A Little Bit of Spectacular

by Gin Phillips

  That’s all I’m saying. It was nice.

  Amelia reached under the porch stairs and pulled out a thick, hardbound notebook so stuffed with papers that it looked like the binding might burst. She showed me how she had photos of each frog, neatly labeled with its name. She’d made notes every day on every frog’s behavior, line after line of her squished-up handwriting saying things like, “10:30 a.m.: Eugene ate entire cricket. 4 p.m.: Has not moved from same spot in corner of box for at least four hours.” And, “9 a.m.: Delores attempted to escape. Threw herself at the wall repeatedly. 1:15 p.m.: Delores made it halfway over the wall. Got stuck. Do not know how long she was hanging there until I found her. Seems stunned but okay.”

  “Eugene? Delores?” I asked.

  “I try to pick good frog names,” she said. She flipped through the pages until she came to a snapshot that had been pasted in the middle of a page. “Sometimes I take extra pictures, you know, if any of them do something especially memorable.”

  The page read, “Alexander, May 6.” The picture showed a frog lying on its back, legs straight up in the air.

  “Is he dead?” I asked.

  “No. He’s just relaxing. He flipped back over a few minutes later. Maybe it was some sort of stretching exercise. Or maybe he had a bad back. I dunno. But I keep the camera here just in case they do anything spectacular,” she said.

  I read through her notebook, more and more impressed. As I read, I could occasionally hear a frog thump against a wooden wall. The porch steps creaked anytime we shifted, and the sound made me think of rocking chairs.

  “You know what I said about frogs being magic?” said Amelia, playing with the buttons on her camera. “I know they’re not, but it’d be cool, wouldn’t it? If all you had to do to get your heart’s desire was to kiss a frog. It’d be gross, but it’d be worth it, wouldn’t it?”

  I closed the notebook and handed it back. “I don’t think you get a wish when you kiss the frog. I think it just turns into a prince. I think you’re confusing it with rubbing a genie’s bottle.”

  Amelia shook her finger at me. “Oh, there are lots of magic frog stories. They’re not always princes. Sometimes it’s a girl who’s the frog. Sometimes it’s a magician in disguise. A frog could be anybody.”

  I didn’t feel like I had enough expertise with frog stories to argue with her. And it was kind of a pleasant idea. Tons of important people disguising themselves as frogs. I had a vision of walking over to one of Amelia’s frog boxes, picking up a frog, and having it suddenly turn into a man in a suit, holding a briefcase and a business card. “I’m Thaddeus Whitehead, and I’ve handled hundreds of lawsuits,” he’d say, like one of those lawyers on television commercials. “Right now I’m a frog. But while you’re here, have you ever been in car accident? Were you injured on the job? Would you like to sue anyone? Ribbit?”

  Amelia cracked her knuckles next to me.

  “So what would you wish for?” she asked. “If you got one wish?”

  I looked away from the box where Thaddeus Whitehead, frog-lawyer, might be rolling in the mud.

  “Right now?” I asked. “A huge cup of coffee.”

  She looked disappointed. “You’re not taking it seriously.”

  I made the sound of a daddy frog horking up a few dozen tadpoles. “You are getting on me for making a joke?”

  “You should take wishes seriously,” she said. “I always have mine planned out. Just in case.”

  “So what’s your one wish?” I asked.

  I don’t know what I expected her to say. To be able to fly? To read minds? I was pretty sure she was a girl who liked the idea of superpowers. But she surprised me.

  “I’d like to build a colony on the moon,” she said. “With rocket ships that took off from airports all across the world, so all sorts of people could go up and visit. Not just astronauts or rich people. Everyone. And it’d be spectacular up there—flying cars and giant swimming pools in the moon craters. Big silver skyscrapers that float.”

  “And anyone could go?” I asked. “Like for a weekend?”

  “Yeah, that’s the point. Even if you’re stuck here on plain Earth, you should be able to see it. Even if you’re, like, a teacher who talks about spelling all day long, you should be able to put your head down on your desk and remember swimming pools on the moon. You’d have that little bit of spectacular with you wherever you went. Oh, look, Brunhilda is trying to catch that fly!”

  I watched her sprint over to Brunhilda with her camera, thinking how she focused so calmly and completely on those frogs. Like she wouldn’t stop until she knew the answers. I thought that maybe, even if she never got a magic wish, she would be the one who figured out how to build a moon colony. She seemed like she could solve any puzzle.

  “Hey, Amelia,” I said, once the fly had escaped from Brunhilda and flown off to a frog-free part of the yard. “I want to tell you something.”

  So I told her all of it. That first time I saw “Plantagenet” written on the wall at Trattoria Centrale. The message in the bathroom at school. The results of my Google search. She didn’t say much. She just nodded and listened, which is probably exactly what a good scientist would do.

  “So what would you do?” I asked. “If you wanted to know what it meant?”

  “You need more data,” she announced. “That’s the problem. You’re trying to put together a hypothesis when you don’t even know all the facts.”

  “I don’t know where to look.”

  “Yes, you do. But you need to look more. You need to branch out. Be organized about it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you,” she said, and she held up her camera.

