"Congratulations on your fine run, Lucky. I understand that there's a story behind your name. Is that right?"
"Well, yes, as a matter of fact..."
The track was crowded; practically the whole school had turned out to watch the race.
"When I play chess, I like to go for the quick kill," Butch said. "Does Lucky have a strategy when she runs?"
"I guess well find out," Bobby replied.
Lucky broke into the lead at the start of the race. By the half-mile mark she had opened a big lead.
"Go! Go!" Bobby and Butch screamed as she streaked past.
A giddy feeling began to spread inside Bobby as he watched. Boy, could she run! No one, not even the eighth-grade boys, could keep up with her. She streaked around the track, her face calm and relaxed as if to say, Hey, no big deal This is easy. Fun. She finished another lap, and another, striding effortlessly, pulling farther and farther ahead of the rest of the pack.
"Ballenger!" It was Scott Shanahan. "Chicks looking for you!"
"So what?" Bobby asked, keeping his eyes on the track. Right then Chick Hall showed up and roughly wedged himself between Bobby and Butch.
"Well if it isn't Spider Boy and his famous sidekick, the Worm. You here to be cheerleader for your girlfriend, Spider Boy?"
"She's not my girlfriend. Chick." Bobby glared at him, letting the other two words—the Cheat— hang unspoken in the air. "And you really should come up with some new material. Those Spider Boy jokes are getting awful tired, don't you think?"
"I know what you did," Chick hissed, putting his finger in Bobby's face. "Just want you to know that you're dead."
"Oh, really?"
"Really." Chick stepped so close Bobby could smell his breath. "Mark this down in your diary. You're a dead man."
"We all have to go sometime, right?" Bobby asked, shrugging. He turned to Butch. "What do you say we go congratulate Lucky?"
"But the race isn't over," Butch said.
"Believe me, its over." Bobby turned and started walking toward the finish line.
"A dead man!" Chick yelled after them.
October 13
The world is dangerous for spiders, too. People think of them as ferocious predators who don't have a care in the world. Truth is spiders are surrounded by predators who will kill and eat them lickety split.
Spiders get eaten by small birds. They get fed to baby birds still in the nest. Lots of birds like to use spider egg cocoons to line their nests.
A major enemy of spiders: other spiders! When baby spiders hatch and the food runs out they get eaten by their own brothers and sisters.
There's one kind of spider (Mimetus) that lives by eating only other spiders.
Man is the biggest threat to spiders. People. We cut down rainforests where they live. We capture them and sell them as pets. And we use lots of insecticides in farming—that poisons spiders, too. Whatever poisons an insect ends up poisoning the spider who eats that insect.
In parts of the world PEOPLE ACTUALLY EAT SPIDERS!!!
Native people in Laos eat two different types of large spiders. They get roasted, dipped into salt, their legs pulled off. Supposedly the abdomen tastes like raw potato and lettuce mixed. Yum yum.
When a predator attacks a spider the first thing it does is to try to remove the spider from its home environment. Web spiders cant. protect themselves nearly so well when they are torn away from their webs.
Like me. Here I am in New Paltz, pulled far from my real friends, my real home. Chick Hall is threatening me. Funny, but I don't feel any danger. I'm not afraid of him. Maybe I should be—but I'm not.
Twelve
Bobby woke with Chicks words—you're dead— stuck like wax in his ears.
Chick wanted him to be afraid, to feel fear. But he didn't feel afraid. He had read that animals could smell fear. He wondered if that were true. Could a tarantula smell fear on a small lizard? Could a lion detect the odor of fear on a sickly wildebeest? What did fear smell like? Maybe fear had a foul smell, like a partially decayed animal. Maybe to a predator fear smelled delicious, like roast pork with garlic mashed potatoes. Or a feta cheese omelette.
His stomach growled. He bounded out of bed and down the stairs without even bothering to get out of his pajamas.
"I'm hungry," he announced in the kitchen.
"Well, it's about time!" Mom said with a grin. She was watching the morning news on the small TV sitting on the breakfast bar. The newscaster looked grim as he reported an earthquake somewhere in the Pacific. Fault, Bobby thought, imagining those immense rock plates sliding apart beneath billions of tons of water. "How about I make you an omelette?"
