Later in the season would be too late.
“That’s okay,” Nora said. “I mean, I understand completely.”
She missed the next throw from Tamara and had to dart after the ball as it rolled toward the bleachers.
Maybe she should get a cat after all?
No. Amy and Emma were cat lovers. Mason and Brody were dog lovers. Nora was an ant lover.
All she could do was hope very hard that she would end up proving something new and startling about the effects of microwaving on radish seeds.
Or that having a sleepover with Emma was new enough to make up for being an ant-loving, no-other-pet-owning, plain old shortstop.
“Haiku,” Coach Joe said during the poetry huddle on Friday. “Who knows what a haiku is?”
Lots of hands went up. Coach Joe called on Elise, perhaps because she was recognized as the class poetry expert.
“There are three lines,” Elise reported. “The first line has five syllables, the next line has seven, and the last line has five. So seventeen syllables total.”
“Correct!” Coach Joe said. “Haiku is an ancient form of poetry from Japan. We’re going to be writing haiku today.”
The groans were muted this time. Seventeen syllables wasn’t too terrible an assignment.
Nora had written haiku before, in third grade. It was satisfying to count the syllables in her head, 5-7-5, like solving an equation in math: 5 + 7 + 5 = 17. Simple, straightforward, mathematical. Add it up, and there was your poem.
“But,” Coach Joe went on, “I’m going to say something that may surprise you. It’s not the number of syllables that is most important here. It’s the idea of taking some experience and condensing it into a tiny package. That means choosing and selecting which details matter most. Often haiku poets wrote about nature or the changing seasons. They looked very hard at something in nature and tried to see it anew, as if for the first time. But you can write about any subject in your haiku, so long as you present it in a few carefully chosen details.”
Coach Joe read some examples of haiku by famous Japanese poets and by actual kids. Then he sent the students to their pods to write.
“We’ll come back to share in fifteen minutes,” he told the class.
How could Coach Joe think it would take fifteen minutes to write seventeen syllables? Practically one minute for each one!
But back at her desk, Nora spent a few of her minutes staring down at a blank page in her notebook.
She knew she’d write about ants, of course.
She liked the idea of a tiny poem about a tiny creature.
But which seventeen syllables should she write?
When it was time to share, Nora wasn’t sure she liked what she had written. But it was the best she could do to capture the wonderfulness of ants in three short lines.
“All right,” Coach Joe said, “who wants to go first?”
To Nora’s surprise, the first hand in the air was Mason’s.
“Mason, my friend,” Coach Joe said. “Do share your haiku with us.”
“ ‘How I Feel About Poetry,’ ” Mason read from his sheet. “That’s my title. Syllables in the title don’t count, right?”
“Right,” Coach Joe agreed.
Mason read his poem.
HOW I FEEL ABOUT POETRY
by Mason
No no no no no
No no no no no no no
No no no no no
Everyone laughed, including Coach Joe.
“Very clever, Mason,” Coach Joe said. “But I hope that in a few weeks, you’ll want to revise your poem to this.”
HOW I FEEL ABOUT POETRY
by Coach Joe
No. No. No. No. No.
Well, maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
Wait….Yes? Yes? Yes. Yes!
Lots of kids wanted to read now. Seventeen-syllable poems kept zinging through the air.
HIP-HOP
by Tamara
When I start to dance
My feet have their own ideas.
My body follows.
PRECIOUS CUPCAKE
by Emma
My cat is the best.
White, soft, fluffy, blue eyes, tail.
She is the cutest.
HAPPINESS
by Brody
It feels like soda
Fizzing up out of the can
All over the floor.
CROCUS
by Elise
Before snow is gone
Green shoots poke through. Yellow blooms,
Then purple. Then pink.
PUMPKINS
by Dunk
Radishes are dumb.
Lettuce is dumb, too. Pumpkins
Rule the world. Kaboom!
WHEN I GROW UP
by Amy
When I’m a mom some-
Day, my kids can have ten snakes
And I’ll say, “Hooray!”
ANT
by Nora
The ant is smaller
Than the cracker crumb. But she
Carries it so far.
“I was thinking,” Nora said to her parents that evening at dinner. “I might like to get a musical instrument and start taking some lessons.”
Her father choked on his ice water.
Her mother paused her meatball-laden fork halfway to her mouth.
Nora told them about Coach Joe’s newness challenge, leaving out her doomed hope for making her new thing be replicating Mendel’s results about the genetics of peas.
“I have a clarinet from high school band around here somewhere,” Nora’s mother said. “I could try to find it and show you the basics. I’d hate to go to the trouble and expense of getting a whole new instrument, finding a teacher, paying for lessons, if—well, Nora, do you really want to learn a musical instrument, or are you doing this to get the new thing over with? I can’t see you playing the clarinet, somehow.”
“I might want to play it,” Nora said.
If her scientist mother had played the clarinet in high school, and had loved poetry, why would she think her scientist daughter might not want to branch out a bit? Maybe Nora’s ants would like the sound of clarinet music. They were more likely to enjoy clarinet music, in Nora’s opinion, than Emma’s pansies were likely to enjoy Emma’s singing.
