Nora shook her head.
“For me, at least?”
Nora shook her head again. “Not even for you.”
Coach Joe led his team out to the class garden later that morning.
From a distance, the garden looked the same: fresh dirt newly plowed, with nothing growing yet. But when they got closer, Nora could see a faint line of green snaking across some of the rows.
The radishes were sprouting.
Some of Nora’s radishes were sprouting: the control group that hadn’t been frozen, baked, or nuked in the microwave. The others hadn’t come up yet—maybe they would never come up?—except for a couple of tiny shoots.
That was interesting. Nora would have thought all the seeds that were baked, frozen, or nuked would respond the same way. What would make one tiny, teensy seed respond differently from another to the very same treatment?
“You did it!” Nora whispered to the brave few seeds that had made it. “Good for you!”
Then she caught herself.
Some of the lettuce seeds and other salad greens had started to sprout, too. Emma’s pansies had yet to germinate.
“I’m going to sing to mine,” Emma announced. “Maybe pansies are musical flowers that respond better to song.”
In a clear, high soprano, Emma began singing, to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”: “Grow, grow, pansies, grow! Grow up very tall! Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, I love you best of all!”
Mason stared down at his radishes, which had sprouted the same as everyone else’s.
“That’s strange,” he muttered.
Dunk’s pumpkins hadn’t done a thing: surprise, surprise. Nora knew from checking the seed catalog that pumpkins were supposed to be planted in late May or early June. Dunk scuffed at the dirt where his seeds were buried, as if to rouse them with a good, hard kick. A clod of earth flew up and hit Amy on the cheek.
“Dunk!” Coach Joe called. “Gardening is not a contact sport.”
“Sorry,” Dunk muttered.
Coach Joe explained to the class that as the shoots grew taller, the gardeners would have to thin their plants, uprooting some of them so the others would have more room to grow. Soon they’d have to start weeding their rows, too.
“Today we’ll give them a good watering,” Coach Joe said.
Dunk looked eagerly at the hose. Nora could tell he’d like to spray Emma so she’d squeal and giggle.
“Actually,” Coach Joe said, looking Dunk’s way, “I’ll water them.”
As the class stood back from the garden patch, Coach Joe sent a fine spray of water down each row to soak deep into the soil.
Seeds + sun + water + oxygen + nutrients in the soil = radishes.
Even though Nora knew it made scientific sense, right this minute it did seem like a miracle.
On Wednesday, Coach Joe’s class wrote “persona” poems about the Civil War.
A persona poem was written from the point of view of a person who was someone other than you. The person in the poem could be the president of either side, like Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, or a general, like Grant or Robert E. Lee, or a common soldier, or a soldier’s loved one back home. It didn’t even have to be a person. It could be an animal or a bird, a flower or a flag, a musket or a cannon (Dunk brightened at that).
The point of a persona poem was to get inside the head of someone else (not that a cannon had a head) and see the world through that person’s eyes (not that a cannon had eyes).
“I want you to think hard about your person,” Coach Joe said. “When you try on someone else’s identity, you might end up seeing something different from what you first supposed—completely different. That’s the beauty and excitement of a persona poem.”
So now Nora sat at her desk, trying to write a poem about the Civil War from the point of view of an ant.
Coach Joe had also told the class that the poem could be sort of like a riddle, where the reader might have to guess who was speaking: Was it a victorious general or a defeated one? A wounded soldier? A nurse? A horse who had ridden into battle? A butterfly with blood-stained wings?
Nora decided to make her readers read to the end of her poem to find out it was being told by an ant.
Though if they knew the poem was written by Nora, that might not be too hard to figure out.
What would an ant think about the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, which inspired President Abraham Lincoln to write his famous Gettysburg Address?
Nora picked up her pencil and started to write.
“July 3, 1863,” she wrote at the top of her page, for her title.
Of course, an ant wouldn’t know what day it was. Coach Joe had told them something in a poem that couldn’t be true was called “poetic license.” Nora didn’t approve of poetic license. But it was hard to write a persona poem from the point of view of an ant without it. After all, an ant wouldn’t think in words! And an ant wouldn’t be writing a poem!
JULY 3, 1863
Feet stamp.
Feet tramp.
So many feet!
The walls of my tunnel collapse.
I dig and dig.
The walls fall in faster than I can dig them out.
Cannons boom.
Rifles fire.
So many guns!
My antennae hurt from sounds so loud.
My feet hurt from digging so hard.
This is a bad day
To be an ant.
Coach Joe had said they weren’t going to share these poems in class; he needed to use the huddle for important announcements about the poetry unit. But Nora could hear KABOOMs coming across the room from the direction of Dunk’s pod. His cannon persona poem sounded an awful lot like his pumpkin haiku.
As Coach Joe summoned the students back to his football-shaped rug, Nora noticed that Emma stayed at her desk, crying. Actual tears were running down Emma’s face.
Why?
Emma silently handed Nora her own persona poem in response to Nora’s questioning gaze.
NEWS FROM GETTYSBURG
My ma got the telegram today.
My pa is dead.
