Roger Mantis

by Tom Alan Brosz

  Roger woke in terror, scrambling off his bed and standing on four shaky legs. Sunlight was coming in the window, and there were bits of something brown scattered on his bed!

  “Lou!” Roger yelled. There was an inquiring whine in response from outside his door. Of course, thought Roger. Lou sleeps in the hall.

  Roger took a closer look at the pieces on his bed. Jeez! They were pieces of his old baseball glove! The biggest chunk still had stitching on it and bits of duct tape. He dropped flat to the floor, legs splayed, weak with relief. Then it hit him. His baseball glove had been on his bedside table last night. And he’d eaten it in his sleep? Well, it was made of leather, he thought. That’s kind of like animal skin, isn’t it?

  Roger started laughing, a bit nervously. Lou barked, and Roger stood up and went over to let him in. Lou ran in, jumped right up on the bed as he usually did, and started sniffing the bits of glove. Then he sat on the bed and looked at Roger.

  Roger knew that expression. It was Lou’s I Swear I Didn’t Do It expression. Lou used it a lot, whether he’d done it or not.

  “Sorry, Lou,” laughed Roger, “it really wasn’t you chewing the glove up this time!” Good thing it had been his old glove, the one he used only for practices. Now that he would be using his newer one, he’d need to be a lot more careful. Eating baseball gloves was definitely out of the question.

  And for darn sure, Lou was never going to sleep in his room again while Roger was a mantis!

  “You up, Roger?” That was his mother, calling up the stairs. “Hurry up! School!”

  Roger’s relief deflated. Oh yeah. Today was his first day of school as a giant carnivorous predator.

  On top of everything else, Roger had to get up a lot earlier than normal. He would be walking to school instead of taking the bus, and Roger’s school was even farther from his house than the high school, especially if you took the quiet Perimeter Road route around the south end of Highland Falls instead of walking right through the middle of the crowded town.

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea to take the bus like you usually do,” his father had advised the night before. “You might have a hard time getting on and off, and if you made anyone nervous, it would only be worse in a crowded space. Besides, Mr. Horowitz wants to talk to the students before he puts you out there officially, and the less exposure you have before that, the better. I’m sorry I can’t give you a ride, but I’m going into the medical office even earlier tomorrow, and I need to have the car with me then.” Roger had agreed. He hadn’t been looking forward to the bus anyway, and he wasn’t sure he would have fit into the back of their station wagon. Besides, he liked walking.

  “And for heaven’s sake, no flying,” his mother had said. “You’d probably be seen by a lot more people than is good right now, maybe even by out-of-towners driving on the state highway on that side of town. Besides, it might be dangerous. You don’t want to risk getting hurt.” Roger nodded. Why, he hadn’t even thought about flying! Well, maybe a little.

  The good news this morning was that he didn’t have to deal with a lot of stuff he used to when he got ready for school. For one thing, he didn’t have to make his bed anymore. His parents had noticed his trouble with blankets and sheets, and now his bed was just a mattress covered with a heavy canvas sheet. Roger wasn’t bothered much by the cold anymore, so he didn’t really miss the blankets. He also didn’t have to comb his hair, or brush his teeth, or even get dressed.

  So now all he had to do was get up and head down for breakfast, which he did, with Lou following him down the stairs.

  After breakfast, when Roger was ready to go, his mother handed him his new school backpack. Last night she had modified it with clips so he didn’t have to try and get the straps over his long arms. But Roger still had a lot of difficulty getting his new backpack on. Even with clips, he couldn’t grab the straps real well.

  “Here, son,” his mother said. “Let me help.” She wrapped the straps under his arms and over his shoulders. Roger did manage to fasten the clips himself.

  Then on Marlene’s advice the day before, Roger put on a baseball cap, his own this time, jamming it firmly but carefully between his antennae so it wouldn’t fall off.

  “Be careful today, son,” his mother said. “Watch for cars, and don’t dawdle on the way.” Roger smiled inside, despite his worries. Moms.

