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Margaret had been spoiled with the phrase “You’re not like other kids.” She never considered herself better than the people she met or kids she went to school with but she never really connected with them either. Her mother, Grace, would tell her it’s because most girls would rather play dolls or go shopping or just hang out with other girls their age and talk about clothes and boys-not hang out with their older brother and talk to cockroaches. Gregor liked Margaret’s quirks though and didn’t mind when she let the cockroaches or rats inside and he always remembered all the names and who was who of Margaret’s little “pets”.
When Gregor moved away from the family’s farm house in Virginia when he turned eighteen it about crushed her. When Gregor told Margaret he’d love to have her come live with him in New York four years later, her mother nearly had to tie her down in order to keep her in Virginia until the end of that school year. Two years later, Margaret was fifteen and she lived with her twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five year old brother in a small, crappy apartment in New York City about five blocks away from Central Park.
The two of them had a happy life together. Margaret went to school at the closest high school and Gregor did an assortment of odd jobs to pay the bills and went to the occasional night class at the cheapest college they could find in the area. Gregor still called her “Boots” and she still talked to cockroaches so “Nothing much had changed” or so their mother said every time she came to visit or called to check up on Margaret and make sure she was eating right and getting enough sleep. Margaret never really understood why her mother eventually stopped trusting Gregor to always take care of his sisters but she knew it happened around the time Gregor ran away for close to six months with no phone call home-only to come back even more scarred than when he left. There was a lot about the relationship between Gregor and Grace that Margaret didn’t understand. Her dad used to say that the two of them were too similar to get along-that they both thought they knew what was right for everyone but they could never agree on it so instead they fought. Her older sister Lizzie usually just said to “leave her out of it”.
Even when they were struggling to pay the bills and the heating or cooling in the building didn’t work, life was easier in New York. Gregor was happier and most of the time the rest of her family just sounded happy when they called or visited instead of angry or upset like they were in the years leading up to and directly after Gregor moved out. Gregor said it was because by the time the family made it to New York or got around to calling, they were too tired to be mad about whatever had prompted the visit or call in the first place and all that was left was the realization that they missed the two of them.
It was early summer and it was already sweltering hot for a north-eastern city like New York. It was the day almost every kid in the neighborhood left for summer camp but luckily for Margaret she was too old for Gregor to force her to go and Gregor would later admit that he would have missed her if she left. Margaret had come up with the theory years ago that Gregor wasn’t actually bad at making friends like he said he was but scared of getting too close and it was why he was so grateful for Margaret’s continuous company.
Since she had no school to go to and most kids were gone, Margaret was occupying her time on the fire-escape outside of her window. For as long as she could remember, Margaret loved heights-especially when they were outside on windy days. It was at times like that that she could pretend to be flying. Today the air was too heavy for the slight breeze rustling the trees to make up to where she sat but she still preferred her perch five stories above the ground than inside the apartment.
Margaret’s attention had actually been drawn outside by the small buzzing of a fly against the closed window. Like Gregor, Margaret had never been fond of killing things-insect or not-and would much rather help than harm the small creatures that ended up inside the apartment so she went to open the window and let out the fly and ended out following it out of the window. She wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting outside enjoying the sun on her skin and the sounds of life going on around her when she noticed two bugs had come to join her. Cockroaches.
What was probably an hour later, Margaret heard a door in the apartment open and close. There was some shuffling and then she heard Gregor curse quietly under his breath. She laughed quietly when he called an apology to her general direction. A few minutes later Gregor poked his head out of the window and smiled at her.
“Hey Boots.”
“Hey. Where did you go this morning?” Margaret replied, swinging her legs back around and crossing them in front of herself.
“Krespies had another leak. Wanted to see if I could patch it up for them.” He explained. Gregor cocked his head to the side and his shaggy bangs fell into his eyes briefly. “There room out there for me? It’s hot as you-know-where in here.” Smiling, Margaret made room for her older brother.
“But be careful. We have visitors.”
“Crawlers?”
As much as Gregor liked Margaret’s little quirks like loving heights and talking to bugs, she loved his. Gregor seemed to have a different name for every little creature Margaret brought home. Crawlers, Fliers, Spinners, Gnawers, Nibblers, the list went on and on. Honestly, Margaret preferred Gregor’s names.
“Two of them.” She confirmed and Gregor, shirtless, crawled entirely out of the window and sat down, the two crawlers between them.
“Tick and Temp?”
Margaret isn’t sure why she always takes to naming the creatures she finds, or why the list of names is always so short but Gregor never seems to mind and he always knows exactly what name or names she’s chosen without her telling him so it stopped bother her a long time ago.
One of the things Grace hates most about Margaret living with Gregor is that she’s afraid he might influence her to do something Grace doesn’t approve of. Margaret is pretty sure she just means getting a tattoo. Gregor has a countless number of tattoos scrawling across his body which tend to take attention away from the multitude of scars he boasts. Some of the tattoos are small pictures made up of black lines and shapes that makes up rats and bats but most of the ink is of words and names. Along Gregor’s right side, mostly hidden by his arm when his arms are down is a list of names. Some Margaret recognizes as names she’s given small creatures and toys she’s grown up with like Tick, Twitchtip, Thalia, and Ares but others she doesn’t quite recognize like Hamnet, Henry, and Mange and yet they seem oddly familiar. Under the picture of a bat, tattooed above Gregor’s heart, is a small poem that reads: Ares the flier, I bond to you. Our life and death are one, we two. In dark, in flame, in war, in strife I save you as I save my life.
Other small little phrases like “Fly you high” and “Run like the river” are mixed in with longer quotes and poems that must have hurt immensely to have tattooed onto Gregor’s sides, inner arms, and back like they are.
