Amphibian

by Carla Gunn

  I said, ‘She’d say she doesn’t know.’ And I wasn’t being sarcastic. What if I learn how to do stuff like that and start to believe it’s more important than learning how to save the life of an animal or something like that? I could start to lose my perspective or something. That’s a thing that’s been worrying me lately.

  The problem with my plan not to learn anything more at school is that it’s not as easy as it sounds. Some things just sink into your brain without you even trying.

  Today I had a plan, though. I know that the best way not to learn something is to have your mind busy doing something else. So last night I ate a lot of popcorn and the shells of the seeds got stuck between my teeth. Pushing on them with my tongue and sucking gave me something to do when Mrs. Wardman was talking.

  Then, after first recess, I made a circle and drew a line across it thirteen times. This made twenty-six sections. Then in each section I put the letters of the alphabet in order. Now I can figure out everyone’s opposite name by finding each letter of their name and then looking to see what letter is exactly opposite to it on the circle. While Mrs. Wardman talked about graphing numbers, I found out that my opposite name is Cuva and that Bird’s is Oveq. Then at lunch hour when Bird and I started calling each other those names, the other kids wanted to know what we were doing, and now they all want to know their opposite names too. That kept me busy for most of the afternoon.

  Do you know what the opposite of opposite is? It’s the same.

  I did something I wasn’t supposed to do this evening. It was a thing that was possible to do because my mother was out at a meeting, and I knew she’d be gone until after my bedtime.

  Rena came over to be my pretend caregiver. She acted really nice with my mother but as soon as Mom left, she got on the telephone. Sometimes this bothers me because I want to play games like Worst Case Scenario where you have to guess the best thing to do when you fall through the ice or get stuck in a cougar’s mouth or how to survive on a desert island. The right answer for that one is to tie tufts of grass to your ankles so that dew will gather on them and you can wring them out for water. But this evening I didn’t even care about playing games because it’s been so long since I did what I wasn’t supposed to do: I watched the Green Channel.

  I felt a little bit guilty about that – but just a little bit. I figured my breaking the law was for a bigger cause. How else am I going to learn about what I can do to save animals?

  And besides, what’s the worst that can happen if my mother finds out? She’ll get really upset and maybe yell at me. I think a question like that should be in the game Worst Case Scenario. It could say, ‘What should you do when your mother gets super angry and is yelling at you?’ I think the answer is to imagine her as a barking elephant seal.

  The first show I watched was about how in Michigan nine dogs were found dead and a few of them had been decapitated. One person wrote a sign to the person who did that. It said, ‘You will be caught. You will be punished. You will burn in hell by God.’

  Then I watched a show about how when people don’t buy other people’s products because of how they’re made, that’s called a consumer boycott. The example they used was the tuna-dolphin problem. That’s when fishermen noticed that tuna often swim below herds of dolphins and started encircling dolphins in their nets in order to catch the tuna. The net was then pulled together to keep the tuna from diving out, but dolphins got caught too. Millions of dolphins died this way. When people learned about this, they boycotted. Then the three biggest tuna companies started buying tuna only from fishermen who don’t use encircling.

  Now people on the Green Channel are working on other problems like the killing of millions of ocean animals by other types of fishing, like bottom trawling. Heavy gates and traps are hauled over the ocean floor and destroy everything in their path – just to get a few shrimp. That makes about as much sense as bulldozing an entire forest just to find some mushrooms.

  The Green Channel said there are hundreds of things that we buy that come out of the destruction of wildlife. I knew about some of those things, but I didn’t know about most of them.

  After that show, I wrote down as many as I could remember. Then I went to my mother’s computer and typed in the words boycott and product I got over two million hits. I read through some of the sites that came up, like ethicalconsumer.org and humanefood.ca and idausa.org.

  Then I made a list. And it’s a very long, long list.

  My mother keeps reminding me that I have another appointment with Dr. Barrett in a few days. I was trying to forget about that, and it makes me angry that she reminds me about it every day.