  Chapter 5

  THE DATA

  The next day after school, I skipped Trattoria Centrale and instead took a roundabout way to Gram’s that wound along 1st and 2nd Avenues. I stopped in every restaurant or shop that I thought might have a public restroom. A couple of cashiers shook their heads at me when I asked to go to the bathroom, but most people smiled and waved me toward the back of the store.

  Not that it was easy. Walking up to complete strangers and asking anything—even just for the bathroom—didn’t come very naturally to me in my new Birmingham life. But I felt a little less shy and a little more comfortable knowing that all along 3rd and 4th Avenues, Amelia was doing the same thing.

  I had a partner now.

  Even after just a month in town, I had a good sense of all the coffee shops and bakeries near me—Urban Standard, Celestial Realm, La Reunion, Lucy’s, Crestwood Coffee. But I’d pretty much only paid attention to places where I could buy sweets and drinks. That afternoon I got a crash course in just how many stores and bathrooms there were within ten city blocks.

  Less than an hour after school got out, I’d been in six restaurants, three ladies boutiques, two antique stores, two drugstores, one ice-cream place, a jewelry store, and a corner grocery store. I’d looked over the bathrooms from ceilings to floors (some of which, let me just say, were cleaner than others). I’d read some things I wish I hadn’t, but I’d also found what Amelia and I had hoped I’d find—more mentions of Plantagenet.

  She’d been right—I’d needed to branch out more. I’d needed to gather more data. My heels had blisters on them, and my back was wet with cold sweat, but as I trudged the last couple of blocks to Gram’s, I was stuffed full of data. And since I’d also followed Amelia’s advice and taken photos of the walls, I had permanent records of everything I’d seen, easy to pull out and study in bed or at school or wherever. I could hardly wait to print everything out, and Gram’s camera—old, but still digital, at least—felt like it was nudging my hip with every step I took.

  Every few steps I wedged that camera a little farther down in my pocket. I guarded it like secret treasure.

  It’s not that I had so many photos. I’d pr
obably taken fewer than a dozen, since I didn’t find the words in every bathroom. But I’d found a version of the two sentences I’d first seen in Trattoria in five more stalls.

  I didn’t think of them as sentences anymore, though.

  I thought of them as messages.

  I was so excited that I couldn’t believe I was walking along the sidewalk like it was any other afternoon—I felt like I should float right up to the rooftops. My hands were tingly. My lips kept wanting to pull into a smile.

  All the sounds on the street were sharper than usual, like I had become super aware of everything. A car honked, and a bell jingled as someone opened a door. A pigeon cooed somewhere above me, and a UPS truck rumbled by, clunking over a pothole. I’d walked these streets dozens of times, and they’d always seemed dull and empty. Now they were packed with excitement and possibility. Every person I passed could be my mystery writer. Every little sight or sound could be a clue.

  I tried to settle down, partly because I wanted to think about what I’d found, and partly because I’d already accidentally run into a nice little old lady because I was trying to read some writing on the side of a building. (For the record, it was pigeon poop, not writing.) I’d added some important pieces of the puzzle in the last hour. The messages were all in the same handwriting, and they were all written in purple.

  I’d also realized that someone was making a habit of writing in the women’s bathrooms. (Not that I could check the men’s rooms.) I’d found the sentence in two ladies’ clothing stores and one jewelry store. Plus, the writing looked feminine. It all pointed to a girl or a woman.

  If she wasn’t just some girl at my school—and I really didn’t think she was, or, at least, I really didn’t want her to be—she probably either lived or worked around here, because why else would she be leaving messages in this neighborhood? Or maybe she was driving all over the city and had left messages in hundreds of bathrooms. I couldn’t rule that out. But I knew the writer had to have been around here often, going in and out of stores and restaurants. Maybe she was still here, still passing me on the street while I walked home from school.

  The biggest question, of course, more interesting than who was writing the messages, was why.

  What did it all mean?

  That, by the way, is exactly what Amelia asked me the next day. I watched for her in the halls on my way to homeroom, and it was the first time since Charleston that I’d had someone to look for in the halls. A little past the school office, I spotted her and called her name. She jogged over to me, weaving through all the other kids. She didn’t bother with a hello.

  “There was that exact same Plantagenet message in a sewing store and a Mexican restaurant!” she said. “I’ll show you on my camera.”

  “I found five more,” I said. “I don’t think we have time to look at pictures before the bell rings, though.”

  She bounced impatiently.

  “It’s aliens,” she said, her book bag slapping against her back. “I know it.”

  “You just want help with your moon colony.”

  “Maybe. Doesn’t mean it’s not aliens.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “Maybe we can get together tomorrow? I don’t want to be late to homeroom.”

  “We’re talking about an alien invasion and the future of the world,” she said, turning toward her own class, “and you’re worried about being late?”

  “Invasion?” I said.

  “Don’t you watch any movies?” she called over her shoulder.

  I wasn’t late at all. I had still had five minutes before the bell. But, for the first time, I had no problem filling the time before class started.

