The Nora Notebooks, Book 1: The Trouble with Ants

by Claudia Mills

  “Social studies!” Coach Joe went on. “So far this school year, we’ve learned about Native Americans, the age of exploration, and the settling of the thirteen colonies. So you know what’s coming, don’t you?”

  Most of Nora’s classmates looked blank.

  Someone had to say something, so she raised her hand.

  “The American Revolution.”

  “Exactly!” Coach Joe beamed at Nora, as if she had said something brilliant instead of the most obvious thing in the world. “The Sons of Liberty. The Boston Tea Party. Battles. More battles. The Declaration of Independence. Washington crossing the Delaware. The terrible winter at Valley Forge. Yes, pretty soon we’re going to see our colonists with a brand-new country.”

  Leaning toward Emma, Dunk gave a loud burp that he clearly thought any fourth-grade girl would find irresistible.

  “Dunk,” Coach Joe said, without even casting a look in his direction.

  The burping ceased.

  “In language arts,” Coach Joe continued, “we’ll be taking a page from the colonists’ playbook and writing our own persuasive speeches. The revolution wasn’t won primarily with muskets and cannons, you know. It was won with words. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ ”

  Nora didn’t think of herself as a word person—she planned to write her ant farm article in plain, simple words that told about her ant experiments in a plain, simple way—but the stirring lines Coach Joe had quoted did give her a strange, shimmery feeling inside. She could see how they could make someone feel like launching a revolution.

  “So we’ll be working on learning how to write our own persuasive speeches,” Coach Joe concluded.

  “What are we going to be trying to persuade people to do?” Mason asked. Nora knew Mason was tired of listening to speeches from his parents, which were intended to persuade him to try new things.

  “Anything you like,” Coach Joe replied. “You can pretend to be a colonist and help the cause of rebellion. You can pretend to be a Tory and defend the rule of King George the Third. You can write a persuasive letter to your congressional representative. After all, we wouldn’t even have congressional representatives if it weren’t for the persuasive speeches of the American Revolution. How about a speech to convince your parents to let you stay up late to watch your favorite TV show? Or a speech to convince me to give you less homework—good luck on that one! Write about whatever matters most to you.”

  Nora didn’t know yet what she’d write about. She did know that her persuasive speech would rely on facts—hard, cold, true facts—rather than on fancy phrases. She wouldn’t write lines like “Give me liberty or give me death.” She’d list the pros and cons of liberty, and the pros and cons of death, and count up the pros and cons on each side, and see which side added up to the biggest number. Nothing was more persuasive than math.

  “All right, team,” Coach Joe said. “Huddle’s over. Time for the back-to-school after-winter-break kickoff.”

  At lunch, Nora sat with the other girls on her basketball team, as well as with Emma and Emma’s best friend, Bethy. She would have sat with Mason and Brody sometimes, but in the cafeteria at Plainfield Elementary School, fourth-grade girls and fourth-grade boys never sat together. There was no rule that said it had to be that way, but everyone seemed to know that was how it had to be.

  Nora understood. In the animal kingdom, the females of many species lived separately from the males for much of the time: seals, elk, mink. On the other hand, no female member of the animal kingdom ever expected another female member of the animal kingdom to squeal over her latest cat videos.

  As Nora carried her tray over to their table, Bethy was hunched together with Tamara, Elise, and Amy, all peering at the tiny screen on Emma’s phone. Plainfield Elementary had a rule against calling or texting during school hours, but apparently there was no policy against using your phone at lunchtime to make other people watch videos of your cat.

  “Oh!” Bethy gushed.

  “That’s not even the cutest one,” Emma announced, taking control of her phone. “The cutest one—wait till you see it—the cutest one is the one I’m calling ‘Princess Precious.’ Okay, here it is.”

  Beaming, Emma handed the phone back to Bethy so that the other girls could resume their peering.

  “I love her cape!” Elise gave a sigh of admiration.

  “Pink is definitely her color,” Tamara agreed.

  Amy exchanged a glance with Nora; Nora knew Amy didn’t approve of costumes for pets. But Amy asked politely, “Where did you find a cat tiara?”

  All the girls seemed to act differently around Emma. Nora would hardly recognize them as the same girls who could knock a basketball out of someone else’s hands and barrel down the court for a layup.

  But right here, right now, there was no escaping Precious Cupcake. Nora leaned in closer to behold Emma’s cat dressed in a jeweled beauty-queen crown and a cape of pink velvet trimmed with purple ribbon.

  “What breed of cat is she?” Nora asked. Probably American shorthair. Amy looked eager to hear the answer to Nora’s question, too.

  Emma shrugged, obviously less interested in the biological classification of her cat than in her costumed cuteness.

  “They should put her picture in the dictionary next to the word cute!” Bethy exclaimed.

