Beetle V. Valorous Is Not a Villain

ONE

On the very last day of summer, in the cold hours of early morning, Clementine tried to take a seat on a magical ferryboat.

It didn’t work.

There were a few things wrong with the flying, glowing ferry:

1. Some of the seats were alive and would scamper away when you tried to sit on them, and

2. it smelled funny—­like plastic, taxidermied rabbit, and chlorine.

Clementine frowned at one of the seats, which did a little hop and scurried farther away. It was supposed to act like a regular ferryboat seat, with black fabric cushions covered in neon stars and patterned swoops.

It was not supposed to have metallic spider legs and thirty beady eyes. It was certainly not supposed to tuck up its spider legs and close its eyes to blend in with the other chairs, and it was really, super certainly not supposed to dart away when you tried to sit on it.

It disappeared out the opposite door, and Clementine watched it, defeated. Then he gave up, lay down on the ferryboat’s floor, and sighed.

I’m bored. We should make a bet, whispered the ancient voice inside his head. If I win, I get to consume the whole Earth.

Clementine answered out loud: “No.”

He focused on the feeling of the ferry’s idle engine humming below him, the arcade carpet scratchy beneath his fingers. The star-­shaped lights on the ceiling glowed even through his closed eyelids.

Clementine felt cold dread curl through his stomach.

He was twelve years old now, but on the inside, he felt almost completely grown up. Outside, he was a boy wearing a green velvet dress with monster teeth sewn into the hem, and seven crystal rings. The dress looked wild and boyish on him; it barely covered his scraped knees and pale, sunburned shoulders. And he hadn’t wanted to put on socks and shoes that morning, so he had styled the gown with bare feet and sparkly nail polish.

Clementine had black hair that fell just past his shoulders and grown out bangs, and he let all of it look stylishly ratty.

He was the queen of the monsters, so he had sharp teeth, claws, and, of course, velvety black antlers. His antlers had gotten a little bigger over the summer, even if the rest of him hadn’t, really. But that was what happened when you made a deal with an ancient, magical entity and got access to her powers: Clem­entine got to look fantastically fearsome and didn’t have to physically grow up.

The chair crept back around the corner, then started bouncing up and down and waving its feet in a spidery way. Clementine had a sneaking suspicion that it was trying to goad him into chasing it.

It would have been cute, if it didn’t make Clementine feel like a failure.

Even after months with his new powers, his magic didn’t always behave. Like, the things he made kept unexpectedly coming to life—­and he was still horrible at teleporting.

And the school that Clementine was supposed to lead hadn’t even opened yet, but it was already falling apart. The ferryboat that the students were set to ride tonight was obviously still broken, they had no idea how many kids were arriving, and, worst of all: Clementine was starting to realize that being the principal of a school, even an evil, magical one that he had created, was sort of . . . boring.

He and his best friend, Cricket, had created the school so kids like them would have a place to fit in. Clementine had this very grown-­up vision: Him, the queen of the monsters, the principal, and an eighth grader with lots of friends. Cricket, the vice principal, building a magical rocket. Better School, bursting with whimsy and love and monsters. A perfect community.

But now he was lying on the floor of the still-­flawed ferry an hour before it was supposed to start its daylong debut trip, and nothing about his plan felt perfect. Better School was important—­really, super, consumingly important—­but he was also realizing it would take a lot more work than he’d expected. And it seemed like the work would be tremendously difficult, occasionally tedious, and often awkward.

To sum it all up, he was tired. This was also a terribly tricky feeling, because Clementine was magic now. He didn’t need to sleep.

He absently noticed a shadow on the wall under one of the picture windows. He blinked at it lazily, and it suddenly grew bigger. Clementine sat up. The shadow looked like dark water soaking through tissue; it had a monstrous shape despite nothing casting it.

Clementine got to his feet and stared at the shadow. He knew it couldn’t hurt him (practically nothing could, after all), but it still felt off. Creepy.

It was about as big as he was, but hunkered down, like an enormous turtle with curling horns. He walked over and crouched, studying where the shadow met the seam of the floor, and got the distinct impression that it was studying him back.

Cricket walked in.

