“All babies like poetry,” Sarah said. “They like the sound of it, the music of the lines, the rhythms and the rhymes.”
Nora remembered something Coach Joe had said to the class on Friday. They were supposed to ask their family members what their favorite poems were. Nora wondered if her parents had favorite poems. They were scientists. Her father might have a favorite molecule. Her mother had a favorite planet (Saturn), and she might even have a special fondness for one of its rings. Sarah, who was a geologist when she wasn’t home on maternity leave, might have a favorite rock. Of course, Nora had a favorite insect: ants.
But a favorite poem?
“Coach Joe said I’m supposed to ask you what your favorite poem is,” she said.
A dreamy look came over her parents’ faces.
“ ‘How do I love thee?’ ” her mother said, obviously quoting from a poem, as people today—except for Elise—didn’t say thee.
“ ‘Let me count the ways,’ ” her father replied.
“ ‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height,’ ” her mother continued.
“ ‘My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight…’ ”
“ ‘For the ends of being and ideal grace….’ ”
At least Sarah looked bewildered, too.
“Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” their mother explained. “One of the Sonnets from the Portuguese she wrote for her husband, Robert Browning. Your father and I would send lines of it back and forth to each other on postcards when we were first falling in love.”
Well, being in love might lead two scientists to quote poetry to each other day and night.
But then her mother said, “Edna St. Vincent Millay. Emily Dickinson. Denise Levertov. I loved them all. I still love them. I wanted to be a poet just like them when I grew up.”
“But you became a scientist instead,” Nora reminded her.
“There’s poetry in the skies, too,” her mother said. “And I turned out to be better at appreciating other people’s poetry than I am at writing it myself.”
“Do you have a favorite poem?” Nora asked her father. Maybe it was that poem about the peas he had quoted the other night at dinner?
“Robert Frost,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “ ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood….’ ”
“Sarah?” Nora asked.
“Dr. Seuss! Oh, the Places You’ll Go! That’s poetry, too. I’ve already read it to Nellie a hundred times.”
Nora had definitely learned something new about her family, this Saturday morning.
Nora walked over to Mason’s house Sunday afternoon, when Nellie and Sarah were taking a nap together. She found Mason and Brody in the backyard, throwing a ball for their three-legged dog, Dog. Mason and Brody were not only best friends, they were also next-door neighbors and co-owners of Dog. They loved him equally, but he lived at Mason’s house because of Brody’s father’s allergies.
“I’ve done seven new things already!” Brody greeted Nora.
Brody often said things that would have been braggy if someone else had said them, but Brody couldn’t help being excited about everything. That was just the way he was.
“On Monday, I ate an artichoke. On Tuesday, I took a cold shower, because my sisters had used up the hot water. On Wednesday, Cammie taught me how to do a cartwheel.”
He paused to demonstrate. It was more accurate to say Cammie had taught him how to try to do a cartwheel. His legs weren’t upright enough. They flipped over in more of a flop-wheel.
“On Thursday—I don’t remember what new thing I did on Thursday, but I know I did one. On Friday, I learned to count to ten in Spanish. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez. On Saturday, I learned to count to ten in German. Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn.”
Nora was impressed that Brody had already filled almost an entire week with nonstop newness.
“And today,” Brody said. “Are you ready to hear what new thing I did today?”
“Sure,” Nora said.
“Today,” Brody said, “I watched a sad movie, and I was sad for a whole hour. I’ve never been sad for a whole entire hour before.”
Nora laughed.
“Did you pick your new thing?” she asked Mason.
He shook his head.
“I guess I could learn to count to ten in French,” he said. “My mother took French in high school, and she could teach me. But I don’t think that would be a big enough new thing if it was the only new thing I did. I’d probably have to learn how to count to ten and learn how to say, ‘What’s your name? My name is Mason’ and ‘How are you?’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and a bunch of other things. And if any real French person heard me, he’d be mad I butchered his beautiful language. What about you?”