Half an hour later, Nora’s mother appeared from the attic, a smudge of dirt on one cheek, a cobweb in her hair, and a clarinet case clutched in her hand.
“I hope it’s playable,” she said. “I can’t think of any reason it wouldn’t be. Oh, maybe the reeds.”
Nora must have looked bewildered, because her mother explained, “The reed is this little bit of wood you put on the mouthpiece. Maybe reeds go bad after thirty years? There’s only one way to find out.”
She showed Nora how to suck on the reed to moisten it: mildly gross. Then she inserted the reed onto the clarinet mouthpiece and attached the mouthpiece to the slim, dark body of the clarinet.
“All right,” she said. “Now I have to see if I can play this thing. Maybe it’s like riding a bike, and however many years go by since you rode one last, you hop back on and go.”
It wasn’t. Or rather, it was more like riding a wobbly bike and falling off a lot. Nora’s mother finally managed to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—an appropriate choice for an astronomer. It was even an appropriate choice for an astronomer who studied planets, given that most people, when they wished upon the first star of the evening, were wishing instead upon the planet Venus.
“Now you try it.” Nora’s mother held out the clarinet to Nora.
She helped Nora position her fingers over the holes and place her mouth on the reed and blow.
The high-pitched shriek that followed would have sent Nora’s ants scurrying to their deepest tunnel. It would have made listening radishes wither and die.
Nora tried again. She couldn’t honestly say the second time was any better.
“It sounds terrible for every beginner,” Nora’s mothe
r reassured her as her father removed his hands from his ears. “Maybe we should get you some lessons. I remember how to play it—sort of—but I don’t remember how poor Mr. McGinness taught us to do it.”
“Actually,” Nora said, “I don’t think I want to play the clarinet.”
Both her parents looked relieved.
Nora’s ant colony was dying off. There was no doubt about it.
Upstairs in her room after dinner, she tried not to mind seeing their stiff, small bodies piling up in the ant burial chamber. That was a part of the fascination of having an ant farm, to see the cycle of life unfold before her eyes. When golden leaves fell off the aspen trees in autumn and the branches stood bare, it wasn’t a sad thing. That was what aspen trees did.
But Nora’s ant farm didn’t get to experience the full cycle of life, because she didn’t have a queen. With no ant queen, she had no ant eggs, no ant babies, no young ants to grow up to replace the other worker ants as they lived, toiled, and died.
If only Nora had a queen!
That’s what she should have wished for with Emma’s friendship bracelet, still fastened around her wrist, frayed now after almost two weeks of play and much scrubbing.
Did you have to make the wish at the time you got the bracelet? Or could you make the wish later? Or change your first wish into a better wish once you realized your true heart’s desire?
Nora couldn’t help touching the bracelet lightly with the fingertips of her other hand.
“I wish I could find a queen,” she said aloud, into her empty room.
Just in case.
“A sleepover?” Nora’s mother asked as she set a bowl of yogurt, blueberries, and granola in front of Nora on Saturday morning. “Yes, of course you can go. That sounds like a lot of fun.”
“But…” Nora loaded up a first spoonful with the exact right amount of blueberries. “We’ll probably stay up late and not get enough sleep.”
Would they? What would they stay up late doing, given how completely different their interests were?
Nora had a hopeful thought: maybe Precious Cupcake would sit purring on her lap the way Cassidy had. But Emma’s cat probably purred only for Emma.
Nora’s mother chuckled. “I’m supposed to be the one worrying about how much you’ll sleep, not you. You can take a nap Sunday afternoon if you’re tired. We don’t have any plans as a family for Sunday.”
Nora sighed.
“What’s going on?” her mother asked then. “Is there some reason you don’t want to go?”
“It’s just…Emma and I…I mean, she’s nice and everything, but we don’t have very much in common.”
She thought about telling her mother that Emma was just doing this to win a prize for having the newest new project of all. But it was such a sad thing to have to say.
“That’s why I’m so pleased you’re doing this,” Nora’s mother said. “It’s good to get out of our comfort zones once in a while. That’s how we stretch and grow.”
Nora glared at her mother. Why don’t you study a different planet for a change, then? she wanted to say. Instead of Saturn, Saturn, Saturn all the time, why don’t you study Mercury? Or Mars?
But there was no point in saying anything.
Emma called Nora mid-afternoon.
“I have good news and bad news,” Emma announced. “Which do you want to hear first?”
“Good news,” Nora said. She could use some good news right about now.
“I thought up the best game for us to play at the sleepover. I’ll give you one clue. To play it, we need ten bottles of nail polish in all different colors. And not ordinary ones like Pretty in Pink or Scarlet Letter or Lavender Bouquet or Purple Passion. Way-out ones, like Green Means Go or Yellow Rose of Texas.”
