Standing By

Quitting

I do remember the reactions I'd had later on. The one when I was six years old was still fuzzy—I think I was jumping into a sandbox or something and a bee flew up in my face, making me poof up like the Stay-Puff marshmallow man. I got two days in the hospital with that one. When I was eight, we discovered I had the same disaffinity with wasps when I tried to climb a tree at church and climbed right into a wasp nest. I got stung not once but five times and fell a good fifteen feet, breaking my arm in the process. When I was nine years old, I got stung by a wasp in the house—it chased me from the back door, through the kitchen, past the dining room, and finally landed a good sting on the back of my neck in the family room. Dad had spent ten minutes trying to kill the damn thing while Mom administered the epipen and Casey called 911. He'd gotten really good at it by then. I had a reaction later that month at school on the playground where I kept trying to tell the teacher that there were bees by the slide. Her solution (not my regular teacher but a sub for the teacher down the hall) was to find something else to play on. My friend Jeremy had thrown his shoe at it to kill it, but it only made it mad and I wound up stung anyway, at the end of the slide. The stupid sub scolded me for not finding something else to play on and tried to have me walk to the nurse's office, Jeremy yelling at her how allergic I was. He openly defied her and took me to the nurse, where she injected me with my medicine and called 911. I remember my parents were fit to be tied when they found out.

Sub got in trouble over that—never saw her again. That spring, I was involved with the choir trip when we won regionals and went to Dallas for state. Mine was cut short when, on the way to rehearsal, I was intercepted by some of my flying non-friends, who seemed to think we were interrupting their solitude in the butterfly garden. Naturally, they picked me as their intended victim and got me twice in the arm. Instead of singing on stage, I got a trip to the hospital and a flight home. I'd managed to avoid being stung for a few years, only getting stung once in high school when I was at a friend's pool party. They tried to tell me the bees would avoid me if I stayed in the water, so I was in it all afternoon and got a touch of sunburn on my shoulders, had a slice of cake in the shallow end, won a game of water polo, got my flirt on with the hot chick from science class—and a wasp sting on the back of my hand in the deep end. Getting stung while swimming was a recipe for disaster. I'd started panicking and managed to hit my head on the diving board. Coupled with my own body attacking itself, I went stupid and instead of just hoisting myself out of the water right there, I tried to swim over to the shallow end to walk out on the steps. I ended up blacking out around the four foot mark and ended up going down. Jeremy had to literally fish me up from the bottom of the pool and administer my medicine while Liz ran inside to call 911 and my parents.

Last reaction I've had was soon after I moved to Nashville. I'd scored an outdoor gig in the early summer. First half the show went great—audience was good and energetic, very responsive—and I was having a great time, letting it all hang out there. Then I took my break, grabbed some water and popcorn, started chatting people up. I started getting a little full of myself and was showing off for a cute girl (How low can you go, Tim? Well, let's see!), opened my mouth to sing some low notes for her—only to have one bee light on my water bottle, one to land on my shoulder, and one to fly right into my mouth. Luckily, only one stung me; unluckily, it was the one that decided to brave my mouth. Instead of demonstrating how low I can go, I demonstrated how high I can go, which surprised even me that time. Apparently, any time I want to sing mezzo-soprano, I only need to have a bee sting me on the roof of my mouth. I was able to give myself my own medicine and was ready to try and tackle the second part the show, but the music manager pulled me when he realized my issues and saw my face was twice its normal size. Looking back, he had been right to. I couldn't even talk right let alone try to sing.

Kirkham eyed me as he pulled into a parking garage and parked his cruiser. "Well, my last arrest was a beekeeper that was cooking meth. So we have a few, um... hanging around."