Sue Ann slept over that night, along with her monkey, of course. We were all serious at first, her apologizing for screaming and getting me in trouble, me telling her to forget it. Then she started grinning at me. “Megin?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Speak.”
“You wouldn’t believe how funny it looked. You stumbling backward and all.”
“I couldn’t stop.”
“I know.”
“I was trying to stop and not fall on my butt at the same time.”
“I know, I know!”
“I crashed!”
“Ka-boom!”
“And the scenery! Everything!”
“Ka-boombah!”
We howled.
It was while we were howling that I reached into my book bag and pulled out a half-eaten Milky Way. Something else came out too: a roach. Probably the roach. It plopped onto some paper—you could hear it—and disappeared. I blinked through my laughter tears. “Omagod.”
Sue Ann saw it too. “Eeeek!” She jumped onto a chair. “Megin! Kill it!”
“Kill it? I gotta find it first.” I started kicking stuff aside. “Come on.”
“I’m not coming down there! I’m scared to death of roaches!”
“I don’t exactly love them either, bozo, but we gotta get it or I’m the one that’ll get killed. Grosso’s always saying we’re gonna get roaches because of me.”
She still wouldn’t come down, so I gave her my hockey stick. She started swishing through the floor stuff. “If you see it, mash it,” I told her—but at the same time, an idea hit me. “No, don’t mash it.” I ran to the bathroom and brought back a paper cup.
“What’s that for?” she squealed.
“Never mind. Just find the roach. And don’t mash it.”
Well, for the next ten minutes it was “Megin, there!… Megin, there!” and each time I looked “there,” the roach was gone. But finally I got it—I gave Sue Ann’s monkey a shake and out it fell. I pounced like Gretzky on a loose puck—down came the paper cup. The roach was trapped.
One by one I pulled the papers and stuff out from under, till there was nothing but an old postcard beneath the roach. I lifted the postcard, keeping the cup clamped to it, and carried the roach out of my room, down the hallway, to El Grosso’s room. He was inside. The door was shut. I crouched. I pressed my little surprise to the threshold. I tilted the postcard, lifted the cup. The roach ran under the door.
Greg
I DIDN’T KNOCK on my parents’ door, I just barged in. They were still asleep. I stood at the foot of the bed.
“I told you it would happen.” Nobody moved. Louder: “I told you it would happen.” My mother’s head came out from under the covers, raised, tilted toward my father’s head, lowered, disappeared. Louder: “I told you it would happen.” This time when my mother’s head came out, she squinted down the covers to me. She blinked but didn’t speak. “I told you it would happen.”
She said something; I think it was “What?”
“Roaches.”
“Huh?”
“Roaches.”
She looked at the clock, looked at me, blinked. “Huh?”
“Roaches.”
She blinked some more. Her head slowly turned away and lowered. She must have given my father a good jab under the covers, because he suddenly jerked awake. He looked at her, but by this time her head had disappeared again. Then he noticed me. “Greg?”
“Roaches.”
“Isn’t it early?” He looked at the clock. “Saturday morning?”
“Roaches.”
He looked up, scanned the ceiling. “Roaches?”
“Yeah. She finally did it.”
“Who?”
“Your daughter.”
“Did what?”
“Roaches.”
“Roaches.” His eyes shifted around. “Where?”
“My room.”
“You saw them?”
“It. But where there’s one, there’s more. Maybe hundreds.”
“Weren’t you sleeping?”
“Yeah. I just opened my eyes for a second. There it was.”
“Maybe you were dreaming. A nightmare.”
“I was awake. It was real. On the windowsill. I saw something moving. I got up and looked. That’s what it was.”
“Maybe it was a water bug. They look like roaches.”
“Water bugs are slow. Roaches are fast. This was fast.”
“Did you get it?”
“No. Couldn’t find anything to hit it with in time.”
He closed his eyes, yawned. “What’s a roach doing up this early?”
“It’s not funny.”
“Sorry.”
“I told you this would happen. You wouldn’t listen.”
His head was going back down. “I guess not.”
“You’re calling an exterminator, aren’t you?”
“Too early.”
“Maybe they have twenty-four-hour emergency service.”
“That’s tow trucks.”
“Maybe exterminators too. It’s a health hazard.”
“One roach? Emergency?”
His head was gone now. I was talking to a blanket. “It’s an emergency for me.”
“Okay, we’ll see.”
“Well, I’m not sleeping in that room till we get an exterminator.” I left.
I was back in a minute, up at the head of the bed this time, holding a pizza crust I had snatched off Megamouth’s floor. “Here—look.”
An eye came out. “What’s that?”
“Pizza.”
“No thank you.”
I jabbed it in his face. “Dad—I got this off her floor. This is why we got roaches now. Next’ll be diseases. They’re having the World’s Fair for Bacteria in there.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Talk to her? That doesn’t do any good.”
“I’ll see that she cleans her room.”
“What good’s that do? You’re always telling her to clean her room. She doesn’t. It stays garbage in there.”
“I’ll make sure this time.”
