The Trouble with Ants

by Claudia Mills

  Mason shook his head.

  “Joining some club that has Dunk in it?” Brody asked.

  Nora tried to think of a club Dunk would join. She couldn’t.

  “No,” Mason told them. “You’ll never guess. No one could ever guess. So I’ll have to tell you. My mother is trying to talk me into…”

  He paused for effect.

  “Figure skating! Ice skating! Doing fancy twirls and leaps and stuff on the ice!”

  Nora couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. Brody doubled over, laughing, too.

  Dog came up, panting, a ball in his mouth.

  “At least Dog doesn’t think it’s funny,” Mason said.

  But Dog did look as if he were grinning as he dropped the ball at Mason’s feet.

  “If only,” Mason said, “I could find a way to persuade my parents to stop trying to persuade me to do things!”

  Monday evening, Nora’s mother was off listening to an astronomy talk at the university, so Nora and her father were home all by themselves. All by themselves, except for her ants.

  “I’m going to work on my ant experiments,” Nora told her father as they cleared away the dishes after dinner.

  “Do you need any help?” he asked.

  “No!” Nora hadn’t meant to sound so fierce, but it was one thing to have a footnote thanking Professor Neil Alpers for suggesting her line of research. It would be quite another thing if she had to thank Prof. Neil Alpers for helping with the research itself.

  “Okay, sweetie” was all her father said. “If you need me, you know where to find me.”

  Nora had already cut a large sheet from a huge roll of butcher paper stored in the attic. She thought her ants would be more comfortable walking across paper than across the slippery, cold, bare bathtub. Now she laid the paper in the bottom of the tub, measured a square in the middle of it, and marked the square with bright blue chalk.

  Gently, she extricated a dozen ants from her farm. Those would be enough ants to start with. She placed them in the middle of the square and set a small piece of cracker outside the square. Then she set the stopwatch on the tablet she had borrowed from her father.

  The ants walked about. In two minutes and twenty-three seconds, the first ant reached the chalk line on one edge of the square, the edge farthest from the cracker.

  Then the ant stopped.

  Another ant followed her. (Nora knew they were both female ants, because all worker ants are females.)

  That ant stopped, too.

  Nora stared. Ants didn’t seem to want to cross a line made of chalk! How could they even know there was a line there? Why would they care? They must have smelled the chalk or felt the chalk dust with their feet.

  As Nora continued to watch, two other ants stopped short their wanderings at a different edge of the square, also reluctant to walk across the chalk line.

  She drew in her breath. This was a pattern! This was a real, observable, scientific result!

  But three other ants, which had reached the edge of the chalk square closest to the cracker, hesitated, and then did cross over the line, taking a direct path to the cracker.

  Ants were willing to cross the chalk line if there was food on the other side!

  Wishing she had remembered to bring her parents’ video camera up to the bathroom, Nora contented herself with watching and timing. Sir Isaac Newton hadn’t had a video camera to record the falling apple. He had just watched it fall.

  For the next hour, Nora sat on the rim of the bathtub, completely still, blissfully watching, measuring, and timing her ants.

  On Tuesday, Emma wore a pink sweater with a fluffy white cat on it to school. The cat wasn’t flat; it poofed out of the sweater with soft, fuzzy white yarn. An actual small plaid ribbon perched on top of its head.

  The girls at lunch squealed with rapture.

  “It looks so real!” Bethy said. “Can I pat its fur?”

  “If your hands are clean,” Emma told her. “Not if you’ve been eating.”

  “I haven’t even touched my tuna melt yet,” Bethy promised.

  With one gentle finger, she stroked the fur of Emma’s sweater cat.

  “It’s so soft!” she exclaimed.

  “Can I touch it?” Elise asked.

  “Me, too!” chimed in Tamara. Even Amy gave the sweater an admiring smile.

  Nora made sure to take a first bite of her tuna melt sandwich so that her hands wouldn’t meet Emma’s cat-petting standard.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, with her mouth full. “I was starving!”

