Ivy and Bean: What's the Big Idea? (2 page)

She was going to be outside for a long time.

She looked at her backyard. Same old yard, same old trampoline, same old dinky plastic playhouse, same old pile of buckets and ropes and stilts. None of them was any fun. Maybe she could play junkyard crash. Junkyard crash was when you stacked up all the stuff you could find and then drove the toy car into the stack. But it was no fun alone. Bean got up and scuffed across the nice green lawn until she reached the not-so-nice green lawn. This part of Bean's lawn had holes and lumps in it. The lumps were mostly places where Bean had buried treasure for kids of the future.

Bean picked up a shovel. To heck with kids of the future. She was bored
now
. And maybe a secret admirer had added something interesting to her treasure, like a ruby skull or a dinosaur egg.

Bean didn't bury her treasure very deep, so it was easy to dig up. This treasure was inside a paper bag, but the paper bag wasn't doing so well. It wasn't really a paper bag anymore. “Holy moly!” Bean said loudly. “I've found treasure!” She pulled the clumps of paper apart. What a disappointment. No ruby skull. No dinosaur egg. Just the same stuff she had buried
two weeks ago: dental floss, tweezers, and a magnifying glass. Some treasure.

Bean flopped over on her stomach. “I'm dying of boredom,” she moaned, hoping her mother would hear, “I'm dyyy-ing.” She coughed in a dying sort of way, “huh-ACK!” and then lay still. Anyone looking from the porch would think she was dead. And then that person would feel bad.

Bean lay still.

Very still.

She could hear her heart thumping.

She could feel the hairs on her arm moving.

Bean opened her eyes. There was an ant scurrying over her arm. Bean pulled the magnifying glass over and peered at the ant. Her arm was like a mountain, and the little ant was like a mountain climber, stumbling along with a tired expression on his face.
Poor, hardworking ant. She knew how he felt because sometimes her parents made her go hiking. She watched as he dodged between hairs and charged down the other side of her arm toward the ground. She offered him a blade of grass to use as a slide, but that seemed to confuse him. He paused, looked anxiously right and left, and then continued on her arm. He had a plan, and he was going to stick to it. Bean watched through the magnifying glass as he scuttled into the grass, rushing along the ground between blades. He was in a big hurry. He met another ant by banging into him, but they didn't even stop to talk. They zipped off in opposite directions.

Bean followed her ant to a patch of dry dirt. There he plunged down a hole.

“Come back,” whispered Bean. She liked her ant. Maybe he would come out if she poked
his house. She found a thin stick and touched the top of the hole. Four ants streamed out and raced in four different directions. Bean didn't think any of them was her ant.

Bean watched the ant hole for a long time. Ants came and went. They all seemed to know where they were going. They all seemed to have important jobs. None of them seemed to notice that they were puny little nothings compared to Bean.

Bean dragged the hose toward the ant hole. She didn't turn the hose on. That would be mean. But she let a little bit of water dribble into the hole, and watched as the dirt erupted with ants. Thousands of ants flung themselves this way and that, racing to safety.

“Help, help,” whispered Bean. “Flood!”

The ants ran in lines away from the water. Some were holding little grains above their heads. They were the hero ants. But even the nonhero ants were busy. They were all far too
busy to notice Bean watching them through the magnifying glass. To them, she was like a planet. She wasn't part of their world. She was too big and too far away for them to see.

Bean looked up into the sky. What if someone was watching her through a giant magnifying glass and thinking the same thing she was? What if she was as small as an ant compared to that someone? And what if that someone was an ant compared to the next world after that?

Wow.

Bean waved at the sky. Hi out there, she thought.

“Criss-cross applesauce, boys and girls,” said Ms. Aruba-Tate.

Along with the rest of the second graders, Bean criss-cross applesauced. Then she sat on her hands for good measure. Rug time was tough. It was the rug. The rug had a map of the United States of America on it. Each day at rug time, all the second graders rushed to sit on Colorado. Colorado was the best state because it had the Rocky Mountains in it. That meant whoever sat on Colorado got to yell “I rock!”

Bean was in Iowa. She didn't rock. She
could
rock. She could lean way over, push Vanessa a tiny little bit, slap the corner of Colorado, and say “I rock!” But then Ms. Aruba-Tate would get mad. Bean knew that from experience. So Bean sat on her hands. Next door, in South Dakota, Ivy was trying to cross one eye without crossing the other. She had been trying all day. She didn't care much about Colorado. Once, she sat on it without even noticing.

Bean decided to pay attention to what Ms. Aruba-Tate was saying. “Today, class, we are having a special science lesson.” Science! Bean stopped thinking about Colorado. Science was usually dirt or fish, and Bean liked both of them. But now, Ms. Aruba-Tate went on, “A team of scientists from the fifth grade will be presenting a report on global warming. And what do I expect from you, class?”

“Respectful listening,” everyone answered. Almost everyone. MacAdam was pulling nubbies out of the rug, and he didn't say anything.

Bean said it, but she felt only a little bit respectful inside. Nobody listened respectfully to second graders. It wasn't fair.

“Let's welcome our fifth-grade scientists!” called out Ms. Aruba-Tate. The door to the classroom opened and four students shuffled in. Their names were Juan, Matt, Adrian, and Shayna. Only Shayna talked. Juan, Matt, and Adrian held the posters.