There were more than two thousand species of firefly, and most emitted light. Bioluminescence, or the production of light by living organisms, was responsible for light emission in fireflies - which were normally yellow, green, or red. The light of a firefly could travel at wavelengths of up to six hundred seventy nanometres, which wasn’t nearly as far as it sounded. Humans were drawn to the firefly - so much so that their population was beginning to decline due to firefly tourism and pesticides. As a young child, Aggie had held a yellow firefly in the palm of her hand on a camping trip, and she had felt a connection with them ever since.

Able-bodied people took their health for granted. When Aggie was healthy, she had taken her health for granted too. The truth was that any regular person could become disabled at any time, and never see it coming. Aggie became an ambulatory wheelchair user at the age of thirteen, although she never accepted this for many years. There was a sense of shame that came with disability, especially as a child. For years, Aggie forced herself to walk, even when she physically couldn’t stand a moment longer. For years, she denied illnesses and the need for accommodations in school, scolding herself for symptoms and weakness. There came a point in any person’s life when they were forced to come to terms with their disabilities. For Aggie, this came in secondary school, after fainting while forcing herself to run laps in gym class. A person could will themselves to be healthy a million times. Sometimes, it just wasn’t meant to be.

Being an ambulatory wheelchair user meant that Aggie had the capability of walking for short periods of time, but needed the help of mobility aids to get around. This also meant that she was harassed often: accused of being a liar by strangers who assumed all wheelchair users had to have some degree of paralysis. The last time this happened was several days ago, at the library Aggie frequented with her best friend, Briar. The library was inaccessible, and the wheel of Aggie’s chair had gotten stuck in a rut. When she stood briefly to free it, a man nearby shouted at her.

“Why are you using a wheelchair? You can clearly walk!”

She got this question often. As a teenager, it bothered her. It seemed the older Aggie got, the less consideration she put toward the opinions of others. There had been a man at the library, accompanied by another who looked little like him; Aggie later learned they were brothers.

It was hard to make conversation. Aggie’s father said it was this way for everyone.

At twenty-four years old, Aggie had spent more time in hospitals than all of her friends combined. Some days, she could walk up and down the hallway of her tiny house without feeling dizzy. Other days, she could hardly get out of bed without feeling weak. She dreamed of travelling and falling in love. She was too much of a liability.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

Since the death of his youngest daughter, Aggie’s father had become very protective. Most would have been annoyed by this. Despite being an adult, Aggie felt as though she were perpetually twelve years old. She and her father lived alone, with the tiny toy poodle Aggie had registered as an emotional support animal. Kieve, who had gotten married and moved out, came around for holidays and the occasional weekend visit. Aggie’s house was quiet and tidy. She liked it this way.

“Good morning, my girl.” Aggie’s father was a man who didn’t talk much, but whose words were never meaningless. Like his children, he had bright red hair, though his was beginning to thin. “What’s your plan for today?”

Cecil was a strict man, but he had good reason to be. He was worried about many things: and most of these were out of his control. Aggie was tired, though she almost always was. “I’m going on a date.”

A widowed father, Cecil was always more lenient with his son than his daughters. Kieve was allowed to go on dates as a teenager, and aged out of curfews by the time he was sixteen. Aggie had never been on a date. She sat on the small living room couch, which folded out into a bed, and which she used to share with Kieve. “A date? With a boy?” Her father frowned, sitting across from Aggie on the couch. “You’re too young for that.”

Her wheelchair was small and didn’t fit well in the home. Cecil had never been able to afford much more than three hundred square feet. “Actually, Kieve was fourteen when he went on his first date, and Blodwyn was fifteen when she went on hers - which means that, because I’m already twenty four, I’m more than old enough for mine.” It had been her idea, the destination. It was unusual for a boy to speak to her without saying something mean.

Aggie could hear the roaring of the refrigerator, and the wind swooping outside the window. She was easily warm, but dressed in layers even in the summertime. As she lay on her stomach across the couch, her father chuckled. “You’re right, as usual. Where are you going?”

It was nerve-racking. Aggie would have been embarrassed to admit she’d never been on a date. Due to her disabilities and her overprotective father, there were many things she’d never done. “We’re going to a movie. Don’t worry, I’ll be back for dinner.” In the winter, it was hard to travel by wheelchair. In the winter, Aggie didn’t often leave the house. It was a small, foldable wheelchair that fit neatly into her father’s car. On bad days, she couldn’t go anywhere without it.

Cecil loved his children. When Blodwyn, the youngest of three, fell victim to depression, he had never learned to forgive himself. “Who’s the guy?”

