I

The Photography Club had been beset by a travesty the likes of which it had not witnessed since its inception.

“Gooooooooooood afternoon, Photography Club!”

The travesty was not the clamorous, boisterous, and vivacious greeting of the club's president, Sara Fisher. To the low-energy introvert who treasured solitude and the calm of the great outdoors, a high-strung individual such as Sara was a consummate travesty, indeed. However, for the disturbance of this particular tale, she wasn't the travesty in question.

She did, however, witness its effects on her vice president, Andrea Burns, who was bunched up in the corner, quivering from terrible fright.

“Andrea, what's wrong?!”

Through her shivering trachea, Andrea stuttered, “...a—a...a c—”

“A C?!” The third letter of the English alphabet seemed too banal to instill such terror, so Sara urged her on. “A C what?”

“...a...a c-c-c—co—”

A second letter. Now that they were narrowing in on the cause, Sara scoured a mental list of all the items that began with co. The first that made sense: “Cobra?!”

As cobras weren't native to their home country, one appearing in their clubroom, on the third floor of the school building, would be as astounding as it would be frightening. However, Andrea shook her head and uttered a single dreadful word: “Worse.”

“Worse than a cobra?!” Sara recoiled. What in the literal world could be more horrifying than a cobra and begin with the letters co? “Cougar?!”

Most certainly. However, the faults for cobra applied here, plus there was the particular that Sara would have noticed the giant feline loitering in the clubroom without needing to consult Andrea over it. She tried again.

“Coyote?!”

See cobra and cougar.

“Coffin?!”

Although death was fearsome to many and loomed over us all, Andrea indicated that that wasn't what paralyzed her now. Back to the list.

“Mmm... Oh! I got it! Confession! Did a boy confess to you, Andrea? Well?! Did one, did one, did one? Tell me tell me tell me!”

Opening oneself to love certainly can be an anxious, even scary, experience. But to cower over it as Andrea did? It was back to the drawing board for Sara.

“What else, what else...? Conman?!”

That wasn't it, either.

“Congressman! Confederate! Conglomerate!” She was just spouting random words at this point, so Andrea forced additional letters out to—hopefully—spell out the threat besieging her.

“Co—Co—Cock—”

“Male genitals?!” That would certainly give a virgin maiden the scare of her adolescence.

This guessing game was leading in every direction—the absurd, the abstract, the political, and the elicit—except for one: the correct. So Andrea, removing half her head's protection, directed an arm and extended a finger toward the pilaster on the opposite end of the clubroom.

Sara strained her eyes to see what was so frightening about the decorative pillar. Certain aesthetes might label its mint coloring as a hideous abomination, but Andrea in the past had remarked how she loved the relaxing shade of the walls' colors. It was unlikely she suddenly developed a distaste for the color to the point of phobia.

But that was when Sara saw it—in examining the distinct shade of the walls, she noticed a blemish of a different shade: mahogany.

By her estimate, this blemish was about four centimeters in length, and it hadn't been there yesterday. It might've been some soy sauce or something that splattered onto the wall, but the snacks the club members munched on were dry, and this officially was the counseling room. Students came here for advice, not to dine on chicken or rice.

But the longer Sara studied this blemish, the more details she noticed, such as the numerous thin protrusions. Some were thin and curved. Most tapered and rested at jagged angles.

But a single moment passed until Sara recognized that shape for what it was: horrible, much too familiar, and all too common in this society.

A cockroach.

The next club member to enter was Melissa, who gave no greeting, as she noticed Andrea hunched in the corner, soberly penning a letter of some kind whilst damming tears, and Sara, who was busy rearranging the room's furnishings into a defensive fortification. Tables became palisades, boxes became sandbags, chair legs were utilized as cheavaux-de-frise, and the assortment of spare or outdated supplies were gathered as missiles. Even Hubert, the anatomical torso model that spent his days gazing out over the clubroom and balancing the club membership gender ratio, was pressed into service as a watchman.

Melissa let out a very long, very exasperated sigh. “What are you up to this time?”