That was all Emma had written so far. Her poem was even shorter than a haiku. But Emma was crying as if her own mother had gotten the telegram and her own father had died on the battlefield.
“But—” Nora tried to think of something comforting to say. “It didn’t really happen, Emma. Your father is completely fine!”
“It did happen!” Emma wailed. “Not to me, but to somebody. It did happen! Thousands of soldiers died at Gettysburg! One of them had to have had a daughter my age, and her mother got a telegram. It did happen to someone!”
Nora didn’t know what to say next.
Emma was right.
But why would you cry about something that had happened so long ago? Why would you cry over a historical fact?
Yet as she watched Emma reach for a tissue and wipe her streaming eyes, her own eyes felt oddly damp around the corners.
My ma got the telegram today.
My pa is dead.
“Oh, Emma, don’t cry.” Nora awkwardly patted Emma’s arm as Emma blew her nose. But now Nora was practically crying, too.
Coach Joe left his rocking chair in the huddle area and came over to see what was going on.
Nora handed him Emma’s poem, and he read its two short lines.
Then he put one hand on Emma’s shoulder and one on Nora’s.
“This, my friends,” he said, “is the power of poetry.”
“I called this huddle,” Coach Joe said, “to tell you the two big activities for the end of our poetry unit. First, we’re going to have a class trip.”
“Where can you go for a poetry trip?” Tamara asked.
That was a reasonable question. Nora had never heard of any nearby poetry museum. No famous dead poets had lived anywhere near Plainfield, so it couldn’t be a class trip to a famous dead poet’s house.
“We are goin
g on a trip to write poetry,” Coach Joe said.
“But we write poetry all the time in our pods,” Mason pointed out.
“Ah,” Coach Joe said, “but in the history of poetry, most poems have not been written by people sitting at school in pods.”
That was almost certainly true.
“Many great poets, like William Wordsworth, wrote their poems outdoors in nature. Wordsworth wrote many of his while wandering around the mountains in the Lake District in England.”
“Are we going to England?” Emma asked, excited now.
“No, Emma,” he said. “That’s a bit far and costly for us, I’m afraid.”
Nora would enjoy a class trip writing poetry in the mountains near Plainfield. She could write a poem and scout for a new colony of ants at the same time.
“Other poets and writers,” Coach Joe went on, “did their best work while sitting in cafés in Paris, sipping their cafés au lait and eating wonderful buttery rolls called croissants.” He smacked his lips appreciatively.
“Are we going to Paris?” Emma asked, sounding even more excited.
Coach Joe grinned. “Not Paris, either. But we are going to a café. We’ll walk to Café Rive Gauche—that’s the name of the arty neighborhood of Paris. And we will drink chocolat—hot chocolate—and eat croissants. We’ll take our poetry notebooks with us and sit there and write. I won’t give you any prompts. I’ll let you draw your inspiration from the trip itself.”
“I don’t want to eat a croissant,” Nora heard Mason mutter to Brody.
“I’ve never had a croissant,” Brody whispered back. “Another new thing for me!”
“What’s the other big poetry activity?” Elise asked, as flushed with excitement about writing poetry in a café as Emma had been about going to England or France.
“We’re going to have a special visitor to our class,” Coach Joe replied. “A real poet. Well, all of you are also real poets now. A poet is someone who writes poetry. But our guest is a published poet, with several books of poetry to her credit. Her name is Molly Finger”—some kids laughed at the name—“and she’ll tell us how she writes her poems, what her creative process is. And she’ll read some of your poems, too, and give you some comments.”
Nora wondered what Molly Finger would say about a bunch of ant poems. She’d probably tell Nora to find something more poetic than ants to write about. Butterflies, maybe. Or daffodils. Coach Joe had read the class a famous rhyming poem about daffodils. Nora remembered the last lines of it: “And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.” She didn’t think she could ever write a poem that good about ants.
That afternoon, it was a dog-walking, not a cat-cuddling, day at the animal shelter. Nora was surprised at how disappointed she felt to be out walking a rusty terrier named Tobster instead of petting a ginger cat named Cassidy.
“Do we have time to look at the cats?” she asked Amy’s mother after she and Amy had each walked three dogs.
“Sure,” Mrs. Talia said. No mom was more willing to let kids hang out with animals than Amy’s mom—unless the animal happened to be a snake.
Maybe Cassidy had already been adopted. For his sake, Nora hoped he was. Nobody—well, nobody who wasn’t already a dedicated ant lover—could meet Cassidy and hold him on her lap for a whole half an hour without wanting to take him home to keep.
Nora’s pulse quickened as she walked past the cages of meowing cats in the cat section of the shelter. She made herself go methodically, reading the name of each one, even though she knew Cassidy was either there or he wasn’t, however quickly or slowly she looked for him.
Then, there he was: “Cassidy. Two years old. Loving and affectionate. Reason for adoptability: Elderly owner had to move into a pet-free care community.”
Poor Cassidy!
He saw Nora and came to rub himself against the mesh side of his cage, meowing plaintively. Nora was sure he recognized her from the week before.
Cats could do that.
Unlike ants.
Nora stifled this disloyal thought. Ants were ants. Cats were cats. It wasn’t fair to blame ants for being ants any more than it was fair to praise cats for being cats.
