Sachs was going to pass on the food but she realized suddenly that she was famished. Garrett poured the contents into two bowls and handed her a spoon. She spit on the utensil and wiped it on her shirt. They ate for a few minutes in silence.

Sachs noticed a sound outside, a raucous, high-pitched noise. “What’s that?” she asked. “Cicadas?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just the males make that noise. Only the males. Make all that noise just from these little plates on their body.” He squinted, reflected for a moment. “They live this totally weird life…. The nymphs dig into the ground and stay there for, like, twenty years before they hatch. Then they come out and climb a tree. Their skin splits down the back and the adult crawls out. All those years in the ground, just hiding, before they come out and become adults.”

“Why do you like insects so much, Garrett?” Sachs asked.

He hesitated. “I don’t know. I just do.”

“Haven’t you ever wondered about it?”

He stopped eating. Scratched one of his poison oak welts. “I guess I got interested in them after my parents died. After that happened I was pretty unhappy. I felt funny in my head a lot. Confused and, I don’t know, just different. The counselors at school just said it was because Mom and Dad and my sister died and they, like, told me I should work harder to get over it. But I couldn’t. I just felt like I wasn’t a real person. I didn’t care about anything. All I did was lie in bed or go into the swamp or the woods and read. For a year that’s all I did. Like, I hardly saw anybody. Just moved from foster home to foster home…. But then I read something neat. In that book there.”

Flipping open The Miniature World, he found a page. He showed it to her. He’d circled a passage headed Characteristics of Healthy Living Creatures. Sachs scanned it, read several of the list of eight or nine entries.

—A healthy creature strives to grow and develop.

—A healthy creature strives to survive.

—A healthy creature strives to adapt to its environment.

Garrett said, “I read that and it was like, wow, I could be like that. I could be healthy and normal again. I tried totally hard to follow the rules it said. And that made me feel better. So I guess I felt close to them—insects, I mean.”

A mosquito landed on her arm. She laughed. “But they also drink your blood.” She slapped it. “Got him.”

“Her,” Garrett corrected. “It’s just the females drink blood. The males drink nectar.”

“Really?”

He nodded then grew quiet for a moment. Looked at the dot of blood on her arm. “Insects never go away.”

“What do you mean?”