Chapter 5

Chapter 5 BATS, PART THO: WHAT'S THEIR FAVORITE SUBJECT? AND DO THEY HAVE PLANS FOR THE WEEKEND? Po couldn't stop thinking about the Minecraft village. They'd all agreed there wasn't timeto explore it before the sun went down. So they'd logged off for the night and returned to their normal lives. Now it was the following day, and classes were moving painfully slowly.

Po wanted to know what surprises awaited them in that village. There were certainly no surprises on Ms. Minerva's pop quiz on A Midsummer Night's Dream. When she'd announced it was time for a quiz, the rest of the class groaned—quietly. Although the bats had been confined to the gym and the classroom vents were sealed tight, Ms. Minerva's students still looked at the vents with distrust. No one wanted to risk setting off another hurricane of bats. Po didn't mind the quiz, though. He loved Shakespeare. He sometimes struggled with reading. His mind was always moving in three directions at once. He had trouble focusing on long passages about how butter was made, or poetic descriptions

of sunlight reflecting just so off a tin roof. But Shakespeare wrote plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream was mostly dialogue between characters, plus some speeches called monologues. There were cases of mistaken identity, and one character was transformed into a donkey. Po loved that stuff. He could imagine himself playing any of those roles. He could imagine giving those speeches and feeling what the characters were feeling. He approached gaming the same way. He didn't just play as himself, as a kid named Po Chen. He imagined himself as a warrior, or a wizard, or a superhero. It's why he was always

trying out new skins in Minecraft. Each one felt like an invitation to be a different personfor a little while. With basketball canceled until the bats were dealt with, Po wondered if he should try out for the school play. But would the drama kids accept him? Would the rest of the school? Sometimes Po worried that people only liked him because he was so good at basketball. What if he tried acting and he wasn't any good at it? "Pencils down, class," Ms. Minerva said softly. Another small groan rippled through the classroom. Po looked up to be sure, but the air- conditioning vent remained solidly in place. The bats were still in the gym, then. Po had another day off from basketball practice. Part of him felt guilty about how glad he was.

While the rest of the school was barely putting up with the bats, Doc Culpepper used them as inspiration for a lesson. "A huge part of a scientist's job is observing," she told the class. "You've all been around these animals. What have you observed about them? Ash?" "Well, they fly. Like birds do. But they have fur instead of feathers. They're obviously mammals." "That's right," said Doc, rubbing her hands together. "And like other mammals, they give birth to their live young and nurse them with milk. They don't lay eggs the way birds do. What else?" "They sleep all day," said Jodi. "Lucky!" Po said. "Correct," said Doc. "They're nocturnal. In other words, they're active at night and sleep during the day. If you were to wait in the school parking lot until dusk, you'd see the whole colony flying away from the gymnasium. They go out at night to hunt bugs to eat. What else? Morgan?" "They're blind," he said.

"Is that something you've observed?" asked Doc. "Well, no," Morgan said. "But there's that saying 'Blind as a bat.'" "Scientists have actually disproven that," explained the teacher. "Bats can see perfectly fine. But many species do use echolocation to navigate and to track down their prey. Does anyone know how echolocation works?" Harper raised her hand. "It's a natural form of sonar," she said. "Bats make sounds, and based on how the sound echoes back to them, they're able to perceive details of their environment. Even in complete darkness."