Then, when I was about a foot tall, I felt the last of my bones dissolve. I could actually hear it happening. My spine had been grinding as it shrank. Then, suddenly, I heard a squishy sound, as all my internal organs lost their bone support.

My skull melted away. It was the last sound I heard clearly, as my ears and human sense of hearing faded.

I was a bag of loose guts. Almost deaf. Half-blind, as my human eyes shrank and the lenses became distorted.

6 My exoskeleton got harder and stiffer and stronger. My wings, glossy and crisp, covered my back. They overlapped at the edges, like the metal plates of a suit of armor.

Extra legs suddenly sprouted from my chest. Only it wasn't exactly a chest anymore. I was a stunted, six-inch-long bug, with a few disintegrating strands of brown hair and shrunken, but still somewhat human, eyes.

Not attractive. Not even slightly.

Then I lost my eyes. It took a second to even realize that I could still see. Then, oh yes! Yes, I could see. But not the way I saw with human eyes.

A weird, wavy mountain seemed to wrap all around me - my clothes. They looked different, blue and green and gray. Kind of. It's hard to describe, exactly. I couldn't see very far, just a few feet.

And what I could see was shattered into dozens of little images. I saw little bits of vast fibrous walls - my socks. And dark tunnels made of thick slabs of what could have almost been wavy, corrugated concrete - the legs of my jeans.

The fibers of the carpet looked gray-green to me, and as big as ropes. My hairy, jointed roach legs would catch in the fibers as I tried to move.

I felt the roach brain surfacing. I'd been through it before. It's different each time, depending on the animal.

Sometimes it's a bunch of raw energy and fear that takes over your own mind so you think you're going crazy.

But not the roach brain. I didn't feel great hunger. I didn't feel great fear. The roach was . . . calm.

Confident. Unworried.

I laughed. I mean, in my head I laughed, be cause I no longer had a mouth or a throat or any thing at all that would make a laugh.

I was so tensed up, expecting the cockroach to be a bundle of energy and fear. But mostly it just felt like resting.

The roach brain wanted to take a nap.

Cool, I thought. It's gross. It's disgusting. Marco and the others will hate the idea, but when I tell them how easy it is to handle - VIBRATION!

Get ready. Get ready. What was it? Get ready.

LIGHT! LIGHT! LIGHT!

7 Chapter 2

RUN! Run from the LIGHT!

Imagine being in one of those race cars at the Indianapolis 500.

Now imagine that instead of sitting in one, you are strapped facedown underneath one. Your nose is about a tenth of an inch from the road and you're going 180 miles an hour.

That's what it was like when I ran. My roach legs powered like something from a Roadrunner cartoon. I blew out from under the folds of my own clothing. I blew across that carpet. I was rocket-propelled.

Someone had put the light on in my room. And when that light came on, my roach brain stopped being calm and relaxed.

Zoooom! Three miles an hour. That's very fast when you're only an inch long.

Vibration . . . vibration . . . vibration . . .

Heavy steps rattled the floor. They vibrated up through my legs. My tiny roach brain knew what they meant. Something very, very big was walking around.

Chasing me! RUN!

Zoom! across the carpet. Suddenly, a wall!

Up? Left? Right? Which way?

Vibration . . . vibration . . . vibration . . .

Wait! A crack. It wasn't much of a crack. Just enough space to slip a quarter through. No way I could fit.

Or could I?

My underside scraped the floor. My hard brown wing cover scraped the bottom of the baseboard.

But I barely had to slow down.

I was in the wall! Hah! The big things that rattled the floor would never catch me now. I was safe here. A nail as thick as a tree trunk stuck up from the wood. I went around it.

On either side of me I saw bright, straight lines of light that seemed to go on forever. They were the cracks beneath the baseboards. To one side a thick, shiny slab with irregular edges intruded into the wall - the edge of the kitchen linoleum.

High above I could see other lights, more circular and dimmer. These were the holes where pipes entered the wall.

8 AHHHH!

Something moving! Close by. Oh, gross! A cockroach!

Get a grip, Jake! I told myself. You're a cock roach, too! But still, you just don't want to be face-to-face with a roach as big as you are. I mean, he was right at eye level. The other roach's antennae felt me, sweeping over me, tangling briefly with my antennae.

We said "hi." At least, we said the roach ver sion of "hi." Which wasn't really "hello." It was more like, "Oh, you're a roach, too."

Now, in the darkness inside the wall, I felt calmer. The electric fear was gone. The suddenness of the light had been the problem. That and the vibration.

I could still feel the vibrations, but they were different now. Further away.

Okay, I'd had enough of being a roach. It was time to get to some safe place, demorph and find out who had been in my room.

Why was someone in my room? A few minutes earlier, and they would have caught me in mid-morph. Stupid of me. Stupid, stupid.

Where could I go to demorph? The garage? Yes, the garage. There weren't any mirrors, and I sure didn't want to watch myself morph again.

Through the kitchen, out under the back door; that was the way.

I went to the bright crack ahead of me, the kitchen. I scampered up on the ledge of linoleum. I stuck my head and antennae out beneath the baseboard. The vibrations were all far away. In some other room.

I emerged from the crack. Over my head was an incredibly high canyon. It went up and up, far higher than I could see. Two parallel walls, just a few body lengths apart. Of course. The refrigerator. I was behind the refrigerator. One side of the "canyon" was the kitchen wall, the other side was the back of the refrigerator.

Someone really should sweep back here. There were dust bunnies the size of couches.

But no problem. I was getting the hang of it now. Follow the baseboard. To the next wall. Turn right, and then there would be the door.

No problem. I was in charge.

Some big barnlike structure was ahead of me. It looked like one of those old-fashioned covered bridges.

Huh. Probably an old matchbox.

9 I went in, trotting along on my six jointed legs.

Wait. I wasn't moving anymore.

What the . . . ?

I tried to run.

I was stuck!

I tried again. One leg was free, but the others were frozen in place. What was ... I felt around with my antennae.

Now my antennae were stuck!

I couldn't move. I couldn't move at all!

I was trapped!

10 Chapter 3

So?" Rachel demanded. "What was it? How did you get trapped?"

"I'll bet I know," Marco said, grinning sardonically, which is the only way he knows how to grin.

"Jake checked in, but he couldn't check out."

I nodded. "Roach Motel. I walked into a stupid Roach Motel. I ran right onto the sticky paper and, man, I could not move. Very frustrating."

"You know, you could do commercials for the Roach Motel company," Marco suggested. "Take it from me, Roach Boy, these things really work."

It was later in the day, and we were in Cassie's barn. Rachel, Marco, Tobias, Cassie, and me. As usual, the place was filled with wire cages, and the cages were filled with animals. Rabbits, foxes, baby deer, eagles, opossums, mourning doves, all of them injured or sick. Some of them feisty and ready to be released.