Amy, who liked to putter in the kitchen, fixed a special snack in Nora’s honor called “ants on a log.” The logs were stalks of celery filled with peanut butter. The ants were raisins stuck on top. After gobbling them up, the girls settled themselves cozily on the couch in the family room. It was strange to be doing such ordinary things when a new niece or nephew was getting ready to be born.
Mrs. Talia came by with an update from Nora’s mom. “It’s all moving along, much faster than the doctor expected.”
“That’s good,” Nora said. She assumed it was good, since Amy’s mom sounded pleased.
“How did Sarah prepare the nursery without knowing the sex?” Amy’s mom asked. “It’s so hard to find anything for babies that isn’t pink or blue.”
Nora shrugged. Surely there had to be some baby decorations that were yellow or green or orange or purple. While she didn’t particularly mind pink, it was bizarre how people thought that every girl on earth wanted to live surrounded by overwhelming pinkness. No girl Nora knew wanted to have everything in her life pink.
Well, no girl except for Emma.
Thinking of Emma made Nora remember the science fair.
“Have you and Anthony come up with a science-fair idea yet?” she asked Amy.
“We can’t decide whether to do something about animals for me, like testing rabbits’ sense of smell, or something about music for him, like figuring out why different strings on the violin make different sounds.”
Both ideas sounded better to Nora than anything she and Emma were likely to come up with. What would Emma consider a truly great science-fair idea? How to measure the cuteness of a cat? How long a cat would be willing to wear a silly outfit? How to get a cat to sit still for endless cat photographs?
How on earth were she and Emma going to be able to agree on anything?
But Nora wasn’t going to let the science fair be ruined this year. She wasn’t!
Maybe…if Emma liked cats so much because of their cuteness, it was possible she also liked babies. Lots of people thought babies were cute. The two of them could study the science of newborn babies: how they reacted to heat, to light, to sound. Nora had already figured out all those things about the ants in her ant farm. Now she could find out how a human baby compared to ants.
If she had to have Emma as a science-fair partner, and had to have a new niece or nephew living in her house, maybe she could do both things together and make it all work out somehow.
Nora ended up staying at Amy’s house for dinner. The girls helped Amy’s parents prepare all the fixings for make-your-own burritos, as Amy’s second-grade brother, Sheridan, swiped pieces of tomato and avocado as fast as they could chop them. With the dogs and cats underfoot, it was definitely different from Nora’s quiet, peaceful house. Though maybe her house wasn’t going to be quiet and peaceful for much longer.
When dinner was over, just as Nora was helping clear the table, Amy’s mother’s cell phone rang. She handed it to Nora, beaming. “It’s for you!”
Nora held the phone to her ear.
“Oh, honey,” her mother said, “Sarah had a healthy seven-pound, eight-ounce beautiful baby girl! She’s tired. Both of them are tired—being born is hard work! But mother and baby are doing great. I wanted you to be the first to know.”
Now there was a tiny new person existing in the world, and not just in the world, but in Nora’s own family.
That was an amazing thought.
“Does she have a name?” Nora asked.
“Nellie,” her mother replied. “Nellie Suzanne. Aunt Nora and Niece Nellie—they sound good together, don’t you think? I’ll be home later tonight. But for now, start celebrating!”
So Nora had become Aunt Nora, with a brand-new baby niece.
A niece who was soon to help her earn a blue ribbon at the Plainfield Elementary science fair.
Blue, not pink.
“You and your partner can start brainstorming your science-fair ideas,” Coach Joe told the class the next day at the start of science time.
Nora looked at Emma.
Emma looked at Nora.
Nora made herself wait for Emma to break the silence. She knew she had a tendency to be outspoken when it came to science, and Coach Joe had told the class that he wanted both partners to contribute equally to the project in every way.
After a long moment, Emma lifted her chin.
“Nothing to do with ants,” she said.
Nora had already decided she was going to give her ants a rest, but Emma’s negativity about them made her bristle.
