“Delphinium.”
“This is turning into a bumpy conversation,” she said.
The thing about Delphinium is: She’s funny. And smart and athletic and all that. She could hang out with anyone. But here she was at Utopia on a Saturday morning—with me.
“How’s your glove?” I asked, changing the subject and showing that I cared about her personal possessions at the same time.
“I washed it,” she said, “which apparently you’re not supposed to do with real leather. But then I put some restore stuff on it that my grandfather had under the sink. Maybe it’ll work.”
“You might try some heat, too. Air drying might not kill the—”
“Flesh-eating bacteria?”
“Jellyfish,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I was attacked by thimble jellyfish.”
“Is that what you have all over you? Stings?”
She pulled out her One and held it to her lips. “Identify: thimble jellyfish,” she said.
A second later, the description beamed out in front of us. Mercifully, she had turned off the sound, so I didn’t have to hear a stranger’s voice say with athletic jocularity, “Also known as sea lice.” I did have to hear Delphinium say it, though.
“You have LICE?”
“Shhh,” I said. “And it’s sea lice. It’s another name for jellyfish larvae. That’s what makes the rash.”
“That’s what makes it disgusting,” she said.
“Is that how you’re going to talk to your patients?”
“I’m going to be in a lab. Does it hurt?” she asked.
“It stings,” I admitted. “And it itches a lot. But it’ll be gone in a week.”
“And you still want to go back?”
“It’s not like we’re going to swim,” I said. “But yes. Of course. Don’t you?”
“Sure. But there’s no rush,” she said.
I looked around at all the fake trees. “Yes,” I said. “There is.”
Delphinium got my drift, which is one of the things I like about her. We stopped under a tree, a real one this time, covered in delicate white blossoms. When the wind came, which it did about once every eight minutes, they fell like snow. Delphinium reached out her hand to catch some.
“It’s a Bradford pear,” I said. “They grow fast, but they don’t live long. Not a prime choice for the green canopy.”
“They’re in a warehouse,” she said. “They don’t have to contribute to the green canopy.”
“In the real world, you wouldn’t even have Bradford pears growing near a lake,” I said. “You’d have—”
“Don’t pick it apart,” she said.
“You’re the one who pointed out the tiger,” I said.
“The tiger was obvious.”
“Tra-la-la,” I said, channeling my mother’s ability to ignore anything that didn’t fit into her desired worldview. “What a beautiful day for a walk.”
“Better,” she said, patting me on my shoulder.
“OW.” My skin burned when she touched it. “Easy.”
“Sorry.”
We walked a little more.
EEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
And froze. It wasn’t a tiger; it was a sound, the sound, the same sound we’d heard on the island. It seemed familiar, and not because we’d heard it just yesterday. I recognized it from someplace else. A movie? From school? I started searching the bushes before I remembered that it was just a recording. I held up my One to see if it could identify the sound, but I was too slow.
“Come on.” I grabbed Delph’s arm and pulled her back up the path.
“It’s just a soundtrack,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “But maybe there’s a credit list. Chirp of the Sparrow. Roar of the Tiger. Errr of the … Whatever.” I didn’t believe in fate, except the kind created by cause and effect. But I believed in coincidences, and this was a big one. We went back to the lady at the desk.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay. I’m sorry, there are no refunds.” Her voice had a weird, echoing quality.
“We don’t want a refund,” I said. “We want to know the name of the soundtrack you play—the one with the nature sounds.”
“You want to know the name of the soundtrack we play, the one with the nature sounds?” She repeated exactly what I said, only she made it sound like a question.
“We just really like nature,” Delphinium said. “We were thinking it would be fun to get the music—the sounds—to play at home. Is it for sale? Could you tell us who makes it?”
“Each Rec Box soundtrack is specially made to bring you, the customer, an authentic experience with maximum enjoyment potential. Our soundtracks are not shared outside the Rec Box experience.”
