Amphibian

by Carla Gunn

  I said okay. I wasn’t surprised Bird wanted to do it because I think Bird actually likes being scared. He dropped our backpacks and started running back toward the school. When he got to the corner, he turned and looked at me and yelled out, ‘If I get caught, you owe me big time! BIG TIME!’

  I sat down next to a tree at the edge of the woods and checked on Cuddles. His throat was moving in and out really fast, and I was worried he was going to have a heart attack or something. I wondered if that happened with frogs. I knew it happened all the time with humans. I also knew that as much as I wanted to hold and cuddle Cuddles to make him feel better, there was nothing I could do to calm him down. He’s not a social animal and other beings wouldn’t be able to make him feel better. If I touched him, it would make him even more anxious. So I just sat there holding the lunch bag and hoping that Bird wouldn’t get caught and would make it back fast.

  Fourteen minutes and seventeen seconds later, I saw Bird running toward me. When he reached me, he said, ‘I did it! I did it! This is really exciting! I think I want to do this professionally when I grow up.’

  ‘I think you’ll be good at it,’ I said. ‘Maybe you can work for Greenpeace someday. They do animal rescues.’

  ‘Yeah!’ said Bird. ‘And do you know what else I did? I took the fraud frog out of the aquarium.’

  Bird hauled the brown fake frog out of his coat pocket to show me. We looked at each other and started laughing.

  ‘Good thinking,’ I told him.

  We walked to my house really quickly, but just before we got there, I put the lunch bag back in my backpack. I figured Cuddles would be okay until we got him up to my room. I opened the door and yelled, ‘Hi Mom, Bird’s here, bye Mom,’ and my mother yelled back, ‘Okay, great, nice talking to you both.’

  When we got to my room, I sneaked quietly to my mother’s room and took her phone, and then I tiptoed back to my room. We looked at the number we wrote down off the website for the Frog and Tadpole Rescue Group: 0419 249 728. That was a weird number to us. Bird and I argued over whether or not the zero counted. I thought it must mean something or they wouldn’t have put it there, but Bird said a zero in front of a bunch of numbers doesn’t make the number bigger than it is by itself. That made a little sense, so I took a deep breath and dialled the number Please hang up and try again.’ So I did but this time with the zero in front.

  A man answered the phone. He had a really weird voice, and when he said ‘Frog and Tadpole Rescue Group,’ it sounded like he was twisting the words in the wrong places.

  I said, ‘Hello. I have a White’s tree frog that I rescued and want to give to you.’

  Bird poked me in the ribs and whispered that maybe we should ask him for a reward for rescuing Cuddles. I made an angry face at him, and he made an angry face back at me but stopped whispering.

  ‘Okay, mate, how about you tell me where you found him, and I’ll see what we can do.’

  I wasn’t sure I should tell him the whole story, but I figured someone who works rescuing frogs wouldn’t call the police on us – and besides, he was at the other end of the world. So I told him that I found Cuddles in an aquarium in my classroom in Canada.

  ‘You found him in an aquarium in Canada?’ the man asked. That’s when I came clean, and I told him that I didn’t exactly find Cuddles. The man was really quiet as I explained. When I was done talking, at first there was no sound, and I thought that maybe he had hung up the phone. But then he said, ‘I’m sorry, mate, did you say Canada?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  The man was quiet for another moment, and then he told me that what Bird and I had done was very brave and showed a great concern for frogs. That made me smile on the inside. I didn’t smile on the outside because I didn’t want Bird to start poking at me again.

  But then the man told me something that made the room start to go dark on the sides but get brighter in the centre. After he said that thing, I didn’t hear much else, even though he talked for what seemed like a long time. After he finished, he asked me if I had any questions. I said no and thanks and then hung up the phone. My mouth all of a sudden felt really dry, and I had a hard time swallowing.

  I looked at Bird and couldn’t say anything at first. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. It was like the speaking part of my brain was numbed. It was like I was floating up above where we were and was looking down at my room and me and Bird and Cuddles in the lunch bag.