“Nothing to do with cats,” Nora shot back.
Emma adjusted the pink bow in her curly blond hair. Emma was always fussing with her hair or her clothes; Nora had absolutely no interest in either.
“Nothing to do with electricity,” Emma said.
Nothing to do with pinkness, Nora wanted to retort. If she didn’t speak up soon enough, Emma would want to display their results on a pink poster board, or at least write them on a white poster board with a pink marker. But Nora wasn’t going to let the conversation get any more ridiculous than it was already. It was time to stop talking about what they weren’t going to do and to start talking about what they were.
“I was thinking,” Nora said. “My older sister just had a baby—last night, in fact—and—”
Emma squealed so loudly that kids at other pods turned around to look.
“Ohhhh!” Emma closed her eyes and clasped her hands against her chest. “I loooooove babies! Don’t you?”
Nora hadn’t seen her new niece yet. Sarah and Nellie were coming home from the hospital tomorrow, Saturday. So Nora had no idea if she was going to loooooove babies.
She might.
Or she might not.
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
Nora had known that would be the first thing Emma would ask. It was strange how important everyone thought that was, as if everything about the rest of your life hung on whether you were born a male or a female. Nora and Amy had more in common with Mason and Brody than they did with Emma. A lot more.
“A girl,” Nora answered. “Nellie.”
“Ohhh! I looooove her name!”
Maybe Emma’s rapture over babies in general, and Nellie in particular, was a good sign that Emma would also like the idea of studying how newborns reacted to heat, light, and sound. Well, how one newborn reacted. That was a problem with their project. You couldn’t really prove anything about all babies by studying one baby. Still, one baby was a start.
“So,” Nora pressed on, “Nellie’s going to be staying at my house for a while, and I thought maybe you could come over—”
“Yes! Like, tomorrow? Could I come over tomorrow?”
“Well…” Nora thought for a minute. Sarah might need a day or two to get Nellie settled before the scientists arrived with their notebooks. “I should check first with my sister. And I should probably ask her, you know, if she’s okay with our doing all of this.”
“Our doing all of what?”
Nora had forgotten to tell Emma the full plan.
“The science fair! Doing our project on Nellie. How she reacts to different stimuli. Things like light, heat, sound.”
Emma stared at Nora. Plainly Emma didn’t get it.
Nora tried to explain more clearly. “Like, how will her behavior change if we put her in a dark room or a bright room? Or a warm room or a cold room?”
Emma still sat, staring.
“I already tested all those things on my ants,” Nora said. “Now we can test them on a baby.”
Emma found her voice. “A baby is…Nora, you can’t….It’s not the same….Babies are not like ants!”
That was precisely what the science-fair project was supposed to show: Were babies like ants or not? But Nora could see that Emma wasn’t on board with the project.
Nora had been right the first time. Working together with Emma on the science fair was going to be impossible.
At lunch, as soo
n as the girls—Emma, Bethy, Elise, Tamara, Amy, and Nora—were seated at their usual table, Emma announced that Nora was a brand-new aunt of a brand-new niece.
The other girls—except for Amy, who already knew every detail—reacted to this news the way they always reacted when Emma showed them endless videos of Precious Cupcake on her cell phone. Emma somehow seemed to bring out squealing and gushing in all who surrounded her.
“Awww!” said Bethy.
“I love her name!” said Elise.
“You’re Aunt Nora!” said Tamara.
“Do you have any pictures?” Emma asked.
“When can we see her?” a chorus of voices asked all at once.
“Soon,” Nora promised.
“Like, how soon?” Emma demanded.
“We want to see her when she’s teeny-tiny,” Bethy chimed in.
“Like, this weekend?” Emma asked.
“She’s not even home yet,” Nora protested.
“Well, as soon as she gets home,” Emma persisted.
Nora smiled weakly. She hoped Sarah would let her host a baby-viewing party, as Emma was clearly going to give her no peace until she did.