“How?”
“I’ll take her garbage license away.”
I stormed out. From the doorway of Megamouth’s room, I winged the pizza crust at the bed. There was a bleat, but the head that popped up and turned to face me wasn’t Megamouth’s—it was her friend Sue Ann’s. I hardly got the word “Sorry” out before Megamouth was standing on the bed in her grungy Gretzky nightshirt with her fists clenched. “Waddaya think you’re doing?” she squawked. She turned to Sue Ann. “What’d he do to you?”
Sue Ann was holding her ear and gawking at me like I was a great white shark. “I don’t know,” she whimpered. “Something hit me.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “it wasn’t meant for her, it was meant for you.”
Megamouth looked around, saw the crust, picked it up, and fired it at me. I ducked. “Get outta here!” she yelled.
“I’ll get outta here when that roach gets outta my room.”
“That’s your problem!” She threw a pinecone at me. While I was coming out of my duck from that, something else headed my way: brown, furry, legs. I caught it in the face. My first thought was, My God, she even has a dead dog in here! Then Sue Ann was going, “Megin—not my monkey!”
I whipped the monkey back at her. It’s hard to aim a monkey. It missed her by five feet and knocked off the only thing left on her dresser, some stupid picture of some kid holding a rabbit. She stared at the picture for a second; next thing I knew she was heading for my throat. But then my father was there, pulling us apart, stuffing her back into her room, shutting her door, herding me away.
Later, in the kitchen, my mother was pouring my father’s coffee and saying, “I don’t see how I can go to ceramics today. This time it won’t be donuts. This time they’ll kill each other.”
“That’s a trifle overreacting,”
my father said.
“Tell that to my headache. And I was supposed to use the kiln today.”
“Sibling rivalry, honey.”
“Sibling homicide.”
I was at the refrigerator. I heard a fart. “Hey, Toddie me boy!” my father cackled. “Listen, I want you to go up to Greg’s room and do that again. Then shut the door real quick. Any life forms in there ought to be dead within five minutes.”
“Thanks,” I said. I grabbed a handful of grapes and left. “Don’t worry about us fighting if you go. I won’t be here.”
I spent most of the day at the library, doing research.
At dinner that night, my father plunked down a can of bug spray.
“That’s no good,” I sneered. “Roaches became immune to that stuff a long time ago.”
“How’s that?” he said. “Did they all get vaccinated?”
Megamouth snickered.
That’s how it went, him giving his supposedly clever comments to my library notes: that roaches have been around for over 300 million years (“Hey, that’s a mighty old roach you got up there”); that a female roach lays fifty eggs at one time (“Whew! That’s a lot of diapers to change!”); that they contaminate everything they touch (“Like teenagers, huh?”); that they even eat the glue off book bindings (“Don’t bookworms do that?”).
Finally I crumpled up my notes and got up to leave the table. “You’re not going to call an exterminator, are you?”
My father held out the can of bug spray. “Let’s just try this first. I hate to spend twenty to thirty dollars on one bug.”
“It won’t work.” I walked away.
He called. “Greg?”
“What?”
“Just one question. You said they hang around where it’s all dirty and wet and garbage?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So how come the roach went to your room instead of Megin’s?”
“Yeah, how come?” piped Megamouth.
“Because it didn’t go to my room,” I said. “She put it there.”
Megamouth shrieked. “Liar!”
“How do you know?” said my father.
“I know.”
“But how do you know?”
I grabbed my jacket and slammed the door on the way out.
They thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. I slept on the living-room sofa that night. I kept thinking of the roach making itself at home in my room, getting fat on the bindings of my books. Sometimes I felt really bitter and was ready to charge upstairs and retake my room, but thinking about the roach crawling over me in my sleep—maybe across my face—was enough to keep me on the sofa.
I also kept wondering how my father could not believe Megamouth was behind all this. (He hadn’t even made her clean up her room.) Didn’t he see that the fact that the roach was in my room proved that she planted it there? Because what roach, if it had a free choice of rooms, would pick mine over Megamouth’s? What were my book bindings compared to her garbage? That would be against all nature.
Well, during the next morning the picture changed a little. I was in Sunday school, and we were talking about the plagues in Egypt, when the land was overrun by locusts and frogs and stuff. The plagues were God’s punishment on Egypt, the teacher said. That’s when it hit me: maybe the roach was planted in my room, but not by Megamouth.
That started me wondering what I’d done lately worth getting a plague-type punishment for. It didn’t take me long to think of something. In fact, it had been in the back of my mind all week: the way I’d treated—the way I’d used—Sara Bellamy. Just because I wasn’t crazy about her didn’t mean I had a right to take advantage of her, just so I could get to Jennifer Wade. I was a rat.
I made a vow to be honest with Sara. No more leading her on. I would ignore her, make it plain that she ought to forget about me, clear my conscience.