"An omelette?" He couldn't believe his ears. He couldn't remember the last time Mom had made breakfast for him. Or for anyone else in the family, for that matter.
"Sure, why not?" Mom said, shrugging. "I'm in a good mood—three miles again today, no problem. How hard could it be to make one little cheese omelette?"
"Great. Hey, where is everybody?"
"Dad had an early meeting. Luke took Breezy to the diner for breakfast."
He watched Mom put a slab of butter into the omelette pan. While the butter melted, she cracked three eggs into a coffee mug and began to whisk the eggs together. His nose twitched at the smell of the melting butter.
"I need to stop at the post office on the way to school," she said.
"That's okay," Bobby said. "I don't need a ride."
She looked at him, surprised.
"Why not?"
"I dunno." He shrugged. "It's barely a mile. From now on I'm going to walk."
***
He didn't see Chick Hall all morning, not in homeroom or science class. After lunch he went outside. Pure Indian Summer—one of those sunny fall days when every leaf and shadow seemed to be in perfect focus. Kids were wearing T-shirts and shorts, sitting in groups or strolling around. He wandered toward a soccer game on the far side of the rec field.
"Spider Boy!"
Suddenly Chick Hall stood in front of him with four or five other kids standing behind.
"This is for you," Chick said and without warning he lunged at Bobby and caught him in the chest. Chick tackled him down, rolled him over. Shouts erupted around them.
"Get him, Chick!" somebody yelled. "Punch his lights out!"
Bobby grabbed Chick by the collar and swung his weight, trying to continue the momentum and roll Chick over. But Chick was strong. He quickly put him into a tight headlock, crushing the tips of his ears against his head. Bobby struggled but couldn't move.
"You spider freak!" Chick hissed. "You told him, didn't you? Didn't you?"
Bobby couldn't speak; he could barely breathe.
All at once he felt Chick flipping over, the arms pulled from their stranglehold on his neck. Bobby gulped in a breath and looked up. Lucky. She stood there, arms folded, scowling down at Chick.
"What do you guys think you're doing?" Lucky asked. Bobby staggered to his feet.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. His voice sounded hoarse, his throat hurt.
She looked at Bobby, then at Chick.
"C mere," she said in a low voice. "I want to talk to you." She grabbed Bobbys arm and pulled, but Bobby didn't move.
"No!" he told her.
"You better—"
"Don't you get it?" he told her. "I don't want you here!"
Lucky stared at him. And all at once she was gone, sprinting toward the school.
"She's gonna tell a teacher!"
Bobby turned to Chick just in time to see a fist screaming toward his left eye. In that clear autumn light Bobby could see the punch arriving in perfect detail, the fist against Chicks white T-shirt, a line of white knuckles streaking toward his face—then BAM! Bobby went down, not with stars in his head the way it happened on cartoons but with bright streaks of dancing light. His head bounced heavily on the ground. The smell of grass filled his nose. Dazed and nauseous, he got to his knees. Lunch rose in his belly.
&
nbsp; Whatever you do, he told himself, don't throw up. He rolled over. Chicks face leered down.
"Lets get out of here!" somebody yelled.
"Its not over yet," Chick said, "because you're still not dead."
***
The nurse gave him an ice pack to put on the lump above his eye.
"How'd you get that?" she asked.
"Head-on collision in the soccer game," Bobby told her.
"Oh, I see," she retorted. "And did you happen to notice what kind of truck you collided with?"
She muttered something to herself, jotted notes on a chart, and led him to a cot where he could lie down. Bobby found that when he closed his eyes he could watch the whole thing all over again on instant replay: the four knuckles flying toward his head, those bright streaks of dancing light.
He'd never had a real fight before. Only once in Naperville he had been close to getting into one, when Teddy Pelligrino threatened to clock him for something during an intramural basketball game. Bobby had walked away; Teddy apologized later in the day.
Bobby glanced at his watch: exactly twelve o'clock in Naperville. That meant the noon whistle was blowing, loud and shrill. At exactly this moment Mike and Chad were on the playground holding their hands tight over their ears. Bobbys head throbbed.