“Melissa! Bad news!” Sara presented her with a sitrep: “We've got an intruder! There's a cockroach on the wall!” She had a bucket on her head.

Melissa's face twisted in disgust at the mention of their six-legged invader. “That's a job for the boys.”

Speaking of, one of the boys, a cheery young man whose blond hair was almost as bright as his eyes, entered the room and offered a greeting only possible in a world without wars. “Guuuuuuuuuuud afternoon, my fellow club members! I see it's another day of fun antics! What are we up to today?”

“Impeccable timing,” Melissa said. She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “There's a cockroach on the wall. Can you do something about it?”

Alex left the room and never returned.

“That sniffling, cowardly little—!” Melissa now wished to squash him like a cockroach.

“Everything all right in here?” A voice came from the door. It was the other boy and last member of the club, a young man who went by the name Warren, called himself Warren, and demanded that others refer to him as Warren. “Alex looked like he was repressing a mental breakdown.”

“Warren! You've gotta help us! You're our last hope!”

“For?”

“The clubroom is being besieged by a cockroach!”

“Oh.” Warren, for his duties, straightened a chair, made himself comfortable, and opted to disregard the cockroach's existence in favor of opening the envelope Andrea had entrusted to him when he came in. It was her will.

“You're really gonna sit there and do nothing?” Melissa's desire for Warren to transform into a squashable cockroach was on the rise.

“It's a cockroach. It's harmless.”

“It's disgusting. And if that thing lands on me, I'm setting fire to the clubroom, starting with you.”

“Why me?”

“Because fire requires kindling.”

“Fine...” Warren relented like a ten-year-old boy who just wanted to shut up his nagging mother. Plus, the will had named him as executor, which sounded like too much work and effort, so dealing with a cockroach was easier than Andrea's estate.

Warren stepped toward the cockroach, the image of calm, cool, and confident. Along the way, he grabbed a jar from Sara's stockpile, undid the lid. That roach stood no chance against what he had in store.

He encircled the roach with the jar's rim, scooched it so the roach fell in, screwed the lid back on to trap the roach in, then held the glass container up in proud display. Warren had done it—he had captured the dreadful travesty disrupting the good peace in this clubroom.

“I present to you our new club mascot. I dub him...Sir Greg.”

To the club's female division, this move on his part was pure, unadulterated blasphemy.

“Warren! You can't!” Sara was the first to object to this course of action. “We already have a mascot, and that's Hubert!”

“Yes,” Warren acknowledged, “but Hubert isn't cute.”

“And you think the cockroach is?” The venom in Melissa's voice was potent enough to put down a beluga.

“If it's cuteness that's determining the club mascot,” Sara chimed in, “I should be the mascot!” At a mere 158 centimeters, she won the designation of cute by default.

“Why would you think of keeping that thing as a pet?” Melissa asked, glaring imaginary death rays at the contender mascot.

“You told me to do something, and I did.” By technical accounts, Warren's argument was infallible. Melissa had no proper rebuttal.

Grounding her teeth, Melissa's recourse was to correct her earlier generalized demand by taking matters into her own hands, quite literally, as she stepped forward and snatched the jar from Warren's hand.

Although she held absolute power over this defenseless roach and could do with it what she willed, at this stage in the capture, she wanted to be rid of the insect and thus would remove the lid so that she could cast the insect back into nature where it should have remained.

Note the qualifier in that previous paragraph: would. Melissa would remove the lid, not Melissa removed the lid. That simple alteration in verb tense would have drastic ramifications on the succeeding events hereafter.

“What the hell, Warren?” Melissa grunted and groaned and grunted some more. “Did you superglue this lid back on?”

“No,” Warren said. “I just screwed it back on with my massive muscles.” Beneath those sleeves of his truly was some formidable muscularity.

“This isn't the time for joking.” Melissa wouldn't think he was joking if she saw those bulging biceps. “Seriously, how the hell is this thing supposed to come off?”

“Need me to get it?” Since he had sealed it, Warren offered to undo it. However, the jar slipped from Melissa's grasp and shattered on the floor. “Never mind. Looks like you got it.”

