It started out as one of those freakish, random thoughts that pops into your head occasionally. Anne was sitting at the dinner table, stirring the macaroni and cheese on her plate with her fork, when she looked up and saw a big, fat fly buzzing around the ceiling lamp and thought, “What if that fly suddenly flew right down from the ceiling into my mouth, and I chewed it with the rest of the food I’m already eating and then swallowed it?”

“What a disgusting thought!” she said out loud.

That got her brother Johnny’s interest. “What?” he asked.

“If I tell you, you’ll lose your appetite,” she replied.

“I dare you!” he said.

Anne looked up at the fly. It was enormous. The buzzing it made as it flitted around the lamp was deep and growly: “BZZZT! BZZT!” One could clearly see that its thorax was a darkish, emerald green; it had a bulbous, furry black abdomen; thick, knobbly, black legs that quivered as it lighted; crystalline U-shaped wings; and, of course, those enormous, shiny, multifaceted fly eyes. “It’s kind of pretty,” Anne thought to herself.

But she said out loud, “Oh, I was just thinking, what would happen if that big old fly buzzing around the lamp up there flew right down into my mouth, and I ate it by accident!”

“Ew!” said Johnny, “That is disgusting!”

“Kids! Not at the dinner table!” said their mother.

Their father rolled his eyes upward, his forehead wrinkling as he studied the fly. “That one is particularly foul,” he said. He pushed his chair back and reached over to the nearby counter for the sports section of the newspaper. He rolled it tight and stood up.

“Don’t,” said Mother, “Not right this instant!”

“They spread germs,” said Father, taking a swipe at it. It made an extra loud, “BZZZ-ZZ-Z!” as it managed to fly right around his newspaper cudgel.

“It’ll fall into the food!” protested Mother, but too late.

It was flying in wide arcs around the lamp now, “BZZZ! ZZZ!” Father studied it like a cat studies a mouse just before pouncing. Suddenly he slammed the lamp with the newspaper, causing it to swing back and forth precariously (Mother let out an “Oh!” thinking it might fall), and when he pulled his paper away they could clearly see the fly crushed against the glass of the lamp, its legs and wings sticking out pell-mell and a globby green splatter mark where its abdomen used to be. Mother grabbed the lamp to hold it steady, and swiped what was left of the fly off with a napkin, though there were still traces of greenish yellow goo on the spot where it had met its end.

“Just imagine if that was in your mouth,” said Anne.

“That is quite enough!” said Mother.

“I’ve lost my appetite!” said Johnny.

That was the end of the fly, but not of the thought. It seemed after that, Anne had a special sensitivity to the presence of bugs, wherever she happened to be. In the next few days, she found a silverfish scurrying about in the closet; a millipede in the basement; one of those mosquito-like crane flies dancing in the window; a moth on the screen door; a black ant on the living room floor hurrying away from an upended bowl she’d eaten this morning’s porridge out of. She even saw a cockroach in the bathroom, scuttling away behind the toilet. And each time she could not stop thinking about what it might be like to grab it between her thumb and forefinger and pop it into her mouth. Would it be crunchy or scratchy? Would its legs get caught between her teeth? Would its innards be the consistency of glue? Would it taste poisonously bitter or maybe salty? Would its legs stick in her throat as she swallowed it? Would it make her barf?

Sometimes if her brother Johnny was around when the thought of eating a bug came to mind, she teased him by saying her thoughts out loud like she had at the dinner table. It delighted her to see his face wrinkle up in disgust and hear him say, “Gross!” or “Disgusting!” But finally one day, he said, “Anne, what is it with eating bugs? You’re obsessed.”

“I am not obsessed!” she replied angrily.

“You are!” he said, “Every time you see some big, ugly bug you start talking about what it would be like to eat it! You’re gonna start eating bugs!”

“I am not!” she cried.

“Anne’s eating buu-ugs! Anne’s eating buu-ugs!” he chanted.

“I am not!” she insisted.

