at your new school. Don’t worry.”

That didn’t sound much like his father.

“Are we leaving forever? Bye-bye.”

“No, not forever. It’s a four-year diplomatic contract. That means we’ll be back in England when you’re eleven.”

“Does Mum know?”

“Yes. She knows.”

Now, her absence during such an important conversation seemed conspicuous. “Is she working late again?”

“She…” he paused, thinking about whether sharing information with him that he couldn’t really understand mattered. “She needs some time alone, Jules. She’s staying at your auntie’s flat tonight. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

He didn’t question it. After all, Father knew what he was doing. When they ate dinner that night, his father would listen to him talk animatedly about tennis, and wouldn’t stop him once, nor would he pester him about eating all his vegetables. He would promise him that after his seventh birthday, he would sign Jules up for tennis lessons, and he wouldn’t try to stop him when he shrieked with delight and waved his arms about at the dinner table. His father would gather the dishes and wash them by hand this time, and would tell Jules to go play in his room.

“But aren’t we going to spell words tonight?”

Richard Bashir looked back at his son, and Jules mistook the look on his face for forgiveness of his flaws. “No, we’re not. Forget about it for tonight. Er, in fact, you know what? Let’s go to the corner shop and get some sweets—go get your coat on.”