It was certainly a strategy for opening the jar. However, it was the opening of Pandora's box, and from her box crawled a cockroach named Sir Greg. Free once more, and a sweet bit irate from his imprisonment, Sir Greg scuttled from the wreckage and made his way up Melissa's leg.

The scream that emanated from that girl's throat. Forget the floor—that itself could've shattered the jar.

Wielding her hand faster than the speed of light, Melissa slapped Sir Greg off her leg, and the roach went soaring in some random direction.

She did not relent on her attack, for Sir Greg was still inside the club room, scampering about, and she would brook no additional contact with the insect. Thus, she went on a stomping spree.

Warren might've had biceps capable of vacuum-sealing a Mason jar, but Melissa had quads that could crush a watermelon, and she brought her loafer's sole down with the full force of that limb brawn.

While her stomps had the strength to pancake Sir Greg, they lacked the agility to match his pace. By the time Melissa had taken aim and put her foot down, Sir Greg was well out of harm's way. Melissa cursed for every miss, and there were a lot of misses.

Sara joined in on the missing action, too, but rather than her shoe, she sought Sir Greg with the bucket from her head.

“You're using the wrong end!” cried out Melissa. “You need to use the bottom so you can squash it and be done with it.”

Sara froze in her pursuit. She regarded the bucket in her hands, whose upward-facing bottom, with its level surface and metallic construction, would deal a swift and crushing blow. “I don't wanna hurt Sir Greg! He deserves to live a good, honest life in the great outdoors! He did nothing wrong!”

“Oh, for—! I'll do it myself!” Swearing off Sara as the insect's champion, she threw off her uniform's blazer, tore off her grade's ribbon, and rolled up her sleeves. Now, this girl meant business.

Snatching the bucket from Sara's hands, Melissa ran down Sir Greg, raised the bucket high above her head, let out a mighty battle cry, and slammed the bucket down onto the floor with such force that the bucket sprung up and out of her hands. As the bucket arced through the air, Melissa saw...

...that she had missed. But she had anticipated as much, which is why one of her hands remained within reach of Sara's stockpile of missiles, and from it, she pulled an old umbrella from a lost & found box and thrust its acute finial at Sir Greg.

The narrowness of the finial demanded a far greater degree of precision than a blunt object like the bucket or her loafer, but what the former lacked in its girth, it made up for in its reach.

Almost predictably, Melissa's thrust missed, but this apparent glimmer of luck for Sir Greg would literally change the course of his life, for Melissa would perform an action nobody would foresee—she opened the umbrella.

Suddenly and inexplicably, an umbrella canopy had cut off Sir Greg's escape route, and the roach was forced to divert. However, this only put him in the path of Melissa's secret weapon: an old coffee maker.

Under normal circumstances, Melissa would've needed to support the appliance's weight against her torso. However, with the adrenaline coursing through her veins, she heaved it over her head like it were a pillow, albeit a pillow that would feel filled with bricks and not feathers to tiny, defenseless Sir Greg.

Down came the coffee maker, like a hammer to molten steel, and it slammed the floor with a force sounding like a grenade, and it blasted apart like a grenade, too, its casing, wiring, tubes, plastics, metals rupturing in all directions.

An assault of this magnitude surely should have spelled the end for Sir Greg. However, Sir Greg, as a reminder, was a cockroach, and if there was one thing cockroaches were famous for, it was their resilience under the worst of circumstances, and Sir Greg was no different.

He dashed forth from the detonation zone, zipping between the shrapnel hailing down upon him. His legs weren't long, but they carried him fast, and they carried him far.

How he had intruded upon the clubroom was an enigma, but he made his egress through the sole portal in and out of the room, slipping between the door's bottom rail and its threshold.

And then just like that, Sir Greg was gone.

Breaths were baited, and pins and needles were at mass as four sets of eyeballs watched the threshold. Were it not for the pants from Melissa, one of those needles falling would've sounded like a wall coming down.