Emma sounded genuinely enthusiastic, as if she wanted to play this game more than anything in the world, and wanted to play it with Nora. But Nora knew Emma really wanted to play this game with Bethy, who was a thousand miles away.
“Plus sparkly ones!” Emma added. “And ones that light up in the dark!”
“What’s the bad news?” Nora made herself ask.
“It’s bad,” Emma said, as if the warning would help Nora brace herself for what she was about to say next.
“What is it?”
It couldn’t be too bad if Emma sounded so excited about the nail polish game. It couldn’t be anything terrible happening to Precious Cupcake. There would be no news good enough to make up for that.
“My dad didn’t know tonight was our sleepover, so he got tickets for my parents and my sister and me to go to a play in Denver. We’re going to have to postpone the sleepover for another week. Is that okay? Say it’s okay!”
Relief made Nora feel giddy.
“It’s definitely okay!” It was better than okay. “In fact—”
“So next Saturday?” Emma cut her off. “Same time, same place?”
Nora tried to think of some possible reason why next Saturday wouldn’t work, but she couldn’t.
“And, Nora, I’m not going to tell you what snacks we’re going to have, because I want them to be a surprise, but I found them on this online party snack website, and they’re amazing.”
“Great!” Nora said, trying to sound as much like Brody as possible. “Great!”
Nora worked on a Civil War battle report all afternoon. Every kid in the class had a battle to research. The Civil War had so many battles that nobody had to share.
Nora’s battle wasn’t really a battle. It was a siege, the Siege of Vicksburg, where General Ulysses S. Grant had surrounded Vicksburg for forty days until the city ran out of food and supplies and had to surrender.
That evening, Nora and her father ordered pizza for dinner. Her mother was dining with a visiting astronomer who had flown in for a conference.
“How’s the class garden coming along?” Nora’s father asked after a mouthful of pepperoni and mushrooms.
Nora felt herself bristling. Was he waiting for her to tell him he had been right that Mendel’s peas would take too long to grow?
“I ended up planting radishes,” Nora admitted. “The same as everybody else. I found a germination experiment to do on them, at least.”
“That’s my scientist girl.”
Nora knew he meant the comment as a compliment, a way of letting her know he didn’t think less of her for not turning out to be a younger version of Gregor Mendel. It wasn’t her fault if peas took forever to grow. She wasn’t to blame if monks had more time to wait around for a pea harvest than fourth graders did.
She tried to smile, but she felt a twinge of irritation. Why couldn’t she grow plain, dumb radishes like everyone else? Why did she have to be constantly pushing back the frontiers of science?
“I probably won’t prove anything new,” Nora said.
“That’s all right,” her dad said. “Lots of scientists don’t prove anything particularly new.”
“I probably won’t prove anything.”
“Now, honey,” her dad began, as she started picking the mushrooms off her slice of pizza and putting them in a pile on the edge of her plate, not that she had anything against mushrooms.
Nora cut him off. She couldn’t bear parental encouragement right now.
“Did you ever want to be anything else but a scientist?” she asked.
Her father considered the question before he replied, the way he always did when she had asked him something important.
“I almost dropped my biochemistry major halfway through college,” he said.
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. I was going to switch to history. Molecules were starting to seem awfully…I don’t know…awfully small.”
Her father’s rueful smile made Nora laugh, even though she didn’t want to.
“And then what happened?” she asked.
“I took a couple of history courses. And human beings started to seem awfully…big. The things they did were so…puzzling. I’ve never been able to make sense of
the behavior of members of the species Homo sapiens. So I signed up again for biochemistry and never looked back. Though halfway through grading a stack of eighty exams, occasionally I have my doubts.” He chuckled.
Then he went on, “Your mother almost became an English major. Your brother was pretty hard-core science all the way, but Sarah talked about dropping out of college to go backpacking through Central America. Life can have twists and turns, and that’s perfectly okay. You can end up someplace you never dreamed of going, and that’s okay, too.”
Nora was glad he had said that.
But in the end, she wasn’t a twisty and turny kind of person.
“I want to go up in a hot-air balloon,” Brody told Nora and Mason on the Plainfield Elementary playground before school on Monday. “But my parents said it would cost too much.”
Maybe Nora could get her parents to pay half, and she could go up in the balloon, too. Then she’d have her new thing accomplished, even if it would be the fifteenth new thing for Brody and the only new thing for her. It would be fascinating to fly so high, learning about hot and cold air currents, seeing things down below from a fresh perspective.
“How much does it cost?” Nora asked.
“Two hundred dollars,” Brody told her.
Forget the hot-air balloon. Nora knew her parents would never pay a hundred dollars for that.
“Did you find your new thing?” she asked Mason. She hoped he hadn’t. She didn’t want to be the only one who couldn’t find a single new thing to do. Then again, Amy hadn’t done a new thing yet, either. She still had her heart set on a snake, and her mother was still saying no.
“Nope,” Mason said. “Though…maybe talking about something new, thinking about something new, could count as a new thing? If you’ve never talked or thought about a new thing before?”
The Trouble with Friends Page 4