It had been the idea of Aggie’s best friend to visit the library. Briar was an introverted and studious girl who lived in a big city, and Aggie very seldom enjoyed leaving the house. “His name’s Salem. He works as a bar manager.” As she spoke, the tiny toy poodle jumped onto the couch in front of her. “You told me to get out and meet more people. You said you were sad because I only have one friend.”

The day she’d met Salem, he’d shouted at the man who harassed her. Aggie wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself, but it was nice to get a break from it once in a while. With him, conversation wasn’t confusing or complicated the way it was normally. She’d lost track of time: babbling on about fireflies and Adventure Time, barely letting anyone else get a word in. He didn’t seem to mind: listening closely, even asking questions about things she was interested in. This had impressed her, because it seemed most people just cared about their own interests.

Her father sighed. “I didn’t mean boys, love. Boys don’t make good friends.”

Never sleep with someone on the first date, her mother had said, when Aggie first became interested in boys. You need to be sure a boy really likes you before you sleep with him. If you don’t, he might just take advantage of you.

“Why not?”

Blodwyn had loved knitting, and bowling, and stars. She died at the age of fifteen, and nobody had even known she’d been suffering.

“Boys don’t want to be friends with girls.” Cecil petted the dog behind her ears, and then stood to pour himself a cup of tea. “They want to sleep with girls. You’re young. I’m worried you might not be able to tell if a boy is taking advantage of you.”

He sounded like her brother. Kieve had said the same things many times. “Daddy, you look at me as a baby because I’m disabled. I might seem like a little girl sometimes, but I’m a grown-up now, and I want to do grown-up things.” He had reason to worry. Having lost one daughter in the past, Cecil couldn’t bear to lose another.

Aggie was born in Swansea, the second-largest city of Wales. In primary school, she was educated in Welsh-language education. In secondary school, she was bullied endlessly, finding solace in books and art. It was a challenge to sit still, to volunteer in class, to look at someone when they were speaking. In secondary school, Aggie was punished often for acting differently than the other students.

She changed in her loft, which was cramped and humid. In Wales, she’d had her own bedroom, with a door and ample space to move around. In Wales, her whole family had been together. On the wall hung a large photo of Aggie’s mother. She’d had the same thick, dark red hair as her daughters: the same stretchy, soft skin as Aggie. Her parents had met when they were young, attending high school together in Wales, getting married directly after graduation. Cecil used to look at Isolde as though she were the only woman in the world, and treat her the same way.

Cecil worked irregular hours, never the same time every day. This caused Aggie stress, but it wasn’t her responsibility to keep track of her father’s ever-changing schedule. Sometimes when her father was at work, Kieve would come to keep her company at Cecil’s request. Sometimes he’d bring his wife along.

Aggie sat on the edge of the couch. “Mam, I miss you.” On the hardest of days, she missed Swansea: the people, the culture. It had been three years since her father moved the family overseas, drawn to suffering from the memories of the childhood home. “Some days, I feel like I’ll never really be a grown-up, even though I’m twenty four. Everybody else knows how to keep a job, and socialise, and make friends, but I don’t know how. Daddy says being different makes me unique.” Aggie’s mother had understood her more than anyone. She’d been a good listener, and Aggie liked to think that she still was. The day of the car accident, Isolde was driving herself and Aggie to a physiotherapy appointment, and the car was T-boned by a pick-up truck.

Aggie’s family wasn’t religious. On days she felt overwhelmed, speaking aloud to her mother was a calming activity. Her body hurt. In junior high, she dislocated her ankle playing in gym class.

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“Mam, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but I’m going on my first date today.” Isolde was a welcoming and outgoing woman. There was never a person who didn’t like her. “It feels like, at some point he’s going to decide I’m too much, just like everybody else.” There was a lullaby her mother always used to sing every night. It always made Aggie feel calm. “I’m not as pretty or grown-up as his ex-girlfriend, and she’s having a baby. I don’t know how I feel about it.”

Before Blodwyn’s death, Aggie had been the last person to speak to the teen. She was twenty years old, and doing her best to comfort Blodwyn after a disagreement with her boyfriend. The mourning liked to be treated with compassion, and Aggie never believed in sugar coating the truth. Blodwyn died alone inside her bedroom, found by her father, leaving her friends wondering why she hadn’t reached out. For a long time after Blodwyn’s death, Cecil never let Aggie out of his sight.

She was long overdue for her first date. She’d had brief crushes on boys before, but no self-respecting teenager would have been caught dead speaking with the weird girl. It had always seemed so simple for everyone else: making friends. Kieve was so good at it. Kieve could walk into a crowd of strangers and come out laughing with a group of new friends.

