A Little Bit of Spectacular

by Gin Phillips

Mom found out that the doctors would have to remove the tumors and the parts the tumors were attached to, and she’d need six weeks to recover. At least. No climbing the stairs in our building, no lugging piles of books around at work. It’s strange how it takes one little ring of the phone and a voice that says, “This is Meghan from Dr. Ledbetter’s office . . . can I speak to your mother?” and life as you know it falls out from under you.

  We were behind in the rent already because Mom had been so sick she couldn’t work. She said we needed help. So she called Gram, and there was a long conversation I couldn’t hear very well, and then we were packing up the apartment and renting a U-Haul truck and then we were here.

  She smiled at me from her bed, her arms limp at her sides.

  “Plantagenet isn’t too far from here,” she said. “I mean, it wasn’t far from here. It was right at the on-ramp for I-20.”

  “Have you heard if it’s going to reopen?”

  “Oh, I can’t imagine that it would. There’s not much more than a foundation there now. I drove past it a few years ago and it was all overgrown and awful looking. I don’t know why the city doesn’t bulldoze it and start from scratch.”

  She scooted over and made room for me next to her. I sank into the mattress, not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. I’d thought I might have solved the mystery. But if I had, where would that leave me? Back to having scones as the highlight of my day.

  “What makes you ask?” asked Mom.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just wondering.”

  I toyed with the sheets, smoothing them over my left leg. I shifted and noticed a bit of red by Mom’s arm. I looked closer and saw it was a tiny splotch of blood. Smaller than a dime.

  “You’re bleeding again,” I said.

  Mom looked down. She licked her lips and rubbed a hand over her eyes. Eyes that seemed a little swollen.

  “It’s nothing, Mario,” she said. “It’s normal. The doctors said there could be a little bleeding while I healed.”

  I couldn’t look away from the red splotch.

  “I’m fine, honey.” She flipped the sheet over the bloodstain and patted my knee. “I am going to be totally fine. I keep telling you—there’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  “I know,” I said, which is what I always said when she promised she would be fine.

  When Mom first got her diagnosis of fibroid tumors, it’s funny what things popped into my head. In Mysteries of the Strange and Unexplained, I read about Queen Mary of England, who thought she was pregnant twice, but both pregnancies vanished without a trace. She supposedly had giant fibroid tumors instead—tumors in her belly growing big as a basketball. I kept wondering how big Mom’s tumors might get before they operated on her.

  Once, right after Mom went to the doctors for the first time, I found a wadded-up towel on the bathroom with blood all over it. It made me think of when Malaka threw a vanilla candle at me so I could smell it, but it hit me in the nose instead. Blood gushed out and turned my white shirt red. That’s how much blood was on that towel.

  I asked Mom about the towel and she said she was fine.

  There’s more trivia about tumors than you might think. I didn’t realize how much until Mom got diagnosed, and then a bunch of it popped into my head like it had been stacked on shelves at the back of my brain until I needed it. There was a man in Vietnam who had a two-hundred-pound tumor removed from his leg—it had been growing for twenty-eight years. I think he turned out to be okay. There was a woman over eight feet tall from Missouri who was already over six feet tall by the time she was my age. Scientists now think it was a tumor on the pituitary gland that caused her to grow that big.

  People used to think sharks couldn’t get tumors, but it turns out they can.

  Goldfish with tumors were once highly prized by Japanese royalty.

  Tumors are strange and mysterious things. They appear from out of nowhere. I found it impossible to believe that there was nothing to worry about. That Mom was—poof!—totally fine again.

  I decided I should sit with her just in case that blood splotch turned out to be serious. I liked to watch her sleep, to watch her chest moving up and down. Taking oxygen in and out.

  “You don’t need to stay in here,” said Mom, her eyes starting to droop. “Go have some fun. Get outside. Go to the park. See some friends. Oh, here’s an idea: Do your homework.”

  “Done,” I said. “I’ll just sit here another minute.”

  “’Kay,” she said, slurring a little, eyes totally closed. She rolled onto her side, wrapping her arms around herself, like she was giving herself a hug. She always slept like that.

  I eased off the bed, not wanting to disturb her, and scooted against the wall. I rested my chin on my knees and watched my mother breathe. Thoughts of Plantagenet High School danced through my head, like sugar plums in that Christmas poem. Being in my mother’s room seemed to give me even bigger, crazier fantasies than usual. Maybe I was focusing on the wrong story: The high school might have nothing to do with the writing on the walls.

  Plenty of British people had moved to America—there could be descendants of those Plantagenet kings living here in Birmingham. Maybe they were starting a new branch of that snobby club, although it still didn’t seem like the kind of club that would promote itself on bathroom walls.

  I was more into the idea of the archery society. I hugged my knees closer to myself. Now, really, that could be a clever way to disguise a more interesting kind of club. Archery and horses and medieval weapons. I thought of that article Gram had been reading about the robber who had been hit over the head and left for the police to find. Could there be a group of people out there—secretive, highly trained, of course—fighting crime? I imagined knights in armor clunking criminals over the head with giant hammers.