“Can we hold her?”
“Can we change her clothes?”
“Can we feed her?”
Nora gave Amy a puzzled look. Amy returned a good-natured shrug, but she tugged on her short, perky braid the way she did when she was excited about something, and her eyes were shining.
Who could have guessed that having your sister give birth to an ordinary human baby could turn you into an instant lunch-table celebrity?
Lunch was followed by another class huddle, this time to explain the next social-studies project. Nora wished they could spend March focusing on the science fair. Well, she had wished that before she had found herself partnered with Emma. It was too much to have a big social-studies project to work on, too. But Coach Joe thought they had to study other things at school besides science.
“Team,” Coach Joe said once he had everybody’s attention. “We are about to head west.”
Nora read bewilderment on her classmates’ faces. She wasn’t sure herself what Coach Joe was going to say next.
“Our American colonists have a brand-new country now,” Coach Joe went on. “We’ve seen them win the American Revolution. We’ve seen them hammer out their Constitution. But now their brand-new country is starting to feel small and cramped. Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark all the way to Oregon to explore new land for settlement. And now, team, you are all going to be heading out west on the Oregon Trail, traveling over two thousand miles, from Missouri to Oregon, by covered wagon.”
Emma raised her hand. “Is this going to be a class trip?”
“It’s going to be a class trip taken during the year 1846, at the height of the trail’s use by westward-bound pioneers. A class trip taken with our imaginations.”
Nora didn’t like the sound of that. She wasn’t as good with imagination as she was with reality.
Coach Joe produced two stacks of index cards, each bound together with a rubber band.
“These are your fate cards,” he said, holding up a stack in each hand.
Nora liked the sound of that even less. Fate was a woo-woo word. People who believed in fate were the same people who believed in luck. They were the people who read their horoscope every day in the newspaper or had some old lady with gold hoop earrings tell their fortune by studying the lines in the palm of their hand. Nora would never do either of those things.
“Each card,” Coach Joe continued, “contains a name of some pioneer on the Oregon Trail. A name and a destiny.”
Another woo-woo word.
“I’m going to hold these out, facedown, and each of you will pick a card. And then, drawing on the reading you’ll be doing in our textbook and the material I’ll be sharing with you in class, you’re going to write a diary for that person.”
“How long does it have to be?” Dunk asked.
“You can make it as long as you want,” Coach Joe said, with a twinkle in his eye. “But the shortest it can be is four entries, one page each, spread out over the time your character spends on the trail.”
At the thought of writing four whole diary entries, Dunk stabbed himself in the chest with an imaginary dagger.
Emma giggled.
Mason asked the next question. “So what kinds of things happen to these people?” Nora could tell that Mason was already envisioning the hideously bad things that were going to happen to him.
“All kinds of things,” Coach Joe replied. “One of you will die on the trail from a disease called cholera. One of you will drown crossing a raging river. One of you will be bitten by a rattlesnake.”
“All three will happen to me,” Mason whispered to Nora and Brody with gloomy satisfaction. “I’ll get bitten by a snake, and then I’ll get cholera, and then I’ll drown. What do you want to bet?”
“One of you will be killed in an Indian raid. The Native Americans, who owned this land first, weren’t pleased, to say the least, to have their land sold to Thomas Jefferson by the king of France.”
“Does anything good happen to anybody?” Brody asked.
“Sure. You might give birth to a baby on the trail.”
More giggles from Emma, echoed by giggles from Bethy, Tamara, and Elise.
“And some of you will get all the way to the fertile valleys of Oregon and settle down to a long and happy life.”
Brody’s face lit up. If anyone was going to live a long and happy life, it had to be Brody.
Nora had a question of her own now.
“Why are there two decks of cards?” she asked. But she already knew the answer.
“One deck has fate cards for boys, and one for girls,” Coach Joe told her.
Nora supposed she should be grateful that at least the cards weren’t blue and pink.
