The Trouble with Ants

by Claudia Mills

  “Good one!” Coach Joe said once Mason stopped reading. “I never thought of things that way. Team, what do you think?”

  Lots of kids clapped this time, too.

  “Yup,” Coach Joe said. “I think Mason hit that one right out of the ballpark.”

  A boy named James read an anti-homework persuasive speech. Nora liked that it quoted statistics, which claimed that there was no relationship between how much homework students did at night and how well they scored on standardized tests. She adored statistics. Then a girl named Hazel read a persuasive speech about some celebrity who wore too much makeup and how she would look better with less makeup. That one was dopey, in Nora’s opinion. People either liked makeup or didn’t, the same way some people liked dogs and some people liked cats. Amy read her speech, which turned out to be about how people in the U.S. should keep pet cats indoors so that they wouldn’t keep killing over 2 billion songbirds each year. Nora remembered that, fortunately, Precious Cupcake was already an indoor cat.

  “Nora?” Coach Joe called on her.

  She picked up her paper and started to read.

  The Importance of Studying Science

  By Nora Alpers

  Many people I know think science is a boring subject. In fact, some of these people are girls in my class at school. Even when girls think science is interesting, they can feel like they’re not supposed to, because the other girls they know talk more about boys, clothes, or cats, instead of about batteries, planets, and ants.

  This pattern continues when girls grow up. More than half the people in America are female, but less than a quarter of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and tech workers are women. Only one-fifth of physics PhDs are given to women. Only fourteen percent of physics professors are women. In a whole century, only fifteen women got a Nobel Prize in science.

  These are very sad facts, because it is so important that everybody, including girls, knows about science. We need to know about science so that we can protect our planet. Species are going extinct at a faster rate than any other time in human history, because of things that humans do. People do things that cause climate change and loss of habitat. If people knew more about science, they would know not to do these things. More important, if people knew more about science, they wouldn’t want to do these things. The more you learn about science, the more interesting and important you think everything in the world is. Even little tiny things that most people don’t care about, like ants.

  So it is important for everybody to learn about science, but especially for girls, because they are getting left out right now. My family is full of women scientists. My mother is a scientist who is an expert on the rings of Saturn. My sister is a scientist who studies rock formations. I want to be a scientist, too, and learn as much as I can about ants.

  Even if you don’t want to be a scientist, I hope you learn as much as you can about science. Science may not be “cute,” but it is interesting, beautiful, and important for our world. The more we all learn about science, the more we can save our world.

  Nora took a deep breath when she was done. What would her classmates think? She knew Amy would like it. But would the rest of them be persuaded?

  They were all clapping loudly. But they had applauded every speech so far, even the dumb one about celebrity makeup. She doubted that she had actually persuaded anybody, not the way that Brody had. But then, as Coach Joe was closing the huddle by saying something about seeing if the local newspaper might want to publish any of their speeches, Emma leaned over to her.

  “I’m sorry, Nora,” Emma said. “I shouldn’t have screamed that day when your ants came to school. I was definitely being unscientific. I hope you bring your ants to school again sometime soon. I really do.”

  Even though Nora knew Emma meant well, this request, following upon the rejection of her ant article and the collapse of her entire ant colony, was too much for her to bear.

  “I can’t,” Nora snapped. “They’re dead.”

  “Dead?” Emma asked, as if she couldn’t have heard correctly.

  “Yes,” Nora said brightly. “All of them.” The last two had died yesterday. “But thanks for asking.”

  Before Emma could make any reply, Nora marched off to her desk, took out her math book, and made herself very busy converting fractions to decimals.

  At lunch, Nora was surprised to see Dunk approach the table with his tray, a sheepish grin on his face.

  “I’m here,” he said to Emma.

  Tamara was absent that day. Emma motioned to Dunk to take Tamara’s empty seat.

  Nora took notice. A fourth-grade boy was sitting at a fourth-grade girls’ cafeteria table. To her knowledge, that had never happened before at Plainfield Elementary School.

  “Dunk,” Emma announced to the other girls, “told me that he’s interested in seeing some of Precious Cupcake’s cat videos.”

  Dunk made a strangled sound. Nora could tell that he wanted to say that he wasn’t interested in watching cat videos, but that he had reluctantly agreed to watch them as part of the truce between cat people and dog people. Nora could also tell that he knew better than to point that out.

  “Are you ready?” Emma asked him sweetly.

  Dunk grunted.

  “Girls, which one should I show him first?”

  “ ‘Princess Precious,’ ” Bethy said.

  “ ‘Cupcake Capers’!” Elise answered.

  “They’re all adorable,” Amy said, in case there had been any hard feelings over her anti-bird-eating speech.

  “Nora?” Emma asked.

  Nora knew Emma was trying to be extra-friendly to make up for the deaths of her ants.

  “Do you have any videos from the high tea?” Nora asked, because she couldn’t think of anything else. “I mean, from the high tea before she swallowed the ribbon?”