  A bit later, Roger trudged along the side of the road. Well, not “trudged” so much, not with his spindly legs. It was more like a very slow scuttle. Roger wished Jerry and Marlene were walking with him, but while Marlene usually walked, she lived much closer to the school and in a different direction.

  Jerry lived close to Roger and usually took the same bus that Roger did, but apparently Jerry valued his sleep way too much to get up early enough to walk with him. At least that’s how Roger saw it at the moment.

  He arrived at school a little late, so nobody was left in the schoolyard to see him. He went around to the back entrance of the auditorium where Mr. Horowitz waited for him by the door.

  “Come on in, Roger,” Mr. Horowitz said. He sized Roger up as they went in. “You can leave your backpack over there. I like that you’re wearing the baseball cap again. I think it might help.”

  Another point for Marlene’s Law, thought Roger as he followed the principal through the door. They went down the short hall to the stage entrance. Mr. Horowitz opened the stage door a crack and peeked out.

  “It’s going to be a little while before all the students check into their rooms and get sent here,” he said. “Can you wait here until everyone’s arrived? I’ll be back shortly.”

  “Sure,” said Roger. He stood near the stage door while Mr. Horowitz went back down the hall and through another door. Roger wasn’t equipped to sit down, and he’d found that just standing in one spot for a long time didn’t tire him at all. He remembered that his pet mantis would stay perfectly still for hours. Still, his brain wasn’t as patient as a mantis’ brain, and for Roger, the next half hour was a very long wait. His feet skittered nervously back and forth, and he caught himself scraping his foreclaws together more than once. He even unconsciously tapped a claw into a nearby plaster wall until he realized he’d made a hole in it. His pet mantis had never done any of that while it was standing still.

  Roger could hear Mr. Horowitz through the auditorium door saying something to the students after they arrived. Most of the talk sounded like the one Mr. Horowitz had given the team, with the cautions about protecting Roger from too much outside attention.

  Finally, Mr. Horowitz opened the stage door. “I think everyone’s ready,” he said. “I’ve prepped them as best I could. Come on in, go out on the stage, and we’ll play it by ear.”

  Roger went through the door to one wing of the brightly-lit stage. The thick, dark purple, velvety curtains were open, and he hung back, hidden behind their folds. From here he couldn’t see the seats, but he could hear the murmuring of all the students in the auditorium.

  Mr. Horowitz approached a podium, then turned and beckoned to Roger. Slowly, keeping his lethal-looking arms folded tight, Roger walked out onto the stage. The auditorium house lights were all on, and he could see everyone clearly, which meant they could see Roger, too. One girl gave a short screech—it didn’t sound like Julie—and he saw at least three kids run for the exits. The rest of the audience gave a collective gasp. It was not looking good.

  Some of the kids looked amazed, or interested, but his sharp new eyes noticed quite a few who didn’t seem that happy about him at all. They had upset and frightened expressions on their faces. Some looked disgusted. Roger even saw upset expressions on a few teachers.

  Nobody booed or threw anything—they wouldn’t with Mr. Horowitz standing right there. The principal was downright fierce when it came to any kind of bullying. But their expressions said enough, and there was a lot of muttering.

  Roger edged back toward the side of the stage. For the first time since he had chang
ed into a mantis, Roger actually felt a little scared about what might happen when a lot of people knew about him.

  It got worse. Roger—who was paying more attention to the audience than he was to his feet—suddenly slipped on the polished wooden floor and fell, landing flat with all four legs splayed out and his arms waving wildly in the air. His baseball cap fell off.

  “Aw, jeez!” he yelled. There was a moment of dead silence.

  “Hey, McGillicutty!” shouted some kid, laughing. “Nice move!” Roger didn’t see who it was, but it sounded an awful lot like Carl, and it set the whole auditorium laughing at once, like someone had flipped a switch. Mortified, Roger scrambled to get on his feet but almost slipped again.