He kept chanting, so she pushed him. And he pushed her back, and kept chanting, so she shoved him. And he shoved back and kept chanting, “Buu-ugs! Buu-ugs!” So she hit him. “Don’t hit me!” he said, and hit her back, and then it turned into a full-fledged fight. Anne was older and bigger, so she got the better of him. She was big enough to pin him to the floor, sitting on him and pinning both his hands down with one of her hands, while she raised her other hand up to ready a punch. Then she bellowed, “Take it back! I do not eat bugs!” Red-faced and out of breath he gasped, “OK! OK! You do not eat bugs! Sorry! Now get off of me!” “Say ‘I take it back,’” she demanded. “I take it back!” he gasped. She got off of him and let him go, and he scrambled away, muttering something under his breath, but she didn’t care since she won.

But the next time she saw a bug and thought of eating it, she didn’t say a word about it to Johnny. She just kept it to herself, just imagined what it would be like crunching on a beetle, or slurping down a centipede or biting a bee’s head off and sucking out its insides. She would go to the school library during the lunch break. She had learned to go straight to the 590’s of the Dewey Decimals, and would find big picture books with photos of insects and flip through its pages, her mouth watering, all the time thinking how perfectly disgusting it would be to eat them.

One night as she went to bed, she noticed up on the ceiling in the corner just above her bed, a spindly, grayish brown spider, sitting in the middle of a wispy web. Once upon a time, when she was younger, when she was a little girl, she might have called for her mother or father to come sweep the spider away and flush it down the toilet. But this time she didn’t, she simply sat perfectly still watching the spider, studying it. And it was almost a sort of conscious break for her, as though she were passing some kind of test. She acknowledged to herself that she didn’t think it was quite so disgusting to eat bugs after all, perhaps it was actually quite good. “Spiders eat bugs,” she thought, “but they are a bug too. Isn’t that peculiar!” And then she wondered, if she ate the spider, would that be like eating all the bugs it had ever eaten? Would she somehow absorb all of them into herself? And she drifted off to sleep, dreaming that inside of her were swarms of bugs, a great kingdom of bugs, and that she was their queen.

She could not bring herself to crossing the boundary between dreaming and doing until quite some time later. Late in the following spring, toward the end of the school year, one day Father came home from work with a good deal of excitement. “I’ve got a surprise for everybody!” he said gleefully, barely able to contain himself.

“What?” asked Mother.

“Everyone wait here in the kitchen, I’ll bring it in!” he said.

Father disappeared into the garage and a few minutes later emerged with an enormous box. “It’s a tent,” he announced, “We’re going camping!”

“Camping?” said Johnny, “Really? Where?”

“Why, up in the north woods, of course,” he replied, “After you kids are done with school. I’ll take some vacation and we’ll all go together.”

“Well, I suppose it will be an adventure,” said Mother.

“It’ll be great to spend time in the outdoors, close to nature,” said Father.

“Will we go canoeing and fishing?” asked Johnny.

“Of course,” said Father.

“There’ll be bugs,” said Mother.

Through the corner of her eyes Anne noticed Johnny grinning maliciously at her. She turned red in the face and glared back at him, as if to say, “Not a word.” And he knew better than to say a word, and didn’t.

“Of course,” said Father, “That’s what it’s like out in nature.”

Of course, from then on Anne could think of nothing else but all the bugs living out in the woods. She didn’t really think about what she was going to do with them, only that they were out there by the thousand, and in every variety imaginable: spiders, beetles, butterflies and moths and caterpillars, ants, bees, flies, gnats of every kind, and on and on, and it made her shiver to think about it. It was only a few weeks of waiting until school was over, but she could barely contain herself until finally came the night when Mother packed their bags with camping clothes and supplies and Father got out the sleeping bags and the tent and went shopping for food, and loaded everything into the family station wagon. And then the next day they got up bright and early and piled into the car. The sun was only just rising, and Johnny fell asleep again as soon as the wheels started rolling, but Anne was wide awake, full of excitement, watching the city give way to suburbs and suburbs to wide open spaces. We’re on our way, she kept thinking.

When they finally arrived at Finland National Park, it seemed unbearable to her that Mother and Father insisted on her helping them unpack things and set up the tents. “Johnny’s not doing anything!” she complained, “Why don’t you make him help too?” She was thinking maybe it would go faster and she could be free earlier if he were doing something besides just idling about the car. “You mind your own business,” said Father, “We need you to help.” And that was that. But finally the tent had been erected and everything moved out of the car that needed to be moved, and exasperated, her parents told her it would be OK to explore, as long as she stayed on the trails and came back “soon,” since Mother was getting a late lunch ready.

