As soon as she got to her house that afternoon, Nora checked on her ants. Some days, she took the bus from school to a parent’s office at the university and did homework there until they were ready to leave. On other days, one parent was working at home, grading exams or doing something on the computer, so she could walk home directly from school. This was a walk-home day.
Whenever she checked her ant farm after a whole day away at school, she always found that something had changed. New tunnels had appeared. Food had been eaten. A deceased ant had been carried off to the corner of the farm where her ants stored their dead.
Today, she arrived home halfway through an ant funeral. Two ants were lugging the corpse of a third down a long tunnel to reach the ant graveyard.
Rest in peace, little ant.
Nora considered recording the ant burial with her parents’ old video camera. That would be something to show the other girls at lunch tomorrow. That would be a pleasant change from the Precious Cupcake costume parade. But she wasn’t going to let herself start imitating Emma, even if Amy might enjoy a change in video subjects, too.
It might be a good idea, however, to start documenting her ants’ activities. She could record them for the sake of science, not for lunchtime show-and-tell. If she studied the videos, she might get an idea for her groundbreaking experiment. She couldn’t publish a scientific article on the usual science-fair stuff that any kid with an ant farm had already found on ant farm websites. She had to come up with something that science had never seen before.
Nora filmed her ants for a while. Then she did homework: some easy math problems, and reading a chapter in her huge social studies textbook on the American Revolution. She already knew that she wasn’t going to be reading about any women who did important things to help the cause of freedom. Most of the famous women back then were famous because they were married to famous men. That wasn’t how Nora planned on becoming famous as a scientist.
Neither of her parents were really famous scientists, but her mother was more famous than her father, even if her father kept a calmer, more scientific head when stinging western harvester ants were on the loose in the kitchen. Her mother was on TV occasionally, when the rings of Saturn made the national news. Admittedly, that wasn’t often. If Nora were in charge of the news, she’d lead off every night with stories like “New Discovery About the Chemical Composition of Stars!” and “Breakthrough in Ant Farm Research!”
Maybe that’s what she should write her persuasive speech about: why the news should have more science stories.
Emma would probably write hers about how the news should have more cat videos.
Nora smiled at the thought.
But then her smile disappeared. Even if her speech was a better speech, her classmates would probably end up being more persuaded by Emma’s. Persuasive speeches could only go so far and do so much. First, people had to be willing to be persuaded.
It was definitely time for her to bring her farm to school to show Coach Joe’s class the wonder of ants.
The next day and the day after that, it was unseasonably warm for January, with highs in the sixties.
Global climate change, Nora thought to herself darkly.
But warmer temperatures were good for transporting an ant farm to school. She had confirmed with Coach Joe that she could present her ant farm during science on Friday. Ants had nothing to do with electromagnetism, their current subject of study, but Coach Joe said ants would make a nice change.
“Kids will still get a charge out of them,” he told Nora.
She was so surprised to hear him making a science pun rather than a sports reference that she forgot to give a polite chuckle.
Nora’s father drove her to school on Friday so she wouldn’t jostle her ant farm or risk tripping and shattering months of her ants’ hard work. She kept the farm covered with an old T-shirt. While she didn’t think of herself as a dramatic person, she wanted to introduce her ants to the class with some fanfare. She suspected that a lot of people, unbelievable as it might seem, thought ants were boring.
Ants? Boring?!
So she wanted the equivalent of a drumroll before she uncovered the farm to their astonished eyes.
She didn’t wait on the blacktop for the bell. Instead, she hurried to Coach Joe’s room and set the ant farm safely on the bookcase in the back of the room, where it wouldn’t be disturbed.
Coach Joe was at his desk when she arrived.
“The ants go marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah!” he sang out in greeting.
Nora had forgotten about that kindergarten song. She was glad there was a song about ants, but of course the ants in the song did the most un-ant-like things imaginable. “The little one stops to suck his thumb.” As if ants had thumbs rather than mandibles! “The little one stops to tie his shoe.” Tying a shoe? Really?
Still, Nora gave Coach Joe a smile. He meant well.
