Ant Hill: Chapter 1

I remember when I was little. Before any of my real life started. The days I spent doing nothing. Nothing but playing and running around with my big sister. It was a wild life. I went from school to gymnastics to messing around. I never really cared about anyone else. It was that selfish childhood façade we all have. You’re the only one in the world who matters. You’re the only thing.

I remember the summer I was seven, also known as the Summer of Too Many Popsicles. I learned a lot of things that summer. For one, I learned that high fructose corn syrup makes you fat. Another, I learned that Jada is very bossy. Lastly, I learned that you aren’t supposed to look at boy’s “parts.” No matter how different they are from your own or how curious you are. Important lessons.

One day I was playing with my big sister, Jada. She had just passed the fourth grade with flying colors and thought she knew everything under the sun. We looked like sisters. Both of us have the Marsden trademark blonde hair and emerald green eyes. Jada is just taller with a slimmer face like Mom. She always will be. She also has Mom’s personality. She is bossy, know-it-all, and sometimes hostile. Jada was and still is short-tempered, but this was a different time. That summer was far before she took off with her boyfriend, before she changed her mind and came back, before she left again for college to take over the world of fashion and “turn it on its head.” Jada is the ambitious one. We don’t talk as much anymore. We don’t really talk at all.

But that day we were best friends. Jada was sitting in the grass, looking at the sky because she was mature like that. The clouds were cotton puffs that day. Cotton puffs in a bright blue ocean of sky. I was too focused on the bugs, though. There were lots of them. Beetles and grasshoppers and lady bugs. I was rummaging through the dirt with my magnifying glass when I landed upon a sandy ant hill. Little black dots marched in step up the mountain.

“Jada!” I yelled in excitement, holding my magnifying glass closer to the specks. “Jada come look!”

Jada pulled herself away from her reclined position and came to see what I was looking at. She knelt in the grass beside me. “What?”

“Look at the ants,” I drawled, mesmerized. One little straggling ant stumbled with a crumb on its back. With a maniacal smile I poked the ant. It began to struggle and squirm. I poked it again. It writhed painfully in front of my eyes. One more time. The ant curled up into a ball and died peacefully.

A sadistic giggle escaped my lips. I saw another ant marching along to its home. I began to poke it like I had the other one.

“Storm! What are you doing?” Jada yelled. She pushed me away from the ants and glared at me angrily.

“I was just poking it,” I replied innocently. Jada’s stare was burning a hole into my flesh, tearing through the thin layers of skin protecting my vital organs.

“You killed him! Storm, are you crazy?! He had a family and friends and a wife and baby ants to take care of. Now he’s dead!” Jada was flailing her arms around in the air. The sky was starting to turn dark and shake at her wrath.

I watched her wide-eyed. “It’s just an ant.”

“Storm, ants are just like people. There are billions of ants on this planet, and there are billions of people. We all just struggle to get along until something bigger than us kills us.” Words of wisdom from my eleven-year-old sister.

I looked down and saw two ants fighting over the dead ant’s crumb. They struggled back and forth. Jada was watching, too. There was a glint of sadness in her eyes as one of the ants killed the other and grabbed the crumb. The two dead ants lay next to each other now in peace.

Jada shook her head and stood up. “Sometimes, just like people, ants kill each other, too.”

Seven years later, Jada would get a full-ride scholarship to a school for philosophy. Seven years later; Jada would go to design school and learn to become a fashion designer.

Author's Note: Doesn't seem romantic now, but it will get that way eventually. In a gradual process. (: