* * *

  We’re going to get an early start and be in Ocean Park by daybreak. Assuming we make it through the night.

  I ask Mum and Dad if I can sleep on the floor in their cabin. They got Happy. There he is, on a painted board above their doorway. With his roly-poly belly and his roly-poly cheeks and that big cheery grin.

  “Please, Mum. It’s important.”

  “Talk to him,” says Mum to Dad.

  “Soldier,” says Dad, with his hand on my shoulder. “There are a lot worse things than an older sister, let me tell you.”

  “Annie Oakley isn’t really my sister. I think you stole her from the zoo.”

  “We didn’t steal her from anywhere and I’m afraid she is.”

  “Yeah, well that makes two of us.”

  Dad sighs. “I’m not even going to ask what she did now,” he says. “But I’ll admit she doesn’t always think of the consequences of her actions.”

  “Like getting us killed,” I say. I start to walk away up the hill toward Grumpy. “Have a great time in Ocean Park,” I call back to Mom and Dad. “I’ll be thinking of you from my grave.”

  “Rex.” I don’t stop. “Rex!” says Dad more sharply. And so I head back down to him, my chin on my chest.

  “What’s going on, Soldier?” he says.

  So I tell him everything.

  * * *

  Back in Grumpy, I turn on the TV. They get more channels than we do back in Canada, but wherever I look it’s the news, and I sit and watch. Luckily, Annie’s not there. Maybe she’s smartened up and gone home. It’d be a long walk but not as long as being dead. I turn off the television. By the time the image disappears to nothing, I’ve made a big decision.

  He’s going to get us. Skip. The only way is to strike first. Catch him off guard.

  I walk over to my little suitcase. There’s nothing much in it but shorts and underwear and bathing suits and T-shirts and more shorts. But there are a couple of valuable things. I open the case, take a deep breath. They’re the only weapons I’ve got. I’m just not sure I’m brave enough to use them.

  I walk down the hill toward Snow White. From the back she looks eerie in the fading light. The spotlights have come on out front and from my point of view she’s just a huge silhouette with her arms flung upward in shock. From here, she could be a witch.

  As I crunch across the gravel of the parking lot, I notice they’ve uncovered the “No” sign. That means there are no vacancies at the Snow White Motel. But they may have acted too soon. If what I have planned doesn’t work out, Grumpy may be available, once they clean up all the gore and mess from our dead bodies. I stop at the red door and consider going back. Or better still, knocking on the Happy cabin and demanding that my parents take me in. They have to do that when your life’s in danger.

  But no. I have to do this.

  I hope he’s still here. Skip. He’s the owner’s son. That’s what Dad told me. I take a deep breath and open the door and he’s there, all right. He’s sitting at a desk behind the counter. He looks up with a smile.

  “I’m sorry, there are no …” he says before he recognizes me, then the smile disappears. “What do you want?” he says. I just stand there on the threshold. He can’t beat me to death here, can he? It wouldn’t be very good for business to have blood splattered all over the place. “Well?” he says.

  I get my feet to move and I walk up to the counter. “Here,” I say and try to hand him my almost brand-new Panasonic transistor radio in its leather carrying case.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s to replace the one my sister threw in the pool.” He looks at it, doesn’t touch it. “Take it,” I say. He frowns at me. “It’s not booby-trapped.”

  He reaches out and picks it up by the strap and swings it around to look at it.

  “It’s an RF-811,” I say.

  He nods. Then looks hard at me. “Is it hers?”

  I shake my head. “No, it’s mine.”

  He nods, looks the radio over one more time and then puts it back on the counter. “She never threw it in,” he says.

  What? How did I miss that?

  “If it were hers, I’d-a kept it, anyway,” says Skip. “But you didn’t do anything.”

  “She was just defending me. She doesn’t always think before she acts.”

  “Yeah, well, she wouldn’t be the only one,” he says. “Now beat it.”

  Beating it is a really good idea. Except I can’t move. “I did do something,” I say. “I gave your comic a soaker. That was a really good issue. ‘The Thing is here!’” I say, putting on my best Boris Karloff voice. “‘The Thing has us trapped! There’s no place to run!’”

  He screws up his face. “You’re weird, little man,” he says. “Now get out of here.” He looks down at the motel registry book open in front of him. “You’re in Grumpy, right?” He looks up. I nod. “Have a good night, Rex,” he says. His voice is tired, not really angry. Just kind of drained, worn out.

  Still I don’t move. Can’t. I take back the transistor and put the strap over my shoulder. But I’ve got something else, something I’ve been keeping hidden from him behind the counter. My only other weapon. Now I lift it up. “I owe you this,” I say and reluctantly shove a rolled-up comic his way.

  He takes it and unscrolls it to look at the cover. His eyes grow wide. “It’s the new Strange Tales,” he says. “This only just came out.

  “Whoa!” he says, flipping through the pages.

  “It’s got the Human Torch, Doctor Strange and Thor in it,” I say.

  “And Thing,” he adds.

  “Yeah, and Thing. It’s … it’s yours,” I say.