  “C’mon, Roger! Get up! You can do it!” That was Ricky, his team’s second baseman.

  Roger looked at Mr. Horowitz. Why was he just standing by the podium and not saying anything now? He even looked like he had a small smile on his face. Didn’t he care that everything was screwing up?

  Then Roger realized something. The kids weren’t laughing at a monster bug. They were laughing at him. At Roger. Just the same as they did when they sometimes made fun of his last name, or that one time when he accidentally flipped his lunch tray full of spaghetti onto Jerry’s head. The same way everybody—including Roger—had laughed when Billy Henderson flew off his sled last winter and got jammed headfirst into a snowbank with just his wiggling legs sticking out.

  The way normal kids laugh at other normal kids.

  With relief, and slowly growing confidence, he finally managed to stand up without falling, and a few kids actually clapped at his seemingly impossible feat. His baseball cap lay on the floor in front of him. He hooked under it with a claw end and lifted it up. On impulse, he tried to flip it up onto his head. It bumped an antenna and fell back to the floor.

  “That’s one!” yelled a kid in back.

  Roger tried again, holding his antennae out sideways, but he missed again.

  “Two!” yelled several kids together.

  Roger picked up the cap on his claw point this time, spun it around, and then flipped it up. He focused on the moving cap, got his head in exactly the right spot, and the cap landed squarely on it.

  “Three!” the whole crowd roared as the auditorium burst into wild cheers. Roger stood statue-still to keep the cap from slipping off again and waved.

  Maybe, just maybe, it was going to be okay. At least mostly okay.

  Mr. Horowitz rapped loudly on the podium with his knuckles. His face was stern now, and the auditorium fell silent. There were many more apprehensive young faces in the audience, but now it was probably because they thought they’d gotten on the principal’s bad side.

  “As I said earlier,” said Mr. Horowitz, “the most important thing about a person is what they are inside. There are many people who have had to deal with prejudice and fear based on their appearances, but what has happened to Roger has never happened to anyone before, and he is walking a road no other person has had to walk. He is going to need all the help and support he can get.”

  He looked slowly around the room. “I am not upset with the students who left. This was a bad shock for them, even with my preparation. I hope they will get over it. I have prepared information sheets for you students, your parents, and our staff. Please make sure your parents receive them and read them. Make special note of how we have to keep Roger secret within our community for now, and make sure your friends and family are aware of this. Roger’s safety may depend on it.”

  He stepped back from the podium. “Now we can all get back to our work. Remember, part of that work in this school has always been helping each other succeed, especially those who need it the most. Oh, and counselors, see me in my office as soon as you can.”

  Mr. Horowitz then dismissed the students back to their classes, and kids started filing out the back, chattering loudly while teachers herding them back to classes tried to quiet them down. Roger went offstage to meet Marlene and Jerry waiting there for him, and they all headed back into the school hallways.

  “That went pretty well,” said Marlene. “Score one more for the cap!”

  “Maybe,” said Roger. “There were a lot of kids that didn’t look happy to have a giant bug in the school.”

  Mr. Horowitz walked up to them. “It’s not surprising, Roger,” he said. “In a lot of places there are still people who don’t even want someone who’s a different color in their school. As I said, you have a harder road to walk than most. I, and others, will see to it that you can.” He patted Roger on the back of his thorax. “Tolerate, or even ignore the people who aren’t receptive to you, and focus on the people that are.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Horowitz,” said Roger, as the principal continued down the hall.

  “Our coach is kind of scary sometimes,” said Jerry, looking at the departing principal. “I’m glad he’s on our side.” Roger had to agree, on both points.

  Some kids hurried past them, not looking, on their way to class, but other kids paused along the way, asking questions.

  “Hey, Roger,” asked one younger girl, “how did you get to be a praying mantis?”

  “Probably some bug that’s going around,” said Jerry.

