Once, when I was very young (i.e., impressionable), my sister told me she had just eaten a peach with a worm in it. Not that she ate the worm or anything, but she saw it wriggling around in the peach and, I guess, ate around it. To this day, I wonder why she didn’t show it to me because I would’ve been so grossed out. She’s just too greedy!

Anyway, being the older one, she is always imparting knowledge on me: indeed, I learned a very important lesson that day, despite not seeing the nasty little creature. The horror that I imagined my sister feeling, which she didn’t actually feel, was forever imprinted on my fragile young mind. From then on, I refused to eat any large fruit resembling peaches — you know, like apples, pears and plums — that had not first been cut into slices. (Not that I used to go around biting into any old fruit, but that was out of laziness, not terror.)

This tactic has served me well for the past 15 or so years. I’ve never once come across a nasty little worm in any of my fruit. My worst nightmare has remained just that — a nightmare, with practically no basis in my reality — and I was really perfectly content to be terrified without having the actual experience. Alas, the old adage of “There’s a first time for everything” reared itself, and behold, I was dicing a peach to make my blueberry peach smoothie when I saw a tiny black thing not even a centimeter long sort of wriggling away from my knife. What is that? My brain went through a series of Rapid Response thoughts one by one, each lasting no more than a mere flash, but which are still nonetheless well-documented in my memory now. It was all over in less than a second, but when I replay it in mind, it’s a lot longer. Oh no, this isn’t happening to you. That’s not, oh god, please no, it is. That’s a tiny black worm in your peach! I simultaneously threw down the peach and knife, screamed and backed away as far as I could (but my kitchen is pretty tiny).

Anyway, that old adage, while certainly a wise one, neglects to mention that there’s usually a second time as well. There I was, facing my fear and making peach shortcake yesterday, when I decided to inspect this little white-ish speck that seemed to be growing and wriggling a little out of the peach as I was peeling it. Oh my god, I’ve just cut a worm that was in my peach in half! Both of its halves are still wriggling! And holy crap, maybe it was in the process of regenerating itself when I threw it into the food scraps bin? I can’t control what I think during my Rapid Response, and I can’t really control what I do, either. Despite having already lived through one worm in my peach, I let out a blood-curdling scream, threw everything down and tried to wash my hands and mind of what had just happened, again. I may even have wept.

In the end, though, Boyfriend was a hero, calmed me down and got rid of the worm, and we still made this fabulous worm-free peach shortcake:

I had come across this recipe from David Lebovitz after getting the urge for strawberry shortcake and lamenting the facts that (1) strawberry season was long gone and (2) shortcake of the angel cake variety is really hard to make without the proper equipment. Lebovitz’s recipe provided me an out by using peaches and what’s essentially buttermilk biscuits for the cake part. Now, Boyfriend, who is British, has a better idea of what a biscuit is — i.e., not a cookie.

And through it all, I am trying to keep in mind what my coworker said when she found a worm in her peach last week: At least she knows the peaches are safe to eat, free from any pesticides. I just … I really, really hate bugs.