A cricket smacked his cheek.

Another landed on his head.

He yelped and batted it off.

One hit the kitchen floor.

Where it landed with other crickets.

Not that many. Fifteen? Twenty?

Then the box moved. Crickets jumped onto Will, and Will jumped away from the table, hitting it with his legs, jarring the box just enough to slide to the edge, tip, and fall. It landed on its side with a thud that jarred loose the egg crates, layers tipping out like a paper fan opening up.

A cricket could jump twenty to thirty times its body length, and these did.

A lot jumped for the nearest heat source, landing on the brick chimney with audible ticks. Others went in different directions.

An orchestra of crickets dove into Mom’s messily knotted hair as if it were good cover. Shrieking, she ripped out her hair tie and bent over, shaking her hair free and making crickets rain down.

Others launched themselves toward the living room and landed on the coffee table with poofs of glitter. Hollie screamed and ducked behind the couch. Crickets followed. Glitter streamed in the air behind them as they made landings. On Hollie.

In the kitchen, crickets sank into salsa and sour cream. A few must have made their way free—thin red and white lines trailed across the counter like muddy footprints.

Some crickets stayed near the box, shaking as if they were cold or scared, and secreted a brown liquid.

Will did a dance as crickets slid beneath his collar and crawled up his jeans. He flapped his shirt and kicked his legs. It didn’t help to tell himself not to be freaked out because they were only crickets. They were a lot of crickets.

Spreading fast and far as they made their break for freedom.

Then they started chirping.

He’d read only males chirped, usually to get girls. But sometimes to establish territory. And there was a lot of new territory to lay claim to.

For a few seconds, Will, Mom, and Hollie stilled. Chirping echoed down the hallway, bounced around the kitchen, reverberated up the chimney. Though totally out of place, it was kind of wonderful. Like lying in a field as the sun set on a summer day. A very large field. Swarming with crickets.

“Open the door,” Hollie said. “Make them go outside.”

If Will opened the door, the crickets would only back away. It was November out there. Freezing. Crickets weren’t stupid.

But it finally occurred to Will to get the box and its remaining inhabitants outside. He tilted the egg crates back in. A few crickets got squished. Guts smeared the sides.

Though he carried them to certain death, he handled the box as gently as he could.

The night was still. Stars spread a net across the clear sky.

Will walked the box to the middle of the yard, his socks crunching on brittle grass. His chilled clothes stiffened and crinkled like paper. A cricket fell from his shirt’s hem. In the box, maybe a third of the crickets remained. They huddled in the corners; a few slid to the bottom. They were all going to die.

Will’s fingers felt frozen to the cardboard, ready to break off like icicles. Air burned his lungs.

He set down the box. He didn’t look inside again. He went back to the house.

Mom was vacuuming up crickets and glitter with the Dirt Devil. Hollie braved the couch to get her laptop and look up ways to catch the rest. A Google search became their checklist.

First and easiest: Set out strips of duct tape. Dad always joked that duct tape fixed everything, and here was another example.

Mom found a jar of molasses. Apparently, crickets’ love for the thick brown goo was suicidal. Will and Hollie set out bowls with a layer of the water-thinned stuff in the bottom.

Last, Will raided the recycling bin for the plastic bottles of seltzer Mom liked and Hollie wouldn’t drink because she had read that bubbles made you fart. They cut off the bottle tops, inverted them into the bottom half, sprinkled sugar inside, and set them out.

By the time they were done, a couple hundred corpses and not-quite corpses were piled around the three of them.

He was glad he hadn’t been alone when the crickets escaped. Mom being so matter-of-fact about having to catch and clean up bugs kept him from losing it. She taught kindergarten, so she was used to snot and stickiness, but this was a whole new level of “ick.” And Hollie, she’d been creeped out by the bugs from the beginning but had gutted it out to help him.

When Dad called to check in and heard what had happened, he asked if they wanted him to call his brother. Uncle Rick lived on a lake, which meant summer at his place was Mosquito City, so he always had exterminator-level bug spray on hand. But Mom didn’t like the idea of using stuff like that in the house in winter, especially since Dad had already put up the shrink film to insulate the windows. They were just going to have to hope the traps kept working.

No one seemed to blame Will, but he did. Simon had sent him a box of bugs because he was Bug Boy. It wouldn’t have been funny if he weren’t.

But it wasn’t funny, and Will should have just let Mom call Simon’s mom rather than try to fix it himself. More importantly, he shouldn’t have opened the box.

It had been reasonable to think they were in some kind of bag inside, hadn’t it? He’d seen the mesh in the box’s “windows.” And how could the crickets have been piled in and stayed in the box long enough to close it without some kind of net? Not that it mattered anymore. A few hundred were outside, freezing. A few hundred more were trapped and dying. And it was likely that another few hundred were roaming the house, searching for hideouts.

If he had only known the crickets were coming. But what would he have done then, really?

All these dead crickets. Tomorrow the story might be funny. Most of a thousand crickets had escaped in his house.

But tonight he just couldn’t see the humor.