A Clatter of Jars

by Lisa Graff

  Ellie, clearly, was waiting for Chuck.

  They were still standing in the doorway when Del popped his head into the cabin ten minutes later. “Nice shoes, Frog Twin!” he greeted Chuck, noticing her Kelly-green high-tops.

  Chuck let out a growl. When she’d begged her parents for those shoes last week, she’d thought they were the most unique ones in the store. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her till later that bright green shoes would only make her look more froggy. She dumped her duffel on the floor, wrenching the zipper open. She was sure she’d stuffed a pair of ratty water shoes in there somewhere.

  “Del?” Ellie said as Chuck tore through her bag. “At the slumber party, everyone sleeps next to their cabinmates, right? And they sit together at meals, too? And at the campfire, and arts and crafts, and—”

  Chuck shot to her feet. She’d have time to change her shoes later. At the moment, there were more urgent matters to attend to.

  “Where are you going?” Ellie shouted as Chuck darted out the door.

  “Don’t follow me!” Chuck called over her shoulder. She clenched and unclenched her right hand as she raced down the dirt path.

  Charlotte and Eleanor Holloway had discovered their Talent when they were four, on the afternoon of their Adoption Day party at Miss Mallory’s Home for Lost Girls. Everyone had taken a break from games and cake (a chocolate-hazelnut icebox cake for Chuck and a strawberry layer cake for Ellie) to stroll to the duck pond. And while their new parents were tearing up stale bread loaves not far away, Ellie had made an unusual announcement.

  “Mink frogs!” she’d shouted. “Six of them, right there. Four boys and two girls.”

  Chuck had peered down into the pond, at the thick patch of lily pads where Ellie was pointing. At four, Chuck had never heard of mink frogs, but sure enough, she spotted one, poking his sleepy face out of the water. After a bit of a search, she spied another. Bright nose and a dark body, with brown splotches all over. Several minutes later, she’d found three more. “There’s only five frogs,” Chuck corrected her sister. “Not six.”

  Which was exactly the moment when the sixth frog leapt from the water and landed at Ellie’s feet.

  “Six,” Ellie told her. “And there’s a Fowler’s toad in the bushes.”

  Four-year-old Chuck had been impressed. “Ellie!” she’d squealed, squeezing her sister’s left hand with her right one, and wishing she felt half as spectacular as her twin clearly was. The grip was chilly, Chuck remembered. “You’re Talented!” And then Chuck had let go of her sister’s hand to point to a brown speck in a tree above them. “What’s that one?”

  To which Ellie, surprisingly, had not had a response. “I don’t know,” she’d admitted.

  “You don’t?” Chuck had asked. It was a spring peeper; Chuck was certain of it. She took Ellie’s hand again, to help her remember how spectacular she was. This time the grip was warm.

  “Spring peeper!” Ellie cried suddenly. “And a Northern leopard frog, in the bush!” The spotted creature raised himself on his front arms, puffing his throat silently, as though begging the twins not to reveal his hiding spot.

  That’s how Chuck and Ellie Holloway had discovered they shared a Talent. Only one sister could use it at a time, but together they had the most extraordinary ability to identify frogs. It was unusual, Chuck knew, to share a Talent. She’d never heard of two other people who had done it before—which was why, she suspected, they’d been allowed to attend Camp Atropos. Renny had been right earlier, about identifying frogs not being a Singular Talent. Chuck didn’t mind not being Singular. But she’d give anything to be unique.

  For years, it had been fun, sharing a Talent. But lately Chuck was beginning to get frog fatigue. Lately she’d begun wondering—with a sour sort of guilt in her stomach—how her life might have been different if Miss Mallory had matched her with another family, one that didn’t have Ellie in it. Most times, Chuck felt her family was perfect. No complaints. But every once in a while, like when Ellie grabbed for her hand over and over and over, Chuck wondered if maybe she was meant for something else. If Chuck hadn’t spent her whole life glued to her sister’s side, how unique might she be?

  Hdup-hdup!