  I said, ‘Mom, if you were about to have a piece cut out of your brain and you knew it was going to really hurt, would you want me to remind you of it every day?’

  ‘Does it hurt you to see Dr. Barrett?’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt my body but it hurts my mind.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Dr. Barrett says things that don’t make any sense and when people do that it makes my mind confused.’ I told her that I figure that’s how people’s minds feel when they take drugs.

  ‘Phin, maybe Dr. Barrett seems confusing at first, but soon you’ll understand what he means and he will help you feel better.’

  Hearing that just made me mad. I said, ‘I don’t know how he’s going to do that. Is he going to stop the destruction of the earth? Is he going to bring back animals from extinction? Does he think he’s God or something?’

  ‘Phin! You’re being very melodramatic! Stop! It’s not the end of the world!’

  Hearing her say that made me even angrier. ‘But, Mom, don’t you see? It is! And it’s not like a video game – there’s no Reset button!’

  My mother’s voice got really quiet again. She said, ‘Phin, please calm down.’

  Then I screamed in my loudest voice. I screamed so loud that the sound of my voice scared me even though I felt it come from my own throat. I screamed so loud that if there had been a puddle in front of me, my voice would have made the water move and cause a one-foot tsunami. I screamed, ‘Stop lying! Stop telling me that everything will be all right! It will not be all right! It won’t be all right until people like you and Dr. Barrett and all the other big, fat, humongous, gigantic, enormous liars start telling the truth to yourselves!’

  That’s when my mother told me in a very, very low voice to go to the bathroom for a time out to think about my behaviour. She’s trying not to argue with me. I know this because I overheard her talking to her friend Jill about how she should stay calm and not argue with me because all that does is make me a better arguer. What she doesn’t know is that I don’t need a person to say something in order to argue. I could still argue with the look on my mother’s face and the way she sighed.

  I screamed, ‘No – you go sit in the bathroom and think! Go think about your own behaviour!’ Then I sat down on the floor and wouldn’t move even though she told me three more times to go to the bathroom.

  My mother’s face looked like the face of an angry baboon. She tried to pick me up under my arms but I made my body go straight. I thought of my mother as the unstoppable force and me as the immovable object, but I knew one of us was going to lose, which made the whole idea false.

  She decided to pull me, but still I kept my body straight. She got me across the living room but when she tried to haul me through the door to the stairs, I grabbed hold of the plant stand and it got hauled along with me.

  My mother forgot what Dr. Barrett said and turned around and yelled at me, ‘Phin! Let go of that plant right now – you’re going to knock it over!’

  I said, ‘I’m not going to knock it over! You’re the one creating the force, so you’re the one who’s going to knock it over! I’m just sitting here!’

  That’s when the plant stand fell over. It made a loud crashing noise that made me stop talking. It made Fiddledee run and squeeze under the couch. It made the plant pot break in two and the peace lily fall out
. And it made my mother even angrier. She looked even scarier than a mad baboon. She looked like a girl I saw on TV one day on the horror-movie channel. The girl was sitting in a bed and her face was like a monster’s and then the bed started to move up off the floor and the girl’s head started to spin around like a bicycle tire. That’s when I changed the channel. I wished I could have changed my mother’s channel.

  My mother didn’t even pick up the plant. She must have gotten some more strength from being angry because all of a sudden she picked me up off my feet and carried me up the first eight steps really fast. She banged my arms and legs against the railing and that’s when I said, ‘Mom, stop! You’re hurting my parts!’

  Then she said in a very low voice, ‘Phin, if you don’t stand up and walk up the stairs on your own, all of your parts are going to hurt! In fact, we’re both going to hurt a lot when we fall backwards down the stairs.’

  I thought about that. We were on the eighth step and I figured if we fell backwards two steps at a time, when we hit the sixth step, I would land on her. Then two more steps would make her land on me and then two more would put me on her and then the last two would put her on me. That would be the most painful landing since the foyer is hardwood but the stairs are carpet. I didn’t think it would feel very good, so I decided to walk the rest of the way to the bathroom. But when I got there, I slammed the door really, really hard.

