Clocks and Robbers by Dan Poblocki Page A

nothing to do with the money she kept slipping him. Sylvester put it all in his sock drawer, but he couldn’t bring himself to spend it. It didn’t really feel like his money at all.
    Several days after she’d left on her trip, Sylvester woke in his basement bedroom while it was still dark out. He felt especially itchy. After turning on the lamp next to his bed, he flipped the covers away to see strange bumps all over his stomach. They looked like bites, similar to the ones that he’d discovered on his ankles a few weeks earlier. Little red dots were lined up in rows, as if some insect had made its way along his skin, chomping every few steps. The sight disturbed him so much that he ran upstairs and woke his parents.
    When his mother saw the marks, her eyes widened. They all paraded back downstairs. His parents pulled the bottom sheet from the mattress. Looking closely at the stitching along the edges, they recoiled, gasping and stepping quickly away from the bed. “Oh my gosh,” said his mom.
    “What’s wrong?” asked Sylvester.
    “Oh, honey,” she answered, “you can’t stay down here.”
    Sylvester knew it had something to do with what they’d found on his mattress, or
in
his mattress. His stomach went sour. Still, he managed to ask, “Why not?”
    “Bedbugs!” Woodrow cried, immediately scooting away from Sylvester at the lunch table. It was the same reaction Sylvester had had thenight before, when his parents finally told him what had invaded his bedroom. “That’s so creepy!”
    “Yeah,” said Sylvester, red-faced.
“I know that.”
    “Where did they come from?” said Viola.
    “Funny you should ask,” said Sylvester. “Because my parents wondered the same thing. We’ve never had bedbugs in our house before. So they probably weren’t just hanging out in my basement, waiting for me. Where do you think they came from?”
     
    “They must have hitched a ride on your grandmother’s stuff,” said Rosie, tugging at her braids with worry. “The Oriental rug doesn’t seem to have enough crevices for the bugs to hide in … so it might have been the yellow couch that your grandmother seems to love so much. Once down there, they migrated to your bed … and to their food source. You!”
    “Yup,” said Sylvester. “That’s what my mom figured out last night. She did a quick search of the couch and found the creepy little monsters all along the cushion seams. So nasty. I couldn’t shower enough last night, or this morning. But my parents don’t think the bugs have spread outside of the basement yet.”
    “I didn’t know they really existed,” said Woodrow. “I thought they were imaginary creatures from that old nursery rhyme:
Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
    “Oh, they’re real all right,” said Sylvester. “And let me tell you straight up: That nursery rhyme does
not
work. If the bedbugs want to bite, there’s nothing you or I can do to stop them.”
    “But what are you going to do about it?” asked Viola. “I heard that bedbugs are really hard to get rid of.”
    “My parents already called an exterminator. And we’re going to wash all our clothes. But most important, my parents called the dump to take away my grandmother’s yellow couch.”
    “But your grandmother was so attached to that couch,” said Rosie. “What did she say when they told her they had to trash it?”
    “I don’t know. They were going to call her this morning. I wasn’t around to hear the fallout.” Sylvester shuddered. “I don’t want her to be upset or anything, but there is no way I was spending one more night in that basement knowing little bugs were sucking my blood.”
    “Really?” said Woodrow. “Sounds like the kind of thing you’d enjoy.”
    Sylvester squinted, then punched Woodrow in the shoulder.
    Woodrow glanced at the girls for support. Viola replied, “Sorry, but you pretty much deserved that.”
    When Sylvester got home from school that afternoon, he