She took her wrist to her chin, wiping a beard of sweat that had cultivated. In her other hand was a dustpan, ready to launch at Sir Greg should he return. But he didn't. Evidently, he had had enough of Melissa's fury, and who could blame him?

“There,” Melissa said, easing from her battle-ready stance. “It's no longer our problem.”

Right as she attached a period on that statement, the clubroom door opened. It wasn't Sir Greg, as he wasn't tall enough to reach the knob. Rather, it was Alex, the member who dipped soon as the word cockroach came up in discussion. Seemed he had a radar for the critters, since his return happened to coincide with Sir Greg's leave.

However.

Up went Alex's arm, a handkerchief clenched in his hand. The gesture unsettled the other club members, for his arm rotated like it were a single humerus, and what he did next would not be so humorous.

Placid smile not breaking as he spoke, he queried, “Did you lose something?” before dropping the contents of the handkerchief onto the floor.

It was a cockroach. One Sir Greg, to be specific.

Alex closed the door.

“I'M GONNA KILL HIM!!!!”

Whether Melissa was referring to Sir Greg or Alex was unclear. Her rampage resumed with its furiosity elevated such that the other club members might suffer collateral damage.

Rulers, pencils, pens, old textbooks, a deck brush, an old speaker, a teddy bear, that dustpan: all mind and matter of objects flung from Melissa's possession into the general vicinity of Sir Greg. If it seemed like an item with a reasonable percentage of winding up inside a school building, Melissa launched it.

One box, she splashed its contents like they were water onto a fire before hurtling the box itself at Sir Greg. Predictably, the roach dashed between the raindrops and narrowly avoided the box's edge.

“Don't you think you're going a bit overboard?” came Sara's voice as she huddled behind the side-turned table, the bucket returned to her cranium.

“What, would you like me to invite it to tea so that we can discuss and settle our differences? Pest control requires all-out attacks. I've demolished walls dealing with infestations, and I'll do it again!”

“If you're planning on landing the killing blow, now's your shot,” Warren pointed out, pointing to Sir Greg, who had come to a rest. Understandable. Fleeing for one's life tends to exhaust mind and body.

Melissa cast aside the printer she had picked up and grabbed a new weapon. Warren was right: what she needed was a singular attack that would finish off this infestation once and for all, and to land that final, decisive blow, she would need to get up close and personal. For that, she armed herself with the most intimate and precise of weapons—the katana.

For the record, it wasn't a real katana. If that were the case, the club would have greater issues than a single roach. This katana was a former prop of the Theater Club worked from wood and painted to look convincing from the audience rows. However fake this sword was, any whacks from it would deal real damage, especially to something whose girth just so happened to match that of the katana's point.

Holding the weapon at her hip, Melissa lasered in on the roach, measuring the angle, the distance, the space her blade would need to cut to reach its target.

Her vectors calculated, she moved for the roach.

A breeze blew in through the open window, ruffling the pulled curtain, and the club members held their breaths in collective anticipation. Not Warren, though. He was busy looking around for a discarded shamisen to play in order to fully set the mood of a samurai showdown. But while this clubroom had a coffee maker, an umbrella, a printer, and an anatomical model, it lacked a musical instrument. So he did the next best thing and played the notes in his head. The scene was much more immersive from his perspective.

Melissa took a step forward, and two notes twanged in Warren's head. Eyes locked on her opponent, she moved her hand to the hilt, carefully and slowly, so as not to startle or alarm the roach.

Her fingers wrapped around the handle. She took another step forward.

A breeze blew in through the open window, ruffling the pulled curtain, and the club members' breaths were still held in collective anticipation.

The breeze released its last, and the curtain fell motionless.

Warren's mental shamisen twanged.

Quick as a lightning bolt, swift as a shooting star, Melissa ripped the katana from its sheath, arced its blade behind her head, and brought it down on Sir Greg.

A perfect downward slash. Any opponent struck by that would be bisected. Match set.

A foreign object flitted into Melissa's field of vision. It seemed it might have been some shard of rubble from her strike, but no objects were near where the katana fell, and the blade itself, though now cracked, remained intact.