  ‘And I’m NOT going to see that fucker Dr. Barrett again!’ I yelled as loud as I could. Then I had a sore throat.

  After my mom told me I could come out of the bathroom, I went to my room and stayed there for two hours. I wanted to make my mother feel bad, but she didn’t even ask me to come out like she usually does. I could hear her slamming things around in the kitchen.

  For a long time I just sat in there thinking with my hands shaking and my parts hurting. Then after a while I decided to try to calm myself down. I got out my Reull book. I thought and thought about what to write. I was having a hard time because I was still angry.

  I lay down on my bed and imagined being at Pete’s Pond in Africa. I imagined the sounds of the birds and the wind. I imagined the smell of the grasses and of the water. I imagined being hot, and the hotness made the blood run into my hands and my feet, which calmed me down.

  Then I sat up and wrote as fast as I could. I wrote about how one day on Reull things started dropping from the sky. All the Gorachs looked up in awe at the thousands of unidentified shining globs floating down, down, down to the ground. All the Gorachs were amazed and excited.

  As the floating, glittering objects started to land, every Gorach on the planet rushed to grab one. The Big Ideas Gorachs pushed and shoved and kicked and shot weapons in the air so that they could collect the most objects. They were thinking that these objects were like the other good things on the planet – they could sell them to the ordinary Gorachs and make a fortune.

  But the Wooloofs and the creatures of Reull had predicted that that would happen and so the glittery, shiny objects just kept dropping and dropping like millions of raindrops. Soon every Gorach was holding one.

  As soon as these objects made contact with the chemicals in the Gorach’s skin, the mysterious globs took a DNA sample of the Gorach holding it and immediately transformed into a perfect little replica of that Gorach. When this happened, the Gorach was amazed. All over Reull, you could hear the sounds of ooooohhh and aahhhhhh. It was like the planet was breathing in ooooohhhs and out aahhhhhhs.

  As the Gorachs stared at the replicas of themselves, the Wooloofs and the other creatures jumped into action. They encircled all the Gorachs who just couldn’t tear their eyes away from themselves. The ones who stopped looking at themselves long enough to see what was happening were allowed to run free. In the end, mostly all the Big Ideas Gorachs and the Gorach Leaders and the scientists who worked for them were caged.

  Then the glittery, shiny objects all turned to dust. Those who were in cages looked up for the first time. They couldn’t believe their eyes. So they closed them. They couldn’t believe their tendrils. So they tied them. They couldn’t believe their ears. So they plugged them. They couldn’t believe their hands as they grasped the cold steel of the cages. So they clenched them. But as much as they wanted it to, that didn’t change the fact – the fact that they were captured in cages.

  This morning while I was getting ready for school and while my mother was in the shower, the phone rang. It was only 7:33 a.m. Whenever the phone rings that early, my heart does a somersault. The only person who calls that early is my dad.

  I ran to the phone and glanced at the call display before picking it up. Dad has a cellphone and it always comes up Walsh Will. But as my hand was on its way to the receiver, I noticed that the call display didn’t say that. I jerked my hand back. It said a different name. At first I thought I must be seeing wrong. I blinked and looked again, and yep, that’s what it said all right: Gaskell Brent. BRENT!

  Do you know what it feels like to be expecting one of your most favourite people in the world and to get one of your least favourites instead? It’s crueller than cruel. It’s like biting into what you think is a big, sweet, juicy purple grape and getting a mouthful of bitter, gross black olive. Or like if you think you won a million dollars in a lottery but it turns out that all you won was a lousy box of Glosette raisins. And raisins make you gag.

  I let the phone ring three times and then I picked it up and put it back down. I felt a little bit powerful when I did that. I imagined Brent’s confused face. I imagined him thinking that my mother didn’t want to talk to him. I imagined him deciding, ‘Oh well. I’ll just call that other woman instead – the one who doesn’t already have a husband.’