  And what if the alien thing wasn’t so crazy? Aliens might consider themselves chosen. Aliens might never grow old. They could have strange powers like that. Powers that meant they’d live forever, that they’d never get sick or hurt or tired.

  When Gram came home from work, I was still leaning against the bedroom wall. She apparently called my name a few times before I looked up, because when I finally said “hey,” she just shook her head and humphed. I walked back into the living room as she was picking up the purse she’d just set on the coffee table. Then she slipped her feet back into the white sneakers she’d left in the doorway.

  “You’re coming with me,” she said.

  Chapter 4

  THE FROG GIRL

  “We are getting out of this apartment,” said Gram. “Now.”

  She couldn’t have surprised me more if she’d announced that she was buying me that pet dolphin I’d always wanted. Gram liked to prop her feet up and flip through the newspaper on the couch after she’d been working for eight hours straight. She never wanted to leave the apartment once she got home. For a few seconds I just stared at her as she opened the front door.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “You’re coming to meet Amelia.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl I told you about. The one who goes to school with you.”

  “Oh, Gram, that’s okay . . .”

  She gave me one hard look, purse on her arm, foot tapping. “Grab your coat, Olivia. You’ve spent way too many afternoons sitting in here alone. It’s time to stop thinking so much.”

  I did not want to go. For more than one reason. First, I did not want to put on my coat. It had belonged to Gram—she hadn’t thought the pullover I brought from Charleston was warm enough for early March, and a brand-new coat was another “unnecessary” thing we didn’t need to spend money on. The pale green coat was waist-length on Gram, but it was knee-length and baggy on me. It made me look like a lima bean. I usually tried to slip off to school without it, and she usually caught me. I t
old her I’d rather die of cold than embarrassment, but she did not find it funny.

  So I did not want to meet anyone in my lima bean coat. But I also did not want to leave the apartment. I wasn’t exactly happy alone in there every afternoon, but I was comfortable. I knew what to expect. I did not want to make awkward conversation with some possibly weird/possibly mean/possibly boring girl. I figured Amelia was probably begging her mother at that very same moment not to force her to make awkward conversation with me. She was probably dreading me coming over. That would make it even worse. I’d have to make conversation with a mean/weird/boring girl who was also annoyed.

  But when it all came down to it, nothing I thought really mattered. It was possible that I could have argued with Gram and gotten her to change her mind. I’d say the odds were one in fifty. Arguing with her would have disturbed Mom. And it was always so much work to argue with Gram . . . it was a lot easier just to grab my coat.

  “Do you want to push the button?” Gram asked as we stepped into the elevator.

  “I’m eleven, Gram,” I reminded her, for possibly the thousandth time since we’d moved in. “I don’t need to push buttons anymore.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said as the doors closed behind us. “I like pushing them myself.”

  She was very slow, though, when it came to reaching for the button. Too slow. I admit it—I pushed it. I pushed it twice.

  Gram nodded approvingly.

  “Your mother is fine, you know,” she said as we started to move.

  “That’s what she always says,” I said.

  “That’s because it’s true.”

  “Okay,” I said, a little too quickly. A little too agreeably. Gram frowned like she recognized the tone of someone who doesn’t believe you but doesn’t want to argue about it. She had Mom’s light brown eyes with little gold flecks in them, and when she stared at you, it was hard to look away.

  Ding, went the elevator as we passed the third floor. Ding again as we passed the second floor.

  “I know you were scared when she got sick,” she said. “I know you felt like you had to take care of her when it was just the two of you. But you don’t have to be scared now. You don’t have to worry. She’s healing, and, in another month or so, she’ll be totally back to normal. You need to stop sitting around imagining that something terrible is going to happen.”

  “I don’t think about terrible things happening,” I said.

  The elevator was going really slow.

  “Of course you don’t,” she said, a little too quickly.

  She didn’t say anything else, though; she just stepped out of the elevator when it opened onto the parking level. I followed her and hoped we were done with serious conversations.

  It turned out that Amelia lived in a part of town called Southside. We slowed down in front of a white brick house with black shutters and a porch that wrapped around both sides. There was a wrought-iron gate all the way around the house, and the front yard was overgrown and junglelike in a good way, with big shady trees and hanging vines that were already a summery green. The roof had swoops and curves in it, not just straight lines. The front door was polished wood with a big brass knocker in the shape of a fist. It felt weird to pull up to the house in a car—it seemed like the kind of house that would fit better with a horse and carriage. I half expected Amelia and her mother to come out in long puffy dresses and big hats.

  Instead they opened the door in jeans and sweatshirts. They were both short—“petite” as Gram would say—with round, happy faces. Mrs. Glasgow was smiling, which looked like her natural expression. Amelia wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning either. It looked like she could go either way.

  Gram introduced me, and I shook hands with Mrs. Glasgow and then nodded at Amelia.

  “Hey,” I said, pulling off my coat as quickly as possible.

  “Hey,” said Amelia, looking at a spot just over my left shoulder. I wasn’t sure if she was shy or rude or just uninterested.

  Gram rolled her eyes, and Mrs. Glasgow smiled.