  I didn’t need to fidget with pages and pretend to be busy. I had plenty to do without pretending. I held the camera in both hands. I scanned through my photos, enlarging them on the screen, moving them around. I was going to be as thorough and patient as Amelia with her frogs—I would study every picture. I would memorize every detail. The camera let me spread out all my evidence and take my time, calm and collected, no emotion at all.

  Well, that had been the idea at least. Honestly, I was having a hard time keeping calm. And forget about no emotion. Because the photos had already shown me a couple of things that I missed the first time around. I guess I’d been so excited at first that I hadn’t really looked closely. And the lighting in most bathrooms wasn’t the best.

  But now something was obvious: The Plantagenet messages weren’t all the same.

  With Rachel and her friends chatting behind me—about shoes, and mothers, and apparently a really gross dead roach—I flipped through my photos in order of how I’d found the messages. First, I looked at the picture I’d taken from one wall at Trattoria.

  Nothing had changed there—it was the original message. We are Plantagenet. We are chosen.

  Next I studied the picture of the school bathroom wall, which had the same message as Trattoria, but with the additional line.

  We are Plantagenet. We are chosen.

  We will never grow old.

  Now this was where it started getting interesting. When I looked at the photo from Levy’s jewelry store, I saw something below the “We are Plantagenet” line I’d first seen. There was a water stain on the wall and some scribbling by a black pen, but underneath it all, there was more faded purple writing.

  We are Plantagenet.

  We walk next to you.

  But we are not one of you.

  There was something even more interesting from the Urban Standard coffeehouse. It was so small I hadn’t seen it at first. It wasn’t in the usual purple pen. It was written in a plain blue ink, and it was easy to miss on the beige walls. But this was the message that made my heart beat a little faster.

  We are Plantagenet.

  Our home is in the stars.

  I thought back to that ridiculous website about aliens, with its talk of a crashed ship and helpful blue-eyed, silver-haired aliens. No matter how much Amelia loved the idea, I knew aliens were ridiculous. But still . . . maybe. On a wall inside my brain, that was the word I kept writing over and over: “Maybe.”

  I wouldn’t take it further than that. But I kept rereading the lines I’d found, considering what a home in the stars might mean. People (or something like people) who never grew old, who were not really like us. Who were smarter, stronger, better. Who never got sick, never got hurt, never got tired. . . .

  Maybe.

  I felt a hand land on my shoulder, and the pressure startled me enough that I dropped the camera on the floor. Luckily, it seemed pretty sturdy. I bent to pick it up, turning in my desk to look into Rachel’s slightly surprised face.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you jump.”

  She had blue eyes, it occurred to me. Not that I was looking. Not that I was suddenly very interested in blue eyes.

  “I wasn’t paying attention,” I said, inconspicuously looking for any silver streaks in her brown hair. “My fault.”

  As I spoke, I realized I hadn’t frozen up at all. In fact, my words seemed to be coming easier all the time. My head was full of thoughts of Plantagenet and Amelia. I hadn’t even remembered to be embarrassed about my lima bean coat that morning.

  “I was just going to ask you about your pictures,” Rachel said. “What are they?”

  Well, there was no way to answer that and not have it sound weird. I considered my options. . . .

  “Glad you asked, Rachel. These are messages from aliens.”

  “Well, Rachel, there’s this secret society of people who use medieval weapons, and they could be using bathrooms as their home base.”

  “I think some kings of England are spending a lot of time in the toilet.”

  I finally just shrugged—inside my head, not in real life. I had nothing to lose. It wasn’t like she wanted to be friends with me anyway. She
had plenty of friends; she didn’t need more. I picked the best of all my creepy possible response.

  “They’re pictures of bathroom walls,” I said.

  “Huh,” she said. “Why do you like bathroom walls?”

  I turned all the way around in my seat. No one had ever asked me that. I hadn’t ever had an actual conversation about the appeal of bathroom walls. I was surprised to realize that I knew the answer: It was waiting there on my tongue.

  “Because what people write can be really interesting,” I said. “It’s like they pull random thoughts out of their head and leave them on the wall, and then, when you come along, you get to read their thoughts. You get to look inside people’s heads for just a second.”

  “Like a crystal ball,” she said.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “You ever played with a Ouija board?” she asked. “My mom won’t let me have one, but I tried it last summer at somebody else’s house. I asked it the name of who I would marry.”

  “Did it tell you?” I asked, interested.

  “Yes,” she whispered, leaning closer.

  “Who?”

  “Blarktog.”

  I started to giggle, and she did, too.

  “Blarktog?” I asked.

  “It actually spelled B-L-R-K-T-G, so I added some vowels.” She tried to keep a straight face. “I think he might be Russian.”

  Mrs. Snellhawk started talking then, so I had to face forward. I was pretty sure that was the most sentences I’d ever exchanged with anybody at my new school. And it hadn’t been awkward. I’d felt normal. Like my old self. That was the kind of conversation I might have had in Charleston. (Evon and I had once played with a Ouija board. Evon asked it where she would live when she grew up. It answered, “A big mushroom.” I admit—there was nothing magic about it. I was totally steering the game piece. The best part was when we got to “A big m . . .” and she was sure it was going to say mansion.)