The Trouble with Ants

by Claudia Mills

  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 s
aid, 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.

  Nora refused to sit at her usual table that day at lunch. She took her sack lunch from home and headed outside to eat beneath the winter-bare trees. Kids were allowed to go outside for lunch recess whenever they were done in the cafeteria. Today, Nora was done from minute one.

  Even though it was early January, the sun was so warm that she wasn’t a bit chilly as she perched on the picnic table in her jacket and knit hat.

  She was touched when Amy abandoned the other girls and came out to join her.

  “If only Emma hadn’t screamed,” Amy said sorrowfully.

  “I know.”

  “Sometimes I wish Emma weren’t so…Emma-ish,” Amy said.

  “Me, too.”

  But Nora knew Emma was going to keep on being Emma-ish, just as she was going to keep on being Nora-ish. She wasn’t really mad at Emma for screaming any more than she had been mad at her stinging ants for stinging. Both people and ants were what they were and did what they did. But if only people could be and do something different!

  “Game tomorrow,” Amy said, her voice more cheery. “We’re playing the Killer Whales.”

  Dunk’s team.

  “Maybe we should change the name of our team,” Amy suggested. “From the Fighting Bulldogs to the Stinging Ants.”

  Nora laughed. She had told Amy the story about her first try at setting up an ant farm. “We’d be sure to win, then,” she joked.

  Besides, they had beaten Dunk’s team once last fall. They could do it again tomorrow.

  During the game the next morning, Nora didn’t let herself think about ant experiments or cat videos. She focused her thoughts on positioning herself to shoot and on guarding one of Dunk’s teammates, who was almost as big and beefy as Dunk himself.

  At one point, as she was preparing to take a free throw after one Killer Whale had fouled her, she heard Dunk’s taunt: “Ant lover!”

  Apparently, Dunk thought that was an insult!

  Nora showed him what a perfect shot an ant lover could make.

  The Fighting Bulldogs, aka the Stinging Ants, won, 16–14.

  At home that afternoon, Nora tried to think of the next experiment to do with her ants, the experiment that would make her name as a rising young scientist.

  Was it cheating to ask her scientist parents for some ideas? Should a soon-to-be-famous scientist come up with breakthrough ideas all on her own, or was it all right to ask for help from other scientists?

  Nora remembered a famous line said by one of the most famous scientists of all time: Sir Isaac Newton. One day, an apple fell on his head, and as he asked himself why it had fallen down rather than up, he discovered the law of gravity. So he had certainly had help from the apple. The famous line he had said was “If I have seen further (than others), it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He didn’t mean that he actually stood on the shoulders of tall people. He meant that his ideas had built on the ideas of the great scientists who had come before him.

  Nora found her father at his extremely messy desk in his extremely messy upstairs office. That was another difference between her parents. Her father’s desk was buried under stacks of paper piled every which way. Even the floor was barely visible, covered with a jumble of books, science journals, heaps of student final exams from last semester. Nora could hardly walk across the room without causing some pile of paper to topple. In contrast, her mother’s office was as neat as could be, her desk completely bare except for her laptop, a vase of flowers, and one coffee cup. Right now Nora could see that her father’s desk had six or seven coffee cups on it—each one, she knew, half filled with coffee he had poured but forgotten to drink.

  Nora was neat like her mother, not messy like her father. She liked her mother’s office vastly better than she liked her father’s office. But her father was the better parent to go to with a question about ants.

  “Is it cheating if I ask you to help me come up with an idea for the best ant farm experiment ever?” she asked.

  There was no place to sit down in her dad’s office—his couch was occupied with the same mess that spread over every other available surface. So she stood next to his desk while she waited for his answer to her question.

  Her father thought for a while before replying. No matter what question she asked, he never answered right away.

  “You’ll still be the one doing the experiment,” he finally said. “And interpreting the results. If you were to publish your findings”—how did he know?!—“it would be intellectually honest to have a footnote thanking anyone who helped you in your work. So you could say, ‘I am grateful to Professor Neil Alpers for the suggestion to pursue this line of research.’ ”

  Nora liked that wording. She could so easily imagine it in print.

