Sorry excuse for a shoe? That shoe happened to be the exact same model worn by my absolute favorite basketball player. I knew because I had seen the commercials. I didn’t say anything, though.
The examination continued. “Uh-huh, cracked leather here. Worn rubber down there. And is this some torn … plastic? Honestly, how shabby. Even back in the days when I was but a large and formidable apprentice, I knew better than to make a shoe out of plastic. Would ye make a wedding ring out of tin? Would ye make a cake out of rocks? Would ye make a rainbow out of bubble gum?”
“Um, no, sir?”
“‘No, sir’ is right!”
“So you can’t fix it, then?” Lizzie asked.
“Can’t fix it? Are ye kiddin’ me, lass? There isn’t a shoe made that I can’t fix! I just hate wasting my talents on this piece o’ rubbish, that’s all. But if ye really want me to, I’ll do it. Now, Willie, do ye want this lace repaired?”
I nodded.
Big Pat Clancy reached behind his ear and somehow pulled a sparkling, brand-new shoelace out of the air. He mumbled, “Better replace the pair, then,” and created another lace. Then he tapped his finger on the sneaker, and instantly, one of the new laces had replaced my old, torn one. Lizzie tapped my shoulder and pointed down at the foot that still had my other sneaker on it. That one had a new lace as well—and I had never felt a thing!
Pretty cool.
Big nodded with satisfaction. “Would ye like me to repair the wear and tear on the rest of this shoe, then?” I nodded.
“And the other one?” I nodded again.
“Better give ’er over, then, laddie.” I took off the other sneaker and walked across the grass to give it to him. Yuck! The dew soaked through my socks and drenched my feet. I trudged back to sit next to Lizzie again. “Now cover your eyes—this next part is too brilliant for your mortal minds!”
I wasn’t sure how brilliant shoe cleaning—even magical shoe cleaning—could be, but I covered my eyes. Lizzie covered hers, too. We sat that way for a minute. As far as I could tell, nothing was happening. But the minute stretched into two minutes, then three. Finally, Lizzie couldn’t take the silence anymore, so she said, “Mr. Clancy? Um, Big? Sir?”
There was no response. I peeked out from behind my hand and saw that the little man was gone. My sneakers were sitting on the rock, but Mr. Big was nowhere in sight. I turned to Lizzie and saw that she had peeked, too. We walked over to the sneakers and checked them out. I had to admit, even if he had just been using them to distract us and disappear, the repair job was pretty sweet. They were now spotlessly, blindingly white in the sunlight, and instead of their old slightly funky aroma, they now gave off a strong lemon-fresh scent.
“Hey, look!” Lizzie said, pointing to the side of one sneaker. Where there had been the swooshy sort of stripe that the manufacturer used as a trademark, now each shoe had a fluorescent-green shamrock.
That was either really cool, or the dorkiest thing I had ever seen.
Anyway, I put the sneakers on. They felt great—somehow they now fit better, and my feet were practically tingling with happiness. “Oh, well,” I said. “If the leprechauns aren’t going to help save the forest, at least I got some free shoe-repair work out of the deal.”
Lizzie frowned. “Why would he just disappear like that?”
“I have no idea. Maybe he really was offended by my sneaker?”
“No, there must have been something else. Here, let’s try to get him back.” She took off her left boot, placed it on the stone, and shouted, “Mr. Big! Come back! Please!”
We closed our eyes for a second, and when we reopened them, there he was. But now he looked furious! “So, I see how it is! The so-called Great Lasorda sent ye, didn’t he?”
“No,” I said. “What are you talking about? Why are you so angry all of a sudden?”
“I know he sent ye. Not only do ye have his hideous taste in footwear but ye’re sneaky like he is, as well.”
“What do you mean?” Lizzie asked.
“As if ye didn’t know, missy. I mean that while ye had me here, working on your stinking excuse for a shoe, your accomplice was snooping around the forest behind my back! From what I hear, she’s already been and gone while ye had me slaving away at the thankless task of mending your shoe. Well, take this, then!” He tapped Lizzie’s boot, which melted into a sad puddle of rubber. “Now, get out of here, and consider yourselves lucky I don’t use my mighty charms and spells to do even worse! As for me, I’m off to gather my allies around me and confront your little sidekick! Look out behind you!”