So then, the question became, what was it that had become airborne?

Melissa studied the floating item, “?!” and that was when she realized—Good heavens...that thing could fly!

The situation had turned critical. A land-bound Sir Greg was hell enough, but an aerial Sir Greg that could come and go onto her person as he pleased? She would sooner fall on her own sword than occupy the same omnidirectional space as him.

Of course, Melissa didn't want to impale herself, so she opted to impale Sir Greg instead.

Through the air her katana soared, twirling like a cherry blossom pedal stepping on the breeze. Her foot rose, traced the rising and falling of a hill, kissed the floorboards: her footwork moved that of a ballerina, soundlessly, so that the music could sing.

Her form was excellent. Her accuracy was not.

Swing and a miss once, swing and a miss twice, swing and a miss eight, nine, ten times. Multiply those figures by two and the result spells out Melissa's persistence. Multiply them by three and you'll get the idea of how long this dragged on for. Cool as Melissa had been when first showing down the cockroach, she was not a useful samurai. The strings of Warren's imaginary shamisen were broken.

Melissa chased Sir Greg all about the clubroom, but the supplies that had served as their missile stockpile now only impeded her path, and the allies who hadn't done much but stand off to the side continued doing exactly that.

“Would you do something besides stand there and watch?!” Melissa yelled at Sara.

“Oh! All right, then!” Sara offered up a secondary weapon to take care of the roach: her bucket.

“Enough with the bucket already!” Fed up with the bucket, Melissa hurled it, but she was productive in her hurl, aiming it at Sir Greg. Predictably, she missed.

“Want this?” Warren offered her a tennis racket.

“Hell yeah!” Now she was dual-wielding—katana in one hand, tennis racket in the other. Sir Greg was done for.

She scoured the room, in search of Sir Greg, found him zipping around a half-square meter pocket, as though taunting her. But Sir Greg would rue this arrogance.

Melissa lunged at Sir Greg, slicing at him with the katana, as she had done, but Sir Greg deftly dodged this maneuver, as he had done. However, it was a trap.

Dodging the katana only put Sir Greg in greater danger—the mesh of the tennis racket loomed over him like an oceanic cruiser does a rowboat. But whereas an ocean liner is grand enough and sluggish enough that a sailor could spot it nautical miles away, the racket was flying so hard and so fast, it seemed to bend back in the air, and it was only when it was on top of Sir Greg and the illusion could no longer take effect that he noticed its arrival.

The tennis racket collided with Sir Greg and rocketed him away at very nearly 200 kmh.

“Ooo! Nice serve!” Sara applauded her from the sidelines. “You're a shoe-in for the Tennis Club!”

“Then why the hell was I drafted to this club?”

Melissa pushed the distracting question away, for though she had succeeded in striking Sir Greg, this battle was ongoing yet, and a new concern arose: Where had Sir Greg vanished to?

Bugs were tough mothers, cockroaches famously so, and beautiful and clean as her hit was, Melissa wouldn't rest on her laurels until she saw for herself Sir Greg resting in peace.

“Where is it?! Where did it go?!” Melissa's head spun on a frantic swivel as she sought what would hopefully be Sir Greg's motionless corpse.

“Over yonder.” Warren pointed at a wall on the far side of the room, where a suspiciously Sir Greg-shaped blotch had appeared. At a glance, it appeared to be his splattered remains, but then...

An antenna twitched. His legs shuffled forward.

He lived.

Melissa moved in to make that past tense a permanent tense. But a third entity, she now noticed, stood between her and her target: Andrea. By sheer dumb coincidence, Sir Greg had either landed on or took refuge on the wall next to where Andrea had been cowering.

Andrea's presence, however, meant little to Melissa, who instructed her, “Move,” lest she become collateral in the killing blow. And she needed to move fast, because Sir Greg was on the move himself. But to her surprise, the fearful Andrea, who had made end-of-life preparations upon spotting the cockroach, did not move. Melissa stopped, asked her, “Why are you just standing there?” She eyeballed the roach. Thankfully, he had ceased his advance.