  He frowns at me, bobs his head up and down, and purses his lips as if he’s coming to a big decision. Then he smiles. Phew! I want to ask him if that means we’re square now, and he won’t come and kill us in our sleep. Then again, I don’t want to give him any ideas.

  “Thanks, kid. I’m going to take you up on this.”

  “Okay,” I say. Now I should definitely turn around and go but I can’t. I’m still not finished.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say.

  “Yeah, well … I’m sorry, too. I kinda lost it up there.”

  “No, I mean about, you know, the war.” Now the sadness seeps back into his eyes and his expression grows hard again. Uh-oh. “I didn’t know they just declared war,” I say. “Today.”

  He leans on the desk behind the counter and looks away. His face is bitter. “They didn’t ‘declare’ war,” he says. “They just started a war with no declaration or nothing.”

  I don’t say anything. All I know from Dad is that Skip just registered with Selective Services a few days back. That’s what Dad told me. He got talking with Skip’s dad when he was checking in. That’s what took so long.

  A boy has to register within thirty days of his eighteenth birthday and Skip had done it right away, like a good citizen. He didn’t know then that they’d go right out and start a war, as if they’d just been waiting for him. Which means he might have to go over there, wherever it is. I’m not sure. I saw a map of Vietnam on the news. It looked like a long snaky “S” with a beehive hairdo.

  “You’d better get to bed, Rex. You’re leaving real early, from what I hear.”

  “Okay.” Finally, my feet unlock and I turn to go. I’m relieved, I guess, but not happy.

  “Hey, Rex,” Skip says. I turn around at the door. “I might not get drafted,” he says. I nod. “It could all be over real soon.”

  “I hope so,” I say.

  I walk up the hill, feeling a little bit better, even though I’d had to give up a brand-new comic I’d been saving until we got to the cottage. I look over toward Happy. Dad’s standing outside under the porch light smoking his pipe.

  I head up toward him.

  “How goes the war, Soldier?” he says.

  Ant and the Praying Mantis

  Pretty well everybody has some kind of creature in their name. There are eight people in my class with ants in their name and four people with bees. There’s also Marybeth Stone who has both an ant and a bee in her name, which maybe accounts for how twitchy she is. There’s also a cow, an eel, a flea and a rat in our class. I’m not saying everybody lives up to their creature name, but some do. Take Dierdre Prosser, for instance. She has a spider in her name and she is most definitely spidery: a gossip girl always weaving webs.

  My name is Ant. Well, Anthony Lawson, but my creature name is Ant and I’m fine with that. Ants are industrious. Stubborn. They can lift a hundred times their weight, right up over their heads. They are superheroes. I made a T-shirt in summer camp with a line of ants that look as if they’re coming out of my left pant pocket, meandering across my torso, over my shoulder and marching all the way down to my right back pocket. Ants with a goal.

  Sometimes your creature name is just sitting right there, like mine is. Sometimes it’s hidden and you have to move letters around to find it. So if your name is, say, Vera Best, you could go a long, long time never even realizing you had a beaver hiding secretly in your name. I thought she’d be excited to know about it. I was wrong.

  “Hey, you,” says the new girl. “Do you have any idea how creepy this is?”

  “What?”

  “Calling people names.”

  New Girl looms over me like a tree in winter, all shivering limbs.

  “I didn’t call anybody a name.”

  “Yes, you did,” says New Girl. Behind her, a few paces off, there’s a gaggle of girls and one of them is crying. Vera Best.

  “Oh,” I say, confused. “I didn’t call her anything.”

  “You did so!” shouts Vera.

  “No, I didn’t, honest.” I look past New Girl at Vera. “All I did was tell you what I’d found in your name.”

  “In front of a bunch of people,” says Vera.

  “And now everyone is calling her … calling her that,” says New Girl, stepping in front of me to protect Vera from having to so much as see me.

  “Everyone?” It’s the first I’ve heard of it.

  “Some people,” says New Girl, glaring down at me.

  “Is that my fault?” I ask. And it really is a question.

  “What do you think?” says New Girl.

  I’m not sure what I think. I’m not very fast on my feet. Ants just aren’t. “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”

  “She’s not some animal,” says New Girl. “So just stop it, okay?”

  New Girl doesn’t wait for my answer. She turns and joins the gaggle of girls and they scuttle away, with their arms around Vera, throwing angry glances back my way.

  I thought Vera would be excited to have a creature name. Meryl Squires loved it when I told her she had a squirrel in her name. And Rose Campione told me she was going to get a tattoo of a scorpion when she was old enough. I think it’s magic how words are full of other words. I stand there feeling angry. Well, angry and sorry and really stupid.

  * * *

  Samantha Grimsby-Paine. That’s the new girl’s name. It’s kind of an amazing name and she is kind of amazing. So tall and willowy.

  “Qué es ‘willowy’?” says Moth.

  So I try to explain to him that Samantha is tall, but she moves kind of gracefully and her long crinkly hair is like the fronds of a willow tree. Except not green.

  Moth frowns. “She just looks desgarbada to me,” he says. Then he finds the English word. “Gawky.”

