If you’re failing to plan, you’re planning to fail, he thought, and then winced. Fridge-magnet wisdom? Not cool. He’d have to be careful about that. They’d spot him a mile off.
Oh, who am I kidding? They’ll spot me a mile off anyway. If you looked up “loser” in the dictionary, there’d be a picture of me, with my eyes halfway shut from blinking and someone making bunny ears behind my head.
He looked dejectedly around the lab. Mr. Levitt had been called away and had left his DT class to get on with their assignment in his absence. Of course, the minute he was gone, everybody had left their drawing boards and started messing around and chatting. Mark watched the other boys as they lounged on the backs of chairs, laughing with their friends and flirting with girls. It all seemed so easy for them. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
When did I get left behind?
They didn’t even notice him. That was what hurt. If he were spectacularly ugly, if he wore his trousers above his navel, then at least he might qualify for a bit of bullying now and then. If he were some pimple-faced geek or one of those kids who looked permanently filthy because they ate fried food all day and never washed, then the girls might snicker at him as he passed. But Mark was none of those things. Instead, he seemed to occupy a blind spot in the school hierarchy. He was just there, like an extra wandering about in the background of a TV show while the stars talked among themselves.
Up until a few months ago, he hadn’t really minded. He had his pals Andrew and Graham, he had his hobbies, his parents were nice, and there were no particular problems in his life. All in all, he was content.
Then something changed. He didn’t know what. He didn’t even notice it at first, but every day this new awareness bothered him more and more. It was as if he were waking slowly from a long and pleasant dream to find himself in a cold, damp bedroom with peeling wallpaper and the rain pouring down outside.
Gradually, he became self-conscious. He began to imagine how he must seem to other people, the way he looked, the way he acted. It made him cringe. He began to wonder what he was missing out on.
Andrew and Graham didn’t understand. When Mark tried to broach the subject, they just gave him blank smiles of incomprehension. They wondered why he wasn’t so keen to join in their games anymore, but they didn’t wonder for long. They just carried on playing without him.
I’ve outgrown them, thought Mark one day. It was a shock, and it made him sad, but there it was. I’m embarrassed by my best friends.
The problem was, he had no idea how to make new ones.
Since then, he’d undertaken a thorough reevaluation of his life. How was it that he’d never noticed before how geeky his hobbies were? He was into electronics, computers, online games. He built models, took photos of them, and put them on his Facebook page. He flew his radio-controlled plane around for hours at a time. He got excited when the guys from NASA announced that they’d detected a new quasar in the Crab Nebula.
If you made a list of all the hobbies least likely to get you a girl, just about everything Mark did would be solidly in the top ten. The only comfort was that he’d never been interested in stamp collecting (although monster trading cards were arguably just as bad; the jury was still out on that one). Only his passion for photography could possibly be classified as cool-ish, since it was kind of arty, and he figured that girls liked arty.
But it wasn’t too late to do something about his situation. Mark wanted to be part of the in-crowd. Or at least make his way in from the edges a bit. He wasn’t asking for much, just for someone to notice him. Someone other than a teacher or another forgotten kid like himself.
And so, being the meticulous sort, he’d identified a target. Paul Camber.
Paul was the perfect candidate, really. He’d joined the academy at the start of the spring term, and he hadn’t really settled in yet. He seemed an affable type, since he was always hanging out with different people, but he didn’t have a close group of friends as far as Mark could tell. That meant he was still a bit of an outsider. Just like Mark.
Mark had waited for him in the corridor outside Mr. Harrison’s office after biology. He’d felt sure that Paul would recognize a gesture of friendship when he saw it. Mark had lied on his behalf after all. He’d taken a big risk, ratting out Adam like that. He’d done his best to get Paul out of trouble.
But Paul had walked past like he didn’t even recognize him.