  Chuck stopped walking and turned slowly. There, squatting behind her on the path, was the white-lipped tree frog. He swelled his throat, the skin growing thin and translucent as it filled with air. And then he let out his call—remarkably loud for such a small creature.

  Hdup-hdup! went the frog.

  Chuck blinked at him. “Did Ellie tell you to follow—?” she began. And then she realized she was talking to a frog. She spun on her heel and started for the lodge again.

  The frog hopped up the steps behind her. He seemed to know his way around.

  The door to the camp director’s office was open, so Chuck figured it was okay to wait inside. Out the window, past the camp store where Renny and Miles were buying candy bars, Chuck made out the lake, sparkling in the sunshine. She’d go for a swim, she decided, after Jo assigned her to a new cabin. Swimming always made Chuck feel like the mess of the world was far, far away.

  Hdup-hdup! went the frog from the doorway. And then, his froggy legs splayed out behind him, he leapt straight for her. Chuck let out a squawk of surprise, but the creature hadn’t aimed for her shoulder as she’d supposed. Instead, the frog landed—thwop!—on the shelf behind her. He puffed out his throat, watching her. Hdup-hdup!

  Chuck peered at the object the frog had planted himself in front of. A small glass jar, empty except for a thin bracelet woven from silver embroidery thread. Chuck picked up the jar to examine it.

  “What are you doing?” boomed a voice from the door.

  Chuck didn’t mean to. She really didn’t.

  Chuck dropped the jar.

  The glass broke, shards scattering across the toes of Chuck’s Kelly-green high-tops, the bracelet plunking itself among the laces. And in that moment, the white-lipped tree frog leapt again, this time landing at Chuck’s feet. Squatting on his four froggy legs, he stretched apart his white lips—wide, wider, widest—and shot out his long pink tongue. And before Chuck could so much as blink, the frog had swallowed the bracelet. Gulped it completely down.

  There was a horrified screech. The woman in the doorway, Chuck saw now, with the wild black curls, was the camp director, Jo. And she did not look pleased.

  Jo dropped to the floor, knees in the glass, grabbing for the frog. But the creature escaped, leaping at Chuck again. Before she even realized she’d caught him, the frog had settled onto Chuck’s palm.

  Through the thin skin of the frog’s white throat, Chuck could see that woven silver bracelet. “Why’d you do that?” Chuck whispered at him. As if in response, the frog puffed out his throat.

  The silver bracelet shifted inside the frog.

  One twist.

  Puff.

  Two twists.

  Puff.

  Around and around and around and around.

  Puff puff puff puff.

  “That frog,” Jo said, rising to her feet, “stole my Talent.” Her voice was a terrifying rumble.

  “Talent?” Chuck asked.

  At that, the frog—hdup-hdup!—spit out the bracelet into Chuck’s open hand and hopped right out the window.

  Chuck plucked up the bracelet with two fingertips. Wet and slimy, it had been tied into the most intricate knot she’d ever seen. Quirky and complicated and beautiful.

  And as unforgettable as the entire scene was, in that instant (“I want to eat my Caramel Crème bar,” came a voice from outside. “I can’t eat it till I pay!”) . . .

  Chuck forgot it.

  “This is neat,” Chuck said, examining the knot between her fingertips. She looked up at the curly-haired woman. Jo, she thought her name was. Their camp director. Chuck scratched at an itch below her ear. “Did you make it?”


  Jo narrowed her eyes at Chuck. “I don’t think you’re very funny, little girl.”

  Chuck scratched harder. “I wasn’t trying to be funny,” she said. She shook her head, trying to remember why she’d come. “I want to change cabins,” she said at last.

  “No reassignments,” Jo snapped. She still had her eyes narrowed. “You’re Charlotte, right? Chuck?” Chuck nodded. “I think it’s best if you go now, Chuck.”

  “But—”

  “Good-bye, Chuck.”

  The itch persisted, just below Chuck’s ear, as she passed beneath the moose head keeping guard above the lodge’s double doors. She slipped the curious silver knot into her pocket and looked down the path to the lake, sparkling in the afternoon sun. A good swim, she figured, ought to clear her head.