  “Can I have a piece of paper to write that down?” she asked.

  “Sure. If there’s one thing I have, it’s pieces of paper. Finding a blank one, on the other hand, might not be so easy.”

  After some rummaging, he handed her a scrap of paper, somewhat stained from coffee, and a pencil. Nora scribbled down the words he had told her.

  “So what would be a good line of research to pursue?” she asked.

  He paused again to think. “You could take a few of the ants out of the farm,” he said. “Put them in a measured area and see how long it takes them to find a piece of food placed outside the area. You’d be studying the ants in relation to both time and distance. You could keep increasing the distance of the food from their starting point. Is there some distance that is too far? Or will they keep seeking until they find what they are looking for?”

  It was a perfect idea! Except for…

  “Mom,” Nora said. “She’s not going to go in for taking the ants out of the ant farm. You know she’s not.”

  “Good point.” Another pause. “You can do it on one of her university days. Just make sure you put the experiment ants inside a larger enclosure so they don’t get out. Like—the bathtub, maybe.”

  Nora didn’t think her mother would like ants in the bathtub, either. But she’d use the bathtub in her own bathroom, not her parents’ bathroom. Besides, science called for some sacrifices.

  Just as Nora was measuring the dimensions of the bathtub, the phone rang. She was the only one in her family who ever answered the phone, as both of her parents got all their important calls on their cell phones and Nora didn’t have a cell phone yet.

  “Hello?”

  “Nora, can you come over? Right away?”

  It was Mason, sounding more upset than she had ever heard him before.

  “What happened? Is it Dog? Is Dog okay?”

  “Dog’s been skunked!”

  Although the afternoon had been as unseasonably warm as the rest of the week, darkness was falling and the night air was frosty as Nora hurried to Mason’s house, a few blocks away. She could smell the pungent odor of skunk, stronger than her father’s strongest coffee, as soon as she turned the corner onto Mason’s street. How could one small animal produce such an enormous stink? What was that smelly stuff made of? What chemicals combined to make a stink so horrific?

  By the time she reached Mason’s house, which was right next door to Brody’s house, Nora’s eyes were stinging and her nose was crinkling. She could see the boys outside, crouched next to Dog in the pool of bright light from the light fixture over the garage door.

  It was one of the saddest sights she had ever seen.

  Mason was trying to get Dog not to rub the spray from his face with his paws, as Brody sat next to him with streaming eyes—whether from the skunk smell or from tears, Nora couldn’t tell.

  “Don’t, Dog,” Mason pleaded. “You’ll just make it worse.”

  “Where are your p
arents?” Nora asked.

  “They’re out on a date night with Brody’s parents,” Mason said. “Cammie and Cara are ‘babysitting.’ ”

  Cammie and Cara were Brody’s older sisters, who were nowhere in sight.

  “They’re inside,” Brody explained, “trying to call my parents or Mason’s parents to find out what to do.”

  “What we need to do,” Nora said, “is wash Dog. Now.”

  “In the bathtub?” Mason asked.

  Nora could tell he was wondering if his mother would really want Dog inside the house, dragged all the way up the carpeted staircase to the upstairs bathroom. A skunked dog would be a worse thing to find in your bathtub than a few little ants.

  “No. We don’t need to wash all of him. In fact, we don’t want to wash all of him. We don’t want to get the stinky stuff on his front half all over the fur that doesn’t stink yet, or then all of him will stink.”

  “What do we wash him with?” Brody asked.

  “Hydrogen peroxide.”

  “Whatever that is,” Mason said. “Which we probably don’t have. And can’t get, because none of us can drive anywhere to get it.”

  Cammie and Cara came back outside. They were both in middle school and even more giggly than Emma herself. But neither one was giggling now.

  “They’re not answering their phones!” Cammie wailed. “They went to some dumb classical music concert and turned their phones off!”

  “They don’t even care that we’re here all by ourselves trying to figure out what to do with the world’s stinkiest dog!” Cara moaned.

  “Do you have any hydrogen peroxide?” Nora interrupted.

  Brody’s sisters stopped their wailing and moaning, and gave Nora a look of utter confusion.