Crenshaw

47

I couldn’t fall asleep that night. Sounds echoed off the walls of our empty apartment. Shadows loomed and shrank. A question kept nagging at me: Why did things have to be this way?

Life isn’t always fair, Crenshaw had said. His words reminded me of an interesting nature fact Ms. Malone had taught us last year in fourth grade.

Bats, she said, actually share food with each other.

She was talking about vampire bats, the ones that slice open sleeping mammals in the dark of night. They don’t actually suck blood. It’s more like they lap it up, which is awesome enough. But the really amazing part, the no way part, is that when they get back to their caves, they share with the unlucky bats who haven’t found anything to eat. They actually puke up warm blood into the hungry bats’ mouths.

If that’s not the coolest nature fact ever, I don’t know what is.

Ms. Malone said maybe bats are altruists, which means they’re sharing to help the other bats, even if it’s a risk. She said some scientists say yes, some say no.

Scientists love to disagree about things.

Ms. Malone looked at me then, because even though it was only like the third week of school, she already had me pegged pretty well. “Jackson,” she said, “maybe you’ll be the one to settle the great Are Bats Nice Guys? debate.”

I said probably not, because I wanted to be a cheetah or manatee or dog scientist, but I would keep bats in mind as a backup plan.

Ms. Malone said something else about bats that day.

She said she sometimes wondered if maybe bats are better human beings than human beings are.