  Bird started saying, ‘What? What? What?’ louder and louder. The only thing that unfroze my brain was when I suddenly had the thought that my mother might come upstairs to see what we were doing if he didn’t shut up.

  I told Bird that the man said that once a frog was taken from its natural habitat, it could never be put back because it might have picked up a virus or a bacteria that it could spread to other frogs in the wild. He told me that the frogs rescued from bags of groceries and suitcases and things are given to frog foster parents who keep care of them in captivity.

  ‘He said he can’t take Cuddles. He said he has to live in an aquarium now because he might have a disease that wild frogs would get if he were brought back to Australia,’ I told Bird.

  Bird stared at me with his mouth open. Then he said, ‘No way! You mean we did all this for nothing? I got a misbehaviour and won’t be allowed to play my Game Boy for nothing? Why didn’t you know that already? You know everything else! You know I count on you to know this stuff because I don’t know it! What the crap are we supposed to do now?’

  I didn’t say anything. I lay down on my bed and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. How could I have been stupid enough to think Cuddles could be put back into the swamps of Australia? It seemed so obvious now that he couldn’t. And if I hadn’t thought of how impossible this was, what other things hadn’t I thought of?

  Maybe my mother and Dr. Barrett were right after all – maybe there was something wrong with me. Why couldn’t I just be a normal kid and be happy and not worry about a class frog? Why did I have to worry so much? Why?

  I snapped out of it when Bird yelled, ‘What the bleep are we going to do now, Phin? Think!’

  ‘Bird, shhhh!’ I hissed. ‘You’re going to make my mom come up here, and that’s the last thing we need!’

  ‘Actually, the last thing we need is to have a bleeping frog in a lunch bag!’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘take him back then. We can’t send him to Australia, so go put him back in his aquarium.’

  ‘What? Take him back after all this? Are you crazy or something?’

  ‘Do you have any better idea?’

  Bird said, ‘But why do I have to do it? Why don’t you go do it?’

  I would have done it but my legs felt all rubbery and my breathing was all weird and I doubted I could make it to the school and back. So I said, ‘And tell my mom, “Bye, Mom, I have to go return Cuddles to his aquarium because the man in Australia says I can’t send him there”? I can’t leave! If I leave, my mother will think something’s up!’

  ‘You’ve got a point,’ said Bird.

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  I opened the lunch bag and checked again on Cuddles. He was sitting perfectly still. I figured he’d given up too. I closed the lid and handed him to Bird, reminding him to carry him carefully. I also told him to throw out my lunch bag afterwards. I figured it would be better to tell my mother I lost it than to explain all the holes in it.

  ‘All right, but cross your fingers that I don’t get caught doing any of this,’ Bird said. Then he sneaked down the stairs and past my mother’s office and made it out safely.

  I lay back down on my bed. My head hurt and I felt all weak. I closed my eyes, and all I could see was Cuddles. I looked up at the pattern of the plaster globs on my ceiling and thought I saw Cuddles’ head and neck. I just could hardly believe it – once a frog was taken from nature, it couldn’t go back. Once Cuddles became contaminated by humanness, he was trapped by humanness forever.
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  This made me think of the true story of Minik, who was an Inuit boy who was taken to New York along with his father and some other men. The men died of disease and their bodies were put on display in the Natural History museum, just like rocks. When Minik found out they were in the museum, he was really, super, to-infinity upset. All his life, he felt that he didn’t fit in anywhere – not in New York and not in his native land.

  This made me think a horrible thought: what if humans have become so contaminated by the evil of humanness that they never see that what they do to animals is wrong? And what if non-human animals have become so contaminated by humanness that they can never be saved? What if the world is becoming just one great big, enormous Museum of Natural History, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it?