“All right,” Coach Joe said. “Let’s begin. The moment has come for each of you pioneers to find out your fate.”
Dunk grabbed his card first. He seemed to think that the person who chose first had the best chance of getting a good fate. But Nora knew that wasn’t true. With thirteen cards in the boys’ deck, each boy had a one-in-thirteen chance at each fate, whatever order the cards were chosen.
“I’m Tom Talbot,” Dunk announced, staring down at his card. “It says that I’m married to Martha Talbot, and I have three kids. I make it all the way to Oregon and set up a general store. I bet I earn a ton of money selling stuff to the rest of you. I’ll be rich, suckers!” He smirked, obviously as pleased with himself as if he had survived the Oregon Trail and reaped a fortune in real life.
“Good for you, Tom Talbot,” Coach Joe said. “But remember, the point of the assignment isn’t what happens to your character, but what you write about it in your diary.”
Dunk’s face fell. Plainly, he had forgotten that part.
Emma’s best friend, Bethy, chose the first card from the girls’ deck.
“My husband gets shot and killed in an Indian raid, and I crush my leg in a wagon accident. Great!” Bethy moaned.
“Sometimes the worst fates make the best diaries,” Coach Joe told her. “The stories we remember longest, the ones that touch us most deeply, are often the ones without the happy endings. And they definitely aren’t stories where everything is happy from start to finish. A story without problems for its main character isn’t much of a story at all.”
Sheng drew a fate card for being a doctor who helped treat an outbreak of cholera on the trail. He looked pleased.
Amy drew a fate card for being a mother who killed a rattlesnake that was about to attack her children.
“Exciting!” she whispered to Nora. Nora could imagine Amy bravely facing down a rattlesnake, though knowing Amy, she’d probably want to find some way of taming the snake and making it another pet.
Elise’s card told her she’d give birth to a baby in Wyoming, a baby who would die a week later. Nora knew Elise
, who wanted to be an author, would be glad to have a wrenching tragedy to write about.
Brody’s face shone with anticipation as he took his card. Even Nora expected Brody to get a happy fate like Dunk’s. Brody was the happiest person in their class. For all Nora knew, Brody might be the happiest person in the world.
“I’m Bill Breeden,” Brody read. “I like my name! Two Bs, just like Brody Baxter. And I have a faithful dog with me! That’s like my dog! And then I get to Wyoming! And then—”
His voice broke off.
“And then what?” Dunk asked, clearly hoping the answer would be something terrible.
“Then I die,” Brody said. “I get a fever, and I die. I die, and then I’m dead.”
Brody sounded so heartbroken that Nora couldn’t help feeling sad herself. But she pulled herself together.
“It’s just a social-studies project!” she whispered to Brody as Tamara was choosing the next card, taking too long to decide which of the identical-looking, facedown cards to select. “It doesn’t really happen! None of these fates really happen!”
“But he even had my same initials,” Brody whispered back. “And a dog like mine, too.”
Tamara didn’t read her card aloud. Coach Joe hadn’t said people had to share their fates with the rest of the class. Nora decided she wouldn’t share her fate, either.
It was Mason’s turn to pick. “If Brody dies of a fever, I’m going to die of a fever, plus twenty Indian arrows in my chest, plus…maybe a tornado?”
When Mason looked at his card, he seemed as bewildered as Brody had been.
“I live,” Mason said. “I’m Jake Smith, the head of the wagon train, and I get to Oregon, where I have a successful wheat farm. Coach Joe, I think I got the card Brody was supposed to get, and he got the card I was supposed to get.”
Coach Joe grinned at Mason. “Sorry, Mason. You’re luckier than you thought, my friend. You’ll have to make the best of a long life, good health, and prosperity. And, team, no trading fates. What you pick is what you get. That’s the whole thing about fate.”
Nora was surprised to find her pulse quickening as she got ready to take one of the last cards left in the girls’ deck. She forced herself to reach for the closest one.
The Nora Notebooks, Book 2 Page 2