Monday morning—I slept on the sofa again Sunday night—that’s what I did. I saw her in Algebra, in the hallways twice, and at lunch. Each time, I looked the other way, waved at somebody else, pretended to be talking to others. I could see the shock on her face. Pain too. It was hard. Sara Bellamy is an okay girl, even if she’s not my type. I really had to force myself to remember that I was doing this for her sake. I was thankful that she didn’t try to talk to me, that she wasn’t making it harder than it already was. Class girl, Sara.
By afternoon I was feeling a little better, a little lighter. Like in the conscience, maybe? And for an instant I had the strangest feeling that half a mile away a certain cockroach was leaving my room.
Then, as I was coming out of History, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Sara. Usually I wouldn’t see her there. She must have come looking for me.
“Hi,” she said. Her lips were smiling, but her eyes were wider than usual. “Bonjour.”
“Oh, hi,” I said.
“Preoccupied today?”
“Who, me?”
“Yeah, you,” she mocked.
I shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“Sick?”
“Nope.”
“Worried?”
“Never.”
“Enjoying this third degree?”
I laughed. “Sure.”
Her smile changed. “Something wrong?”
“What could be wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” I chuckled, “I don’t know either.”
“You’re not mad?”
Her eyes were burning into mine. I laughed. “Shoot, no. What at?”
“Me, maybe?”
“Heck no!” I nudged her.
We both laughed. We walked a ways, laughing. Then she said, “Well, glad that’s settled.”
“Yep.”
“Yep. Now I can invite you to my party.” She saw the shock on my face. She laughed. “Freaky fifteen. You’re the first to hear about it. Saturday night. Coming?”
I wish I could say I said “Sure” instantly, the moment she asked me, laughing-eyed. But I didn’t. First a thought came to me: She’ll probably invite her friend Jennifer Wade too. And only then, then, did I say, “Sure.”
And half a mile away a certain cockroach turned around.
Megin
DADDY, it’s not my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“So why are you punishing me?”
“I’m not punishing you.”
“You’re making me clean my room.”
“That’s punishment?”
“What do you know? You never have to clean a room. Mommy cleans your room for you.”
“Well, when you get married you can have your husband clean your room. For now, it’s up to you.”
There was more to it than he was saying, something he wasn’t telling me. “Daddy, the roach is in his room. Not mine.”
“I know, but it’s not that simple.”
“You think I put the roach in his room, don’t you? You believe him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You never believe me. You’re against me.”
He took a deep breath. He put his hand on my knee and patted me. I slapped it away. “Dimpus—honey—I’m not against anybody. It’s just that for three nights now Gregory has been sleeping in the living room.”
“So?”
“So, it bothers me. It’s not right. He has a room. He should be sleeping in it.”
“So, make him.”
“It’s not that simple. He’s really terrified of roaches.”
“So get an exterminator.”
“It’s not that simple either.”
The way he half-grinned, the way he looked at me, I could tell I was close to what he was holding back. “Why isn’t it that simple?” I said.
“Well, because Greg feels an exterminator—”
“Oh, Greg feels.”
“—an exterminator isn’t enough. It’s okay to have an exterminator, but first we ought to have all the other rooms in the area as clean as possible.”
; “Oh, great. So he’s giving the orders now, huh? He tells you to tell me to clean my room. What are you, his slave? I thought you were the father around here.”
“Honey,” he whined, “why are you making such a big deal out of it anyway? I’m not asking you to commit suicide. All I’m asking is for you to clean your room.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Okay, what is the point?”
“The point is, I’m being persecuted for something I didn’t do. I’m being framed.”
He laughed. “In the first place, you’re not being persecuted. In the second place—look, Dimpus—just do it for me, okay? A favor for your old dad. Okay?”
He was staring at me, wanting me to smile back at him and say, “Okay, Daddy.” He’d have to wait about a million years. “It’s not fair,” I told him.
“Life’s not fair.”
“It stinks.”
“Life stinks.”
So, strictly as a favor, I cleaned my room. When I finished I went to him. “Okay, it’s done.”
He looked like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “What’s done?”
“Waddaya think? My room. You told me to clean it.”
He looked at the clock. “That was five minutes ago. You’re done?”
“Come on and see.”
He came, he saw, and he laughed. I asked him what he was laughing at. He tweaked my cheek. “You’re getting to be quite the little comedian, Dimpus. For a minute there, I thought you were serious.” He went away laughing.
“What’re you gonna do?” I called. “Have a big laugh with Grosso?” I reached my foot under my bed and kicked out the stuff I had pushed there.
That night, I finished my dinner in two minutes and got up to leave. I told them I was going to Dunkin’ Donuts.
“I don’t think so,” my father said.
“What?” I screeched. “Why not?”
“Your room.”
“What about it?”
“You know what about it.”
“I did clean it. I showed you.”
“You might have done something to it, but I don’t think the word is clean.”
I turned to my mother. “Mom, can I go?”
Her fork cut a piece of broccoli in half. “You heard your father.”
“But I have to go to Dunkin’ Donuts. I have to.” (I hadn’t taken a french cruller to Emilie in a week.)
“Fine,” my father said. “Just clean your room and you can go.”