Anne was a few dozen yards down one of the trails leading away from the main campground, when she heard small footsteps behind her and turned to see Johnny following her. “No!” she shouted, “Go back!”

“Mom and Dad said I could go, if I stayed close to you!” he replied.

“Fine, but I’m not slowing down for you, so you’re going to have to keep up with me,” she said, picking up her pace.

“Fine!” Johnny said.

“Fine!”

They wandered down the trail quite a long way, for what seemed to Johnny like quite a long time. He started getting antsy, and finally said, “I think it’s time to turn around and go back! Mom and Dad said we’re going to eat soon.”

Anne replied, “We haven’t been gone that long, but if you want to go back, the trail’s right there.”

“I’m not supposed to go by myself,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have come in the first place,” she grumbled.

They finally arrived at a small pond, surrounded by trees. There was a thick layer of bright green algae growing all around the edges, and the pond was at the middle of a kind of depression in the forest, so although there had been a light breeze most of the way further up the trail, here the air was quite dead. There were some trees that had fallen over into the pond, and one right near the kind of muddy clearing that widened out from the trail. “I want to sit on that log,” Anne said, almost to herself. So she crawled out along the log until she was over the water, and sat there quite still with her feet on the log in front of her and her knees pulled up to her chest. Johnny stayed away. They had not been there very long, when both Johnny and Anne started to hear a certain thin, whiny buzzing just inside their ears. Suddenly Johnny slapped himself on the face. “Ow!” he shouted, “Mosquito!”

“There are mosquitos in the woods,” said Anne sarcastically. And just as she said it, she could feel some lighting on her skin. She looked down at her arm and saw three of them, bobbing up and down, finding just the right place for their proboscises, and then she felt the familiar little sting. She didn’t want to slap them at all like she once might have. She just watched them curiously as they started to fatten on her blood, while others started to land on her as well.

Johnny slapped his arm and then brushed his legs with both hands. “There’s lots of them here!” he shouted.

“I suppose so,” said Anne calmly.

Johnny slapped his face again, and then his arms, and then brushed his legs again. He started doing the “mosquito dance.” “They’re really bad!” he exclaimed, “Let’s get out of here!”

Anne looked at her arm, holding it very still. With her other hand, she slowly reached down and grabbed one of the mosquitoes by the wings and plucked it off her arm. The others stayed right where they were, feeding away. She held the plucked one close to her face and looked at it wriggling, fat with blood, her blood. “Dare to eat me!” she said, under her breath, and with that, opened her mouth wide and popped it in. She rolled it around with her tongue, and then crunched it good between her molars, and then swallowed. “Mmm, salty,” she said, and began plucking them off her arm, one after another, and popping them into her mouth, one, two, three. “This is perfect,” she thought, “They come to eat me and I eat them instead.”

Johnny began wailing. “What are you doing!” he cried.

“Oh, be quiet,” she said. And at that, he burst into tears and ran back up the trail.

Anne stayed and ate mosquitoes. After she had eaten a couple dozen or so, she crawled off the log and turned back up the trail, taking her own good time. When she finally arrived, at the camp site, she found Johnny, his face red and moist with tears, and her parents, sitting grimly at the picnic table. “Anne!” her father frowned, “Explain yourself.”

“What?” she said, “Am I late for dinner?”

“Tell them what you were doing,” sniffed Johnny, clutching his mother’s arm and hiding behind her.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Anne, you had better stop playing coy right this instant, and tell us exactly what you were doing out there that scared your little brother so badly,” her father demanded, his voice rising slightly.

“Oh,” she said, “Oh that. Oh, Jeez. I was… I was just pretending to eat mosquitoes off my arm. It was just in fun, I thought he’d think it was funny. Jeez, I didn’t think he’d get all scared like that. Really. He was being a pest anyway.”

“She was eating them,” he said, “She’s lying. She wasn’t pretending. I saw her.”

“Honey,” said Mother, “that’s silly. Of course she was pretending.” She turned to Anne, “But that was a wicked trick to play on your brother. You really frightened him.”

“Apologize to your brother,” said Father.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Anne.

“I don’t like that tone,” he replied.

She took a deep breath and sighed impatiently. “OK,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s better,” he said, “Now hug your brother, and make up.”

“I don’t want to hug her,” said Johnny.

“Johnny, you’re both going to go to bed without dinner if you don’t shape up,” he said.