Mark had been disappointed at first, but he soon bounced back when he realized what had gone wrong. Nobody had told Paul what Mark had done for him. And it seemed that Paul was still in the dark, since he hadn’t so much as looked at Mark all period. Surely, if he’d known, Paul would have come over and thanked him by now.
Well, then, time for Plan B. Mr. Levitt’s departure had given him the opportunity he needed. He couldn’t let himself pass up the chance.
He took a deep breath. His mouth had gone suddenly dry. He felt too hot in his clothes.
Just do it, he thought. Go over and say hi. Say you saw him in the hallway. Ask how it went with old Harrison.
How hard could it be?
His feet were taking him across the classroom before he could change his mind. He could sense Andrew’s and Graham’s puzzled gazes following him as he walked. The world crowded in and everything seemed close and tight. He wanted to turn back, but he couldn’t now. Not without looking like a fool.
Paul was talking with Ben Hooper and Sandra Appleby as Mark approached. He was telling some funny story about a teacher from his previous school. Mark realized too late that he should have waited until Paul was alone, or at least until he wasn’t talking. It would be rude to interrupt. Instead he found himself hovering on the edge of the group, just behind Paul’s shoulder, waiting to be noticed.
Seconds ticked by. Agonizing, endless seconds. And nobody so much as looked at him.
His nerve broke. He looked desperate, standing there. He was sure that everybody was watching him and laughing, but he couldn’t just walk away. That would be crushing. Instead, he turned his attention to the drawing board that Paul, Ben, and Sandra had been working on.
They were supposed to be designing a simple control system for a Meccano car engine, something to move the car forward and back and turn the wheels. It was child’s play for Mark, who’d been doing that kind of thing at age eight, but these three hadn’t gotten very far with it at all. He pretended to be furiously concentrating on it, so he looked like he was doing something.
Maybe he’d been standing in the wrong place. That was why they didn’t notice him. On reflection, he should have stood a bit more to the right, instead of just by Paul’s shoulder. Standing behind someone that way, that was just creepy. Why wasn’t there a manual for this kind of stuff?
Well, he’d screwed up Plan B, that was for sure. Only a few more seconds, and he could walk away and pretend that he’d just come over to take a look at their schematic. A few more seconds and —
“Er …,” said Paul. “Hi.”
They’d noticed him. Just when he didn’t want them to anymore.
“Can we help you?” asked Sandra in a rather sarcastic tone that he didn’t like.
“Oh, I was just looking at what you were doing here,” Mark said in a false-casual voice. “I like this part, but you’ve connected the capacitors all wrong, and you haven’t earthed it anywhere.”
His words plunged into silence like stones into a black well. Sandra gaped in horrified amusement, half a smile on her face, as if she couldn’t believe she was lucky enough to hear anyone say anything that geeky. Ben gave him a flat look that said: Seriously? You’re actually talking to us?
Paul just looked a little bit puzzled.
“Ha!” Sandra gave a short, sharp laugh. And that was all.
Mark turned and hurried away from them before they could say anything else. He burned so furiously red, he must have been giving everyone a suntan.
Stupid, stupid, idiot, stupid, STUPID!
; He returned to his drawing board, picked up his pencil, and started drawing straight lines with the slide rule. He didn’t look at anything but the paper.
“What happened?” asked Andrew.
“Did you talk to them?” Graham asked, amazed.
They hadn’t even realized that he’d humiliated himself. How could they? They didn’t know what embarrassing was. Instead of making him feel better, that just made him feel worse. It was like they lived in two different worlds now.
“I told them how to fix their remote,” Mark mumbled eventually.
“Really?” Graham was astonished at his friend’s bravery. “Well, what did they say?”
“Oh, you know,” Mark replied, “they just said thanks.”
By lunchtime, all the talk was about the silver beetle. Well, it was among Mark’s friends, anyway. He doubted if kids like Paul got excited about stuff like that.