“...W-Well, um...I-I've been thinking...” Andrea said, nudging her fingertips together, looking everywhere and at everything besides Melissa's eyes.

“About what? This isn't the time for idle chitchat. The roach is getting away.” For the time being, the roach was just chilling.

“A-About that...about S-Sir Greg...” Andrea clasped her hands together to hold them still, but her eyes wandered about just the same. More, even. “...D—Do you really have to—I mean, is it necessary to—Do we have to—”

“Spit it out already.”

“I—I think...” Hands now on her skirt, she scrunched up the hem, steeling herself for the response to the words about to leave her mouth. “...I think we should let Sir Greg live!”

Silence across the clubroom.

Stunned expressions.

Melissa's jaw dangled open. It almost sounded like Andrea had suggested they let the cockroach live. Turncoat.

“Let me get this straight...” Melissa said through grinding, jarring, gnashing teeth. She was a pressure cooker with a busted temperature setting, and the only thing holding back an eruption of red-hot chili was the lid. She needed to remember whom she was talking to and turn down the heat so that nobody got scalded. “You've lost your ever-loving mind!!”

“No! You've lost your ability to understand!”

“The hell are you on about, girl?!”

“Don't you get it? The reason Sir Greg is fleeing so much and not letting you hit him? It's because he wants to live!” Andrea continued to plead Sir Greg's innocence: “Sure, he may be icky and gross, and the thought of being in the same room as him makes me itch all over, and I just want to submerge myself in a hot bath to wash the grossness off...” After a deep breath, she presented the thesis of her stance: “...But Sir Greg's a living thing that deserves the same respect as any other living being!”

After such an impassioned speech from the club's quietest member, would Melissa relent in this war between her and bug?

“Your argument's overruled, I don't respect your standpoint, and I certainly don't respect a cockroach. I'm killing that thing, and that's that.”

Call it persistence, call it stubbornness, call it the sunk cost fallacy. Whichever your fancy, Melissa wasn't backing down and was, in fact, performing the opposite, advancing to deliver that roach to the seventh layer of Hell. Sir Greg, not wanting to go down, clamored up the wall.

“Is that really how you feel?” Once more, Andrea rose up to blockade Melissa's charge. “Would you do that to me? Would you slap me with a tennis racket just because I'm gross and annoying?”

“Now that you mention it...”

What Andrea was doing was a simple but effective piece of bait. Of all the club members, she was the only one Melissa didn't have regular beef with. In fact, if there were one club member she'd invite to grill some beef with at a Korean BBQ, that club member would be Andrea. By leveraging their not-negative relationship, Andrea was looking to draw out Melissa's hypocrisy so that she could call her out on it, and she was deeply confident in this plan. After all, Andrea was such a kind, sweet soul. Who could and would slap her with a tennis racket just because she was gross and annoying?

“...Yeah, I would.”

“...you...you would...?” Andrea did not foresee this being Melissa's answer.

“I'm no stranger to fending off creeps. If you're gross and annoying like them, I won't have any reservations dealing with you.”

“Y-Y-Y-Y—w-w-w-w-w-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh—” Andrea stammered half the syllables known to man, shaking like a leaf in a tornado. Poor thing was standing on such wobbly knees, the disturbance of air from a fly buzzing by would knock her over. Thankfully, it was a roach tormenting them.

Melissa, tapping the tennis racket against her shoulder, holding her chin up, was the very image of a delinquent. Perhaps she had been one in middle school, and Andrea had inadvertently drawn that side out.

Still, “I-I-I-I w-w-won't l-l-l-l-let y-y-y-y-you h-h-h-hurt S-Sir Gr-Gr-Gr-Gr-Gr-Greg...!” Despite feeling like a cockroach herself facing the might of a flyswatter, Andrea stood her ground.

Stood her ground might've been generous phrasing. The closer Melissa got, the lighter her head got and the more stars she saw. One or two more steps from Melissa and she might drop to her knees.

Yet.

And yet.

Melissa ceased her advance.

What a tremendous feat from Andrea, who stared the lion in its maw and blinked a ton and winched even more but refused to back down.

