I was laying with my phone burning in my hand as it does every time I try to text while tanning. My phone never gets this hot when I’m using it and walking or eating outside, but if I’m tanning it turns to near boiling temperatures, always. My phone was so hot that it stopped responding to my finger, taking on a mind of its own, so I turned the sound on and hid it under my towel. I turned to face the sun, feeling it wrap around my skin, press its face on my own, and dissolve the solid ice barrier around me. The warmth seeped into my bones and I breathed slowly. My dog came up expecting to be pet, which she was for a brief period of time, till I realized she was casting a shadow on my leg so I withdrew my hand and she retreated to the shade. I pushed my hair off my shoulders and smiled as I received the heat.
     I was relaxed until I wasn’t. The sun felt nice at first but then I got restless. Why had no one texted me yet? The silence of my slightly cooler phone mocked me. I turned over to even out my tan, buried my head in the crook of my shoulder so that my nose wouldn’t burn, and positioned my hair so that the front pieces would get nicely highlighted. I knew my nose would burn either way; I just wanted to protect it a little. I’m an Irish girl by birth, I’m not tan at all, I try to tan every day and admittedly I am a rather tan pale person, but I’m an Irish girl. I’m not tan. My face and arm started becoming wet, along with my scalp and back and thighs. I let this go on longer, while I felt my heart pressing against my chest, moving its pulses into my arms and ankles. I tried to sweat out as much as possible with as little effort on my part as I could manage.
     The pulse moved to my head, so I moved to the water. I walked straight to the pool, my bathing suit was pulled high to get a “no tan line tan,” so I moved at an awkward angle to not flash anyone inside the house perpendicular to me, separated only by air and six huge rectangles of glass. I waded in, feeling the water rush around me, feeling cool mist bite my face, then submerged my head under the mist. I started to swim from one side to the next. Swimming with my head above the water, doggy style, to adequately avoid the dead bugs and leaves that shared the water with me. I told myself that I would do fifty laps; I did ten.
     On my tenth lap, my phone went off, with one of my custom text tones, signifying that one of my friends whom I was trying to go to the beach with later had responded. I swam to the edge of my pool where a large step was. On my way over my puppy followed me. He watched me, curiously, as I moved through a seemingly dense yet empty surface. We haven’t taught him to swim yet. Our other dog never liked the water so she didn’t understand it either. A bee flew by low, right in front of my dogs face, and I smiled. I’ve always liked bees, I’m not sure why. Maybe its their little fuzz, or that in elementary school they taught us about all the good things that bees do for us, or maybe I was still subconsciously sad about how if they sting someone they die.
     I jumped out of the water, drained my hair and grabbed my phone from under the towel before I got back on it. My friend had just woken up, at noon. I would have done the same if it were not for ACT tutoring.  I texted her, my other two friends and my father who was checking up on how my tutoring had gone. I laughed because he gave himself a superhero name, as result of my mockery of his supposed innate ability to feel my success in the upcoming exam. I sent a screenshot of this to my other friends. My father has always connected with my friends, some more than others, especially my one friend who couldn’t go to the beach. I don’t know why exactly, he’s always been a very good father, I guess so good that he becomes one to anyone who needs one.
     My phone started acting up again so I put it back under the towel. My mother got home after about fifty minuets of me tanning, came outside and told me my chest and nose were burning. She disappeared and a minuet later brought out sunscreen. I got up and put some over my chest and face, then went back to my seat. We’ve had people in our family die from melanoma so my mom’s not a fan of me tanning. I let the sunscreen dry as I played some music to myself. I played The Weekend’s new song The Hills. It’s admittedly not my favorite of his, but I like it because he sings it. I checked Instagram, where on my feed a picture of a girl in my class came up. She was in bed. She looked pretty. She is the high school pretty girl, the one who has the perfect life, all the boys, all the parties. But everyone has stuff. Even her. She normally gets every boy I like, even the one I loved, the one that never loved me, the one I loved. She’s fun and nice enough but not real, I still can’t understand why he loved her but he did. Anyways, she did look pretty, high school pretty. I got annoyed and turned my phone off. It starts malfunctioning when the sun is out for too long. It didn’t need to go under the towel. It was completely cooled.
     I got up, sweating, and walked to the pool. I jumped in from the side into the more shallow part. I started to wade out until I saw the bee in the water, buzzing around helplessly. I remembered a story about this girl I grew up with when I was a child. She was my old best friend’s sister. She had seen a wasp in the pool and tried to get it out and it stung her. A very funny story if you appreciate its irony, which I do.