We both whirled to look, but it was just a trick. When we turned back around, Big Pat Clancy was gone.
“Um, sorry about the boot, Lizzie.”
“Never mind the boot, Willie. Don’t you know what must have happened?”
I thought about it. Snooping … little accomplice … “Amy!” I shouted.
Lizzie kicked off her lone remaining boot. Then we ran all the way to my house.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nothing a Gallon or Two of Mouthwash Won’t Fix
YOU KNOW YOU’RE HAVING a bad day when kissing a frog isn’t even the bad news—but this was rapidly turning into that kind of day. By the time Lizzie and I burst into the back door of my house, I had no idea what we would find—but I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it. I yelled for my parents, and they didn’t answer. Then I remembered my father saying he was going downtown to rent a pressure washer and something called a Shop-Vac. Apparently, manly housekeeping is more fun if you use complicated, expensive power tools. And Hey, I thought, maybe Mom took Amy out on some errands or something. Maybe everything is fine after all.
Also, if my family wasn’t in the house, I could yell for some magical help. “DODGER,” I shouted, “WE’RE HOME!”
There was no reply. That was somewhat unusual.
“Hmm … he must be taking a nap,” I said. Dodger is a big, big fan of naps.
“Or in his lamp.” Lizzie was right: Dodger spends a lot of his free time in his lamp. Anyway, Lizzie and I started up the stairs to see what Dodger was up to, but stopped short when we heard a weird croaking noise coming from behind the closed door of Amy’s room. “Did you hear that?” I asked Lizzie.
She looked a little nervous. “Umm, was it, like, an odd crick-crick sort of sound?”
“Yeah.”
“Sort of frog-ish sounding?”
“Yeah.”
“Nope,” she said. “Can’t say I heard anything like that. Listen, do you want to go outside and play tag or something? Right now?”
“Lizzie, what are you talking about? Don’t you want to see what’s going on in my sister’s room?”
“Well, I prob’ly haven’t mentioned this before, but I have a little, um, problem with frogs.”
“Problem? What kind of problem?”
“They … they make me kind of … well … sick.”
Just then, there was a whole series of croaks, followed by a hollow thumping noise. It sounded like a large frog was throwing itself at Amy’s door from the inside. “All right,” I said, “why don’t you stay here? I’ll just check out what’s going on, and you can run for help if things get ugly. Deal?”
We heard several “ribbits,” each of which was followed by a solid THUNK. Lizzie looked as though she might faint. She nodded. “Don’t worry, Willie,” she said bravely. “I’ve got your back. Just as long as I don’t have to touch a frog.”
I turned and crept up the last few stairs. Then I tiptoed to Amy’s door, gently turned the knob, and pushed my way in. I put one foot slightly in front of the other, like the karate fighters in my favorite video game. I balled my hands into fists. I was ready for anything.
Anything except what I found in there. Amy’s room was trashed! Her bedcovers were thrown around, her dresser drawers were all pulled open, and her stuff was tumbled out all over the place. Worst of all, there was a big, slimy frog crashing itself into my left foot repeatedly. Bending down to
take a closer look, I noticed that the frog had a sort of bluish tint. Also, he appeared to be wearing a black eye patch.
“Oh, no!” I said, my voice shaking. “Lizzie, come quick!”
“You mean, come quickly,” she replied. “Anyway, is everything all right?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“But there isn’t actually a frog in there, is there?”
“Not exactly.”
She bounded up the steps and into the room. Then she looked down, saw the frog, and gasped. “Not exactly?” she asked. “Then what do you call that?”
I sat down on Amy’s bed and sighed. “I’m pretty sure I call it Dodger.”
Lizzie bent down to take a closer look, studied the blue-green amphibian that was now jumping up and down on top of my foot, and said, “Oh, dear.” Then she straightened up and charged out of the room in the direction of the bathroom.
From the sound of things, she made it there in time. But barely.