  “It’s soooo cute,” Amy admitted. “Her ribbon even has sparkles on it.”

  “Mega-cute,” Elise agreed. “Look! She has real whiskers!”

  “The cutest cat in the world!” Tamara gushed.

  The sudden frosty look on Emma’s face let Tamara know that her praise of the sweater cat had gone too far.

  “Except for Precious Cupcake, of course,” Tamara hastily corrected herself. “Precious Cupcake is the cutest real cat in the world. This is the cutest cat on a sweater in the world.”

  Emma’s smile returned.

  “I know,” she said.

  Nora chomped down on another bite of tuna melt. She wouldn’t have minded all the fuss over Emma’s cat sweater if she hadn’t known how differently the girls—well, except for Amy—would have reacted if she had worn a pink sweater covered with little black ants.

  “Ewww!”

  “Gross!”

  “They look so real!”

  Screams from Emma. A stampede away from the table.

  Maybe Nora should defy the code of the Plainfield Elementary animal kingdom and go sit with Mason and Brody and their other friends. But she knew she wouldn’t; she couldn’t. Animal kingdom behavior wasn’t that easy to change, even if a human animal really wanted to change it.

  Nora took a big swig of milk to force down a bite of sandwich she was having trouble swallowing.

  On Wednesday, Dunk wore a T-shirt that said I HATE CATS. Beneath the slogan was a big red circle crossing out the silhouette of a cat. The T-shirt looked brand-new, unlike Dunk’s usual clothes, which bore stubborn stains of catsup, mustard, and whatever his horrid dog, Wolf, had rolled in lately.

  As soon as Dunk yanked off his jacket in the cubby room, Emma’s eyes widened.

  “Ooh!” she seethed, jabbing him in the chest. Her rage today seemed real to Nora rather than pretend. You could sound mad even if you weren’t really angry. It would be a lot harder to make your cheeks flush on demand.

  Dunk grinned.

  Other boys whooped and hollered and thumped him on the back.

  Emma’s friends formed a protective circle around her as Nora stood watching. Nora had no interest in taking sides in the war between cat lovers and dog lovers in Coach Joe’s class. But if she were to take sides, right now she’d side with Emma. It was one thing to love your own kind of pet. It was another to hate someone else’s kind of pet.

  When Dunk tried to sit next to Emma in Coach Joe’s huddle, even before Coach Joe could make Dunk move, Emma got up and flounced away.

  Dunk gave his usual donkey-like guffaw.

  He plainly didn’t get the difference between Emma’s fake rage and her real rage.

  But Nora did.

  After school, Nora hung out with Amy. The two girls went for a walk with Amy’s two dogs, Nora walking Amy’s big dog, Woofer, on one leash while Amy walked her little dog, Tweeter, on another. It was considerate of Amy to have a dog for each of them.

  Amy had a cat for each friend, too. Earlier in the afternoon, Mush Ball had been cuddling on Nora’s lap while Snookers had been snuggling with Amy.

  Amy even had a rabbit for each of them out in a hutch in her backyard, and a pair of parakeets in a cage in her dining room.

  But there was one pet Amy didn’t have, the best pet of all: ants.

  “So which do you think is better, dogs or cats?” Nora asked, knowing which answer she hoped Amy would give.

  “Nei
ther! I mean, why do we have to take sides? Dogs are better at being dogs, and cats are better at being cats.”

  Nora couldn’t have said it better herself.

  Woofer stopped to smell something buried under the new snow. Nora had read that a dog’s sense of smell was thousands of times better than a human’s. Even though a dog brain was only one-tenth the size of a human brain, the smelling part of its brain was forty times larger.

  For a moment, Nora envied Amy for having so many different animals she could study, so many notebooks’ worth of fascinating facts. But maybe it was better to study one subject in greater depth. Her mother was an expert on Saturn, not Saturn and Jupiter and Mars. It was enough to be an expert on Saturn—and not even on all of Saturn, just on its rings.