  “Jerry,” said Roger, “if you say that again, I’m going to chew your head off.”

  “If he says that again,” muttered Marlene, “I’m going to chew his head off.”

  Chapter Ten

  The rest of the day went all right, more or less. Roger tried to find a place in the back of classrooms to keep from being any more of a distraction than he had to be. It also gave him room to stand and stretch out behind a desk with his long body without getting in the way of another desk. Some kids didn’t mind sitting near him, mostly his friends on the team, but some made a point of moving as far away from him as possible, and a few refused to even look at him. Julie, in Roger’s science class, was one of these.

  Even some of his teachers seemed uncomfortable around him. Ms. Williams, his math teacher, wouldn’t come over to his desk to comment on his work like she used to all the time when he was human. Okay, so back then most of her comments had been about how he was messing up with his math, but at least she hadn’t been trying to stay on the far side of the classroom all the time. A couple of other teachers had tried hard not to show they were creeped out, but Roger could tell they were trying hard, and in some ways, it was almost worse than if they’d just openly stayed away from him.

  Some teachers treated him as normally as he could have expected under the circumstances. In art class, Mrs. Clancy, a tall, thin woman with hair tightly tied back and large, thick glasses, looked at him calmly as though she taught insects every day and asked him if he thought he could still deal with the clay during the sculpture lesson.

  “I think I can manage,” Roger said in his buzzy voice. “I’ve almost got my own sculpting tools here.”

  The class laughed. Mrs. Clancy did not.

  “Are you making fun of how I talk, Mr. McGillicutty?” she said, in her own buzzy voice. “I don’t need any more smart-alecks in this class.”

  There were a few more chuckles out of the class at the sound of her voice, but fortunately they were quickly stifled before things got worse.

  Roger made a point of not saying much for the rest of the period as he carved clay with his claws, but weirdly, it sort of felt cool to get bawled out in class just like a regular kid instead of treated like something from outer space.

  “I think we all saw that coming,” said Jerry after art class. “I had a heck of a time keeping a straight face when you two were quacking at each other.”

  Roger’s abdomen gave a deep, whistling sigh. Spiracles. Marlene had told him the little breathing holes in his abdomen were called spiracles.

  Unlike Roger, Jerry was one of Mrs. Clancy’s favorites since he was really good at drawing. Earlier in the year, Jerry had built a papier-mâché sculpture of the Statue of Liberty that wa
s five feet tall. It was still in the front hallway on display.

  Noticing Roger’s struggle using a pencil in English class, Jerry got some plastic tubing from art class that he taped onto pencils and pens, so Roger could poke his tarsus “finger” into the tube to hold the writing implements. It gave him more control, although he continued to practice wrapping a tarsus around a regular pencil. Even with the tubes, Roger’s handwriting looked like something from his old kindergarten schoolwork papers, but he hoped that would get better over time.

  Roger had learned that he could hold larger objects by gently pinching them between the tarsus and the smooth back of his claw, and he found out that he could use some little gripper things at the tarsus ends to pick up very small items. And of course, he could use his big pinching claws to pick up heavy things. If they weren’t very fragile, that is. He even had little claws on his feet that he could use to grab things off the floor. Particularly dropped pencils.

  Aside from Mrs. Clancy, the only other thing he got yelled at for during the day was when he kept practicing trying to pick up things on his desk and not paying attention. Fortunately, it was kind of hard to catch him not paying attention, since his big, unblinking insect eyes could see things on his desk while his head was pointed at the blackboard. Roger wondered if he could get away with sleeping in class.

  By the time the school day was over, Roger had to admit the day could have gone a lot worse, but it still felt like the day had been twice as long as a normal school day.

  He hoped his mother had something really good for supper. Eating cafeteria food hadn’t worked out at all. He’d ended up eating outside so people didn’t have to see him eat. On top of that, the Mystery Meat had been horrible, and it wasn’t like Roger was a fussy eater now. And there had been so little of it!