The boys who’d found the beetle had taken its squashed body to Mr. Sutton for identification. They spent the next double period telling everyone who’d listen about their amazing find, and their encounter with Adam Wojcik. It wasn’t long before it occurred to somebody that there might be more of those beetles down by the lake.
Mark knew that looking for beetles wasn’t the kind of thing the cool kids did, but when Andrew and Graham asked if he was coming, he said yes anyway. He’d had enough of trying to be someone he wasn’t for one day.
When the lunch bell rang, Mark headed back to his dorm and picked up his camera. Like everything else he did, he took photography seriously, and read his Amateur Photographer magazine cover to cover each week. Last Christmas, he’d persuaded his parents to shell out for a Canon EOS 350D camera with an EF 75-300mm lens. He hid it in a satchel as he scampered across the grounds toward the lake, in case he bumped into someone like Adam who’d demand to “give it a try” and somehow break it.
There were about twenty students of various ages rummaging through the undergrowth when Mark got to the woods that surrounded the lake. Andrew and Graham were waiting for him down by the shore, beckoning to him frantically. He picked up his step at the sight of the urgent expressions on their faces.
“Get a photo!” Andrew squeaked, pointing at a clump of marsh grass near the water. “Quick!”
Despite himself, Mark’s pulse sped up a little as he hunkered down to take a look. He was sure that the stories had been exaggerated — you’d have to go to the rain forests of the Amazon to find a beetle that big — but it definitely didn’t sound like something you’d see every day in the English countryside. He had visions of his photograph appearing in a double-page spread in Amateur Photographer, with his name printed at the bottom.
It took Mark a moment to find the beetle amid the thick tangle of greenery. When he did, he let out a low whistle.
“That’s some beetle,” he said.
The stories hadn’t been exaggerated at all. On the contrary, it was bigger than the rumors painted it. The one that had been given to Mr. Sutton was the size of a mouse, by all accounts. This one was the size of a small rat. It was laboring clumsily through the foliage, which bent under its weight as it clambered along.
“You know what the longest beetle in the world is?” Graham said. He was full of facts like this. “The Hercules beetle. The biggest reported ones have been about seven inches long. That thing can’t be far off that.”
“Photo!” Andrew urged.
Amazed, Mark dug out the camera and put it to his eye. He studied the beetle through the magnified viewfinder. Its ridged carapace had the metallic sheen of mercury, and there was something stiff and awkward about the way the creature moved, as if it was somehow dazed or disoriented. Blank silver eyes were set above outsize mandibles that chewed the air in slow and constant motion.
Maybe it was because it was so big, but it really was one evil-looking insect.
He focused in and took a pic. The flash went off unexpectedly. Andrew sucked his breath through his teeth. “Oi! Don’t let the others know we’ve found one!” he complained.
Mark glanced up at the sky. Dark clouds had gathered, making it dim enough to trigger the automatic flash on his camera. He checked the digital picture on the display — too bright — then turned off the flash and lined up again.
But the beetle wasn’t moving anymore.
“You killed it,” Graham muttered. Mark gave him a look.
“Hey! Did you find something?” said a Year Nine who was coming over to investigate, attracted by the flash. But before Mark could say anything, a shout went up in the trees — “There’s one over here!” — and the Year Nine changed direction and joined the stampede to check it out.
Mark returned his attention to the beetle. It was unnaturally still. A few seconds passed, and then suddenly it jerked into motion again. It rotated itself toward him, turning like a miniature tank.
“Here’s another!” someone called from the undergrowth nearby. It seemed like they were all over the place. More kids hurried off to examine this new find, leaving Mark and his friends alone.
Mark aimed his camera again. The beetle was larger in the viewfinder now. Slow as it was, it was lumbering toward him with unsettling purpose. He took another picture. The beetle kept on coming.
“Flash it!” said Graham.
“What?”
“You used the flash before.”
Mark turned the flash back on, and took another shot. The tall grass flickered with light. The beetle froze.