By the time she got back, looking kind of pale and sickly, I was on my hands and knees checking out something on the floor. Amy kept a big glass jar of seashells on her dresser, but it had been knocked over onto the floor, and the shells were all spilled out onto the floor. At first I had thought the shells were just spread out randomly, but then I noticed that a lot of them had been pushed into patterns to make letters. The letters looked like this: SS ME LIZZY
Lizzie bent down next to me and read the letters, too. I turned to her and said, “Lizzie, do you know what this is? It’s a message from Dodger! He’s trying to tell us—”
Lizzie laughed. “‘Toss me Lizzy’? What the heck does that mean? Are we supposed to find some girl named Lizzy and throw her at him? And how is that supposed to help?”
I looked at her in disbelief. She was usually much quicker than I was at figuring things out. How could she not see this? “It doesn’t say ‘Toss me Lizzy’!” I said.
Meanwhile, the Dodger frog was jumping up and down, like it wanted to get our attention. We both looked and saw that he had pushed a longish, slightly curved shell into place between the second and third groups of letters, which now said this: SS ME, LIZZY
She frowned. “‘Pass me, Lizzy’? Like a football? Wouldn’t that be, um, animal cruelty?”
I said, “It doesn’t say ‘Pass me, Lizzy,’ either. It says—”
“‘Miss me, Lizzy’? I still don’t get it.”
“Lizzie, quit messing around! It means ‘KISS me, Lizzy’! You know what they say about frogs and magic—that you have to kiss them to turn them back into their original form? Well, I bet you have to kiss the frog so he can turn back into Dodger!”
Lizzie looked like she was going to pass out any second, but she wasn’t done arguing yet. “No, it’s clearly not meant to be me, Willie. My name is spelled with an ‘-ie’ at the end, NOT a ‘-y.’ Must be a different person altogether.”
This was too much. “Lizzie!” I said. “You know Dodger can’t spell. Of course it means you.” Dodger jumped up and down again when I said this, and I could have sworn he was glaring at me. Although when you’re talking about a one-eyed frog, it’s kind of hard to be 100 percent sure.
I looked at Lizzie. She was glaring at me, too. And her lower lip was trembling a little. “Willie, I can’t,” she said. “I’m … afraid!”
Holy cow. Lizzie was never afraid of anything. “Really?”
“Yes, really! When I was only four or five years old, back in England, my rich, horrible old aunt had me over for dinner one night. She served me these little fried things that looked like chicken wings. I didn’t want to try them, because she had once tried to feed me snails. But then she said I couldn’t have dessert unless I ate one. And the dessert was this huge, lovely cake with swirly whipped cream on top. And cherries. You know, those really bright-colored ones that are cut in half? I love those. Plus, all the grown-ups were looking at me, and it was embarrassing. So I picked up one of the fried things and took a little nibble.”
“And?”
“And it was delicious! I ate every bit of meat off of the bone. Then I grabbed another one and ate that one, too. I swear, I must have eaten seven or eight of the things before I stopped to take a break. That was when some old man grinned at me, leaned over across the table, and said, ‘Do you know what you’re eating?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Chicken wings?’ He laughed a wicked laugh and said, ‘Not quite, child. Those are frog’s legs!’”
“Wow. What happened then?”
Lizzie looked down and away from me, like she was embarrassed. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but notice that Dodger had kind of crab-walked around to the side of me where Lizzie wasn’t, as though he was afraid she might grab him for a snack.
“I felt nauseated all of a sudden, right? So I knew I had to get out of there, pronto. I jumped up out of my seat and tried to make a run for it, but one of my aunt’s maids was wheeling the dessert trolley into place behind me. I smashed into it and—”
“And?”
“And threw up all over the cake!”
I looked at her for a minute. She played with the hem of her shirt. Dodger tried to crawl under Amy’s bed. Then I said, as gently as I could, “You know you have to do this, right?”
Lizzie looked miserable and angry at the same time. “Have to do it? And my mum always says we moved here because America is a free country. Hah!”
“Come on,” I said. “You can do this. I’ll grab Dodger and bring him to the bathroom. We can pour some mouthwash into a glass and have it right there ready for you. One little peck and it’ll all be over. How bad can it be?”
Lizzie sighed. She knew there was no choice. I mean, if your friend got stuck in a frog’s body, you’d pucker up and give him a big old kiss right on the slimy lips to break the spell, right?