Clementine jumped, startled, then asked, “Can you see that?”

Cricket had only turned twelve in March, but she would still be half a head taller than Clementine if not for his antlers. She was wearing a stripy black-­and-­purple hoodie that was several sizes too big for her, black shorts, and an astronaut helmet. She had slapped retro space stickers on the side of it, and it had an antenna with a star on the top. The visor reflected Clementine’s watery freckles back at him.

Under the astronaut helmet, she had dark brown hair that was barely long enough to curl, brown cheeks with a sunburn that matched Clementine’s, and big, round brown eyes. But she wore the helmet most of the time these days.

She typed her answer into her glow-­in-­the-­dark phone, then handed it to him, can i see what?

“You don’t see the shadow?”

no

Clementine huffed at the shadow, and it twisted and dis­appeared the same way it had come—­splotchy, like water evaporating.

If Clementine saw it again, he could investigate better. He could show it to Aunty, maybe. She was the ancient voice he’d invited inside his head. She’d given him magic, and knew about most things (like ancient history, and the moon, and how to preserve human bones). But for now there wasn’t much to be done.

Cricket showed Clementine her phone again—­she didn’t talk out loud; she typed what she wanted to say. They had learned over the summer that the phone could be called an AAC device for short, or an Alternative and Augmentative Communication Device for long. She had a newer, nicer one back at home, but she didn’t use it very often.

She said, i couldnt find where the chemical plastic smell was comin from. It always smells like it MUST b comin from the floor down, but when i go 2 the next floor theres nothin there

She typed one more thing. I found a coat closet with a ball pit, tho. A rainbow ball pit deep enough it went over my head

“Oh, that’s fun!” Clementine smiled.

not 4 a boat. what if someone gets stuck?

“Then . . .” Clementine paused—­he knew Cricket was stressed out. The more stuff they’d done, the more stressed out she’d gotten, like a soda bottle getting shaken up but never opened. “We’ll get them unstuck. I dunno. I’ll come check the ferry after everyone gets off?” He shrugged. “I couldn’t figure out how many seats are alive either. But it’ll be fine, I think.”

Cricket crossed her arms and stared at him.

Clementine’s voice went high. “It’s just the first day! We’ll keep working on it. And I sat on so many seats and I’m bored. I’m past bored: I’m starved for entertainment and going to die if I can’t get a slushy and enjoy our very last day of summer.”

Cricket kept staring, as she often did.

“Aren’t you bored too?”

Cricket paused, then, yeah.

Clementine grinned. “You wanna fly down?”

yes:)

The ferry was ready to take off on its quest through the Earth’s upper atmosphere, so its dock was way up above Better School—­and Better School already sat on top of the biggest cloud in the sky, which was very high up itself.

Clementine and Cricket stepped out onto it. The Rocky Mountains below them looked like an emerald sea, and Clem­entine knew the little town he’d grown up in was somewhere down there, too deep in the trees to be visible. The lake that had raised him spit out into a thin river, and he followed it lovingly with his eyes as it wove down the mountains and toward the distant desert. Little towns were speckled around it like freckles around a smile. One of the towns had developed a particularly pretty rainbow dot—­maybe a big building with a mural on the roof?

He’d seen it before, and had been feeling it tug at him. If he’d been able to sleep, he was sure he would have had dreams about it every night. Aunty knew a secret about that little rainbow dot that she absolutely would not share, and he was ­desperate to know.

He hadn’t dared to go back down to Earth, though. His parents were down there. Bug was down there.

(Bug was, of course, his nemesis. Nothing else.)

But Clementine didn’t have to think about them. He looked up, and could see stars streaking the dark half of the sky, and the first glimmers of September sun rising on the eastern horizon.

He let the vastness above and the vastness below fill him up. The world had felt so small just a year ago—­each nook and cranny mapped, every spider memorized, all possible futures crammed into corners.

The world was so big now that he had joined it!

The ferry’s dock, or terminal, was almost ordinary . . . ­except it was made entirely out of pink quartz. The sun made the quartz station, with its quartz roof and quartz seats, glitter. It made the purple-­and-­green ferryboat shine.