Innocent

Chapter 15

The first time I ever caught fireflies was the summer I turned six. Daniel thought it would be nice if we could go down to the river with Aunt Zoe. Usually my brother was the one that would sometimes go down to the river to catch them, but this time he decided to take me with him. He and Aunt Zoe showed me how to catch them in the jar. Almost every day when my aunt wasn’t busy with work, we would go down there to catch them. Sometimes it would just be Daniel and I.

The one thing that I liked about catching fireflies is that you could have had a bad day. When you come down here to catch them, everything that happened in that day just slips your mind as you enjoy catching the insects.

And that’s exactly how I felt when James and I returned to the river again that night. We were each carrying our own jar that I got from Aunt Zoe. I showed James how to catch them. We ran around, catching them. Some of them escaped from the jar, some of them we managed to catch, the jar lighting up brightly every time we caught more of them. James began to sing Owl City’s song Fireflies as we caught them. I joined in with him.

After catching them, we set our jars down on the river bank and sat down beside them, watching the insects inside them. As I stared at them I felt like James and I were the fireflies. They were flying around a few minutes go and wasn’t expecting to be captured at all by us. It reminded me of how free James and I used to be before the incident. Well, James was probably not free since he lived with his dad, but it felt as if he wasn’t really a prisoner before until the incident. Like the fireflies were in the jar, James and I were trapped in this world. We had nowhere to go. No one wanted to believe the truth of really happened. They say the truth will set you free, but it doesn’t feel like that for us. Each time we tell the truth it punishes us. And even though we are out here it still doesn’t feel like we are exactly free.

I tell James what I’m thinking. He agreed that our lives were like the fireflies in the jar.

“Do you think we will ever be free?” James asked me.

The question hung in the air. It was a question I wasn’t sure of and didn’t know the answer to.

“I guess so. I don’t know,” I answered.

“If we do become free, what would you do and where would you go?”

I thought about it for a second. “To tell you the truth I don’t know exactly what I would do, but I would like to go to Paris someday.”

“Why Paris?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s a place that I have always wanted to go to. It seems like an amazing place to go to. Although I have heard that the French are pretty snobby and rude people, but I would still love to go there no matter what.”

“Can you speak French?”

I shook my head. “No unfortunately. I wanted to, but the classes for French were full so I chose Spanish instead.”

“I chose Spanish. I wish I didn’t though. I completely suck at it.”

I laughed. “So, tell me what you would do if you were free and where would you go?”

James sat there for a moment. “I don’t know if I want to go somewhere out of the United States, but I would like to go to New York. To me it’s a place where you can go and express yourself to whatever you want to be.”

I smiled. “I want to go to New York too.”

“Maybe we could go there someday.”

“I like the idea of that.”

James reached over and pushed some of my hair behind my ear. “I like seeing you smile. I feel like I haven’t seen you smile for a long time.”