“Why should I go to bed without dinner if he’s being a pest,” Anne immediately complained. Johnny started crying.

“Dear, they’re hungry,” said Mother, “Let’s just put all this behind us and start over again, or what a vacation this is going to end up being! OK? Everyone, take a deep breath and start over.” But no matter that Mother tried to “start over again,” the rest of the vacation turned out to be not fabulous. Anne refused to participate in any family activities, and her constant bickering with Johnny made them impossible anyway. It turned chilly and rained most of the week. Father tried to put on a chipper mood and make the most of it, but just ended up getting on everyone’s nerves. Mother hated the rain and the cool weather and ended up taking refuge in the car in the small parking lot near their campsite. Johnny spent most of the time sulking, and tried to stay away from Anne. And when no one was looking, Anne would wander away from the campsite and wouldn’t come back for hours at a time. Anne spent most of the rest of the vacation eating bugs. She would wander down a trail and find an isolated stretch and then wade out into the underbrush. She was ecstatic the first time she turned over a rock and found a fat white grub: chewy. She tore the bark off of fallen logs and licked up ants by the dozen: she liked the way they tickled in her mouth as she crunched them. She found a great black scarab crawling through the underbrush, bigger than the tip of her thumb. As she picked it up by its thick, round back and watched its legs squirming madly and its formidable jaws opening and closing, she remembered some of her former revulsion for such things and almost dropped it. But then she thought, “If it escapes like that, I know I’ll always regret it if I don’t find another one before we leave.” So in it went, and she made sure to chew extra well before swallowing. And once she had got a taste of it, she decided it was her favorite and now she would be doubly sad to leave without getting at least one more. “It might be worth getting stung,” she thought, when she saw her first bees. But she thought better of it, since she had read somewhere that if you kill one, they might swarm. “I’ll figure out how to eat those later,” she told herself. Flies were tricky; getting them live into her mouth was the problem. (It was no good eating them, or any bug, dead; she threw away plenty of mosquitoes that she’d absent mindedly swatted.) She finally resorted to catching them in her hand and carefully plucking the wings off. “I’ll have to remember that when I get home,” she told herself. The crown jewel of her vacation gourmandise was the praying mantis she found in a grassy knoll near the parking lot. She took it to some hidden place in the woods, where she could eat it slowly without fear of getting caught.

As the vacation neared its close, Anne began to feel a certain unease about the whole thing. She watched her father, totally dejected that his brilliant idea for a vacation had gone so disastrously; her mother, sullen and teary, and hiding out in the car; and her brother, giving her wide berth, not talking to her at all, and glancing sideways at her like she was some kind of terrible alien and not his sister any more. She overheard her father whispering to her mother in the tent, “Is something wrong with Anne?” Of course nothing was wrong, she thought. She had had a wonderful time. But now she could not help but feel she had enjoyed herself at their expense, that she had thought of no one but herself, and that perhaps their unhappiness was at least in part her fault. And, after all, would not anyone reasonable say there was something terribly abnormal about this much bug eating?

The more she thought about it, the more queasy she felt. And the night before they left, she found herself behind the outhouse vomiting. She thought she could make out a beetle carapace or two in it, and the vomit itself was thin and yellow in color. “Like bug’s blood,” she thought.

“This is it,” she told herself, “I’m putting it behind me. I’ve gotten it out of my system. I’ve had my fill of bugs now. I swear before God, I will never eat another bug again.”

She did her best to put it behind her. But it was summer vacation, and next year she would be starting middle school, and she had plenty of time to wander about the neighborhood and worry. And it was a particularly hot, humid summer, and even though the city sprayed all the lakes, there were lots of mosquitoes and lots of bugs.

The mosquitoes worried her. One would land on her leg and bite. As soon as she felt the little pin prick, she had a terrible urge to stand very still and reach down carefully and pluck it by the wings, and then… But she wouldn’t, no she’d put that behind her. She’d squash the thing and run.

She finally decided that, it being a particularly buggy summer, she could not escape the mosquitoes completely so long as she was outside, so she would spend her time indoors instead. The house got unbearably hot every day after noon, so her favorite haunt was the basement. She’d bring a blanket and a pillow down and hide underneath the ping pong table with a good book.

