Nanny X Returns by Madelyn Rosenberg Page A

things in the museum: the dinosaurs. They were big in size, plus they were popular.
    I wanted to look at the T. rex, but Eliza toddled over to the triceratops. “Dina-tore,” she said. He wasn’t the tallest dinosaur ever made, but he was taller than me. He was also about thirty feet long.
    I put my hands on the railing and stood next to Eliza. I felt a tickle. Then—
ouch
—I felt a chomp. A beetle, like the ones we’d seen near Ursula, had bitten my pinky.
    My mother doesn’t like us to kill bugs, except for mosquitoes. Instead, she asks us to “escort them outside.” I picked up the beetle the way you’d pick up a crayfish, holding my fingers behind the pinchy part.
    â€œCome on, Eliza,” I said.
    We escorted the bug back to Nanny X.

19. Alison
Nanny X Learns About Insect Digestion

    I am not afraid of worms, snakes, mice, rats, bats or raw chicken, but bugs have freaked me out ever since Jake told me, during a previous visit to the museum, that there are more than ten quintillion insects in the world at any given time. There were only about twenty bugs outside the museum when we found Nanny X, but they were still disturbing, even though none of them was actually moving. The only bug that was moving so far was the one inside the museum, with my brother and Eliza.
    â€œYou know,” said Stinky, who was probably sorry he’d given me the rain poncho, “with global warming there’s going to be a major increase in the number of insects.”
    More than ten quintillion? But I was not going to run screaming down the stairs in front of Stinky. Yeti looked like he wanted to run, though. He has not liked bugs since his flea problem.
    â€œThe population has already grown,” said a woman who had to be Ursula. She looked at her own bugs—kind of fondly, I thought. Her hair was brown, pulled back in a braid that poked out from underneath her fishing hat, which was like the one Nanny X wore except it was green instead of orange and it didn’t have as many fishhooks in it.
    Ursula hit a button on her remote, and the bugs near her feet began to move. They fanned out in different directions, some going toward the museum and some going away from it.
    Nanny X took her umbrella and pointed it at one of the bugs. The umbrella didn’t fly or talk, like Mary Poppins’s umbrella. Instead, it shot out a blurp of clear liquid, the queen of all raindrops. The blurp hit the bug, which struggled for a minute, like it was dizzy. Then it straightened up and kept walking.
    â€œStop,” said Ursula. She was talking to Nanny X, not the bug.
    But Nanny X shot another blurp as the rain continued to fall. “It’s supposed to be sticky,” she said. “It’s supposed to trap them like flypaper.”
    â€œThe rain must be counteracting the stickiness,” Boris said.
    It was hard to believe my special-agent training was coming to this, but I couldn’t think of what else to do. I walked up to the bug nearest to me and stomped on it. Tiny screws and mechanical pieces came spurting out of the side.
    Stinky and Boris went after the bugs, too. So did Howard. Yeti stayed close to Boris but didn’t attack anything. Nanny X reached into her diaper bag and pulled out an industrial-strength nasal aspirator. Nasal aspirators are what you use to suck the snot out of babies’ noses when they are too young to blow properly. Jake called them “boogersuckers.” This one had a wide opening at the end, so when Nanny X squeezed the bulb part and let go, it slurped the beetle right inside.
    â€œYou are destroying my
art
,” Ursula said.
    â€œWhat about you?” said Nanny X as she sucked up another bug, and then another and another. “What have you destroyed?”
    My brother came out of the museum then with my sister. In his hand he was holding a small black beetle. He ran down the steps and stood next to me and Stinky. Boris and Yeti