  Once I thought that, I felt like my whole body was growing smaller and smaller and smaller but heavier and heavier at the same time. I read somewhere that since atoms are 99.9 percent empty space, if all the space were sucked out of the atoms in your body, you’d shrink to the size of a grain of salt, even though you’d be the same weight. I felt like I was becoming a seventy-pound grain of salt and was sinking, sinking right through my mattress.

  This made me think of the fact that scientists say that most atoms were made a few minutes after the birth of the universe and the rest were cooked inside stars that exploded billions of years ago. They say that 1 percent of the hiss we hear on the radio is the echo of the Big Bang.

  I made myself think of more facts about atoms and the universe, and then, finally, my body seemed to go back into its regular size and shape and the pounding in my head stopped. By suppertime, I figured I could fool my mother into thinking that nothing was wrong with me. But there is. Something. Very. Wrong.

  Ever since Bird and I found out that there’s nothing we can do for Cuddles, I’ve felt really weird. I feel like it looks when DVDs go wonky and people’s bodies are all broken up into little square bits that move slowly around the screen.

  I’ve felt so weird that I actually thought about telling my mom about what happened – but then my common sense kicked in. I also considered calling my grandmother to talk to her. She’s the only one who really seems to understand about animals. Just as I was dialling her number, though, a part of my brain screamed, ‘No! You can’t tell ANYONE! Listen to me!’ and won over the other part of my brain that thought maybe my grandmother could help. I’m still not 100 percent sure I shouldn’t tell Grammie but I’m a little worried that she might tell my mom. Maybe there’s a Giant Rule Book of Life that says that people who know things about kids have to tell their moms about it. I know Mrs. Wardman has been following that rule.

  Speaking of Mrs. Wardman, these days I’m liking school even less than usual. Every time I look at Cuddles in his aquarium, I feel really sad and angry all at the same time. I think there should be a word for that feeling.

  In math class today, though, I was just plain annoyed. Well, that’s like saying the Arctic is a little on the chilly side. In fact, I got very, very mad. It all started with a question from the book called Math Makes Sense. It said, ‘Add 679 and 451 and then estimate to the nearest hundred to check your answer.’ It didn’t make any logical sense. I raised my hand and Mrs. Wardman came over to my desk.

  I said, ‘I don’t think this makes sense.’

  ‘Phin, just do as it says,’ said Mrs. Wardman.

  ‘But how can I check my answer with an estimate after I actually add those numbers up?’

  ‘Phin, we spent a whole unit on estimation. Remember how we discussed that if you round numbers up or down to the nearest hundred and then add them, your answer should be about the same as when you really add them?’

  ‘I remember that,’ I said. ‘But how can an estimate be more true than the actual answer?’

  Mrs. Wardman told me to just give it a try. I didn’t say anything. I added the numbers up, and the answer was 1,130. Then I estimated and the answer was 1,200. I raised my hand again. Mrs. Wardman came over but she didn’t look very happy.

  ‘Should I change my answer to 1,200?’ I asked.

  ‘No, you’ve done it right,’ she said.

  ‘But you said the estimate should be about the same as the real answer, and it’s not.’

  ‘Phin, you’ve done it right – just go on to the next question.’

  I was very, very mad. Normally math makes sense, but this math did not. I thought about all the ways other things don’t make sense. I made a list in my mind:

  1. At noon hour yesterday, Bird said shit and got in trouble for it. But the day before that Lyle said piss and didn’t get in trouble. Why is it okay to say piss but not shit?

  2. Cans of food with No-Name on the label. How can it be no-name if they call it No-Name? Isn’t that a name?

  3. Dr. Barrett is supposed to be helping me but so far all he’s done is make my life worse.

  Then I started to think about how maybe the reason things aren’t making sense is because something has infected the brains of humans all over North America. Maybe it’s something in coffee or in other stuff adults eat and drink. Maybe it’s the pollution or maybe it’s the chemicals pillows are soaked in so that people’s heads don’t catch on fire. Maybe whatever has infected their brains is the same thing that infects the brains of people who are addicted to drugs or video machines.