     I looked for a leaf until I remembered from previous failed attempts how hard it is to save a bee with a leaf. I grabbed my puppy’s toy lemur and lifted the bee out of the water with its paw. I started worrying that my dog was going to come over and try to take his toy back, but he didn’t. I placed the bee on the side of the pool, far away enough that it wouldn’t stumble back in. I nudged him off of the lemur and onto the pavement and watched him from the side of the pool. He walked around in circles, desperately, clumsily, feverishly, and helplessly. I stared at him in complete captivation. My puppy started walking over and I had to keep him away from the bee. Behind the bee was my ninety pound golden retriever and in front of it was a seventeen-year-old girl. The bee ran and fell back in forth between the two of us, scared to death, trapped. I yelled for my sister to call my dog in, which she did, and he promptly left. The bee stopped for a second, and continued in now lopsided circles. His back leg was now dented, self-inflicted, so his circles were now angled towards the center. Every turn he made he got lower to the ground, as if he was grinding away his left legs one turn at a time. He stopped for a second, lowered his head to the ground, and buried his right side in a concave of the brick he was on. I thought he was going to lie down and give up. Then he made churning, buzzing sounds and flipped his body upside down. His legs flailed facing the sky. His, what I’m assuming to be a chest, rose and fell rapidly. Then with one jolt he flipped himself up again. He flapped and buzzed his wings and threw himself forward, but fell. I realized he wasn’t able to fly. After six more attempts he realized this too. He then sat in a hole, in an alarmingly human like position, brought his hands to his face, and flapped his wings. It reminded me of a little girl who had fell and was now just lying there covering her face, crying. Out of his mouth amber colored stems started to appear. There had to be around five of them. His antennas turned downwards. He got up again and fell on his back. His chest area started moving back and forth in a weird, slightly sexual way. That was the only part of his body still moving. The rest was completely still. His yellow and black striped body continued to move, and I couldn’t tell if he was panting, which was a weird way to do so if that was the case, having a seizure, which was too timed and coordinated, or having some primal, trivial last hurrah reproductive act, which was probably not the case but is what I concluded. He did this for five minuets or so. I stood there watching for five minuets or so. Hopeless.
     Part of me wanted him to just die. I didn’t even want him to get up and fly like I had been yearning for in the previous ten minuets. I had given up; I knew he didn’t have a chance. I just wanted it to be over. So did he. But it wouldn’t stop. I stood there hopeless, crying, hot tears streaming down my face, stinging my skin that was having a bad reaction to the face sunscreen I foolishly put on my ultra sensitive T-zone. I was devastated. I was watching something die and there was nothing I can do. If he were human we could have fixed his wings. No one was going to remember he died. No one was going to have a funeral for him. As I watched him pace around uselessly for fifteen minuets, I thought you are wasting what would be probably five years of human life, crawling in circles. I didn’t know what to do. He sat there panting. Should I kill him, should I let him suffer? I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the pool and take him out of my misery. I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t take it. I cried even harder because of this. It wasn’t my place to kill him, was it? If I were the bee would I want to be in pain? Yes.
     But that’s just me. I’m terrified of death. Always have been. I want to live forever, I want to be immortal, I want to beat mortality. I would take a lifetime of suffering for the promise that that lifetime would never end. My family and I had just watched the movie Jupiter Ascending the night before. Which we laughed about, but it did make a good point. In the movie they said, “time is our most valuable resource… time is the only thing worth fighting and even killing for.” Time is everything. I want as much time as I can get. But that’s just me.
     I remember when I had to put down my favorite dog the summer before this one. He was my best friend of a decade. I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone. I was in the room when they put him down. It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. He was my baby and he died and it was our choice. I know we took him out of misery, but it was still a choice that we made. I remember my dad tried to explain putting down animals to me when I was a child. I can still hear him say, “it’s selfish of us to want to keep them because they are in pain.” In funerals I always hear people say, “they are in a better place now.”
     I replayed these voices over in my head as I stood in the water, with tears streaming down my face and the bee rocking his body back and forth. I was outside for an hour, a fair skinned girl, letting the sun hit my body, letting the sun shorten my lifetime, pushing the probability of skin cancer higher up, contributing to what I fear the most, contributing to my own death. I was crying in the sun, damaging my life span, while watching another creature’s end. I was worried about the ACT that morning, I was tanning that afternoon, I was stressing over my social plans for the night ahead. I was worried about drama and popularity and high school pretty and parties. None of it really mattered though when I watched that bee. It’s stupid to care about that stuff but could you blame me? We can’t just deny everything our world exists upon, we can’t just give up on the world because one day it’s going to end. The bee didn’t cry out as it lay there dying. No one came to watch, no one but me.
     I walked towards the steps grabbed the most perfect leaf I could find in the pool, a nice symmetrical caramel colored one, and placed it besides the bee. I walked over to my father’s now barren garden, which he moved to the side of the house, and grabbed one of the many perfectly smooth blackish gray oval rocks. Those rocks are the ones that as a child I always skipped on my birthdays at the local Hibachi restaurant. Those rocks were magical to me. I grabbed the flattest and lightest one I could find.
     I walked over, knelt down, and placed the tip of the rock in front of the bee. My hand trembled. I bowed my head, shielding it from the sun that mocked me, and cried. I looked back at the bee, took a deep breath, and pressed the rock down hard in one smooth, sweeping motion. I heard an awful crunching sound. As I moved the rock up I looked at the bee who now lay on his side in a fetal position with his arms and legs tucked inward like a child at naptime whose mat is right under the air conditioner. The rock had a wet imprint of the bee stained on it. I scooped the bee up into the leaf and grabbed the rock in my other hand. I walked over to my dad’s relocated garden, found a sunny spot in front of the lilacs in bloom and placed the bee down and his rock next to him. I took a long purple flower and placed it at his head. I got up and walked away and didn’t look back.
     I wrapped my towel around my head like an Eskimo, walked inside, and threw on some clean clothes not bothering to shower, as I normally would do to make sure I didn’t break out from all the sweat. I walked downstairs to make the sandwich that I originally planned not to eat and sat in my sunroom facing two rectangle windows that look out at the garden. There I began to type out a story about the bee lying a few feet beyond me, separated by glass, air, and a computer screen.