Nora had known the question was coming.
“I had a new thing picked out, a new experiment I was going to do in the class garden, but it didn’t work out. It had to do with peas, and they take too long to grow, so now it’s radishes for me, like everyone else.”
Maybe Nora could find a new radish-growing experiment in Coach Joe’s big book of science fair experiments. But her heart wasn’t in it.
“Nellie smiled at me. That was new. But it’s more of a new thing for Nellie than it is for me.”
“You and I are more like Dog,” Mason said as he tossed the battered tennis ball the hundredth time. “Dog doesn’t say, ‘I need a new ball to fetch! I want to fetch a squeaky toy! I want to fetch a toy that lights up and plays “Pop Goes the Weasel”!’ He likes fetching the same ball over and over again. Right, Dog?”
Dog laid the ball at Mason’s feet, panting with happiness.
Nora couldn’t tell if Mason’s comparing her to Dog was comforting or not.
Amy called Nora on Sunday night.
“Bad news,” Amy said. “My mother said no to the snake. I knew she would. It’s sad when older people are so closed-minded about new ideas. And my mom’s only forty.”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said.
“You don’t suppose…” Amy’s voice trailed off.
Nora already knew what Amy was going to say.
“I’d provide the frozen mice to feed it with. And I’d get a good lid for the terrarium so it can’t get out,” Amy promised.
“No,” Nora said. “My mom is closed-minded, too, when it comes to snakes. She’s not going to want a snake in our house.”
Nora didn’t know that. But she suspected it strongly.
And, if truth be told, when it came to feeding frozen mice to a pet snake, Nora was a bit closed-minded herself.
The pre-dug furrows in Coach Joe’s class garden were neatly measured off with strings stretched across them from posts at each end. Name tags clipped to the strings with clothespins marked off each student’s section of soil.
Nora had thought the radish people would be together, but on Monday morning, she found herself outside in the garden, positioned between Brody’s everything seeds on one side and Emma’s pansies on the other.
Even before her seeds were planted, Emma was already talking to them.
“Little seeds, today is a big day for you!” she crooned to the picture of the purple-hued pansies on the front of the Ocean Breeze seed packet. “Today you enter the earth! Today you experience sun and soil and water! Today your journey begins!”
Even more unscientific than talking to plants, in Nora’s view, was talking to seeds.
“You haven’t planted them yet!” Nora told Emma.
“Lots of mothers talk to their babies before they’re born,” Emma replied, clutching the package of seeds to her chest as if it was an infant in need of cuddling. “I bet your sister read to Nellie during her pregnancy. Ask her.”
Nora had a feeling Emma was right on this one. If Sarah had read Dr. Seuss to Nellie a hundred times already, some of the reading may have taken place before Nellie’s birth.
She heard Brody whispering to his seeds as he pu
t each one into the ground, evidently inspired by Emma.
“Grow, little carrots! Grow, little salad greens!”
One row ahead of Nora, Amy turned around and flashed Nora a grin of amusement at Emma’s and Brody’s seed conversations.
Mason sprinkled radish seeds into his furrow, next to Amy’s.
“I bet mine don’t sprout,” Mason predicted. “And what’s going to stop rabbits from hopping in to eat them if they do?”
Coach Joe overheard Mason’s question. “We’ll fence around the garden next week, before the seeds start germinating. The fence will be high enough to keep out rabbits. I don’t know about deer.”
Mason brightened at the thought that even if his radishes weren’t gobbled by rabbits, they had a good chance of being devoured by deer.
Dunk was planting pumpkins. Apparently he had tuned out when Coach Joe had told the class to plant a crop with a short enough life cycle that it could be harvested before school ended. Dunk’s pumpkins wouldn’t be ripe until close to Halloween. Maybe, like Brody, Dunk planned to water them through the summer. Probably Brody would actually water his carrots. Dunk’s pumpkins didn’t have a chance.
