Free Everybody Sees the Ants by A. S. King Page A

looks up and acknowledges Mom.
    “He’s fifteen,” Mom says, stone-faced. “Keep your pills away from him.”
    “I was only trying to help.” While Jodi’s talking, a bit of food escapes her mouth and lands on my plate, next to thelukewarm, nasty chicken nuggets that I am not eating. “It’s just Prozac.”
    “He doesn’t need Prozac.”
    Jodi puts her hand out toward Mom. “Give it here.” And when Mom does, Jodi pops it into her mouth and swallows it.
    Mom leaves her lunch on the table and goes back to her laps.
    A few minutes after she’s gone, Jodi says, “Does she always swim this much?”
    “Yeah. It’s her thing.”
    “Huh. You’d think she’d get sick of it.”
    “Not yet,” I say.
    “Weird,” she says, gobbling the last of her sandwich and washing it down with a Diet Coke.
    “Not for our family,” I say. This makes Jodi laugh, and when she gets up to clear the rest of the table, she musses my hair a little with her free hand.
    At midafternoon I take a break from my book and go to the guest room to use the bathroom, and I find Mom on her bed, gorging on a bag of granola, and I’m starving, so I eat some, too.
    Between crunchy mouthfuls, Mom says, “I don’t think you need pills. I mean—I’m worried about you, but not that much.”
    “I know.”
    “It wasn’t her place to do that to you,” she says. “She just doesn’t think.”
    “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have taken it.”
    “Good. But I want you to know I didn’t tell her to do that.”
    “Well, yeah.”
    “I mean—I’m worried about you, but not that worried.”
    “You just said that,” I say. The ants say:
Hey! Don’t be a smart-ass
.
    “I want you to get it. Do you get it?” she asks.
    “Yeah.”
    “Good.”
    Then she looks at me, her eyebrows raised. “You’re sure? I shouldn’t be
worried
worried, right?”
    “Right. Nothing to worry about. I’m fine.”
    Now
. I’m fine
now
.
    When Dave gets home, I lift weights with him. We do different muscle groups again so I don’t hurt myself. When I sweat, it stings Ohio, but I don’t care.
    “You’re digging this, aren’t you?” Dave asks.
    “I am.”
    “Only three days and you’re already feeling great, am I right?”
    “Yep.”
    It feels really good to release the built-up bad energy from the last eight years of my life. And it feels really good to spend time with a cool guy. He’s not scared of what I might say. He’s not afraid to give me advice. Already I feel something good coming from this. I find myself wondering what it would be like if I could trade Dad for Dave.
    The ants say:
Be careful what you wish for
.
    About ten minutes before we’re done lifting, Dave goesover to the tool bench by the door and clicks off the radio. Then the door squeaks open, and Aunt Jodi pokes her head in.
    “Five minutes.”
    “ ’Kay.”
    “Don’t come in all sweaty.”
    “ ’Kay.”
    As we shut down the garage for the night, Dave calls me over to the corner to show me a scorpion hiding behind a bag of pebbles. It’s really small.
    “Is it a baby?” I ask.
    “Nope. That’s full grown.”
    “Something that small can kill me?”
    “Well, it can hurt you really bad, but it probably won’t kill you. We have black widow spiders and rattlesnakes here, too, though.
They
could kill you.”
    “Huh.”
    I think of those microscopic things that killed so many soldiers in Southeast Asia. The parasites and bacteria and malaria. I decide if I was going to go, I’d want to be eaten by a tiger or something. At least I would know it was coming.
    Ten minutes later, as I stare at a plate of so-called lasagna that once had freezer burn so bad that the top layer of noodles is still brittle and covered in a white film, I decide to share my I-just-saw-my-first-scorpion story, and though Dave told me it couldn’t kill me, I say, “Seriously. I’d rather be eaten by a tiger than killed by something so small.”
    “See?” Aunt Jodi says to Mom. “You need to take