"You're going to have that egg for a day or so," the nurse told him. "You want to go home? You want to call your parents?"
"No, I'm okay."
At the end of the day Lucky saw him at his locker.
"Hey, thanks for not telling," he told her.
"Thanks for nothing," she told him, biting her lower lip. "You guys can be such jerks, you know that?"
"What's with you?"
"I hate fighting! It's so stupid!"
"Hey wait a sec, you think / started it?"
She frowned at him.
"Listen, tonight I'm going to call you, and I want to hear the whole story. The real story."
He watched Lucky run off to track practice. Somebody grabbed him by the arm. Butch Fostick.
"Hey! I heard Chick Hall jumped you. You okay?"
"It was no big deal," Bobby said, walking into Mr. Niezgocki's laboratory.
"That's not what I heard," Butch said, slipping in with him.
"Well, you heard wrong," Bobby said. "You know how people exaggerate."
He bent down to check Thelma. It soothed him to look at the tarantula and know that her world was totally different from his own. Totally separate. He put on the rubber gloves and reached into Monks cage.
"You know, I've got a theory about fighting," Butch said. "The way I see it, the guys who—"
The door opened. Chick Hall walked in with Scott Shanahan and two other kids.
"Thought we'd find you here, Spider Boy!" The door shut. Chick smiled and took a step closer.
"Mr. N'll be here in about half a minute," Butch told Chick. "You better get out of here!"
"Mr. N's at a faculty meeting upstairs in the library," Chick said, smiling at Bobby "C'mon, spider freak, let's you and me finish what we started."
Bobby proceeded to pick up Monk. Dangerous and aggressive, can deliver a nasty bite. He was grateful he had on the gloves. Monk seemed to freeze.
"Try it," Bobby said, holding Monk up to Chick. Chick jumped back a step. "But I wouldn't want to get my friend here mad if I were you."
"Yeah, sure," Chick said. "In class you told everyone they weren't dangerous. Remember, stupid?"
"Ever heard of an African king baboon spider?" Bobby asked. "I didn't think so. You know what the word lethal means? How about fatal? Look those words up in your Webster's. This is one of the deadliest spiders on earth."
Bobby took another step closer; Chick jumped back again.
"In Africa they call it a two-step spider. Know what that means? Well, I'm going to tell you what it means. If this spider bites you, you've got two steps before you're dead."
Pause.
"Yeah, right," Chick said. "How come you're holding it then?"
"Why do you think I'm wearing gloves, Einstein?" Bobby asked.
Right on cue, Monk raised his feelers and front feet and started making a dangerous hissing sound.
"Yeah, go ahead, Chick," Butch said. He was grinning. "Who knows? Maybe he's only bluffing."
"I think it's time for you guys to leave," Bobby said. "Show's over. You're starting to make him nervous."
He took a step closer to them. The other boys moved toward the door.
"Let's go," someone said.
"Just don't think it's over, Spider Boy," Chick said on the way out. "'Cause it's not."
***
That night Lucky called right after supper. Bobby told her the whole story—watching Chick cheat on the test, crossing out his signature, talking with Mr. Niezgocki, fighting with Chick, confronting Chick after school in the laboratory.
"Wow," she said after a long pause. "A two-step spider, huh? You make that up?"
"Yeah."
"That's pretty good." She laughed softly. "Thank God you can make up stuff like that on the spot. Weren't you afraid Monk might turn around and bite you?"
"A little. I was wearing protective gloves."
"I guess you're lucky, too."
"I guess," he said, though he didn't feel very lucky. He took a breath. "Would you have done what I did?"
"What? Snitch on Chick?"
"I didn't snitch!" he snapped. He hated hearing that word—snitch—come from her mouth. "Geez, Lucky. I didn't even tell Mr. Niezgocki it was Chick."
"I know, I know. But maybe you should've told Chick that."
"Oh, that's right, how stupid of me," Bobby said. "I totally forgot that Chick's one of your best friends."
"That's not fair."
"Then why are you always apologizing for him?"
"I'm sorry," Lucky said. She didn't sound sorry.
"I better go," he said. "Bye."