Right?
I coaxed Dodger out from under the bed and carried him to the bathroom, which looked clean—apparently, Lizzie had finished her previous mad dash in time. Lizzie followed. I put Dodger down on the counter and poured Lizzie about half a glass of mouthwash. She looked at the mouthwash, then at me. I tried to look encouraging as Lizzie took a deep breath, crossed her fingers for luck, and leaned over to kiss a frog.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kiss and Tell
JUST AS LIZZIE GOT HER FACE all the way down to his level, Dodger kind of scootched backward a few inches. Lizzie rolled her eyes. “Dodger,” she said, “I promise I’m not going to eat your legs, okay? Now, can we get this over with?”
I don’t think frogs have necks, but somehow Dodger gave the impression that he was shaking his head at us. Then he raised his front leg and pointed it at the glass of mouthwash.
Lizzie giggled nervously. “Oh, Dodger, you’re worried about kissing me without using mouthwash first? How sweet! Here, I’ll, uhh, soak a cotton ball with the mouthwash. Then we can squeeze it over your face, and you can stick out your tongue to get some in your—”
But Dodger jumped backward. He was clearly shaking his head again. He pointed at Lizzie.
She got mad. “Wait, you want ME to use mouthwash before I kiss YOU? I’ll have you know I have very fresh breath. In fact, I just rinsed my mouth with toothpaste in this very bathroom just a few minutes ago. But here: If it will get this over with faster, I’ll be glad to oblige your ridiculous, pigheaded request.”
She grabbed the mouthwash and took a big swig. “Um, not to be too technical about it or anything,” I said, “but I think it was actually a frog-headed request.”
Apparently, that wasn’t the right time to make a joke, because Lizzie and Dodger both gave me dirty looks again. Then, before any of us had time to think, Lizzie grabbed Dodger with one hand, lifted him to her lips, and gave him a kiss. She put him down on the counter. Then she washed her mouth out about fifty times, and scrubbed her hands with hot water and tons of soap.
Just as Lizzie turned to get a hand towel from the rack, there was a loud POP! All of a sudden, the frog on the counter turned into a blue chimpanzee. A
four-and-a-half-foot-tall chimpanzee. His head whacked into the bathroom ceiling with a terrible hollow thump, like what you’d get if you whacked a coconut with a board. His one visible eye rolled up into his head, and he fell straight backward off the counter.
I hurled myself toward the edge of the countertop and tried to catch Dodger, but he outweighed me by at least sixty pounds, so we both went tumbling over the edge of the tub. Dodger landed on top of me so hard that I couldn’t breathe. While I struggled to get some air into my lungs, Lizzie started shouting, “Oh, my goodness! Dodger, are you all right? And Willie? Willie, can you hear me? Please, Willie, say something—anything!”
I felt Dodger stirring. Slowly, he pushed himself up and off me. Then he turned, grabbed me by the arms, and hoisted me out of the tub. I looked at him. Lizzie looked at me. He looked at Lizzie. Although he was still looking kind of dazed and was rubbing the top of his head with one hand, he sounded like he was back to normal as he said, “So, Lizzie, am I a great kisser, or what?”
She elbowed him in the ribs and said, “I swear to you, Dodger, if I get warts on my face from this, I’ll—”
“Wait a minute, you two!” I said. “Dodger, what happened? Where’s my sister?”
Just then, there was a POOF! and Rodger appeared next to Lizzie. The bathroom was getting rather crowded. “Dodger,” he said, “did you send out a distress call? Are you all right, safe, A-Okay, peachy-keen, hunky-dory—?”
Dodger put his other hand on his head and sat down next to me on the edge of the tub. “No, I’m not okay. Dudes, it was horrible! I tried to protect Amy, but they zapped me too fast. And there were so many of them. They burst into the house without even knocking. They were screaming and yelling at each other, blowing whistles, barking orders that didn’t make any sense as they came clumping up the stairs. Amy was in her room, and they stormed straight in there and started bossing her around. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t listen to anyone but themselves. They had no mercy. They had no pity. They had really clunky, old-fashioned footwear!”
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