  As they walked on, Amy said, “I thought I’d write my persuasive speech about how people shouldn’t dress up their pets in costumes. Pets hate costumes! And it’s almost like we’re making fun of them, laughing at how ridiculous they look. You know what I mean?”

  Nora certainly did.

  “But then I thought…well, you know…”

  “Emma,” Nora said.

  “She wouldn’t like it.”

  That was an understatement.

  “But I feel sorry for Precious Cupcake sometimes, I really do,” Amy said.

  “Me, too,” Nora said.

  Woofer stopped to sniff at a tree. Tweeter strained at his leash to dart after a squirrel. And then the two girls walked on.

  That evening, Nora worked on writing her ant article. She thought of a catchy title for it: “The Ants Go Marching—Until They Reach the Chalk Line!” Maybe the editors would think that was an attention-getting title. She would certainly want to read an article with that title.

  She had repeated the same experiment three times on Monday night and gotten the same results. That was important in science. You didn’t know if your results were real, and not just a fluke, unless you got the same results over and over again. So she put that in her article, too. And she made a chart of all her measurements: how long it had taken the ants to reach the perimeter of the square, how long it had taken them to cross the chalk line to reach the cracker.

  This was going to be the best ant article ever!

  In school on Thursday, Dunk wore his I HATE CATS T-shirt again, apparently not noticing that it hadn’t gotten the results he wanted on Wednesday. Nora was struck by how much more quickly her ants were willing to change their behavior when a strategy wasn’t working.

  Emma wasn’t wearing her fuzzy-cat sweater, but she had on her cat necklace and a cat charm bracelet. She spent most of the day, as far as Nora could tell, fiddling with them. Lunchtime was nonstop cat videos. The other girls seemed a bit worn out with gushing.

  “I think we saw that one already,” Amy said.

  “My mother said I could have an ice-skating party for my birthday,” Tamara said, daring to change the subject.

  Nora couldn’t help wondering if Mason’s mother had signed him up for ice-skating lessons yet.

  “I love ice skating!” Elise said.

  “Me, too!” said Bethy.

  “Speaking of ice skating, I have a video of Precious Cupcake outside in the snow,” Emma said. “Let me see if I can find it.”

  But the other girls just kept on talking about how much fun an ice-skating party would be, especially if they could wear special ice-skating skirts and send invitations cut out in the shape of ice skates.

  At home that afternoon, Nora sat down at the computer in the family room to try to type her ant article. A real science journal would expect articles to be typed, not written out by hand. She didn’t have a computer of her own, but her parents let her use the computer and printer on the desk in the family room whenever she wanted. Luckily, her mother made her father keep all of his mess contained in his own office, so the family room desk was always an invitingly neat place for Nora to work.

  If only she were a faster typist. Coach Joe’s class went to the computer lab twice a week for keyboarding, but Nora still typed so slowly and made so many mistakes. When she heard her parents typing, their fingers flew over the keys with amazing speed, especially her father’s. He could probably be in the Guinness World Records book for fastest typing.

  Sitting at the computer, Nora created a new file—Nora ant article—and typed in her first sentence: “Is there aynthing in the wrld more fscinatnig than ants?”

  Coach Joe liked them to begin with a question to engage the reader. She hoped the editors of a grown-up science journal would like the same thing.

  Reading her sentence over, she saw four mistakes in it. It took her another two minutes to correct them: “Is there anything in the world more fascinating than ants?”

  Maybe she could ask her father to type the article for her. It wasn’t very long. He could probably type it in five minutes. It would take her more like five hours. No, not five hours. Nora wasn’t one for dramatic exaggeration. But it would take her a frustrating amount of time. It wouldn’t be cheating if he typed it for her so long as she added that to her thank-you footnote:

  “I would like to thank Professor Neil Alpers for suggesting this line of research and for typing this article for me.”