She was fine there until the day she noticed the ants. At first she noticed just one or two, but they were big black ants. She couldn’t bear to squash them, so she ran upstairs. “Ma! Mom! There are ants downstairs!”

She found her mother standing on the ladder that went up to the attic, her head up through the trap door. “Oh, dear,” sighed her mother, “Well, that more or less happens every summer, especially when it’s hot and humid like this. I guess I’ll have to get out the ant poison.”

“Get it right now, Mom!” she fussed.

“Not right now!” replied her mother, “I’m trying to find something.”

So Anne went downstairs to the living room and waited in the heat, and thought, “OK, Mother’s going to poison them, but maybe I can eat one or two first, before she gets them. Just one or two. People eat ants right? In Africa or China or someplace like that?” And she sat there in a quandary, worrying and shivering in the heat for what seemed like an eternity until she finally heard the creak of the attic ladder being stowed, and her mother clomp-clomping down the stairs.

“OK,” said her mother, “The ant poison. Let’s see… Where did I put it last summer?”

She continued down the basement stairs. Anne stood by the basement door, listening to her mother rummage about. “Here it is!” she said. Anne scurried down to watch. Her mother struggled to unscrew the lid of the little bottle. “This is on tight!” she said. She ran it under hot water, then tried again with a towel and finally opened it.

“Oh, dear,” she said, “This batch is all dried out.”

“What do you mean?” asked Anne.

“Look,” said her mother, holding the bottle up toward Anne’s face, “It’s all crystallized. I guess I’m going to have to get more.”

“Are you going now?”

“No I’m not. I have other things to do. I’ll ask your father to pick some up from the drugstore on the way home from work.”

“But Mom! The ants…”

“Oh, they won’t hurt anything till your father gets home.”

“Mom!”

Her mother walked up the basement stairs, leaving Ann standing alone, studying the floor. “Fine!” she thought to herself, “If Mother won’t get rid of them, I will.”

She found a bottle of honey in the kitchen and poured a big gob of it on the basement floor under the ping pong table next to a couple of stray ants, and then sprawled out on her pillow and blanket to watch. The ants were hopeless at first, crawling this way and that without going anywhere near the honey. Finally she lost patience and carefully picked one of the ants up with her forefinger and thumb and placed it right next to the honey. Its antennae bobbed up and down as it ate its fill of the sticky sweet. Then it made its way over to the other ant, and then crawled away while the second ant made for the honey.

“That’s right, tell your friends,” said Anne.

First two came back, then four, then nine. She waited a while, until a couple dozen or so ants had made the trip back and forth, to and from the honey. Once there was a pretty busy ant trail, she started to pick them up one by one and pop them in her mouth. “I wouldn’t have to do this,” she told herself, “if Mother had simply done what I’d asked.” The ants tasted more and more delicious as the afternoon wore on, “sweeter than any honey,” she thought.

When Anne was finished, she had more or less depleted the ant trail. There were a few pathetic stragglers left, drunk on honey. The best part of the hive had to be inside her now, and she began to feel a bit of the anguish she felt toward the end of their camping trip. “I probably shouldn’t have done that,” she thought, “But it was Mother’s fault! I tried to get her to take care of them. Well, I won’t do it again.”

But now she had crossed that line, no resolve was left. She ran an errand to the convenience store on the corner the next day, and found a squirrel carcass in the rain gutter swarming with ants and flies and maggots. She started with the maggots first: that was a delicacy she’d never tried. Then the ants, then flies if she could catch them. And from then on, the rest of her summer was spent gorging on the bugs of the city: June bugs, lady bugs and box elder bugs, roly-polies, stink bugs, grasshoppers, and centipedes, a half dozen different kinds of spiders, black moths, white moths and gray moths, sprinkled with liberal catches of ants, flies and mosquitoes.

The last half of August was cool and rainy, and Anne was haunted by a vague discontent as the summer wound to a close. She tried to avoid thinking about the right or wrong of eating bugs. “It doesn’t hurt anybody,” she told herself, though she still worried that it didn’t seem quite normal. She was anxious about starting middle school, and worried that maybe if something was not quite right about her she would find it difficult to make friends. “Best not to talk about the bugs to anyone,” she thought.