  As soon as she said it, she realized it was the wrong thing to have said.

  “I’ll start with ‘Princess Precious,’ ” Emma declared.

  She fiddled with her phone for a minute as Dunk shoveled in some hasty mouthfuls of hamburger casserole.

  “All right!” Emma chirped. “Here’s the first one!”

  Dunk put down his fork. Nobody was supposed to watch videos of Precious Cupcake with divided attention.

  Emma and Dunk leaned their heads together so they could look at the cat videos at the same time. The other girls got up from their seats and crowded behind them, even though Nora couldn’t begin to count how many times they had seen them all before.

  “Ohh!”

  “So cute!”

  “The cutest!”

  That, from the girls.

  Dunk hadn’t yet said anything.

  “Dunk, you’re supposed to say ooh and aah,” Emma instructed.

  Already red, Dunk grew even redder. But there was no halfway point for admiration of Emma’s cat videos.

  “Ooh,” he muttered sullenly. “Aah.”

  “Say how cute she is,” Emma commanded.

  Nora wondered if Dunk would bolt back to his own table, where two boys were having a lively duel with their bread sticks.

  He didn’t.

  “She is cute,” he said, sounding surprised, and surprisingly sincere.

  Emma giggled.

  “Now let me find the one where she’s licking the cupcake frosting. Oh, here it is!”

  Dunk gave another grunt of appreciation.

  Emma giggled again.

  The weekend was a long, empty one, without any ants in it.

  Saturday morning, Nora emptied the contents of the ant farm into the backyard, all the sad remains of the formerly bustling ant colony. She set her ant farm on a dusty shelf in the back of the garage.

  “You aren’t getting any more ants?” her mother asked as they were getting ready to head over to the last Fighting Bulldogs game of the season.

  “No,” Nora told her. “I’m through with ants.”

  “You’re through with ants?”

&
nbsp; Why did Nora always have to repeat everything? Didn’t people listen the first time? But she knew her mother had heard her; her mother just didn’t believe her.

  “You never liked my ants anyway,” Nora said. It came out sounding like an accusation.

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true. Admit it.”

  “Okay, I never liked having stinging ants loose in my kitchen. That much is true. But I definitely liked your ants when they were safe in their farm.”

  Nora must have looked skeptical, because her mother went on, “Well, I always liked that you liked your ants. Your father and I are both so proud of you for being such a serious scientist, studying your ants, doing experiments with them. How many girls your age are already budding myrmecologists? In fact, your father told me that you—”

  Nora cut her off with a glare that said, Don’t even go there. She couldn’t stand to hear her mother trying to be like her father and make it sound wonderful that she had even tried to publish her ant article. She didn’t want credit for trying. She wanted credit for succeeding.

  “Anyway, we’re proud of you,” her mother finished.

  The Bulldogs won their game. Nora scored the winning basket.

  Mason, Brody, and the rest of their teammates were all screaming with excitement when the buzzer sounded.

  “Nora! Nora! Nora!” they cheered.

  It was amazing how worked up people could get about things that didn’t really matter.

  After the game, Nora went home to a house with no ants for her to check on. She didn’t have any homework to do. Coach Joe had said that in honor of the anti-homework persuasive speech, he’d give them one weekend with no homework at all.

  Nora didn’t feel like calling Mason and Brody. They were probably busy teaching Dog new tricks or giving him another bath to try to get rid of the last, lingering skunk odor.

  She didn’t feel like calling any of the girls, even Amy. They were probably busy talking about how funny Dunk had looked watching Emma’s cat videos and how the cat videos really were the cutest videos in the history of the world. Amy would be busy with her whole household full of still-living pets.

  She didn’t feel like disturbing her parents. They were both hunched over the computers in their home offices, probably busy writing articles to be published in prestigious grown-up science journals.

  She didn’t feel like doing anything.

  Monday morning, Nora found a pale blue envelope on her desk. Her name was written on it in round printing that could only have been done by a girl. The o in Nora had petals around it to form a flower.

  The envelope contained a card with a picture of a rainbow on the front of it, with fancy script that read:

  With Deepest Sympathy on the Loss of Your Pets

  Someone had added an s to Pet to make it read Pets.

  Inside the card was a printed poem:

  Pets are angels in disguise.

  They give us joy and love.

  When they finally pass away,

  They watch us from above.

  From Heaven your pets are looking down

  And sent me here to say

  The love they give is never lost

  But still with you today.

  The card was signed: Emma.

  Nora didn’t know whether to cry or laugh.

  As much as she missed her ants, she couldn’t think of them as angels, even as very well-disguised angels.

  She didn’t think they were in heaven watching her and hoping Emma would give her a card about them.

  She had loved her ants. But she couldn’t honestly say that they had loved her back.

  That wasn’t what ants did.

  “Huddle time!” Coach Joe called out. “Hurry on over, team. I have some good news to share.”

  Nora found a place next to Mason and Brody.