  “Here’s another one,” Emma said. “I’m calling this one ‘Cupcake Capers.’ I take back what I said before: this one is the cutest.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Nora caught a glimpse of Precious Cupcake licking the frosting off an actual cupcake. Not a healthy food choice for cats, that was for sure. But even future vet Amy made no comment.

  “Nora, you can see it first this time,” Emma told her.

  “That’s okay,” Nora said. “I don’t mind waiting.”

  Maybe the end-of-lunch bell would ring before it was her turn to admire the Cupcake Capers of Precious Cupcake. Luckily, right now the squealers were too busy squealing to notice that she wasn’t squealing, too. So Nora gratefully tuned out the gushing and sighing of her friends, and sat thinking of more fascinating facts about ants that she could write in her special notebook.

  It was hard now for Nora to remember a time when she didn’t have an ant farm. But actually it had been only a few months ago that ants first came into her life in a serious way.

  She had always liked watching ants in nature. She’d be out on a walk on a summer afternoon, and there on the sidewalk would be a swarm of ants, thousands of them, crowded so thickly together that half a square of concrete was black with them. Why were they there now, when they hadn’t been there a day ago? Had an ant scout located some unexpected treat or danger, and alerted the others? How did they communicate? What kinds of things did they communicate about?

  Toward the end of third grade, her parents had helped her order an ant farm on the Internet, along with a tube of ants.

  Nora had studied the website that described what they’d be getting.

  “ ‘Live arrival guaranteed,’ ” she read to her mother as she sat at the computer in her mother’s office at the university. Both her parents were scientists. Her dad was a biochemist, and her mother was an astrophysicist. They joked that he liked to study tiny things very close up and she liked to study enormous things very far away.

  Nora kept on reading from the ant farm website.

  “But they say they can guarantee live arrival only if the temperature isn’t below forty degrees or above eighty-five. How hot is it going to be”—she checked the estimated delivery date if she placed her order today—“three days from now?”

  Her mother pulled up the weather on her phone. “High of eighty-six. What do you think? Take a chance on them anyway?”

  Nora knew that the hopeful look in her mother’s eyes meant that she wanted Nora’s answer to be no. Her mother, who was one of the country�
�s foremost scientific experts on the rings of Saturn, had a most unscientific aversion to bugs, including ladybugs, which even Emma didn’t mind.

  Nora nodded. “I want to go ahead and order them. Now that it’s almost summer, it’s only going to be getting hotter and hotter.”

  Her ants were just going to have to deal with the weather, whatever it was. After all, ants lived outside in the world in all temperatures, freezing cold to blazing hot. Of course, in the outside world they lived underground in their snug little tunnels. Still, Nora was sure she had seen ants swarming on the pavement on days when the temperature soared past eighty-five degrees.

  She did feel nervous three days later, when she came home from school and retrieved the small carton from the mailbox.

  Would her ants be alive or dead?

  “Be alive!” she beamed the command toward the package, even though she knew she couldn’t make any difference in their aliveness just by willing it with all her might.

  In the kitchen, she cut through the tape on the box with a pair of shears and opened the lid. From a heap of Styrofoam peanuts, she pulled out the plastic ant farm, a bit disappointed by how silly it looked, with its green plastic houses, barn, silo, and windmill. As if ants would care about any of that! An ant farm wasn’t really a farm. No one had ever sung “E-I-E-I-O” about ants. At least Nora was pretty sure that was the case.

  Where were the ants?

  Digging deeper into the Styrofoam peanuts, she grasped a small tube.

  Filled with ants.

  Filled with ants that were…alive! Ants that were not only alive but apparently eager to get out. Ants that, in fact, looked quite angry—not that Nora believed you could attribute human emotions to ants. But if you could, if ants did have the same feelings that people did, these ants resembled people who were very, very irritated at having spent the last few days in uncomfortably warm temperatures, cooped up in a little plastic tube.

  The instructions said to put the ants in the refrigerator for ten minutes to calm them down before transferring them into their new home. They’d probably enjoy that anyway.

  The instructions said that the ants in the tube were western harvester ants.

  The instructions also said that western harvester ants were stinging ants.

  “Dad,” Nora said as her father wandered into the kitchen to refill his coffee cup. “They sent us stinging ants. The instructions say that my ants ‘can inflict a painful sting.’ ”

  Her dad looked sober, even though he was a fellow insect lover. “Your mother isn’t wild about ants to start with,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t think she’s going to be pleased with the idea of stinging ants.”

  “What am I not going to be pleased with?” came Nora’s mother’s voice from the kitchen doorway.

  “Oh, nothing. Look, Mom, they’re here!” Nora made her own voice cheerful, so her mother would get into the proper ant-loving mood. “My ants are here, and they are alive!”

  “Oh goody,” her mother replied.

  Neither Nora nor her father made any mention about painful stings.

