Jennifer Murdley's Toad

by Bruce Coville

  The witch noticed the problem immediately. “What are you going to do, Jennifer?” she asked, her voice soft, wheedling. “You can’t keep me this way forever. Are you going to spit me out—or swallow me? I don’t know about swallowing; I might get stuck in your throat. I could do a lot of damage before I’m done, or down, or whatever.”

  “Ignore her, Jennifer,” said Bufo desperately. “She’s got a voice like honey; she could talk a cat into a doghouse.”

  “That’s not entirely wrong,” said the witch. “And I can do more than that. I can offer a trade. Look around you, Jennifer. Look in the mirrors, and let me show you what might be. Remember, I have powers, I can change things. Look at yourself.”

  From every mirror in the shop stared a giant toad, a witch dangling from its mouth.

  ME! thought Jennifer, in fear and revulsion.

  But even as she stared at the mirrors, the image began to shift. First the toad dissolved. In its place stood a familiar image, one Jennifer had tried to see as little as possible over the last few years: her own plain face with its small eyes, big nose, and puffy cheeks, framed as always by limp, mousy hair. How she hated that image!

  But as she watched, it began to shift: The nose shrank, the eyes grew. The limp hair became a thick, shaggy mane of sun yellow as the cheeks narrowed and slimmed. Cheekbones rose beneath those cheeks, like mountains stirring beneath the earth’s crust, and beauty crept across her face like dawn across the sea.

  Great tears formed in Jennifer-the-toad’s enormous eyes. This was the secret image she had held within, the way she would have chosen to look, if only she had the power.

  “I have the power,” whispered the witch, as if she had read Jennifer’s mind. “I can make you look like that if you want; if you’re willing to trade. Just say the word, Jennifer. Let me go. I can make you human again. And not merely your old, ugly self. I can make you beautiful . . .”

  Jennifer hopped forward, a leap that covered several feet. The image in the mirror, not that of a toad, but of a girl more beautiful than Sharra, came forward to greet her.

  The Jennifer that might be, the midnight dream that haunted her days.

  “Beautiful . . . ,” whispered the witch.

  “Jennifer,” said Bufo desperately. “Don’t listen to her! Remember what she—”

  “Quiet, you,” hissed the witch.

  Ignoring her anger, Bufo tried again. “Remember what she really—”

  “Quiet!” bellowed the witch. Losing control in her wrath, she spit out not only the word but another rat, which came hurtling out of her mouth and landed halfway across the room.

  Jennifer-the-toad took another step toward the mirror. Jennifer-the-beautiful stepped forward to meet her.

  “This is what you look like inside,” whispered her reflected self, and Jennifer could not tell whether the words were spoken aloud or only in her mind. “Like the geode. Let me out. She can help you—help us. She can set me free, release the beauty inside you.”

  Like the geode, thought Jennifer, her mind whirling as if lost in some fever dream. But if you turn it inside out, it’s beautiful outside, and ugly inside.

  “Where does beauty matter?” whispered the reflection. “Where you can see it! What else counts?”

  “Barbie and Ken!” bellowed Bufo. “Perfect plastic people! Is that what you want, Jennifer? If that’s it, go ahead. Spit the witch out. She can have the jewel in my head, and let what happens happen.”

  I don’t want to trade you for being beautiful, thought Jennifer, still unable to open her mouth, for fear of letting the witch escape. But oh, how I want to look like that. Oh, how I want to be beautiful.

  If only someone would make the decision for her.

  But no one would.

  “It’s your choice,” whispered the mirror.

  “Decide, Jennifer,” hissed the witch. “Give me the toad, and I’ll let you go free—free and as beautiful as you could wish.”

  Jennifer sat in silence, her mouth closed.

  “He’s only a toad,” wheedled the witch. “And a rude one at that. It’s not as if I want your brother; I only got him by accident, anyway. I thought I was stealing this one. But your brother did make a perfect trading card—I gave you the child, you gave me the toad. You were willing to sacrifice the toad for your brother. Why not for yourself? He’s only a toad, Jennifer. Only a toad.”