One of the best things about the summer, Anne thought on looking back, was that her pest of a little brother Johnny had steered clear of her ever since that camping trip. She hadn’t seen much of him at all really. He’d spent most of his time at his friend Tommy’s house during the day, and even for sleepovers on the weekends. When he was home he had left her alone. But when school started again in the fall, Johnny started hanging out with a new group of friends, and his attitude changed. Johnny seemed to take pleasure now in tormenting his sister. After school, he and his friends spent their time devising ways to torture her: squirting her with disappearing ink, hiding her books in out of the way places, sneaking into her room and breaking her things, and using her dolls for target practice in the back yard. She complained to her mother, but she was no help. “You kids are getting big enough to sort your problems out for yourself,” she would say. A rage came over Anne and all she could do was scream at him, which only provoked wicked laughter and more pranks. She was horrified to learn he and his friends had given her a nick-name that was spreading through the schoolyard: “Bug-chewer.”

One day that fall Anne came home from school and went to her room and found a tarantula in the middle of her bed. She’d seen pictures of tarantulas, but never one in the flesh, up close like this. She had never seen such a magnificent creature before, so beautifully proportioned, such lustrous, bluish-black fur, and so enormous. It had two rows of bright, shiny, watery eyes and its body pulsed ever so slightly, as if breathing, and she wondered, “do spiders breathe?”

“Where did it come from?” she wondered. And as soon as she thought the question, she knew the answer. This could only be a prank pulled by Johnny and one of his bratty friends. The tarantula was probably a pet. They doubtless expected her to come screaming bloody murder out of her room any moment now. She would teach them. She turned around, looking cautiously in every direction, then ever so quietly eased the door to her room shut. She would eat it. She would eat it and never say a word to anyone; let them think it had crawled away and gotten lost. And if they asked her about it she would say, “What spider?” And that would teach them.

When she picked it up, it arched its back and squirmed it legs, its fanged mandibles straining menacingly. She sat down on the edge of her bed and paused, looking it right in the eyes and thinking, “Almost too beautiful to eat.” But then she bit its head off.

At that point, she was startled by a terrifying clatter and piercing, high-pitched screams from inside her closet. The closet door slammed open and out burst Johnny and one of his friends. They raced right past her, threw open the bedroom door, and stampeded down the stairs, crying, “Mom! Mom!” Anne burst into laughter. They had wanted to frighten her.

Better complete the deed, she thought. She had several minutes to finish off the spider, legs and all.

Johnny and his friend were hysterical, in tears. Anne of course denied everything, and accused Johnny of making it all up as a prank. Mother was completely befuddled. Father made even less of the situation when he came home from work, and finally sent Johnny’s friend Billy home, and both Anne and Johnny to their rooms to “think about things.” From her room, Anne heard her father talking sternly to one of Billy’s parents on the phone, “Yes, that’s what Johnny said too. But do you really think it’s remotely possible my daughter ate his pet tarantula?”

Anne laughed some more. She rolled about on her bed, laughing so hard she cried.

But that night she did not sleep well. She tossed and turned, and eventually only managed to fall into a kind of torpid half-sleep. She was uncomfortable; she had indigestion, a stomach ache; she itched inside. She thought she heard voices rising up from inside her stomach, many inhuman voices whispering all at once so she could not understand them. But she thought she made out the words, “With that last one, it is finally enough.”

She woke up with a kind of itch under her arms. It was just a little itch at first, that she scratched gently. But in the middle of the night, she sat up in bed alarmed by a sudden fierce, stinging sensation. She felt under her arms. The skin was lumpy and tender. She got out of bed and turned on the lights, and examined herself in the dresser mirror. The skin under each of her arms was swollen and red, and looked like it had several large blackhead pimples in it. But when she looked close, she noticed her skin seemed to be growing translucent, and underneath, she saw that what looked like pimples from a distance, up close looked more like thick, black, chitinous needles pushing up from under her skin.

She cried, great big tears welling up in her eyes. “This can’t be happening,” she said, “This has to be a nightmare.”

The next morning her mother found her huddled in bed, nothing of her showing from under the covers. “Anne!” she said, “You’ve overslept! It’s time for school!”

“I’m not feeling well,” moaned Anne.

“Do you have a fever? Let me see…” said her mother, stepping closer.

“NO!” screamed Anne, “LEAVE ME ALONE!” Her voice sounded raspy.

Her mother stopped. “OK,” she said, “But if you’re so sick, we’ll have to take you to the doctor later.”