  “My parents read my anti-persuasive persuasive speech,” Mason told her.

  “And?”

  “They weren’t persuaded.”

  Nora laughed.

  “Actually, they were sort of persuaded. My mom said I still have to try new foods sometimes. And go new places. But I don’t have to do figure skating! And I don’t have to take voice lessons. My dad looked pretty thrilled about it. I don’t think he wanted to have to listen to me practice.”

  Nora laughed again.

  “All right, team,” Coach Joe said. “Here’s today’s paper, hot off the press: the Plainfield Daily Record.”

  Nora’s parents got the Plainfield Daily Record, but they hadn’t had time to read it this morning.

  “Well, on the op-ed page today—that’s the page opposite the editorial page—there is a piece by one of our classmates. A persuasive speech about the importance of getting more kids, especially girls, to study science. Congratulations, Nora!”

  Nora was bewildered. But then she remembered that Coach Joe had said something about seeing if the newspaper might want to publish their speeches. Apparently, they had. And the one they wanted to publish was hers.

  This time, the applause from her classmates was more than polite. It sounded more like the cheers of the Fighting Bulldogs after she had scored the winning basket.

  Her persuasive speech wasn’t published in Nature. It wasn’t going to set any Guinness World Record for youngest article by anyone ever. But right now it felt pretty sweet to have Coach Joe hold up the newspaper, folded open to the page where her article appeared, framed in a little box:

  THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING SCIENCE

  By Nora Alpers

  Nora is a fourth-grade student at Plainfield Elementary School.

  Part of her wished they hadn’t printed her grade. Maybe they had published her article because it was good for a fourth grader, not because it was good, period.

  Then again, she was a fourth grader. And the newspaper editors obviously thought it was impressive that a fourth grader had written an article good enough to be published.

  When the applause had died down, Coach Joe said, “So, Nora, speaking of getting kids more interested in science, what do you think? Will you give us another chance with your ant farm?”

  Nora heard Emma’s gasp.

  “Coach Joe,” Emma blurted out, “Nora can’t bring her ant farm in again. Because, you see, her ants are—well, they’re…” She lowered her voice to avoid saying the final word too loudly. “They’re deceased.”

  Coach Joe turned to Nora, as if to confirm the truth of this terrible statement.

  Nora thought for a moment before speaking.

  “My ants did die. My colony didn’t have a queen, and without a queen, a colony dies out in a few weeks or months. That’s the life span of the worker ants. But it’s okay when ants die. It’s part of the life cycle. Ants go through four different stages in their lives: egg, larva, pupa, adult. Once they’re adults, they do their work to help the colony survive. Then they die. It’s what ants do.”

  She looked around at her classmates, all of them seeming to be listening hard to every word she spoke, even Dunk. Maybe next, Dunk would be agreeing to watch ant videos.

  “I’m going to get more ants soon,” Nora told the class.

  Had she really just said that? Apparently, she had.

  “It’s winter now, so I don’t think I can find any outside in nature. Maybe next summer, I can find more ants in my backyard and even find a queen to go with them. But for now, I can send away online to get more ants shipped to me in the mail. I’ll bring them in once I get them.”

  She hadn’t spoken the truth to her mother, even though she had thought what she said was true at the time.

  She wasn’t through with ants.

  She was never going to be through with ants.

  She’d always want to study ants and learn about them. Maybe she would publish an article in Nature someday, when she had studied ants for years and years.

  She was going to study ants forever.

  After all, studying ants was what Nora did.

  ACKNOWLEDGM
ENTS

  It is a joy to be able to thank some of the wonderful people who helped bring this book into being. It was during breakfast with my brilliant editor, Nancy Hinkel, that I paid attention when she said, “I could use a book about a girl with an ant farm!” Her encouragement and enthusiasm fueled Nora’s love of ants on every page. I received careful critique on early drafts from my longtime Boulder writing group (Marie DesJardin, Mary Peace Finley, Ann Whitehead Nagda, Leslie O’Kane, Phyllis Perry, and Elizabeth Wrenn). Professor Whitney Cranshaw of Colorado State University gave generously of his time and expertise to talk with me about ants (any ant-related errors in the book are, of course, my own). I looked at Katie Kath’s adorable first sketches for the book and said, “There she is! There’s Nora!”

  Thanks also to my wise and caring agent, Stephen Fraser; consistently helpful Stephen Brown; magnificently sharp-eyed copy editors Esther Lin, Steph Engel, and Artie Bennett; and Isabel Warren-Lynch and Trish Parcell for their appealing book design. Most of Nora’s fascinating ant facts are drawn from Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1994. On behalf of Nora and all budding myrmecologists everywhere, I am grateful to them for this amazing book.

  Claudia Mills is the author of over fifty books for young readers, including the Mason Dixon series. She does not personally keep an ant farm, but she does have a cat, Snickers, with whom she curls up on her couch at home in Boulder, Colorado, drinking hot chocolate and writing. Visit her at claudiamillsauthor.com.