  “Amelia, why don’t you go show Olivia the backyard?” Mrs. Glasgow said, giving Amelia a sort of half-pat, half-shove with one hand.

  “Okay, okay,” said Amelia, taking a step away from her mother. She met my eyes, finally, and she almost smiled. “Come on. You’ll like the backyard. Everyone likes the backyard.”

  She took off into the house, and I followed. She didn’t turn back around until we’d gone through the front door, rounded a corner, walked through the kitchen, passed through a screened-in back porch, and jogged down another set of stairs. Then she stopped and watched me while I took in the backyard.

  It was like nothing I had ever seen. It was a big yard with lots of open space, and it was unusually flat for a yard in Birmingham, which is just one hill after another. But what mostly stood out about the view from Amelia’s back porch was the boxes. There must have been at least twenty white boxes all over the yard. The best way to describe them is to say they were like white coffins without tops. They were wooden rectangles sticking up out of the ground, no more than a couple of feet tall, but long enough that I could have laid down in them and had a few inches leftover. I couldn’t see anything but dirt and grass inside them.

  “They’re for my frogs,” said Amelia, looking very serious.

  “Frogs?”

  “Yeah. I collect them. As pets.”

  I walked over to the white box nearest to us. I could see one frog, but there were a couple of tree branches blocking a lot of the ground, so I could have missed others. There was a bowl of water fitted into a hole in the ground, so it looked like a miniature swimming pool.

  “I keep leaves and branches for shade and to give them something to hop over, because frogs need their exercise. Plus they all have water,” Amelia said from behind me.

  It was all so unusual that I forgot to be nervous about talking. My words didn’t freeze up.

  “Don’t they die being trapped in there with no food?” I asked.

  “Oh, I feed them spiders and grasshoppers and whatever bugs I find,” she said. “Plus they can catch their own food. And they don’t drink the water . . .”

  “They absorb it into their skin,” I finished for her.

  She looked at me like I was a potentially interesting frog to add to her collection. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s something I remembered. Like how there’s one frog that has fake eyes on its butt to confuse predators. And that there’s a male frog that swallows frog eggs until they hatch in his throat, then he spits out the babies.”

  She nodded, impressed. “So you’re into frogs?”

  “Not especially,” I said. “But they’re kind of cool. So why do you keep them?”

  She looked around, even up at the sky and under the porch, like someone could be eavesdropping from anywhere. The wind blew just as she started to speak, lifting her long dark hair off her neck.

  “Because they might be magic,” she whispered. “If you catch enough of them, one’s bound to be a handsome prince. Or a powerful wizard.”

  I started planning my escape then. I didn’t want to be rude, but I was not going to spend any longer than I had to with a girl with believed frogs could turn into people.

  “Yeah, well, uhhh . . .” I looked back toward the house. “I think I hear my grandma calling me. Maybe I should just. . . .”

  She laughed out loud. “I’m just messing with you. I want to be a scientist one day, and I really like frogs. I like all amphibians, really, but frogs are the most interesting.”

  She sat down on the bottom porch step and patted the space next to her. She was still smiling, and she didn’t look insane. So I sat next to her and considered what she’d said. I’d never heard of a frog scientist, but it was definitely less crazy than trying to hatch a prince out of one of them.<
br />
  “So you do experiments on them?” I asked.

  “I’m not Dr. Frankenstein,” she said. “I don’t dissect them or torture them. I keep four frogs in each pen, and I keep a journal of what they eat, how high they hop, which ones seem to get along, and which ones avoid each other. Basically I let them do their own thing, and I just watch them.”

  “You’re not trying to prove anything? Test any theories?”

  “Well, I guess you could say I’m collecting data first. I figure before I come up with any major scientific breakthroughs, I need to know what I’m talking about. So I watch.”

  That seemed very reasonable.

  “You kind of freaked me out,” I said. “With the whole handsome prince thing.”

  “That was the point.”

  “Were you trying to scare me off?”

  “My mom told me some lady from work was bringing over her granddaughter. That sounded like it might be boring. Who likes boring?”

  I glanced out over all the white rectangles and the thick green grass. You could still see tidy lawnmower tracks in it. A tiny frog head popped up in one box. It disappeared, then popped up again. I saw its glassy, googly eyes and thought maybe it was wondering who I was.

  “I thought your frog pens were coffins at first,” I admitted.

  “Really?” Amelia looked delighted. “Coffins, huh? I can make that work, I think. I have some cousins coming next month. They can be really boring if I don’t plan ahead.”

  “Who are you going to say is buried in the coffins?” I asked, curious.

  She glanced around the backyard, drumming her fingers against her thigh.

  “Well, no one,” she said finally. “Because they don’t have tops. So that wouldn’t work. But maybe, oh . . . maybe whoever was in them has gotten out.”

  We looked at each other.

  “Vampires,” we said at the same time.

  And that’s when I knew we were going to be friends. I had that sensation like I might float off the ground again, like I did walking back from school this afternoon. I tried to shake it off—I didn’t want to act like a dork. I didn’t want to act like it had been forever since I’d made a new friend. But it was a nice feeling.