Why wouldn’t mommy drive any faster? Getting home usually never took this long.

Jenny saw it earlier that morning when she was getting ready for school. All of the butterflies had hatched.

She was in a hurry so she didn’t actually see any butterflies, but she saw that all of the chrysalis were broken open except for Swirly.

Swirly was so strange, whatever it was. She was pretty sure it was a butterfly, but she wouldn’t know until it hatched. Jenny had never seen anything like it before in her life. What if Swirly was a brand new kind of bug? What if it hatched while she had been at school today? There were so many questions to answer, and mommy still wasn’t driving faster!

She didn’t want to cry, but it was getting hard to stop herself. This was like Christmas-eve when you weren’t even allowed to open one single present. Nobody deserved to go through that.

This might be even worse!

Mommy pulled onto their street and Jenny started rocking back and forth in her car seat excitedly and kicking. She couldn’t contain it all.

“Stop that Jenny!” Mommy looked back annoyed and waggled her finger. “I’ve told you plenty of times not to kick the car seat. You don’t want a time out do you?”

This was bad, a time out meant longer without getting to see the new Swirly bug. Jenny forced herself to be as still as possible.

“Sorry, Mommy,” Jenny said. Better to not push her luck right now. If she was bad, Mommy would make her wait even longer and probably make her eat more vegetables too.

That was absolutely not an option.

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They pulled into the driveway and Jenny fiddled with her buckle. She knew how the buckle worked, but she wasn’t quite strong enough to undo it by herself yet, so as frustrating as it was, she had to wait.

Of course, Mommy took her time getting her out. She didn’t seem to understand that Jenny was in a hurry.

As soon as she finally undid the last clasp, Jenny sprang out of the car, dashed in the house, and headed straight to her room.

What she saw didn’t make sense.

The Swirly chrysalis was in a different part of the cage from before. Was it a little biger too?

All the chrysalis’ that Jenny had collected over the past few days were broken, but there were no butterflies in the cage. She looked back to the corner of the cage, where she had placed Swirly, then back to where Swirly was now.

Jenny checked the cage flap, but it was firmly closed.

She looked closer at the Chrysalis and they didn’t look like they normally did when a butterfly squeezed out.

Jenny’s eyes widened as she had a thought: What if Swirly did all of this?

Then it all made sense.

Swirly must have somehow eaten everything and then went back into its chrysalis in a different spot afterwards.

That wasn’t nice, eating all those butterflies.

Jenny had worked hard to find all of those and now they were gone. That was a bad thing. She felt like smashing Swirly to teach the bad bug a lesson, but she stopped herself. It was too pretty to smash.

When Jenny Broke Mommy or Daddy’s things they had always punished her, so maybe she should do the same, Jenny thought about how many times she wished they would have just let her have another chance and they would punish her anyway.

Jenny thought hard and found the perfect compromise.

“Stop that,” Jenny waggled a finger at the chrysalis like Mommy did to her. “I’ve told you plenty of times not to eat my butterflies. You don’t want a time out, do you?”

Swirly stayed quiet.

Jenny felt satisfied. Now that Swirly was properly warned, she was sure he would be a good bug.

She stared at the empty cage and realized that if it was that hungry, she needed to get Swirly more food. Jenny had work to do.

She knew it took time to hatch and she didn’t want to be bored watching nothing happen. She’d done that too many times with the butterflies. Jenny grabbed her chrysalis collector to hunt more butterflies. She stopped before leaving her room and grabbed an extra collector to gather food for Swirly.

Jenny shook her head. Parenting was tough work.