  She saved her one completed sentence on the computer—she certainly didn’t want to have to type the whole thing over again—and wandered up to her dad’s messy office. She hadn’t told either of her parents yet about her publication plan. The thought of telling them made her feel shy for some reason. They had always supported her love of science. How could they not, given that they were both scientists themselves? But they might say, “Oh, honey, I don’t think a real grown-up journal is going to want an ant article by a ten-year-old.”

  Would a real grown-up science journal want an ant article by a ten-year-old?

  Nora felt a twinge of doubt.

  Maybe her first sentence didn’t sound scientific enough. Coach Joe’s advice might not apply to scientific articles; maybe those articles weren’t supposed to begin with a question. Their readers were probably already so wild to learn about science that they wanted to jump right in and skip the beginning stuff altogether.

  And she didn’t even know of any ant journals where she could send her article. How would she know which ant journals were the best?

  Her father was hunched over his computer, typing at his usual Guinness World Record speed.

  “What’s up?” he asked, swirling toward her in his big swivel chair.

  “Nothing.” She moved a pile of journals from his couch to the floor so that she could sit down, careful to keep them all in order. Her father claimed that even though his office looked like a mess, he knew exactly where everything was.

  The top journal in the pile was called Nature.

  Nature was a huge subject. It would include every single thing in the natural world. Including ants.

  Nora picked it up and thumbed through it. She saw lots of graphs. She’d have to be sure to put graphs in her article. Luckily, she already knew how to make graphs on the computer. There were lots of footnotes, too, numbered stuff in little type at the bottom of each page. At least she’d have one footnote, the thank-you to Professor Alpers. One footnote was better than nothing.

  “Did you ever have an article in this one?” she asked her dad.

  “Once. That’s a tough one to get in, because it has so many different kinds of science in it.”

  “How did they know to pick you? Did they already know how smart you are?”

  He chuckled. “Hardly. They send each article off to experts in the field. The experts review it blind. That means without knowing who wrote it, so they won’t be influenced by anything except by how good the science is.”

  Nora liked that part. The ant experts who read her article wouldn’t know that she was only ten. They would just care about how much she knew about ants.

  “So anybody could publish an article here if it was good enough?” she persisted.

  Her father nodde
d.

  “Even a kid?”

  To her great disappointment, he didn’t give her an encouraging grin.

  “Well…”

  “Why not a kid?” Nora demanded.

  “Well, there’s no reason why a person’s age in itself should make a difference,” he said slowly. “But I have to say, it’s exceedingly unlikely that a child would be able to compete against adult scientists with their doctorate degrees and fancy labs.”

  Nora lifted her chin.

  Did any of those adult scientists, with their doctorate degrees and fancy labs, love ants the way she did?

  And that girl in the record book, Emily Rosa: she hadn’t had a doctorate degree or a fancy lab, and she was only a year older than Nora.

  “Is there anything you came in to ask me?” her father asked, glancing over at his computer screen as if he wanted to get back to work.

  “No,” Nora said. “Can I borrow this?” She held up the copy of Nature.

  “Sure.”

  Nora thought he looked amused. Had he figured out that she was planning to send her ant article off to Nature as soon as she finished typing it? Now she was definitely going to type it all by herself, without help from any grown-up. She was never going to ask for help from a grown-up on anything ever again!

  Did her father think she was funny?

  Even worse, did he think she was cute?

  Without another word, Nora stalked out of his office and shut the door.

  Let her father try to hide a smile! She was going to show Professor Neil Alpers just what a ten-year-old ant-loving scientist could do.

  It took Nora two hours to type her article. When she printed it out, it was only four pages, including the graphs, which were in color.

  Was that too short for a real grown-up article?

  No, she decided. What mattered in science were your experiment and what it proved: your data. You didn’t need to go on and on about it for pages, just repeating the same points over and over.

  She looked again at her graphs.

  Ants busy in their tunnels were the most beautiful thing in the world. But the second-most beautiful thing was graphs about ants, printed in color!