“They’re going to be this big!” Dunk shouted, holding up his arms as wide as they could reach. “If I dropped one on your puny, scrawny radishes, it’d be like an atom bomb exploding. Pow! Crash! Kaboom!”
Leave it to Dunk to turn a class garden into nuclear warfare. He was clearly ready to film his own horror movie, Attack of the Killer Pumpkins.
Nora looked at the notes she had written in her special notebook in preparation for planting her radishes. She wanted to do something scientific with them, even if it didn’t count as her new thing. Why miss out on the chance to contribute something to the world’s storehouse of knowledge?
She had sorted the tiny seeds, as best she could, into four piles. One group she had frozen overnight. One she had baked for half an hour in the oven. One she had briefly microwaved. The other was her control group, the normal group to which she had done nothing.
Exactly how would temperature extremes affect germination? Would radiation from the microwave have any effect?
It was on the minimal side as a contribution to science.
But right now it was all Nora had.
“Little seeds, I bless you!” Emma intoned. “Little seeds, go forth and grow!”
“Go forth and die is more like it,” Mason muttered to the furrow where he had dumped his radishes.
“Pow! Pow! Pow!” Dunk shouted as he dropped each pumpkin seed.
Nora tuned them out, concentrating on placing her frozen seeds, baked seeds, microwaved seeds, and control-group seeds carefully into the waiting earth.
“So is this weekend still okay?” Emma asked Nora as they headed toward the cafeteria for lunch. The other girls in their lunch-table group—Tamara, Elise, and Amy—were farther back in line.
“For the sleepover,” Emma added, as if Nora could possibly have forgotten.
Nora considered making up some excuse. But she wasn’t the type of person to tell an outright lie.
“I’m going to be pretty busy this weekend,” she said.
She was always busy: looking after her ant farm, doing homework, reading library books on volcanoes or fossils of the Cretaceous Period. On Wednesday afternoons, she volunteered with Amy at the animal shelter. On Thursday afternoons, when the new season began this week, she’d be at softball practice with Tamara and Elise, with Saturday morning or afternoon games.
Emma pushed out her lower lip in a pout.
“Busy doing what?” she demanded. “Whatever it is, I bet it doesn’t take up every minute of every day all weekend. You have to sleep, right? Everyone sleeps. So you might as well sleep at my house. Saturday night? Come at six? For make-your-own pizza? Precious Cupcake loves make-your-own pizza.”
“Okay,” Nora said. “Saturday could work for me.”
Maybe if she had the sleepover with Emma, Emma’s project would be done, and they could go back to being regular non-project friends again.
“You don’t need to bring a sleeping bag,” Emma said. “Just bring yourself! Well, and your pj’s. And a toothbrush!”
They had reached the cafeteria.
Emma flashed Nora a huge smile as she picked up her tray.
“This is going to be great!”
It had been chilly for the past few days, but it was warm enough that afternoon that Nora took off her sweater and tied it around her waist as she walked home with Amy.
“What do you think would be a good name for a snake, if I get one?” Amy asked. “I’m thinking about Fred.”
“Do you think your mother’s going to change her mind?”
“I’m working on her. I’ve been putting snake pictures on the refrigerator. I read that if people have a phobia—you know, a weird fear of something—they can get over it if you help them get used to it in itty-bitty ways. So looking at snake pictures can help a person not mind seeing a real-life snake.”
“Is it working?”
“Not yet. It would work better if she didn’t keep taking the pictures down and throwing them away. What’s that on your wrist?”
The question caught Nora by surprise. She looked down at Emma’s bracelet on her arm, newly bare on this spring day.
“That’s not a friendship bracelet, is it?” Amy asked.
“Well, sort of. Emma gave it to me.”
“Emma?” Then Amy nodded with understanding. “Oh, I get it: the newness project.”
“She told me I was supposed to make a wish on it,” Nora said.
“Did you?”
“Not yet,” Nora said.
The wish Nora had almost made—that Emma would stop making Nora her project—didn’t really count. So she still had a wish waiting for her.