  Only a toad, thought Jennifer. But the words burned, because she had heard words like them too many times, sneered once by Sharra, and whispered over and over in her memory thereafter. A toad for a toad.

  In the mirror, the witch’s image appeared beside that of the Jennifer-that-could-be. She was as beautiful as night, with eyes you could drown in.

  “Or you could join me,” the witch whispered, putting her arm around the false reflection. “Stay with me and learn the secrets I have to offer. I traded the jewel of happiness for them. All you have to trade is a single toad. I get the jewel, you get the beauty and wisdom and immortality. And Bufo gets to go on living, only slightly—altered. Why not, Jennifer? Why not stay with me and learn my secrets? Look at me. See how beautiful I am? See how beautiful you can be? Stay with me. Be beautiful. Stay with me . . .”

  Jennifer ached with the sight of the self that could be, the face in the mirror that had, until now, existed only in her imagination.

  Only a toad, she thought. He’s only a toad. I only met him two days ago, and life has been nothing but trouble since. I don’t owe him a thing. And he’s only a toad, after all. And I could be beautiful . . .

  And then she remembered Mr. Elives’ words: “Take good care of this toad. If you don’t, you’ll have me to answer to.”

  Would the old man pursue her, punish her, if she traded Bufo in for beauty? What would he do? Would the witch protect her?

  “Beautiful,” crooned the witch. “So beautiful . . .”

  “Most mirrors are mere errors,” said Mr. Elives.

  Jennifer blinked. Mr. Elives? What was he doing here?

  But it wasn’t Mr. Elives—it was Bufo, using the old man’s voice.

  “Shut up!” snarled the witch.

  But it was too late. Like sand in butter, the words had grated against something, shaken Jennifer out of her stupor. She stared at herself in the mirror, at the Barbie-perfect image the witch and her imagination had conjured up, and knew it was not, could not, ever really be her. With a cry of rage and sorrow, she lashed out at it with her most powerful weapon—her tongue. The great length of solid muscle shot across the room. The witch was still stuck to it. She struck the mirror, which shattered against her back, glass tinkling to the floor.

  Unconscious, the witch fell from Jennifer’s tongue and lay amid the shards of glass. Yet her image and the image of the false Jennifer remained, surrounding them in all the other mirrors that lined the walls of the shop.

  “Jennifer,” the images crooned, as if they had taken on a life of their own. “Jennifer, it’s not too late. Trade the toad. He’s only a toad.”

  But Jennifer had had enough of mirrors. Nearly blind with rage, she lashed out again and again, her powerful toad’s tongue slamming the smooth reflective surfaces, shattering one after another, until suddenly she found herself standing not in a modern beauty parlor but inside a cottage that looked as if it had been lifted from a fairy tale.

  “It’s my home!” cried Bufo in astonishment. “Jennifer, this is the cottage where I was born!”

  Jennifer didn’t answer; her tongue was sore and bleeding, and speech was more trouble than it was worth.

  Bufo seemed to understand. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, glancing at the unconscious form of the witch.

  She nodded, though getting out wasn’t going to be easy, since the cottage’s only door was less than half her width. She hopped toward it, nudged it with her nose.

  Not a chance of getting through.

  Turning, she went to the back of the cottage, took a few small, exploratory hops forward, then hurtled
her great body at the door.

  Struck by two thousand pounds of toad, the door gave way, along with the wall, and Jennifer found herself outside, blinking in the sunlight that flooded the small forest clearing where she had landed.

  What happened to the street? she wondered.

  Before she could worry about that, a figure stepped from among the trees.

  It was Mr. Elives.

  “Congratulations,” said the old man. “And apologies. When this started, I didn’t know what I was getting you into. But you have handled yourself well.”

  Jennifer considered giving him the same treatment she had given the witch. A good tongue-lashing may be just what he needs, she thought. She tried to say it, but her tongue was too sore, and she couldn’t get the words out.

  “I will take care of the witch,” he said.