Dressed in all black, Salem was the most handsome man. He was so grown up compared to Aggie: working full time, owning a home, driving a car. At her request, he stepped inside for a moment, not at all intimidated by her father’s harsh stare. Cecil had a way of intimidating people by staring at them in just the right way - but it had never failed, and Salem wasn’t the type to be intimidated.

She’d made the first move. This was surprising to Blair, and it seemed to be surprising to Salem, too. After expressing interest in a date, Aggie asked for his phone number, and he’d agreed. Honesty wasn’t intimidating. Growing up, she was scolded for it.

“Hey, Aggie.”

He was so friendly, popular. Instead of spending the afternoon having fun with friends, he’d driven forty five minutes to come see her. As a disabled person, Aggie spent a lot of her time feeling invisible. It was as though if anyone paid any attention to her at all, it was to mock or stare. It was as though there was a target on her back just from leaving the house.

“Never be the first to fall in love,” said Kieve, when he wasn’t poking fun at Aggie. “It’ll make you seem vulnerable.” As a teenager, she might have thought it a bad thing to be vulnerable - but how could a relationship grow without it? There was risk to falling in love, but there was risk to anything. You could fall in love with somebody today, and wake up in the morning feeling as though they’d never existed. Aggie didn’t know a lot about love. She’d known she loved Salem before he left the library.

He drove a sports utility vehicle, which was green and looked futuristic. According to the user manual in the front seat glove box, it had a range of four hundred eighty kilometres. Salem cared a lot for nature and animals - Aggie had learned this during a late-night conversation. She didn’t know much about cars. She’d never learned to drive.

Her wheelchair fit neatly in the back seat of the car. Aggie had tried to drive before. There was always too much going on around her. “Your car smells like smoke.” Aggie’s pink backpack was decorated with charms and squishy keychains, which soothed her when she was feeling anxious. Over the past weeks, this had been more often than not. “Smoking is bad for you. I don’t want to date you if you smoke cigarettes.” People claimed to value honesty. When Aggie was honest, they always just got offended. How was a person supposed to know how much honesty was too much, if nobody ever said anything?

“Don’t worry.” It was warm in the car. Salem was a cautious driver. “It’s just weed. Does that change how you feel?” He was too attractive to date somebody like Aggie: she liked his piercings, and smile, and braid.

When Aggie’s mother had been alive, she’d dealt with the same major disability. Aggie had seen her mother smoke weed since she was a child, all the way up until the day she died. If she’d asked to join, her mother probably wouldn’t have minded. She fiddled with a popper toy on her backpack, staring straight ahead. “My mother smoked weed all the time. I’ve never tried it. Maybe I will someday, because I do have a lot of pain sometimes.”

Making conversation was hard. Most of the time, Aggie had no idea how to keep a conversation going. She got to know people via text or email: quick ways of communicating that didn’t involve speaking face-to-face. Aggie was the one who had suggested seeing a movie. She enjoyed company, but not in a way that involved talking or making eye contact. They could have gone anywhere: a fast food restaurant, a yard sale, a meaningless drive. He could have taken her anywhere, and she would have been pleased.

“Why are you in a wheelchair if you can walk?”

Aggie hated the questions of strangers, though they were often. Kieve would scowl at them, cursing at them or shooting them a dirty look. Disclosing medical issues to strangers was uncomfortable and unnecessary - but there was often no way around it. It was always the first thing, when new people came along: always a question of what had happened to make her this way, as if sharing personal health issues was common decency. The theatre was loud, but not unbearably. Aggie hadn’t been to the movies in ages, and she’d admittedly missed it. It was new and scary to like somebody so much - and Aggie didn’t know what it was about her, but falling in love was both simple and petrifying.

There was a lot of space inside the vehicle. Aggie could spread out in the front seat with room to spare, and her wheelchair wasn’t cramped. After getting comfortable, she looked around. “Is this an electric car?”

Salem was far friendlier than her. He smiled at everyone he saw, and went out of his way to help those in need. “Yep.”

Aggie didn’t know what it was about her. Recently, she finished memorizing every country’s flag. “Are you an environmentalist? If you are, there are so many more things you should be doing to help save the planet. When I was a kid, I went every year with my mom to plant a tree on earth day.”

He never made fun of her. If anything, he seemed to appreciate her honesty. “Oh, you know. Just trying to do my part.” He had a touch that was soft and warm and made Aggie feel safe. If it were anybody else, she’d hate the physical contact.

She hated scary movies. For the first time in her life, she’d chosen something other than a children’s adventure film. Her chair sat awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs, folded in half to save space. It was a small and generic chair - this had been all her father could afford.

Aggie had a text from her father. He was a sensitive man, and never would have forgiven himself if she were alone and in trouble. She wouldn’t end up like Blodwyn - he’d make certain of this. Feeling clammy, she took a handful of M&M’s.