“Look,” Delphinium said, in the reasonable voice she uses with teachers and parents. “We’re not going to open our own Rec Box. We’re just two nature-deprived kids who want to hear some nature sounds in the comfort of our own homes. Could you at least tell us the name of the recording?”
“Could I tell you the name of the recording?” the woman repeated.
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” she said.
I changed directions. “What about the animals?” I said. “Could you tell us the animals that appear on Utopia’s nature soundtrack?”
“Yes, I can tell you the animals that appear on Utopia’s nature soundtrack,” she said.
“Great,” I said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “It is great. The animals that are on Utopia’s nature soundtrack are lake animals.”
Delphinium thanked her, laughing a little. I didn’t thank her. I didn’t laugh, either. We walked back toward the lake, just in time to hear the eee-eee of a dolphin, which I recognized, and a screeching sound I didn’t recognize at all.
I tried to mimic the errr sound for my One, hoping the recognition software could get me in the ballpark. “Errrrrr,” I said.
“Cow, sick,” the One responded.
“I don’t think there’s a ‘cow, sick’ on the island,” I said. But that introduced a new possibility. What if the thing we heard on the island was sick? I was pretty sure discovering another sick and dying animal wouldn’t make me a D². But what if I could save it?
“Whatever it is, we’ll find out tomorrow,” Delphinium said.
One thing we knew for sure: Whatever made that sound was not a lobster.
It was eight a.m. and the sun was already blazing. We’d brought hats, the kind with little curtains to protect our necks. Delph had an umbrella.
“It’s in case anyone watching wants to turn us into a painting,” she said. I didn’t think anyone would want to paint a bunch of geeky kids rowing a tree across the harbor. And I hoped nobody would be watching.
We loaded Leroy’s canoe with gloves, tongs, test tubes, tweezers, an eyedropper, a net, a rope, snacks, and my grandfather’s hip waders. Leroy had brought a lead pipe—his weapon of choice, I guess. I’d also brought my science bag, an aquarium, an air pump, and Davy’s dog kennel, which was too small for a tiger but could accommodate a raccoon.
“My mom will kill me if she finds out,” he said. “Obliterate. Extirpate.”
“She won’t find out,” Delph said.
Leroy smiled. I had a feeling that the list of things his own parents didn’t find out was pretty long.
Rowing was easier this time, the rhythm in our heads without Delph having to call it out. Instead, she threw out more potential names for the island.
“Leahdelvy? It’s the first part of all our first names.” She’d put Leroy’s first, of course. I concentrated on rowing. The sweat made my rash itch worse, even though I’d slathered on black salve. To hide the rash from my friends and the sun, I’d also put on long sleeves, so my arms and body felt like the inside of a sandwich. The salve was the mustard.
“What first?” Leroy asked as we dragged the canoe ashore. He was captain, but he seemed willing to take orders.
I wanted to run straight up the hill, but we needed t
o be methodical. Besides, we might find a lobster. “We should start at that spot,” I said. “Where the waters meet.”
I was wearing my grandfather’s hip waders, so I crossed to the other side of the stream. I crouched and waited. The sound of the water lapping at the shore blocked out my nervous breathing, and made our silence seem not so awkward.
After a few minutes of nothing happening, Delphinium picked up a black rock, smaller than a baseball but almost as round. She tossed it and caught it, tossed it and caught it. Leroy picked up a rock, too, flattish, slate, and sent it skipping into the water. It bounced three times before it sank. Davy tried to skip one. If it was a virtual rock, it wouldn’t have been a problem for him. But it was real, so it was.
“You need to angle it at about twenty degrees,” I told him. I was about to mention hydrodynamics when Leroy picked up another rock and handed it to him.
“Put your finger here,” he said. “Nope. Yeah. Okay. Try again.”
“Just aim it in that direction,” I said. “So you don’t scare anything away.” I looked back at the water.
Davy threw another rock.
“You have to spin it a little,” Leroy said. “Here.” I looked up, just in time to see it skip.
“You see that?” Davy said. “You see that?!”