That is, if she believed in wishes.
After school on Wednesday, Amy’s mother picked up Amy and Nora for their weekly volunteering at the Plainfield animal shelter. Usually they walked dogs on the loop trail behind the shelter, to give the confined animals much-needed exercise. But sometimes they sat inside and cuddled cats.
Today was a cat-cuddling day.
In the cat visitation room off the main lobby, Nora sat with a plump ginger-colored cat on her lap, while Amy amused a scrawnier black kitty with a feather fastened to the end of a long string. Nora’s cat purred with contentment, sounding like a boat’s motor at full throttle. Amy’s cat stalked the feather as intently as if it had been a whole tasty bird. Amy’s mother sat nearby, reading a book; kids under fifteen couldn’t volunteer without a parent, but the parent didn’t have to do anything, just be there to supervise.
“Cassidy is so sweet,” Amy said, about the cat purring in Nora’s lap.
“He is,” Nora agreed, stroking Cassidy’s soft orange fur and scratching gently behind his ears.
“You could adopt him,” Amy said. “For your new thing. You could.”
Nora’s hand paused mid-stroke as she considered Amy’s idea.
Could she adopt a cat? Should she?
Her parents had always seemed neutral on pets. They traveled a lot for work, off to conferences here and conferences there, so they never sought out pets themselves. But now that Nora was old enough to take full responsibility for a pet, they’d probably say yes if she asked, especially for a pet as sweet and comforting as Cassidy. And Nora would never let any cat of hers be dressed in costumes or star in cat videos, as Precious Cupcake did.
Would her ants mind?
She couldn’t in all honesty say they would. Ants didn’t get jealous. That wasn’t what ants did.
Yet Nora felt disloyal at the thought of her ants displaced in her affections by a mammal pet, a pet that could sleep in her bed, come meowing to the door when she returned from school, communicate with her by sound and gesture, and stay alive for more than a few short weeks or months.
They might not be jealous of a cat, but Nora felt jealous on their behalf.
Amy wa
s able to divide her love among dogs, cats, rabbits, parakeets; she even had enough love left over to give to a snake.
Nora was more of a one-species lover.
“No,” Nora finally said. “Cassidy’s the best cat ever, he truly is. But I’m going to stick with ants.”
Yet when the animal shelter man came to collect Cassidy at the end of their volunteer slot, Nora surrendered him with a pang.
Ants weren’t soft.
Ants weren’t cuddly.
Cassidy was soft and cuddly.
Ants didn’t purr when you held them.
Cassidy did.
The first softball practice of the season was after school on Thursday. If only Nora hadn’t played softball last year, this could have been her new thing.
Tamara and Elise were on the team, too. Tamara, who loved dancing, played second base with agility and grace. Even when she struck out, her swings were elegant, not awkward and flailing. Elise had a great throwing arm, but she had a tendency to daydream out in right field, as likely to be making up a poem in her head as to be catching a fly ball.
Nora considered herself to be a pretty good shortstop. She was quick and strong, but her best trait, in her own opinion, was that she was good at paying attention. Someone who spent as much time as Nora did studying ants scurrying and digging knew how to watch.
The softball coach was a woman named Coach Josie, Jo for short. It was strange that Nora had two Coach Jo(e)s in her life.
The girls partnered for a throwing and catching drill. Nora threw a straight, hard pitch into Tamara’s well-positioned glove.
“Nice, Nora, nice,” Coach Jo said.
Nora had a sudden idea.
“Coach Jo?” she said as the coach stood behind her. “Do you think you could try me as pitcher this spring?”
That would be a new thing!
Coach Jo pulled off her cap and ruffled her short, spiky hair in an uncomfortable way.
“Well, Nora,” she said, “you might have potential on the mound. But I already have Abby and Eleanor in that position, and I need your fast reflexes as shortstop. Maybe later in the season we could shift things up a bit, though.”
The Trouble with Friends Page 3