  He’s right, I guess; she is kind of gawky. But apart from her biting my head off like that for something I didn’t mean to do, she’s kind of cool … well, in a slightly frightening way. I don’t say that to Moth.

  Moth’s real name is Timoteo Hiraldo, which is about as good a name as you could ever want. Except he doesn’t like it. Why? Because people at our school call him Timmy.

  “Timmy,” he said, when we first were getting to know each other. Then he gagged.

  “So, how about ‘Moth’?” I said.

  “Qué es ‘moth’?” So I told him. “Ah,” he said, smiling. “Una polilla.” He seemed okay about having a moth in his name. “Una mariposa nocturna,” he said.

  Even I could translate that: a butterfly of the night. His eyes glowed as if he was picturing a superhero with colorful wings instead of a cape. And so we became Ant and Moth. Just a couple of little insects trying to get through middle school without being stepped on or swatted.

  * * *

  Samantha Grimsby-Paine: she’s got an ant in her name, just like me, and a manta ray, which is ultracool. Talk about graceful. I see those two creatures right off. But it’s only when I get home from school that day and I’m doodling with all the possibilities of all those letters that I figure out just how amazing her name is.

  * * *

  “Don’t you ever learn!?” says Samantha Grimsby-Paine at lunch the very next day. She plants a Post-it Note on my chest so hard she almost knocks me over. “This was sticking on my locker. Half the school saw it before I did!”

  I look down at the note. I can’t see what it says upside down, but it isn’t my writing. I peel it off and read it.

  Beware the Preying Mantis!!!

  “I didn’t do this,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “I told you about it this morning before homeroom. Why would I put a note on your locker?”

  “Who else in this school goes around making fun of people by turning them into insects?”

  “Seriously, it wasn’t me,” I say. “It’s spelled wrong.”

  “What?”

  “It should be ‘praying mantis,’ with an ‘a’ because it looks like it’s praying.” She looks up at the sky as if only God is going to be able to stop her from stepping on me and squishing me into ant-dust. “Honest, Samantha, I didn’t write this. I don’t even know where your locker is.”

  She crosses her arms. “Okay, you didn’t do it, but it’s your work, right? Don’t try to pretend you didn’t come up with this.” I swallow, nod. “And then you told everybody to show them just how smart you were.”

  I can feel my face burning. “No. I didn’t mean it like that, honest, but I’m sorry,” I mutter. My voice has gone all dry. I want to scuttle away and hide under a leaf.

  She pokes me in the chest again. “You don’t even get it, do you?” she says.

  “Get what?”

  Her shoulders droop as if she’s exhausted at the effort of trying to talk to someone so dim. She blows a strand of crinkly hair out of her face. “Maybe you didn’t …” Her brow creases, as she tries to find the right words. “Maybe you didn’t throw the rock but you put it in someone’s hand.”

  It’s a pretty good analogy, except that it’s aimed right at me. Her face is so angry it looks as if it is cracking around the edges, like there’s a bird inside her trying to get out but once the shell opens, there will only be tears.

  She snorts with disgust and then turns and strides away.

  “‘Mantis’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘prophet,’” I mutter under my breath.

  * * *

  There is a bird in her name, more than one. There’s a tern, a magpie, a martin and an ibis. She’s almost an egret but needs an extra “e.” She’s almost a heron but lacks an “o.” I google “ibis” when I’m supposed to be doing my math homework and find this great symbolic meaning about an ibis representing a graceful and well-balanced individual. I like that. But I highly doubt Samantha would. Not now. Maybe if I got to know her better and we became friends, I could tell her, secretly, so no one else could hear. I try to imagine whispering it to her. She’d have to bend down a long way to hear or I’d have to stand on a box. If we were friends, I’d probably get a crook in my neck from looking up at her.

  * * *

  Moth and I are sitting in homeroom Thursday morning, talking about the new season of Stranger Things, when suddenly my name comes on over the intercom.

  “Would Anthony Lawson please report to the principal’s office?”

  Moth looks at me with surprise that is only matched by my own.

  I sit outside the principal’s office. “Dr. Yasmin Farrokh,” it says on the door. I’ve only ever known her last name until now. Such a beautiful name. Hmm. But before I can find a single creature in it, she’s at the door inviting me in.

  I sit in front of her desk and she sits behind it. She places her palms together as if she’s praying, while looking at something on the desk in front of her. Then she places her hands on the desk, leans forward and looks at me sternly.

  “There have been some complaints,” she says.

  Some complaints? How many is “some”?

  “About me?”

  She nods then folds her hands on her desktop. “Name-calling is a form of bullying, Anthony,” she says. “Do you understand that?”

  I nod, swallow hard.

  “So what do you have to say for yourself?”

  My mouth is dry, my throat tight. I don’t know what to say. All I can think is that for someone with such a pretty name it’s amazing that there is a mink in her name. Also a shark.

  “Anthony?”

  “Sorry,” I say and try to speak. I can’t. I point at my throat.

  She reaches into her desk and finds one of those tiny bottles of water and hands it to me. I unscrew the lid, take a long swig, then recap it.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “You’re welcome.” She waits. “Well?”

  “I just … It’s not …” I look down.