Anne didn’t respond. She just lay there, very still. Her mother thought how, with her covers wrapped around her like that, she looked like a great big caterpillar in a cocoon.

That night, Anne heard her parents conferring in hushed tones outside her door.

“I tried to take her to the doctor,” said her mother, “but she wouldn’t let me anywhere near her.”

“Is she running a fever?” asked her father.

“I don’t know,” said her mother.

She heard her brother pipe in, in a high-pitched whisper, “The spider! She got sick from eating the tarantula spider!”

Her father said, “Hush! I don’t want to hear another word about that!”

There was a knock at her door.

“Anne, unlock your door,” said Father, “we just need to know you’re OK.”

“GO AWAY!” she croaked.

“I have an idea what this is about,” said Mother, “You two leave. I’ll take care of this.”

She heard her brother’s and father’s footsteps receding, and then her mother continued, “This doesn’t have anything to do with what we talked about a while ago, does it? When we talked about the changes a girl goes through when she gets to a certain age? Does it?”

Anne’s mother told her father, “She just needs some time. And if she needs a day or two off school, we should just write a note to her teachers and let her have it, and deal with it once she’s feeling better.” And her father reluctantly agreed.

She told Anne through the door, “OK, we’ll just let you have as much time to yourself as you need. I’ll leave some dinner for you here in front of your door.”

A “day or two off school” turned into three days, then four, then a whole week. Anne’s mother would leave food in front of the door. Sometimes she waited to see if she could catch a glimpse of her daughter taking it, but she never did. Eventually she’d come back and see the food had disappeared and an empty bowl or plate from the last meal was left in its place.

At the end of a full week, Johnny came home from school one day, and saw Anne’s bedroom door ajar. It looked dark in her room, like she had taken masking tape and covered all the windows with it and turned off all the lights.

“Anne?” he said, “Are you in there?”

There was no answer.

“Anne,” Johnny said, his voice trembling a little, “I’m sorry I’ve been so mean to you. I don’t wanna be like that any more. I wanna be friends.”

Very quietly, he entered. It was pitch dark inside, and he still couldn’t see a thing, so he reached over toward the lamp on her nightstand. He recoiled at first, as his hand brushed through something that felt like sticky spider webs. But he finally found the lamp switch and turned it on. He gasped at what he saw. The entire room was covered with thick, white, silky stuff. That was what was covering the windows and keeping light from coming in.

“Welcome to my parlor,” hissed a voice from behind him.

The door slammed shut, and Johnny spun around and saw his sister in a corner and screamed.

During her time in her room, Anne had been going through some changes, though not the kind her mother thought. Those spikes growing under her arms had sprouted into eight long, spiny, black arms. Her body grew very thin around the waist and very fat around her neck, her back, and her behind, though it didn’t feel like fat, it felt hard. Her arms shrank until they were just big enough to shove things into her mouth, and her legs withered away until she found it necessary to crawl about using the new arms she’d sprouted out of her upper body. Her skin gradually turned a shade of blue. What she thought were pimples growing on her temples erupted into extra sets of big black eyes. And she found she could spin webs, and she preferred the dark, and that’s when she covered her windows and her whole room with a nice layer of Anne silk.

“I don’t know how you did it,” said Johnny, gasping for breath, “but… that’s… a great Halloween costume.”

“I’m glad you like my new look,” she said.

Johnny tried opening the door, but it was covered with that sticky webby substance, and it was somehow wedged shut now. He could not get it open, no matter how he pulled.

“Mom!” he shouted.

“Hush!” said Anne.

Anne could do things now she had never dreamed. She was much bigger and ten times stronger and she could move lightning fast. And as she watched Johnny screaming and crying and banging on the door, she thought how strangely indifferent she felt about him, about her parents, about everything her life used to be. She snatched him with her four front legs and started to spray him with web, slowly turning him so that the web covered him nice and evenly. She sang a little song as she did it, “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, think I’m gonna eat worms! Pesky little brother worms, long father, mother worms, see how they wiggle and squirm!”

After she’d finished wrapping her brother up into a nice bundle and given him a bite, just to put him to sleep and stop his screaming, she hung him up on the wall. Then she reached out with one of her arms and smashed the lamp, plunging the room back into pitch dark. No one would be turning that on again. Then she settled down in the middle of the floor and rested, waiting. Waiting for a knock to come at the door.