The last time she’d spoken to her sister, Blodwyn had been upset about a boy. She’d had a new boyfriend, and she’d known her father disliked him. It was obvious how differently girls and boys were treated in society. As a teenager, Kieve was permitted to bring girls into his bedroom with the door closed. As an adult, Aggie was hardly permitted to even talk to a boy. If she were a boy, nobody would have cared what she did.

She wanted to rest her head. It was stupid, how much of an effect a random person could have on you. She was exhausted by noise and pain and jump scares, and couldn’t get comfortable. If it wasn’t something Aggie initiated, physical touch made her feel nauseated.

When the film came to an end, and the lights flickered back on, Aggie’s head hurt. There was pain in her legs and chest, and the lights hurt her eyes. Padding down the short staircase to her wheelchair, she followed the crowd of people out of the theatre. Socializing was hard. In school, Aggie was often scolded for doing it wrong. “Did you know there’s more than two thousand species of firefly?”

“You’re a dork,” Kieve would say, whenever she shared a new fun fact. “You know that’s the reason you don’t have any friends, right?”

Salem opened the car door for Aggie. Even just a simple look from him was enough to make her breath catch. It was foolish. Being the first one to develop feelings meant being the first one to get hurt. “I didn’t.” In the cup holder between the seats, there was a slim red pipe and a metal grinder. “You like fireflies?”

“They’re my favourite animal.” To anybody else, it would have been embarrassing to admit her fascination with fireflies. Aggie had many interests, but nobody ever seemed to share them. “A firefly is actually a beetle, even though it has the word fly in its name. Females have light-emitting organs on their abdomen, which is actually cold and has no UV radiation.” This was the reason Aggie couldn’t keep friends. She was smarter than the average person her age, and seemed to offend people when she told them so. “Sorry. My older brother says nobody cares about my fun facts.”

It was noisy. Even the most quiet of sounds became too noisy. Aggie fiddled with the keychains on her backpack, which were sequined, and flipped back and forth between colours. She’d been told many times that it was childish to carry around sequined charms and squishy stuffed animal keychains. She’d never been bothered by being childish. Salem smiled, driving with one hand. “You’re cute.” This was hard to believe. “Did you know there’s an instrument you can play without touching it?”

People were filled with fun facts. All anyone ever wanted to do was make small talk. “That sounds weird. I want to see it.” For a girl who hated to be touched, it was strange to crave human contact. Hugging Salem made her feel safe and warm - she could have done it all night. “Thanks for not saying anything about my wheelchair. Everybody says something. You smell nice. I like hugging you.” She caught people off guard. After a lifetime of being made to feel like too much, Aggie was finally beginning to feel like just enough. “You’ll never be too much,” her mother had said, “for the right person.” Aggie’s mother was a wise woman. Aggie wanted to grow up to be just like her.

He had nice eyes. After parking outside of Aggie’s house, he picked up a pipe. “Figured you’d tell me when you wanted me to know.”

It was time to go home. Aggie, for the first time in a long time, didn’t want to go home. There was fear, always, of being left behind after a night out, of doing something wrong without meaning to. “I have a blood circulation disorder called POTS, and a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. My mother had them too.” Her mother, Isolde, had died in the same car accident that left Aggie with PTSD. At her father’s insistence, she’d spoken to somebody about it. “You can look it up later, because I don’t want you to be late for work listening to me explain.” She wanted to kiss him. Aggie’s head hurt. There was always something that hurt. “Goodnight, Salem.”

Aggie always liked people more than they liked her. She always knew she didn’t have much to offer. “Aggie, wait.” Even the way he said her name made her weak. She’d never spent so much time with a boy before: except maybe Kieve, and never by choice. They sat very close, and Aggie wasn’t uncomfortable. “My next day off is Monday. Do you want to go out again that day?”

It was way past curfew. “Yes.” Inside the house, Kieve watched out the window, likely prepared to question Aggie the second she stepped inside. “Are you going to kiss me goodnight?” It was easy to be blunt. Aggie had been doing it her whole life.

Salem checked the time. “Would you like me to?”

Aggie was tired. On a bad night, she had too much pain to sleep. “Yes.”

If somebody loves you, you’ll know. But you have to remember that people show love in different ways, and not everyone is honest and thoughtful like you. The most important thing to remember is that, even though some people will say you’re weird or intense or anything else, you deserve to be loved just like anybody else. Do you understand?

Yes, Mummy. I understand.

Aggie had never been kissed before - and she hadn’t been prepared for the way it made her head spin, or her chest pound. Aggie could have dreamed of being kissed a thousand times, and she still could never have dreamed of this.