  “Now you’ll take care of her,” said Bufo. “Excuse me, boss, but where were you when we needed you?”

  “There are some thresholds I cannot cross,” said Mr. Elives, his voice solemn rather than cranky. “And this cottage could not be entered without an invitation, which I surely would never have received. The door is gone, however, knocked down from within, and now I may enter. And I had best do so soon, for there is no knowing how long the woman may sleep. I have work to do if you are to be safe. Follow the path—it will lead you home, where your friends are waiting.”

  “Home?” cried Jennifer, the word exploding out of her in spite of her injured tongue. “How can I go home like this?”

  From inside the cottage came a slight moan.

  “Quickly!” said the old man. “Go. Now!”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  “Jennifer,” said Bufo nervously. “We’d better go.”

  The path led through a forest that seemed older and more gnarled than any Jennifer had ever seen. She moved slowly, the woods too thick for her to take the kind of hops and leaps her great body was capable of.

  Thick roots rumpled the soil, and after a while Bufo scrambled onto her back, since it was easier for him to ride than to try to keep up with even her small hops in that terrain.

  “I have a question,” said Jennifer after a while.

  “Shoot,” replied Bufo.

  “The words you said when we were in the shop—‘most mirrors are mere errors.’ How did you know them? They were in the letter Mr. Elives sent me.

  “You don’t really want to know that,” said Bufo with a little laugh.

  “Yes, I do,” replied Jennifer, remembering that Bufo had to tell the truth when asked a direct question. “How did you know them?”

  Bufo cleared his throat. Using the president’s voice, he said, “Well, when you went off to the museum with Brandon this morning, there I was alone in the room with that letter.”

  “So you read it, even though he didn’t want you to,” said Jennifer, not really surprised.

  “Well, ahhh, I guess you could say . . .”

  Before Bufo could finish blathering, Jennifer felt the world go strange around her, and found herself facing a pair of mountain ash trees that looked familiar. On the other side were Sharra and Ellen, Skippy and Brandon, and old Miss Applegate, sitting on the grass beside the bikes, talking quietly among themselves. They looked sad and frightened. Brandon was crying.

  Jennifer stopped before she reached the trees. A wave of despair washed over her. “I can’t go out there,” she said. “I can’t go back into our world like this.”

  “I don’t think you should stay here,” said Bufo. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”

  At the sound of their voices the others looked up. Their reactions to the sight of Jennifer’s enormous bulk varied from strangled gasps to near screams. But to her astonishment, rather than running away, they ran to her.

  “Jennifer?” cried Ellen. “Jennifer, is that you?”

  “How did you do that?” asked Brandon, happy to see his sister in whatever form she chose for her return.

  “Mom and Dad are not going to like this,” contributed Skippy.

  Sharra simply stood blinking for a moment. Then, speaking so rapidly that all the words ran into one another, she stepped back and said, “I’m sorry for every rotten thing I ever did to you, Jennifer, so please, please don’t eat me!”

  She was so desperate, and so sincere, that Jennifer nearly laughed in spite of her situation.

  Only Miss Applegate didn’t speak. She simply walked up to Jennifer, which put them face to face.

  Leaning forward, she planted a kiss on Jennifer’s yard-wide lips.

  The explosion was thunderous.

  When the smoke cleared, Jennifer had been returned to her human form and Miss Applegate had been turned into a toad.

  Jennifer started to speak, to cry out, “Don’t you understand? You’re going to be a toad forever. ”

  But before she could say a word Bufo hopped forward. He sat in front of Miss Applegate and stared in astonishment. Then he croaked a single word, which came out as a statement, a question, and a sigh of wonder: “Esmerelda?”

  Miss Applegate hopped forward to meet him. “It’s been nearly five centuries since that witch stole the Jewel of Perfect Happiness from my forehead and turned me into a human, Bufo. Five hundred years of waiting to find you, and all you can say is ‘Esmerelda?’”

  Bufo smiled. “Give me a kiss,” he croaked, sounding only like himself.

  And Esmerelda did.