It's just a shame it had nothing to do with Melissa's halt.

The cause for her cessation was a realization: when Melissa moved, Sir Greg moved, and when Melissa stopped, Sir Greg stopped.

“Damn bastard...” Even battered and bruised, he still found the audacity to taunt her.

Were Melissa to resume, Sir Greg would climb out of reach, then there would be no easy manner for ridding him. Even if she broke into a sprint, Sir Greg would still outpace her. Melissa was stuck for options...

“Hey, Melissa! Have you noticed that Sir Greg moves only when you move?” Sara observed masterfully.

“Yes, I have noticed that...”

“I think he likes you!”

That opinion made Melissa want to destroy an innocent man's food stall. “If the peanut gallery's gonna yap, you could at least give me ideas for killing it!”

“I have an idea.” Warren raised his hand. “We could make Sir Greg the club mascot.”

“We're still not doing your dumb idea!” Vetoed.

“I have an idea!” Sara raised her hand. “We could make me the club mascot!”

“What does that have to do with getting rid of the roach?!”

“Nothing! I just think if we're deciding club mascots, I'm the obvious front runner!” Poor Hubert. Ousted...

“That's not what we're discussing at all! Ever!”

Arguing with her clubmates was giving Melissa one wicked headache. And she still had the headache of Sir Greg to get rid of. But what was she going to do? If she acted, he would take refuge on the ceiling, and though she could reach him with a broom handle, given her accuracy, she was liable to cause a blackout before it was lights out for Sir Greg.

So what? What, she agonized.

“...I—I have an idea...” Andrea raised a meek hand. “...Um...I-I could get rid of Sir Greg...”

Silence and shocked faces met Andrea's idea.

Andrea. The girl who took to the corner to shiver and shake and who predicted and prepared for her own death at the sight of a mere cockroach—now volunteered herself to the front lines in expelling Sir Greg. Truly, the club had gone topsy-turvy by every metric measurable.

“...Uhhh, are you sure?” Melissa checked to ensure she had heard right.

Andrea nodded her head. Firmly. “Y—You've all worked so hard to get rid of Sir Greg, a-and for my sake. Yet all I've done is stand in the corner and cower. That's not fair to any of you, and I don't want to live in fear of a harmless bug, which is why...which is why—I want to get rid of Sir Greg!”

Her speech earned applause from Sara.

“What beautiful character development,” came Warren from behind a table.

“Shut up. You could easily stop hiding behind the table and do it for her,” Melissa pointed out.

“And ruin her precious character development? Never.” Warren remained right behind the table.

Melissa gritted her teeth. As much as she wished to smear Sir Greg's anatomy over the wall, she couldn't deny that Andrea was their last real chance of excising his presence from the clubroom.

With great reservations, she cast her weapons aside. “Have it your way. Just get to it.”

“R—Right!”

Despite her bravery to volunteer, Andrea, though now set to task, hadn't concocted a plan for capturing Sir Greg. The only utensils on hand for grabbing him were her hands, and the thought of Sir Greg's thin, hairy legs prodding her palms was making her woozy.

But just then...

“Andrea! Catch!” Sara lobbed a thing at Andrea, who fumbled but managed to in the end catch the care package. It was the bucket.

Melissa could hurl the bucket, but she could not get rid of it.

Now that she had a utensil equipped, Andrea could get to work apprehending their unwanted guest.

Open end of the bucket pointed at Sir Greg, she took small, deliberate, careful steps forward. “H-Here, roachy, roachy, roachy...”

“It's not a dog,” Melissa said. “Stop treating it like one.”

“Cockroaches deserve life and respect, too!” Ambassador to the Roaches, Andrea, snapped back.

“Okay, okay! I get it!” Melissa threw her hands up in surrender. “Now respectfully capture that damn thing already and throw it out the window!”

She didn't need to tell Andrea twice. Nobody wanted Sir Greg gone more than Andrea, and if her fears hadn't chained her down, she would've scooped that thing up and chucked out the window the millisecond she saw it. Perhaps once this encounter was through and done, she could perform that exact extraction for their next six-legged visitor.