“That,” said Andrew, “is weird.”
It really was weird. In fact, there was something weird about all of this.
Then the beetle was moving again, as if nothing had happened. Most beetles ignored you or tried to move away, and they tended to putter about investigating this and that. But Mark could swear this one was heading right for him, curiously intent on its destination. It made him feel uneasy. Beetles didn’t usually do that.
He put his eye to the viewfinder to ready another shot. He was just focusing in on the beetle when there was a quick movement, and something thumped into his camera, knocking his aim off. Mark jerked backward, away from the grass, and tripped into Andrew, who caught him and held him up until he could get his feet back under him.
His first thought was that someone had thrown something at him, and he checked his camera automatically. His stomach sank as he saw that the lens was cracked. That lens had cost his dad a hundred quid. How was he ever going to explain this?
Neither Andrew nor Graham had even noticed the damage. They were staring at the beetle, which lay on its back, trying to right itself.
“Did you see that?”
“Guys, my camera!” Mark complained.
“The beetle broke it.”
“The beetle?”
“It jumped right into the lens!”
Impossible, thought Mark. It was too big to even get into the air, let alone jump several feet off the ground with sufficient force to break a lens. And yet this whole situation was beginning to feel very, very wrong all of a sudden. He was getting the distinct impression that these strange beetles were not half as harmless as they’d first appeared.
No sooner had Mark thought this than he heard a shriek from nearby. A group of kids came scrambling out of the woods, one of them flailing wildly at himself. At just the same moment, an older student stood up suddenly, shaking his hand in the air.
“Bloody thing bit me!” he cried.
Another shriek. Mark’s head snapped around to find the source of the sound, and couldn’t. Instead he saw one of the beetles launch itself from a blackberry bush, a little silver missile flying toward a blond-haired boy. The kid saw it coming and swatted it out of the air with the plastic binder he was carrying.
Suddenly everyone was pushing their way back through the woods, up the slope toward the school. Absurd as it seemed, they were under attack, so they did the only thing they could. They legged it.
“Mr. Sutton! Mr. Sutton!”
Mr. Sutton looked up from his book
— Species of Coleoptera — as the three boys burst into the lab. Mark Platt, Andrew Taylor, and Graham Nicks. They came running in with the childlike urgency of boys much younger than they actually were, and practically fell over each other in their rush to tell him what had happened.
He suppressed a smile. Sometimes it was nice to see kids acting like kids, instead of trying so hard to be grown-ups. Once you got to adulthood, there was no going back. Mr. Sutton was of the opinion that you might as well take your time about it. You had the rest of your life to wish you were a kid again.
“Calm down, fellas,” he said. “One at a time.”
They composed themselves for a moment, then went on exactly as before. Amid all the blurting and interruptions, Mr. Sutton gathered a picture of what had happened down at the lake a few minutes ago.
“Alright, now,” he said in his slow, considered manner. “Let’s be scientists about this. First thing’s first: How many beetles can you think of in the British Isles that have a bite that’s dangerous to humans?”
“None!” said Graham quickly. He was the naturalist among them, forever poring over books of birds and insects.
“How many in Europe?”
“None,” said Graham again.
“Is there a beetle in the world capable of causing serious harm to a human being?”
They thought about that for a while, and decided that there probably wasn’t. “Not unless you ate one,” Graham volunteered. “Some of them would poison you if you ate one.”
“Did anyone eat one?”
“Don’t think so,” said Graham, sounding disappointed.
“Right,” said Mr. Sutton. “Let’s not panic too much, then. I’m sure the nurse can handle a beetle bite or two.” He got to his feet and brushed the crumbs of his lunch from his shabby jacket. “I was just about to take a look at my specimen, actually. It’s a bit squashed, but worth a poke. Care to sit in?”
The boys eagerly agreed, and followed him over to a workbench, where the beetle that had been crushed by Adam Wojcik’s heel lay waiting for dissection.