  • • •

  Memory is a curious thing. Some details stick in our minds like peanut butter on crackers, and refuse to budge, as much as we might wish they would. Other memories—heavy ones sometimes, ones that seem unbudgeable—can be plucked right out when we least expect it. Lost memories leave remnants, of course, flavors that linger in the mind, but it’s difficult to taste things when you don’t know they’re there.

  All memories have a flavor, although not everyone can taste them. Chuck’s memory, of the Talent bracelet and the frog and the silver knot, tasted of crisp peaches. And it was currently whistling its way down the dirt path of Camp Atropos, flitting this way and that in the wind, searching for a new mind to settle into.

  Lily

  FOCUSING HER THOUGHTS AT THE BRIDGE OF HER NOSE, Lily tugged open the door to the infirmary.

  “Didn’t expect to see you so soon,” Nurse Bonnie greeted her. “Max is just settling in.” She gestured toward the small room behind the curtain where the sick beds were.

  When Max had first broken his leg three weeks ago, the doctor had assured their parents that two weeks of camp would be fine. Lily wondered if that doctor had ever been to camp. With an enormous cast covering his right leg, toe to thigh, Max could hardly do anything. He couldn’t participate in cabin canoe races or Color War (Max and Lily would’ve trounced Hannah’s cabin, for sure), and he had to sleep in the infirmary, in one of the beds reserved for campers who got sick in the middle of the night. It wasn’t exactly what Lily had imagined when they’d signed up together.

  “How are you feeling?” Lily asked, pushing through the curtain to find her brother propped up in bed. His crutches were perfectly balanced before a chest of drawers, without even leaning. As a Calibrate, Max could stabilize any object, from the most teetering tower of blocks to his own body, balanced on his head, his elbow, anything. Well, he used to be able to do all that. Since the accident, some of it was more difficult.

  “My leg itches,” he told Lily.

  “You need more pillows?” Lily already had one in the air, focusing her thoughts, when Max shook his head. She let it fall back to the bed. “You really don’t remember it?” she asked for the thousandth time. “The accident?” Around and around went the length of yarn.

  “It’s like I told that doctor,” Max said. “I must’ve bonked my head too hard. Too bad you weren’t there to help me.”

  “Yeah.” Around and around and around. “Too bad.”

  Ever since they’d signed up for Camp Atropos, Lily had known that they’d need a killer act for the Talent show. It was the last thing they’d get to do before heading home, and everyone’s parents would be in the audience. Their father would be there. He’d rearranged his schedule and everything. So when, while inspecting a photo in the Camp Atropos brochure of a girl breathing fire during last year’s Talent show, Lily had spotted the bookshelf beside the lodge stage, she knew she’d been walloped with a fantastic idea.

  For their act, Max would balance himself upside down on one finger, atop a teetering stack of books, and every time he shouted “More!” Lily would focus her thoughts at the bridge of her nose and tug another book off the bookcase. Then she’d shift her concentration back to her brother, and—focused, focused—lift up the entire stack of books with Max on top, sliding the new book underneath. Max had agreed to the idea right away. Of course he had. It would be phenomenal. Just the two of them, no Hannah.

  Phenomenal.

  Maybe Lily hadn’t been concentrating enough on the books, during their first practice in the living room. Maybe she’d been concentrating a little too much on how pouty Hannah would look when her birthday buddy stole the show with Lily and not her. Because when Max was busy balancing, high up in the air, shouting “More!” Lily tugged a little too hard on the bookcase.

  The books toppled first—Whunk! Whunk! Whunk! Whunk!—landing on Max in a horrible heap. Lily was so startled that she couldn’t refocus. Before she realized what was happening, the bookcase was toppling, too. The entire heavy wooden structure landed—thu-WHUNK!—on top of Max’s leg. And Max just lay there, eyes closed. Leg bent at a bad angle.

  Lily screamed for her mom and Steve in the backyard, and they raced in right away. Lily saw them.

  She saw Hannah racing, too.

  What Lily did next, it was enough to make her stomach twist inside of her, like that length of yarn around her thumb, every time she remembered.

