From Ant to Eagle(16)

“Daily missions?” Sammy asked, looking confused.

“Tell me you know what the daily missions are?”

Sammy shook his head.

“Oh, all right, I’ll explain it. Sometimes I think you don’t even care about the Levels. You certainly don’t know much about getting them.”

“I do care about the Levels!” Sammy said. “I want to be an Eagle!”

“Well, if you want to be an Eagle you better start doing your daily missions. Now that you’re feeling better, I’m going to start giving you a mission each day, and if you complete it, you get a Level. Of course the missions are hard work and they’ll take you all day—so you won’t be able to come with me.”

Sammy stopped pulling on his boots and thought this through. “But can’t I do it tomorrow? I want to come see the sun.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head and standing up. I needed to leave and was getting impatient. I was going to miss the sunrise. “It has to start today. Either you decide now or you won’t be an Eagle.”

Sammy could tell I was serious. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll do the missions. What do I have to do?”

“Hmm,” I said, frantically looking around, trying to think of something quickly—something that would occupy Sammy for the whole day.

I walked over to the sink and opened the cupboard below. Mom kept empty mason jars for making jam and I grabbed one.

“Today’s mission is to catch one hundred live ants in this jar.”

“One hundred!” Sammy cried.

“Shhhhh! You’re going to wake Mom and Dad! Yes, one hundred.”

“But I can’t do that!”

“Yes you can—I did it to get my Cheetah Level when I was only four. And besides, are you telling me you want to quit before you’ve even tried? Because I can always find someone else to train—someone who’s actually willing to put in the work to become an Eagle.”

“No, I do, I do. I mean I will.” I passed Sammy the jar and he took it. “It’s just that—”

Sammy didn’t get to finish his sentence because I was already out the door. I saw him standing on the other side with the jar held tightly to his chest. I felt sorry leaving him behind but it was already starting to get lighter outside and I didn’t have time for feeling sorry. I took off running through the backyard at a full sprint.

It was Aleta who had suggested getting up early for the sunrise. We had come back to the Secret Spot every day after discovering it and had spent hours reading beneath the trees. It turned out Aleta liked Goosebumps books just as much as Sammy and I. She had read the whole series once and was working on them a second time while she waited for new ones to come out. I hadn’t even finished them once—partly because I was a slow reader, partly because Sammy asked so many questions.

But the odd thing about Aleta and her reading was this: every time I looked up at her to see how much further she’d made it through her book, she didn’t actually seem to be reading. She spent more time looking out over Lake Huron than actually reading. And all the while she had this look on her face like she was thinking really, really hard about something. Like there was something confusing about the water.

“If you stare at that lake for too long you’ll go blind,” I finally joked.

Aleta hadn’t responded. She just kept staring off into the distance like she hadn’t heard me.

“You sure like the view, huh?” I said, trying again to get some sort of response.

“Yeah,” she said, still staring at the water.

I went back to reading. When Aleta gave a one-word answer that meant she didn’t feel like talking, and when she didn’t feel like talking, there was no point trying to force the issue. All I’d get were more one-word answers.

But then to my surprise, she continued, “It reminds me of my auntie’s house in Mexico. Of course this is a lake and that was the ocean, but the sun reflects off the waves the same.” She was sitting with her arms stretched out behind her and kept looking at the water as she spoke. “My parents used to wake Raquel and me up early on clear mornings and we’d drive down to the beach and sit on a blanket; waiting for the sun. And when it came, the beach changed into the most magical place on earth. The whole ocean would turn orange and gold—the sand, the boats floating offshore—everything, golden. But it would only last a few minutes before it was over. The magic would leave our beach and move on to the next. My mother used to say that people who don’t believe in magic don’t get up before the sun.” Aleta looked at me. “Have you ever seen a sunrise over water?”

I shook my head.

“I bet the sunrise here would be amazing. We should come really early one morning and see.”

I liked that idea a lot.

“How about tomorrow?” I suggested.

Aleta hesitated. “Tomorrow? Tomorrow might not…”—she paused, debated it momentarily—“okay, tomorrow. We’ll have to be up really early though.”

And that’s how I found myself running through cornfields at a ridiculous hour. I’d grabbed a flashlight but it wasn’t much help. It only gave me enough time to see what I was going to step in—not enough time to avoid it. Still, I ran the entire way without stopping—partly because I didn’t want to miss the sunrise, partly because I was scared that if I stopped something would jump out of the corn and eat me.