  Epilogue

  The wind was blowing through the open window.

  Jennifer Murdley put the finishing touches on her essay, then placed the geode her father had given her on top of the loose pages to hold them in place.

  She could have closed the window, but she was expecting company.

  She knew they were coming because she had gotten a call earlier that evening. Not on the regular phone, but on Brandon’s little red telephone, which he had generously given to her as a “backward” present on the day of his fourth birthday.

  “Jennifer,” the voice on the other end of the line had said, “this is Elives. Bufo and Esmerelda want to know if you’re going to be in this evening; they’d like to come over to say good-bye.”

  Jennifer had told Mr. Elives that she would make it a point to be in. He, in return, had told her to set her alarm for midnight.

  At 12:15 a high-pitched voice outside her window called, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, that I might climb the golden stair.”

  This was followed by another voice that said, “Bufo, cut that out. You don’t have to be a clown all the time!”

  Smiling, Jennifer went to her window and lowered a basket on a rope. After Bufo and Esmerelda climbed in, she hauled the basket back up to her window.

  “How have you been, dear?” asked Esmerelda in a voice that sounded like every grandmother in the world combined.

  “Pretty well,” said Jennifer. “My tongue has healed up, I got my essay finished, Sharra has been leaving me alone, and Skippy seems a little scared of me. So all in all, I guess things are pretty good.”

  “You could try aiming a bit higher,” said Bufo, doing his presidential imitation again.

  “Shush!” said Esmerelda.

  Despite the fact that Miss Applegate had explained that there had never been an Applegate family, that she had simply used the name, and moved from place to place whenever people got too suspicious because she had been living in one town for too long, Jennifer still had a hard time thinking of the old woman as a toad.

  “But I was always a toad inside,” Miss Applegate had told her the first three times they had had the conversation. “And a lonely one, too, since I thought I was going to live forever without ever seeing Bufo again.”

  “What a horrible fate!” exclaimed Bufo, zapping out his tongue and swallowing a bug.

  And now the two of them were going to leave on their “second honeymoon,” though where exactly they were going seemed to be a matter that was known only to Mr. Elives and the two toads.

  “We can
’t talk about it,” said Bufo, using his Bogart imitation. “Special assignment.”

  “Speaking of special assignments,” said Esmerelda, “we have one for you, if you’re willing to accept it.”

  “What is it?” asked Jennifer, knowing even as she did so that she was probably letting curiosity overcome common sense.

  “Lower the basket again,” said Esmerelda.

  Looking at the toads nervously, Jennifer did as they asked. When she felt a tug on the slender rope, she pulled the basket back to her window.

  Inside were two rats.

  Jennifer jumped back with a startled squeak.

  “See, Jerome!” said one of them. “I told you she wouldn’t like us.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jerome. “She’s just startled.”

  Suddenly Jennifer remembered the final moments in the cottage. “You came out of the witch’s mouth, didn’t you?” she asked in astonishment.

  “Got it in one, kid,” replied Bufo, without giving the rats a chance to answer. “I’d like you to meet the two newest Immortal Vermin, Jerome and Roxanne. Elives wants to know if they can stay with you until he decides what to do with them. After all, the terrarium is empty.”

  “We don’t eat much,” said Roxanne sincerely.

  “And I know a lot of jokes,” said Jerome.

  “Quiet,” said Roxanne, batting him on the head with her paw. “If she hears any of your jokes, she’ll never let us stay here.”

  “Look, if they get to be too much trouble, you can just call Elives and ask him to take them back,” said Bufo.

  “And how am I supposed to do that?” asked Jennifer.

  “Come here,” said Esmerelda quietly, motioning to Jennifer to bend closer.

  When Jennifer did as she asked, the ancient toad woman whispered a number in her ear.

  “Direct connection,” she said, when she was sure that Jennifer had it. “I don’t think more than five kids in the world can get in touch with the old man whenever they want. But he told me you had earned the privilege.”

  When the toads were gone and the rats finally settled in to their new home, Jennifer sat and stared at the red phone for a long time.