  “So where are they?” her mother asked uneasily.

  Nora held up the tube. Her mother shrank back, as if the ants might leap out and start marching all over the kitchen, bent on conquest.

  “We need to put them in the fridge first,” Nora explained, “to calm them down.”

  “Well, I do greatly prefer calm ants to agitated ones,” her mother said. “But ants in the refrigerator? I can’t believe it’s healthy to put a tube of ants right next to our family’s food supply.”

  “They won’t get out,” Nora reassured her.

  “Says who?”

  “Says me. They can’t get out. Look, the stopper is in nice and tight.”

  To demonstrate, Nora turned the ant tube upside down to show how snugly the stopper was in place.

  “Oh, Nora, I really don’t think—”

  “It’s fine! Mom, the ant company isn’t going to ship ants in a tube with a loose stopper.” Especially painfully stinging ants.

  For a further demonstration, Nora wiggled the stopper a bit and then gave the upside-down tube of ants a good shake.

  “See?”

  But what she saw next, what they all saw, was the stopper popping out.

  Large red ants—large, red, seemingly angry stinging ants—scattered all over the kitchen floor.

  Nora’s mother screamed.

  “Catch them! Nora! Neil! Catch them!”

  It would definitely be a good idea to catch them. On that, Nora and her mother were in complete agreement. The question was: how?

  For the next twenty minutes, Nora and her father tried to collect the ants, one by one, scooping them into empty jars from the recycling bin. But the ants didn’t want to be scooped. And sometimes one that had already been scooped became unscooped and made its way out as another ant was being coaxed to make its way in.

  Nora’s mother had fled to the safety of the dining room. She kept calling unhelpful things like “Be sure you get them all!” and “It’s all right just to kill them if you need to!”

  Nora was trying to tune out this unwelcome advice when one of the painfully stinging ants gave a painful sting to the tip of her index finger.

  “Ow!” she couldn’t help but yell. “Ow!”

  “What is it? What happened?” her mother called.

  “It’s okay,” her father called back.

  “It doesn’t sound okay.”

  Her mother reappeared in the kitchen doorway as Nora was sucking her stung finger.

  Concern for Nora gave her mom new courage. Heedless of any remaining escaped ants, she rushed over to examine Nora’s finger.

  “Oh, this looks bad. What kind of ants are these?”

  When no one answered, she snatched up the instructions from the counter. “Stinging ants? They sent you stinging ants?”

  That had definitely been a terrible afternoon.

  Nora’s father took over as the sole ant re-capturer, leaving Nora’s mother to administer first aid for the sting. In the end, twenty ants were deposited into the ant farm, to settle into the soft white sand that Nora had already put in place to welcome them, moistened with a quarter cup of water. The few remaining ants were never seen again, except for one that provoked a scream from her mother a day or two later and got itself squished to death with a wadded paper towel.

  Holding no hard feelings toward her ants—you couldn’t blame a stinging ant for stinging any more than you could blame a singing bird for singing—Nora did her best to care for them, giving them little bits of apple or cracker to eat and making sure they had a few drops of water to drink every couple of days.

  For the first week, the ants did all the things that Nora had hoped they would do: they built tunnels, carried morsels of food off to eat and digest, stayed busy in useful ant ways.

  But then they started dying. And kept on dying. And soon they were all dead.

  Maybe Nora had fed them too much or too little? Or maybe they were just at the end of their life expectancy. Without a queen, they couldn’t reproduce and create new baby ants to keep the colony going. The instructions had said that it was against the law for the ant farm company to send a queen through the mail. Nora had no idea who would make a law like that, or why.

  Her ants were dead and done for. But Nora wasn’t done with ants.

  On the Internet, she learned that she could make her own ant farm, using a rectangular, flat terrarium from a pet or craft store. She could use dirt from her own backyard. And she could find her own ants to live in it.

  She had no trouble finding ants. Nora was good at noticing things like where dirt was mounded in a corner of the yard to form an anthill. It was harder finding a queen: the large, winged ant that hatched all the eggs that became all the ants that would keep the colony going. Queens didn’t sit out in plain view on ant-sized thrones, with ant-sized crowns on their heads. They were hidden deep inside the colony, protected by soldier ants. No
matter how long she watched and waited, Nora never saw any queen ready for capture.

  Maybe it would have been wrong to capture a queen anyway. Maybe that’s why ant farm companies weren’t allowed to ship queens through the mail. The other ants would be asking, “Where’s our queen? Where did she go? Oh, Your Majesty, what has become of you?”

  No. Ants didn’t ask questions like that. They didn’t really think at all. Their brains were too small for thinking. In any case, Nora never found a queen.

  But her second colony of ants lived longer than the first, mail-order colony of ants. And when they died off, she just went out and found more.

  And now she was ready for her year of serious scientific ant experiments to begin.

  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.