handful of grass, and stuffs it in his brother’s mouth. Adam, impassive, spits it out. Emmett walks away, shaking his head in pity, victor in yet another one-sided debate.
Adam studies his living map. After a while, the time-lapse flow of color-coded ants begins to suggest how signals might get passed along without any central signaler calling the shots. He moves the food a little. He scatters the ants. He makes barriers and times the ants’ recovery. When the Popsicle is gone, he puts bits of his lunch in different spots and measures how long it takes for those bits, too, to disappear. The colony is swift and cunning—as cunning at getting what they need as anything human.
The bells of the Episcopal carillon peal their foursquare hymn. Six o’clock—time for all delinquent Appiches to head home for dinner. The day’s yield is twelve scribbled pages, thirty-six time-keyed photos, and half a theory, none of which would earn him a broken yo-yo on the open exchange.
All autumn long, whenever he isn’t in school, mowing lawns, or working at the soft-serve, he studies ants. He plots graphs and draws charts. His respect for the cleverness of ants grows without limit. Flexible behavior in the face of changing conditions: What else can you call it but wicked smart?
At year’s end, he enters the district science fair. Some Observations of Ant Colony Behavior and Intelligence. There are better-looking efforts throughout the hall, and ones where the student’s dad has clearly done all the science. But none of the other entrants has looked at a thing the way he has.
The judges ask, “Who helped you with this?”
“No one,” he says, with maybe too much pride.
“Your parents? Your science teacher? An older brother or sister?”
“My sister gave me the nail polish.”
“Did you get the idea from somebody? Did you copy an experiment that you aren’t citing?”
The thought that such an experiment might already have been carried out crushes him.
“You made all those measurements yourself? And you started four months ago? During vacation?”
His eyes fill with tears. He shrugs.
The judges award him no medal—not even a bronze. They say it’s because he has no bibliography. A bibliography is a required part of the formal report. Adam knows the real reason. They think he stole. They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.
IN SPRING, his sister Leigh goes down to Lauderdale with several girlfriends for spring break. On the second night of vacation, outside a beachfront clam shack, she gets into a red convertible Ford Mustang with a guy she met three hours earlier. No one ever sees her again.
His parents are frantic. They fly down to Florida twice. They scream at law officials and spend lots of money. Months pass. There are no leads. Adam realizes there never will be any. Whoever has taken his sister is shrewd, meticulous, human. Intelligent.
Leonard Appich won’t give up. “You all know Leigh. You know how she is. She’s run away again. We’re not holding any service until we know for sure what happened to her.”
Know for sure. They know. Adam’s mother throws Leigh’s words from the previous spring back in the man’s face. You’ve had it out for me since before I was born. Patterns rise up, and she grabs at them. “You planted an elm for her, when they’d been dying everywhere for years? What were you thinking? You never did like her, did you? And now she’s raped and lying dead in a landfill, and we’ll never know where!”
Lenny breaks her elbow, by accident. In self-defense, he keeps telling anyone who’ll listen. That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.
. . .
JEAN TAKES HER BROTHERS into the forest preserve. There, the three of them hold the service their father won’t allow. They build a bonfire and tell stories. Twelve-year-old Leigh, running away from home after Dad slapped her for whispering asshole under her breath. Fourteen-year-old Leigh, punishing them all for hating her by refusing to speak to anyone except in her sophomore Spanish. Eighteen-year-old Leigh, playing Emily Webb, coming back to Earth to relive her twelfth birthday. A brilliant ghost who had the whole high school in tears.
Adam takes the elm plaque he inscribed for his sister and throws it on the fire. A tree