“Nora, I’m thinking it might work better to let you show your ants during the morning huddle. What do you think?”
“Sure,” Nora agreed. Now that her ants were here at school, the sooner she could show them to everybody, the better.
Maybe Emma would want to start taking ant videos? Or at least watching them once in a while? Wouldn’t that be a lovely change at lunchtime?
The bell rang. Nora’s audience came racing into Coach Joe’s room, Dunk leading the way with his shouts and swagger.
One tiny worry wormed itself into Nora’s brain. Dunk had a tendency to be a bully. He’d better not even think about bullying her ants!
Once morning announcements had been read, the Pledge of Allegiance recited, and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” sung, Coach Joe called the class into their Friday huddle. Nora carried the T-shirt-covered object from the bookcase to the football-shaped rug. She sat down and settled it safely on her lap, stroking its T-shirt cover as if to reassure her ants before their big moment.
“What’s that?” Mason asked warily.
“You’ll see,” Nora replied.
“Is it a treat to share? Is it something to eat?” Brody asked hopefully.
“No!”
She knew that people did eat ants in many parts of the world: Asia, South America, sub-Saharan Africa. There was no reason why the protein found in insects shouldn’t be a food source for human beings as well as for other species. But she didn’t want anybody eating her ants.
“Good morning, team,” Coach Joe said in his usual hearty way. “Dunk, I’m not sure you’re making the best choice about where to sit.”
All week long, Dunk had plopped himself down next to Emma during the morning huddle and poked her with the eraser end of his pencil, yanked off her flowered headband, and threatened to remove his shoes so she’d have to smell his feet.
“So, Dunk, why don’t you come over here and sit next to me?”
Scowling, Dunk obeyed.
“This morning, Nora has brought something fascinating to show to us. Something that has to do with science, because it’s part of the natural world, but also has to do with social studies, because it can teach us a lot about how a colony needs to function. It even has to do with art, you might say, as what she’s showing us is a pretty amazing work of art, too.”
Coach Joe couldn’t have given a better introduction if Nora had written it herself. It was a powerfully persuasive speech about the marvels of ants. And he had done a wonderful job of not revealing exactly what was still hidden under the T-shirt. He had left her the fun of revealing the final surprise.
“Nora,” Coach Joe said, as her cue.
Nora smiled at her classmates. Mason and Brody would already know the surprise by now. They had both seen her ants at her house many times. So she focused her smiling on the other girls, especially Emma.
“What I have to show you,” Nora said slowly, to prolong the suspense for one more sweet moment, “is…”
One last smile for good measure.
“My ant farm!”
She whisked off the T-shirt to reveal her scurrying ants in all their glory.
Emma shrieked. Not a giggling shriek this time, but a shriek of pure terror, horror, and loathing.
A few of the other girls joined in the screaming. Shrieking, it turned out, was contagious, a phenomenon some scientist should study sometime.
But Nora was not that scientist.
And now was not that time.
Emma fled from the huddle to the safety of her desk, as if the ants were loose instead of confined to an ant farm, and were painfully stinging ants instead of gentle ants from Nora’s own backyard. Dunk dashed after Emma, pretending that he was about to put an ant down the back of her pink-flowered top. Bethy followed as well, to try to get between Dunk and Emma, with Tamara and Elise trailing behind. Most of the other kids gathered around them, howling with laughter.
“Team!” Coach Joe bellowed. “Team, calm down!”
It did no good.
The only kids left in the huddle were three or four kids who also loved science, plus Amy, Mason, and Brody, Nora’s most loyal friends.
Nora blinked back tears. She wasn’t going to cry just because other people were totally ridiculous! But she felt—she tried to analyze what her emotions were right now—she felt hurt. Hurt on behalf of her ants. Hurt on behalf of science itself.
Coach Joe left his stool and stood facing the rest of the class.
“Team,” he said somberly. “I have to say, you dropped the ball on this one. Nora, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Nora said, covering up her ant farm with the T-shirt again.
Her classmates had made it clear: they hadn’t yet been persuaded to like ants. But she’d be willing to bet that the editors of some famous, fancy science journal were soon going to let the world know that they liked her ants a lot.