“Do you want to hold him?” Amy’s mother asked gently.
“She wants to adopt him,” Amy said. “Right, Nora? You do want to adopt him, I know you do.”
Five minutes later, Nora sat in the cat-human meeting room with Cassidy purring on her lap, even louder than he had the week before.
Ten minutes later, Amy’s mom had called Nora’s mom, who was done for the day at the university, and her mom was on her way to the shelter in her car.
Half an hour later, Nora was the owner of a cat carrier, a cat litter box, cat litter, cat bowls, scientifically approved cat food, half a dozen cat toys, a cat brush, a book on cat care, and a cat of her very own.
“Now, Nora,” her mother said when they reached home. “You’ll want to get Cassidy used to our house gradually. It takes a good while for cats to accustom themselves to new people and new places.”
Nora barely listened as she lugged Cassidy’s carrier, with Cassidy in it, up to her room and set it on her bed. Nora wasn’t a new person to Cassidy. She was his person, the person he already loved, who had met him at the shelter not once but twice, each time as he purred louder than all the cats in the world put together.
“Go away,” she told her mother, who stood hovering in the doorway. “I can handle it.”
“All right,” her mother said. “I’m downstairs if you need me.”
Once the door was safely shut, Nora spoke softly to Cassidy, in her most soothing voice. “You’re home now, Cassidy, and you’re never going to have to live in a cage again. I’ll take such good care of you, and I’ll love you so much.”
She hoped her ants weren’t listening.
But she knew they weren’t.
Drawing in her breath, Nora unlatched the carrier door and reached in for Cassidy.
With one swift motion of an angry paw, the cat swiped his claws against Nora’s hand as he sprang from the carrier, leaped across her covers with a single bound, and darted under her bed.
“Cassidy!” Nora moaned, staring at her bleeding scratch.
She got down on the floor and peered into the dusty darkness beneath the bed, barely able to make out Cassidy’s crouched form and glowing eyes.
“Cassidy!” Nora pleaded. “Come out! You’re safe! This is your forever home, and I’m your forever owner!”
Cassidy didn’t budge.
Nora tried more coaxing, to no avail.
She tried ignoring him. He was apparently glad to be ignored.
She abandoned him to go to dinner, hoping that when she returned he’d be there to greet her, past sulks forgotten. He wasn’t.
At dinner, her mother had just said, “Well, these adjustments take time.” She might as well have said, “I told you so.”
All evening long, Nora waited for Cassidy to come out from under the bed. She set up his litter box in a corner of her room, to be moved downstairs to the mudroom when he was finally settled in as a member of the family—if that ever happened. She put food in his food bowl and water in his water bowl, hoping the smell of the food might draw him out. It didn’t.
At bedtime, she checked on her ants, busy digging and tunneling as contentedly as could be. Well, the few ants that weren’t dead.
Maybe she should have stuck with ants.
As she went downstairs to say good night to her parents, willing them not to ask her how things were going with Cassidy, the phone rang.
“I’ll get it!” she announced, relieved at an excuse not to have a long conversation. It was usually Amy calling for her, unless it was somebody trying to get her parents to give money for something.
It was Amy.
“What?” Nora asked. “I can’t hear you. You have to speak louder.”
“I can’t,” Amy said in a normal voice. Then she started whispering again, so softly
Nora could barely make out the words.
“My mother doesn’t know….Oh, Nora, I did it!”
“Did what?” Nora asked, but she already knew.
“I found a snake!”
Cassidy hadn’t come out from under Nora’s bed when Nora left for school Thursday morning. When she hurried home from school that afternoon, he was still in hiding. She couldn’t tell if his food or water had been touched. His litter box still looked brand-new.
On Friday, he had eaten a few mouthfuls of the dry cat food in his bowl and had drunk a few sips of water, unless the water had evaporated into the air. There was one little wet spot in the cat box, and one small cat poop. That was something, but not enough to ease the hurt in Nora’s heart.
On Saturday morning, when Nora came upstairs after breakfast, she froze in the doorway. Cassidy was on her unmade bed, curled into a ball. Had he finally realized this was Nora’s house, Nora, the girl who had cuddled with him so lovingly at the shelter?
Barely breathing, Nora began inching her way into the room, so as not to startle him.
On the third inch, Cassidy leaped from her pillow and fled back under the bed.
Amy tried to console her on the phone.
“Cats aren’t like dogs, Nora. Snookers was better than Mush Ball, but it took her a long while. And Mush Ball didn’t come out from behind the couch for a long time!”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. A whole day?”
It had been three days now for Cassidy.
As the hours slipped by, it was hard not to despair. The Confederate troops and residents of Vicksburg had held out against Grant’s army for forty-seven whole days. What if Cassidy held out that long against Nora? Did Cassidy think of Nora as an invading army?
What if Cassidy held out against Nora forever?
At five-forty-five that afternoon, Nora stood by the front door of her house, her duffel packed with pj’s, toothbrush, hairbrush, and clean clothes for tomorrow, waiting for her mother to find her car keys.
The Trouble with Friends Page 5