  Then I wondered how long humans can live without brains that work like they should. I read in a book that the reason cockroaches can live for a week without their heads is because they have brains in their bodies too. But they die after a week because they can’t eat without heads. I figure humans can live a long, long time with brains that only partly work as long as they can eat and move. I figure they’ll just keep on doing the things that make them feel good – until they finally completely destroy the planet.

  All this made my head hurt. I could feel my heart beating and my face turning red. I could feel my hands shaking and my brain buzzing. So I dug around in my desk and found a black Magic Marker. I sat there for a second looking down at my math book waiting for my common sense to kick in, but it didn’t. Then I did something that I knew would likely get me in trouble – but I didn’t care because things weren’t making any sense anyway. I wrote on the front of my math book with my Magic Marker. I wrote the word This in front of Math Makes Sense and then I drew an arrow up between the words Makes and Sense and wrote in the word No.

  That’s when Mrs. Wardman asked me what I was doing. I didn’t say anything. She picked up my math book and looked at it and then at me. I still didn’t say anything.

  Then she said, ‘Phineas Walsh! I don’t know what on earth is going on with you. Why did you do that?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  Then she told me that I would have to spend my lunch hour in the principal’s office and he would write a misbehaviour note for my mother to sign.

  Normally that would upset me, but it didn’t – right then I just felt calm.

  I looked down at the cover of my math book. At least then it made sense.

  Today while my mom was reading an article, I boiled some water and made her some jasmine tea. I even cut a little piece of a lemon because she likes that on the side. She was happy and surprised when I brought it to her study in her favourite tea cup with the lady slippers on it. She took a sip of it and said it was the best tea she’d ever tasted.

  I’ve been trying to make my mother happy ever since I wrote on my math book. After Mrs. Wardman told her what I did, shocked was her first reaction. Then she was mad and asked me if I’d completely lost my mind. I told her that I hadn’t, but that it might have been off-line or blinked or something. She told me that what I’d done was called vandalism and was completely disrespectful. This reminded me of one time I was super mad and told her I wanted to kill someone. She was really shocked and showed me how threats were part of the Criminal Code of Canada. She went on about the math-book vandalism for so long that I thought she was going to get out the Code again.


  My mother asked me what I thought my punishment should be, and I said it should be to make me live with my guilt for the rest of my life. She said that, no, it would be no computer or TV privileges for a week. I said that was fine because I couldn’t watch the Green Channel anyway. Then she just sighed and told me that I would have to scrub the marker off the math book. That’s when I could tell that my mother’s mad had turned to sad.

  I can handle it when my mother is mad because that makes me mad too. And being mad makes me feel a bit more powerful, like I can use that energy to do things. But when she’s sad, that’s different. I don’t like to see her sad. The worst sad for my mom was right after my dad left and after Granddad died. After those things happened, she slept almost all the time and wouldn’t eat and her hands shook a lot.

  When my mom’s sad, I feel sad too and that takes my power away and leaves me with only enough energy to want to make her happier. Luckily this time she was sad about something that could be fixed. After all, it was just a dissolvable marker and it wasn’t very hard to get it off.

  After I brought my mom the tea and saw that it made her a little happier, I started having second and even third thoughts about that. The more I think about it, the more I’m not 100 percent sure I should want my mother to be happy. If she’s happy, that likely means she’s getting what she wants. And what she wants is for me to be happy about not being able to watch the Green Channel, and for me to be happy that Cuddles is stuck in a cage for the rest of his life, and for me to be happy that animals are disappearing off the face of the earth and the entire planet is dying.

  Yes, the more I think of it, the more I realize that I don’t want her to be perfectly happy. In fact, I think happiness might be the whole problem – everyone, including my own mother, wants to be happy all the time and nobody wants to be worried, even though they super, to-infinity should be.

  I don’t like it when my mom is sad, but maybe that’s just the way it has to be. So now I’m thinking that she is not going to win this one. I am not going to be happy.