"Bye."
***
The next day he didn't see much of Lucky. Chick ignored him all day But at 3 P.M., in homeroom, Chick looked over and Bobby saw a tiny smile on his face. By the time the bell rang, Bobby had an odd feeling in his stomach. He was the first one out of homeroom. He raced down the corridor and slipped into Mr. Niezgocki's laboratory. Thelma was resting as usual in the back of her terrarium. But Monks terrarium was empty.
"Monk!" He bent down to take a closer look into Monks terrarium. Then he checked Thelma's. No sign of Monk.
Lucky walked in.
"Monks gone!" he shouted. He started ripping open drawers, closets, boxes.
"Check those plants!" he told Lucky. Bobby opened the heavy door to the refrigerator. Then he yanked open the freezer.
He saw it. The green fish net. Dark shape entangled inside.
"Oh no." He pulled out the net and saw Monk, lifeless, partially covered with sand.
"My God!" Lucky whispered. She covered her mouth.
Bobby put the cold spider onto a table. What to do? Not one of his spider books had ever mentioned how to bring a frozen tarantula back to life. Or if you could. Help! Think-spiderthinkspi-derthinkspiderthinkspiderthinkspider. Think! Bobby started blowing gently onto the spiders body. The door opened.
"Somebody put Monk in the freezer!" Lucky cried to Mr. Niezgocki.
"What?!"
Bobby concentrated on blowing, trying to keep his breath warm, gentle, steady. Someone must have come into the lab right after the last period just before homeroom. Homeroom lasted ten minutes. Ten minutes. He could see that the body wasn't frozen solid. There was a chance, maybe one in a thousand.
"Any idea who—" Mr. Niezgocki began.
"Look!" Bobby said. One of Monks hairy legs jumped.
"He moved!" Lucky cried.
"Help me," Bobby whispered. Lucky and Mr. Niezgocki hurried over. The three leaned their heads together, blowing softly on Monk. Another of Monks legs twitched, and another.
"Hes alive!" Lucky cried again. "Hes going to make it!"
But suddenly
all of Monk's legs folded together in a spasm that left the spider motionless, and Bobby knew for certain that he was dead.
Thirteen
Mr. Hall strode like a cowboy into the guidance office. He was a tall gray-haired man with wide shoulders and an ash-colored suit that looked expensive. He glanced at the people sitting around the table—Miss Davenport, Mr. Niezgocki, Dad, Bobby, and Chick. Miss Davenport introduced Mr. Hall to the other people in the room. He shook hands, nodding grimly.
"I want to talk to my son," Mr. Hall said, giving Chick a straight look. "Alone."
"You may use my office," Miss Davenport said.
Bobby watched Chick follow his father out of the room. You may use my office. He could see that it would be that kind of formal meeting.
They waited for Chick and Mr. Hall to return. Miss Davenport mentioned to Dad the unusually warm weather, his father smiled politely and said something back, but the rest of the time they all waited without speaking. Mr. Niezgocki corrected a stack of test papers. Bobby kept his eyes focused on a blank note pad at the center of the table so he wouldn't have to look at any of the adults in the room. Once Bobby heard what sounded like Mr. Halls deep voice raised in anger from the next room.
The door opened. Mr. Hall came in first, with Chick close behind. It looked like he'd been crying.
"Sit right there," Mr. Hall ordered, pointing at an empty chair. Chick sat down. Mr. Hall looked even more furious than before. He took the chair next to Miss Davenport. She cleared her throat.
"I have something to say," Mr. Hall announced.
"It might be best," Miss Davenport said quietly, "if I first lay out the facts of this matter, as best as we can figure them."
"All right," Mr. Hall said, nodding.
"We're here because Bobby's pet tarantula was killed. I think there's some background to this incident that's important to look at so we can establish a context for what happened today." She opened her notebook and glanced down. "At the beginning of the year, Bobby was a new boy in school. He moved here from Illinois. Apparently during the past month Chick has been hostile to Bobby. He and some friends gave Bobby a nickname—Spider Boy—because of Bobby's interest in spiders. But they kept using it even when Bobby asked them not to. There has been a pattern of taunting and teasing."
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