All week, those few crickets roamed free at school, chirping in the hall as if they could tell the acoustics there were perfect for them. Every time the whirring vibrato sounded, someone offered to catch the bug for Will for a snack or asked if he wanted ant-chovy pizza or moth-olate cake, showing that some students had taken Simon’s words to heart about getting more creative with their bug-food names. But Will was still offered a lot of French flies, bee-ritos, and maggot-aroni and fleas—people clearly had their favorites.

At home, the chirping was less fun. The crickets sang their guts out at night. Technically, the sound they made was from rubbing their top wing across their ridged bottom wing, kind of like a violin, and supposedly he could tell the temperature by counting how many times they chirped in fourteen seconds and adding forty.

Will had learned a lot about crickets in the dark hours of not sleeping and trying to find out how to make their chorus stop.

Not enough time had passed for the story to be funny, but telling Dad about it again in person, they could see how it would be one day. Still, Dad was ticked enough for Mom and Hollie’s sake that he had a long call with Simon. Simon had an uncle and older guy cousins, but he’d always especially liked Dad, so Will wasn’t surprised when Simon was a little more subdued the next day.

Dad tried to stop the chirping by turning down the thermostat to fifty-five, because he read that crickets didn’t chirp when they were too cold. But it was November, and the humans were too cold, too. The traps still worked, and each morning Will or Dad dumped a few more cricket corpses, but some hardy suckers had apparently moved into the walls. Hollie bleach-wiped her room every single day.

She didn’t need to, Will knew. Though they sounded like a horde at night while people were trying to sleep, there weren’t that many crickets remaining, and they didn’t leave any visible messes. Will thought maybe Hollie was a little paranoid since the squishing incident, but it seemed that things were normal for her at school. He saw her and her friends around their lockers, and none of them was acting any weirder than girls usually did. Besides, Hollie was Hollie—she never really needed his help with anything anyway.

Simon’s mom did ground him, but it never stuck when she did that. She worked weird hours, so it was tough to enforce anything. She was a nurse at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, actually, and it struck Will, thinking about how Eloy’s family had moved when his mom got a job with one of the Mayo Clinic’s centers in Owatonna, how lucky he was that Simon’s mom hadn’t moved them to the city after the divorce.

“The real test will be when my dad gets the credit card bill,” Simon said. Though he grinned and waggled his eyebrows, Will knew how much it bothered Simon that his dad hardly ever called, even after Simon left messages or texted him.

Will had looked up how much the crickets cost and doubted Simon’s dad would be worried about a twenty-five-dollar charge. Though it was weird to hope your friend got into trouble with his dad, he said, “Who wouldn’t be mad? What normal person needs a thousand crickets?”

“You, but then, you’re not normal.”

Will bopped Simon’s arm, and Simon pretended to be mortally wounded; in other words, he was his normal self.

But on their way to class, Will heard him mutter, “He’ll probably just text Mom.” Will threw an arm over his friend’s shoulders, and Simon let him for almost five whole seconds—a sure sign he was in a low mood—before chucking it off and claiming cooties, germs, B.O., et cetera.

In addition to lack of sleep and a little worry for Hollie and Simon, Will was dealing with the fact that wrestling practice was picking up. Now that the coaches had reminded the guys’ bodies where their muscles were, sparring was added to their workouts. At first, Eloy was too hesitant, and Will felt like a meanie tackling a toddler. But Coach Van Beek got on their cases and made them step up their game.

Eloy didn’t get all the rules yet, and he pulled some illegal moves, but he listened hard when Will or the coaches explained. He wasn’t skilled, but he was fast and pretty strong. A few times he almost pinned Will, which would have sucked big-time. Will had wrestled for years; no way was the new guy taking him down, even if Will was supposed to be helping him learn how to. Next week, they’d have their first matches, and that would be the real test of how far both had come.

The science presentations were coming up next week, too.

Monday, after what had happened with Hollie and then the little dustup with Darryl, Will had thought about calling off his plan, but then Eloy mentioned that the grasshoppers were on their way from Mexico. Will hadn’t thought about where Mr. Herrera would get the bugs, but he definitely wouldn’t have guessed they’d be special ordered from Mexico. Eloy said it was because his dad wanted grasshoppers from Oaxaca, that he was picky about his food, and that seemed funny, since they were talking about bugs. Then Eloy said his dad wanted to be sure that Will had cleared his project with the school’s food policies.

Everyone knew the drill. On TV shows, kids made homemade cupcakes or cookies for class, but that didn’t happen in real life. In real life, Triton students could only bring in food “prepared commercially,” per the Minnesota Department of Health. It was in the student handbook and everything. Mom said it was partly because the school got federal money, so they had to follow guidelines, but anyone who had tasted his grandma’s poppy-seed bars or Mrs. Johnston’s blondies cried about the injustice.

If Will’s mom weren’t already upset about the stinkbug and on edge about the crickets, Will might have asked her to check whether the school might make an exception in the interest of science. He definitely should have asked Mr. Taylor by now, except he knew that, as soon as he did, Mom would hear about it. And now Will didn’t dare ask anyone, because Eloy’s dad had already ordered the grasshoppers, all the way from Oaxaca! What if Will asked and was told no? He couldn’t do that to Mr. Herrera. He’d simply have to take his chances.

So Will told Eloy it was all taken care of.

Which meant Will was officially stuck with his original plan whether or not he had second thoughts.

He didn’t exactly mind. It was going to be funny. Through interlibrary loan, he’d gotten a book about bug eating called Edible by a woman who wrote a blog called Girl Meets Bug. In it he’d found plenty of stuff to gross out his classmates but also tons of cool stuff. Everyone would eat it up—and, he hoped, eat the bugs, too.

But Will couldn’t help being nervous. There’d definitely been some mixed results with bug-eating and his personal life. But he was committed now, and time did its thing and passed before he was sure he was ready.