Andrea took a cautious step forward. She didn't want any sudden movements, and neither did Sir Greg. She had to do this nice and slow-like.

She double-checked that she had the bucket facing the correct way. Open end turned toward the wall. Nice. Now, to relocate Sir Greg into it.

The plan was simple: enclose the bucket rim around Sir Greg, then drag it until it nudged him in, just like what Warren did earlier with the jar. With the sizable diameter of the bucket, it should surround Sir Greg without alarming him, and he was, as a friendly reminder, not the most petite of roaches.

Sir Greg, for all the running around, flying about, and being the source of much mayhem and madness, was, for his part, quite well behaved, moving neither hair nor antenna as the shadow of the bucket eclipsed him. Just a little more and he would be on his merry way.

“H—Hello there, Sir Greg. You don't belong here. Would you like to go back home? I'm here to help you. All you have to do is get in the bucket and I'll release you.”

Andrea offered Sir Greg honeyed words to soothe him as she got nearer, and, seeing as he didn't retreat, they seemed to work.

“What's your home like? Do you live in the forest? I bet it's nice. All the greenery, sunlight, and shade you could ever want. If you get into this bucket, you'll get to go back home.”

Sir Greg wasn't pouncing on her offer. Quite plausibly because he was a cockroach and therefore couldn't fathom human tongue. No matter, that. Andrea would make good on her promise. She just needed that last little push.

“Come on. You can get in. Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you. Just hop into this bucket and I'll take you h—”

Finally, Sir Greg hopped on her offer, in both the figurative sense and the literal. Just, it wasn't the what he hopped into, but the what he hopped onto.

Andrea's face.

She collapsed to the floor.

Sir Greg spread his wings and took to the air.

He left out the open window.

*

Warren lay Andrea on the couch. Once, it was respite for the counseled. Now, a final comfort.

Gingerly, he draped a towel over her face, ensuring its corners lay perfectly. Sara clapped her hands together, said a prayer.

“Would you idiots quit acting like she's dead?” Melissa said as she shut the window to prevent a repeat of the prior chaos. For good measure, she locked it. Never knew when ants might pull together to push a window open.

The crisis good and over, the adrenaline that had been fueling Melissa's rampage flushed out her system, and her bones and muscles cried out for a rest. She gave them a listen, restored the cheavaux-de-frise to its original function as a chair, and plopped her hiney down on the seat, splaying her limbs out to maximize airflow over them. Well, what airflow there was with a shut window.

That workout had really worked up a sweat. The stuff was pooling up all over her flush-hot body and meeting up into beads that would race down her limbs. Save for one bead that went against the pack, flowing upward. Strange of it to disobey the law of gravity.

Confused about this one physics-breaking bead of sweat on her left arm, Melissa looked. The sweat that had coated her skin to cool her froze over.

It was a wasp.

Crawling up her arm with its amber legs.

With its unnaturally concave profile.

And goldenrod-striped bulging thorax.

Thick antennae spinning in every direction.

The arrow-shaped head twitched.

Two eyes, long, wide, pupil-less, regarded Melissa.

“Let me get that for you.” Warren put his hand on Melissa's arm, in front of the wasp, inviting it on. The wasp was hesitant. It had wings, and it had legs. If it wanted to go somewhere, it could very much help itself, thanks.

But, then again, the wasp was small, and the world was big, so it was exhausting to explore. Who was the wasp to pass up a free ride? It crawled onto Warren's fingers, and he carried it over to the window.

After opening the window, he held his hand out, encouraging the wasp to fly away, and a second later, it did, back into the great outdoors.

“At least it wasn't another cockroach,” Warren said, thinking that would make Melissa feel better, somehow, maybe. Turning around, he found Melissa slumped in her chair, the soul vacated from her body.

“I just got a text from Alex,” Sara reported. “He says he saw a really big spider, so he went home.”

“Huh.” Warren leaned his elbow on the window sill and looked out at the great expanse of summertime nature. “Bugs are bad this season.”