  Then after a few minutes, I heard another phone ring from inside my mom’s coat pocket. I pulled it out and pushed the Answer button on and then off again.

  I would have rather my mom got a call from Mrs. Wardman. Or from Lyle. Or from Satan, for that matter.

  At school today a bullying expert came to talk to us … again. This time it was a woman.

  She picked a good day because just before she arrived, Ryan borrowed a pen from Lyle but it turned out not to be a pen at all. It was one of those things that looks just like a pen but it’s really a shocking device. When Ryan clicked down on it, it shocked him and he screamed and flung it up in the air and it landed on Mitty’s head. Mrs. Wardman was super mad. She grabbed the pen, threw it in the garbage and sent Lyle to Mr. Legacie’s office.

  This meant, though, that the biggest bully missed the anti-bullying presentation. The expert talked about how bullying is wrong and that if we’re being bullied, we should:

  1. tell an adult

  2. stay in a group

  3. join clubs or activities where we’ll meet other kids

  4. if we’re being bullied online, don’t reply and tell some-one we trust.

  She also said that bullies often will pick on kids who are shy, quiet or seem different from other kids. That was the part that made the most sense to me. Scientists have this theory called the ‘oddity effect’ that says that fish who stand out are more likely to be chased by predators. This explains why fish prefer to school with other fish who are just like them. Obviously I picked the wrong school.

  Just as the bullying expert was getting ready to leave, Lyle came back into the classroom. As he was walking to his seat – and right in front of Mrs. Wardman and the expert – he flicked my eraser off my desk. He did that right in front of everyone just after we had a session on bullying and nobody did a thing! Isn’t that bullying? And isn’t it also an example of irony or something? As I got up to get my eraser lying in the middle of the floor I was super, to-infinity angry.

  After the woman left, Mrs. Wardman told us to each draw a ‘Bullying-Free’ poster. She said we’re going to put them up all around our classroom. She told us to include some of what we learned from the bullying expert.

  I sat looking at my blank page for a long time. I didn’t know what to
draw. I looked at Kaitlyn’s poster and it was of a girl talking to a teacher. In a speech bubble above her head it said, ‘I am being bullied.’ I looked at what Gordon was drawing and it was kids playing in a Lego club together.

  I thought some more about what I could draw. I didn’t want it to be anything that would belong better on my List of Lies than on the classroom wall. Finally, I picked up my pencil and drew a picture of a kid trying to get his hat back from another kid who was holding it way up in the air and laughing. I made the bully look as much as I could like Lyle and the other kid look like me. Then over top of my drawing I wrote ‘Free Bullying.’

  When I passed it in, Mrs. Wardman didn’t say anything. Not a thing. But I know she’s going to talk to my mother again. Oh well.

  This evening I called my grandmother. I got right to the point. I said, ‘By the way, Grammie, do you know why my parents got separated?’

  My grandmother didn’t say anything at first. Then she cleared her throat and said, ‘Sometimes, honey, people just don’t get along very well.’

  ‘So?’ I said. ‘Does that mean they can’t live in the same social group? When chimps fight, afterwards they still live together in the same group. It’s not like one of the chimps just gets up, packs his bags and wanders off to another country.’

  ‘Well, if your mom and dad lived together, that might mean a lot of arguing and fighting and hurt feelings that may not be the healthiest thing for either your mom or your dad … or for you, sweetie,’ said Grammie.

  I didn’t say anything, and then Grammie told me some more things about adults who don’t get along. Stuff I’ve heard before.

  After a few minutes I changed the topic and Grammie and I talked some about animals. Grammie mentioned that she saw a snowy white owl while she was walking in the woods yesterday. That reminded me of Jean Craighead George, who wrote that her kids used to have a pet screech owl named Yammer who lived in their bookcase, watched TV and even took showers with the kids. Her son had once made a sign for the bathroom that said, ‘Please remove owl after showering.’