Margaret was lost in thought as she looked over the scrawling text on her brother’s left side when she heard him mutter quietly “It’s probably a lot cooler down there.” Curious as to what he meant, Margaret inched closer, mindful of the crawlers.
“Down where? Virginia?”
Gregor’s eyes widened when he looked at her, as if he hadn’t realized he had spoken aloud; which he probably hadn’t. After coming to live with Gregor in New York Margaret quickly learned that sometimes when faced with a problem of some sort Gregor would talk out the issue as if he was having a conversation with someone. The most common “people” he talked to were Ripred, Luxa, and Ares but sometimes there were others like Howard and Vikus too.
“What? Oh no. Definitely not Virginia.”
Something had happened in Gregor’s life that Margaret wasn’t sure if she would ever really understand. She wasn’t sure when it happened or why it had affected her family so much but she knew it was what made Gregor the way he was. She knew it was the reason he was so scarred and that more than likely his tattoos were his way of having some connection to whatever it was that happened. She was fairly certain it was what made the family move when she was still too young to remember most of it, what made her parents so protective, what made her parents put Gregor through years of therapy he didn’t take seriously, and more than anything it was probably what made him runaway all those years ago. Even though Margaret was desperate to know the whole story, it was the one thing Gregor never wanted to talk about and she respected her older brother too much to push him.
Once when she was ten or eleven, Margaret had asked Lizzie what had happened that made them move and put so much stress on the family but Lizzie just told her to be happy she couldn’t remember. Lizzie was fifteen or sixteen at the time, had finally gotten over her stutter and shyness and was getting tired of being connected to Gregor who was known for being a little too strange, even for a New York-er, in that small Virginia town.
“When you’re up high like this, do you ever feel like you can fly?” Margaret asked suddenly.
At first it didn’t look like Gregor was going to answer her but finally he looked up at the sky and nodded. “All the time.” For a while it seemed like that was the end of the conversation until Gregor leaned back on his hands and looked at her. “Do you remember when you were younger and you used to try jumping off of high places?” Margaret shook her head. “You did it all the time, some places were high than others and even when someone was there to catch you I would get so scared those few seconds after you fell.”
“Why did I stop?”
“One day no one came to catch you.” Gregor was quiet as he rubbed his hand along a few of the names written on his side. “Thankfully it wasn’t a very long fall and all you did was bruise a few things.”
“I still love being up high though.” Margaret almost felt like she was arguing, defending herself though she couldn’t figure out why.
“I don’t think a small fall like that could take that away from you Boots, just make you realize that Aurora and Ares won’t always be there.”
Margaret knew better than to ask but the question of who Ares and Aurora were to Gregor was on the tip of her tongue.
“Did Lizzie ever do silly stuff like that?” Came out instead.
“No Lizzie kept to her puzzles and ‘brain-games’. It’s probably what made Ripred like her more than the two of us. She was quieter than you and smarter than me.” Gregor replied with a half-laugh. Margaret didn’t know if she was more frustrated with the idea that she still didn’t know what Gregor was talking about or that Lizzie probably would-Lizzie who stopped wanting to be a part of her and Gregor’s “games” years ago.
Tick crawled onto Gregor’s hand. Margaret and Gregor both watched the small crawler silently as it tired, and failed, to crawl much higher than Gregor’s wrist.
“It looks like Tick likes you.” Margaret muttered quietly.
“She loved you though.” Gregor replied, not taking his eyes off the small creature.
Margaret watched different expressions flicker through Gregor’s eyes before he picked Tick off his arm and placed her back onto the fire escape. Gregor silently went inside but he didn’t bother to shut the window, allowing Margaret to hear him berate himself over “saying something so stupid to Boots” though what part of the conversation he was referring to Margaret didn’t know.
A half-hour later, Gregor, now wearing a shirt, stuck his head back outside.
“Hey Boots. What if I said a friend of mine wanted to come visit us?”
Margaret arched an eyebrow.
“You have a friend that isn’t me?”
Gregor smiled when he realized that even though she didn’t know what he had been talking about when he was babbling on the fire escape, Margaret wasn’t mad at him-just even more curious.
“She hasn't been to New York in a long time so she’s a little nervous about coming up here but she’s said she’d really like to see you again.”
Margaret turned around to completely face her brother.
“I’ve met her?”
Gregor nodded. “It was a long time ago. You were about two the first time the two of you met. Back when everyone still called you Boots.”
Margaret was quiet for a while.
“What’s her name?”
“Luxa.” Gregor supplied, he had a strangely fond smile on his face that made Margaret feel a little giddy inside.
“She sounds like some kind of exotic princess.” Margaret replied with a laugh. She had recognized the name instantly as someone Gregor often talked aloud to. A fake, horrified expression came over Gregor’s calm face.
“Don’t let her hear you say that. She is a queen not just a princess.”
“But you call me ‘princess’ all the time. Does that mean I’m ‘just a princess’?” Margaret asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Of course not. You’re the princess; there’s a big difference. Just ask Tick and Temp.” Gregor replied. Margaret looked down at the two crawlers and she could have sworn they were nodding.
“When is Luxa going to come up?”
“Well if I tell her that you don’t mind a guest tomorrow, she can probably be up here by the middle of next week. Luxa will end up coming really late at night though, and she can’t stay long.” Gregor explained.
Gregor was watching Margaret expectantly. As if he knew somewhere in her mind she would understand what he was trying to say and Margaret desperately wanted to come through for her older brother.
“Could she spend more time with us…if we went down to where she lived instead?” Margaret asked cautiously. A big smile came over Gregor’s expression and he held out his hand for her to take.
“Come along, princess. The Underland awaits us.”