  When she spied Hannah—she didn’t know why, she just did it—Lily focused her thoughts behind the bridge of her nose, and she lifted the bookcase into the air, pushing it back against the wall, settled into its divots in the carpet. The books she left, scattered across the floor, but the bookcase she’d returned.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she told everyone. Hannah was hunched over Max, yanking books off him like he was her brother, instead of her stepbrother. “I didn’t see it.” The words tasted as bitter as a cup of her father’s coffee, but still Lily pushed them out. “I was getting some water.” If Max ever learned the truth, he would never like Lily best. “He must’ve fallen over.”

  Lily had tied the lime green bow around her thumb that evening, so that even if no one else knew the truth, she would always remember.

  She was fluffing another pillow for Max when she heard her least-favorite voice behind her.

  “Hi, Max! I brought you something.” Hannah stepped through the gap in the curtains, holding a glass of red juice. Her blond hair, perfectly straight and incredibly long, swished past her waist. “I would’ve brought you a drink, too, Lily, but I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  Lily rolled her eyes at that, all the way to one side and back again. The Talent Hannah had been born with, she would tell you (and tell you, and tell you), was for tasting the flavors of her memories—good ones, bad ones, scary ones. But about seven years ago, when she’d been a baby, Hannah’s mother had taken her to a cake-baking competition in New York City, and the most curious thing had happened. One of the contestants—a girl, just about as old then as Lily was now, with a remarkable Talent for knowing the perfect cake to bake for anyone she met—had had her Talent stolen by an Eker, right in the middle of the bakeoff. The Talent had escaped, flooded the air that filled the room. And everyone who attended the competition had absorbed a tiny bit of it. The smallest of slivers.

  Everyone, including Hannah.

  With that sliver of new Talent, Hannah’s memory-tasting had morphed into something different. Now she could bring out the flavor of other people’s memories, too, by making one of her special concoctions. Hannah served drinks to practically everyone she met, whether they asked for them or not—juices, punches, smoothies, teas. Whoever drank one of Hannah’s beverages could recall memories in vivid, sharp detail. Lily had tasted a few before, mostly by accident, and the clarity of the memories was, she hated to admit it, rather incredible.

  “It’s a strawberry basil juice bomb,” Hannah told Max. “Wait till you taste it.”

  Max sucked down half the drink in one gulp, eyes closed. “First day I discovered my Talent,” he said, popping his eyes
open. “Thanks, Hannah.”

  Their stepsister plopped herself down on the edge of Max’s bed, far too close to his injured leg. “I figured out what I’m going to do for the Talent show,” she said. Not that anyone had asked. “I’m going to make a punch for the whole camp and serve it while everyone’s performing. It’s going to have memories from every single camper. Chef Sheldon said I could practice in the kitchen during free swim.”

  “Cool,” Max said, taking another glug of his juice.

  “Free swim sounds way better,” Lily muttered.

  “Wanna help me?” Hannah asked Max. “You can help, too, Lily.”

  “Sure,” Max said, slapping his empty glass on the chest of drawers. “Sounds fun.”

  Lily sputtered at that, sending Max’s crutches crashing to the floor. “You can’t help Hannah,” she told her brother. “You’re doing an act with me.” What would their father think if he rearranged his whole schedule and then all he saw was Max serving stupid punch with stupid Hannah?

  Max frowned at her. “I can’t balance upside down with my cast,” he said. “I tried, and I can’t.” He turned back to Hannah. “Your idea sounds good.”

  “It does not sound good,” Lily argued. She did her best to focus her thoughts and set Max’s crutches upright again, but only managed to shoot them under the bed. “I already came up with a new act for us, just you and me.”

  “You did?” Hannah asked.

  “You did?” Max said.

  “Yeah,” Lily replied. Around and around went the length of yarn. “I just have to work on a few more details, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Max thought that over, sticking one finger underneath the ridge of his cast to scratch his leg. “I guess I could wait a few days to decide what to do,” he said. “But I think we’re supposed to start practicing soon.”