Read the text and answer the question.
Marvin the beetle saw the bottle of ink. It was high up on James's
desk, and it appeared to be open.
Curious, Marvin crawled across the floor to the desk and quickly
climbed to the top. James had spread newspaper over the desk and
two or three sheets of the art paper his father had given him. On one
page he'd made some experimental scribbles and had written his
name. The pen, neatly capped, rested at the edge of the paper, but
the bottle of ink stood open, glinting in the weak light.
Without really thinking about what he was doing, Marvin crawled to
the cap of the bottle and dipped his two front legs in the ink that had
pooled inside. On his clean hind legs, he backed over to an unused
sheet of paper. He looked out the window at the nightscape of the
street: the brownstone opposite with its rows of darkened windows,
the snow-dusted rooftop, the street-lamp, the spidery branches of a
single tree. Gently, delicately, and with immense concentration, Marvin
lowered his front legs and began to draw.
The ink flowed smoothly off his legs across the page. Though he'd
never done anything like this before, it seemed completely natural,
even unstoppable. He kept glancing up, tracing the details of the scene
with his eyes, then transferring them onto the paper. It was as if his
legs had been waiting all their lives for this ink, this page, this lamp-lit
window view. There was no way to describe the feeling. It thrilled
He drew and drew, losing all sense of time. He moved back and forth
between the ink cap and the paper, dipping his front legs gently in the
puddle of black ink, always careful not to smear his previous work. He
watched the picture take shape before his eyes.
And then the light changed. The sky turned from black to dark blue to
gray, the streetlamp shut off, and James's room was filled with the
noise of the city waking. A garbage truck groaned and banged as it
passed on the street below. James stirred beneath his bedcovers.
Marvin, desperate to finish his picture before the boy awakened,
hurried between the page and the ink cap, which was almost out of
ink. At last he stopped, surveying his miniature scene.
Marvin's heart swelled. He felt that he had never done anything so fine
or important in his entire life. He wiped his ink-soaked forelegs on the
newspaper and scurried behind the desk lamp, bursting with pride, in
a fever of anticipation, just as James threw off his blankets.
"Huh," James said, walking toward his desk. "I wonder where this
Marvin stiffened and retreated farther behind the desk lamp.
Marvin watched James's pale face, his eyes huge as he stared at the
drawing. He quickly looked behind him, as if the room might hold
some clue that would explain what he saw on his desk.
Then slowly, brows furrowed, James pulled out the chair and sat down.
He leaned over the picture. "Wow," he said. "Wow!"
Marvin straightened with pride.
James kept examining the drawing, then the scene through the
window, whispering to himself. "It's exactly like what's outside! It's
like a teeny-tiny picture of the street! This is amazing."
Marvin crept around the base of the lamp so he could hear the boy
"But . . . how?" James picked up the pen and uncapped it, squinting.
He lifted the bottle of ink and frowned, screwing the ink cap back on.
"Who did this?" he asked, staring again at the picture.
And then, without planning to—without meaning to, without ever
thinking for a moment of the consequences—Marvin found himself
crawling out into the open, across the vast desktop, directly in front of
James. He stopped at the edge of the picture and waited, unable to
After a long silence, during which Marvin almost dashed to safety
behind the desk, James spoke.
"It was you, wasn't it?" he said.
Marvin hesitated. He crawled over to the bottle of ink.
James reached across the desk, and Marvin cringed as enormous
pinkish fingers swept tremblingly close to his shell. But the boy
avoided him, carefully lifting the bottle and shaking it. He unscrewed
the cap and set it down next to Marvin.