Leroy grinned. “Flick the next one harder. It might go twice.”
Davy kept flicking. I kept scanning the water. Nothing moved, so I studied the island. From a distance, it had looked like a circle, except for one part, where it jutted into the water in a point. From above, it must have looked like a lumpy, tree-covered teardrop. The errr sound had felt like it was everywhere at once, amplified somehow, but I had a feeling the root of it was somewhere in the trees. “Let’s go,” I said. “We can look for the lobster later.”
We each grabbed something for the trek uphill. I noticed Leroy grabbed the pipe. I grabbed a net and a pocketful of test tubes.
We followed the stream. The incline was steep. If you had short legs, like Davy, it probably felt like mountain climbing. But he kept up all the way to the top, where we found a small, clear pool that spilled down the hill like lava. Behind it were two large rocks with a space between them that looked almost like the mouth of a cave.
“Ponce de León, eat your heart out,” Delphinium said. Her voice echoed, amplified. You could tell how tense the moment was, because nobody checked their One to look up Ponce de León. (For the record, he was an explorer who searched for the Fountain of Youth and found Florida instead.)
Whatever made the errr sound had probably stood exactly where Delphinium was standing. But no one was here now.
She stepped to the side. “Hello?” she said. This time, her voice was normal.
The spring was easy to spot: a bubbling, churning spot where the water couldn’t sit still. I reached out and touched the water—without gloves. I cupped my hand and held some.
“I don’t know about that,” Davy muttered. He moved into the echo zone. “I don’t know, bruh,” he said, louder. And then in Latin: “I don’t know, frater.”
“But look at it,” I said, letting the water drip back into the pool. It was clear as glass. You could see every rock on the bottom.
“The water looked nice at the Utopia, too,” Delph pointed out.
But this was different. The water had a crisp quality to it; it didn’t feel soft like the water at home. I opened one of my test tubes, filled it, and stoppered the top. Then I filled another, in case the first tube broke.
Leroy didn’t say a word about my playing scientist, which is what Derek Ripley would have done. Look at Slime Boy. What a poser.
I flipped over a rock, hoping something underneath it would scurry out. Nothing. Davy and Delph each put on a pair of gloves and started flipping rocks, too. So did Leroy, without gloves. I don’t know if it was because he trusted me, or because he wanted to show that if I wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t, either. Each time he grabbed a rock, he flung it down the hill, crackling through the trees.
“You’ll mess up the ecosystem,” I said. “And you might hit something.”
“Like what?”
ERRRRRR. The noise came right on cue, strong and loud.
We froze, all except Leroy, who reached for his pipe again. I got that feeling in my legs, like electricity. I grabbed my net and moved to the end of the pool, the side farthest from the lava stream.
Leroy and Delph followed me. We moved quietly and hoped the ERRR thing wouldn’t run. But part of me thought the thing wasn’t scared of us. It must have seen us; that’s why it called out.
I heard the buzz of a cicada, a real one. And from below, I could still hear the ocean. It sounded a lot like the nature soundtrack at the Utopia. The only thing missing was the tiger.
ERRRR.
The sound came from someplace low, near the ground.
I squatted low, too.
EEERRRR. RUP.
There: a pair of eyes protruding from the water. They were yellow, with black specks, like bugs in amber. The black pupil wasn’t round but more like a flattened football. The rest of it was covered in water, but I could make out a squat body and long, folded legs. It was a frog. A monster of a frog, the likes of which I hadn’t seen—well, okay. Ever.
The noise had sounded like it had come from something bigger, but this must have been what made it. A frog.
When the fragile species list (formerly known as the endangered species list) had its growth spurt, frogs were the first thing on it. It had something to do with their immunity, fungus, and the changes in temperature that affected their breeding habits. I’d read about it for a report I did for science class, which wasn’t about frogs, or even amphibians, but about the fragile list in general. The Panamanian golden frog went first, a part of the old list, along with the Wyoming toad and the mountain chicken frog. They’d started as endangered, then they went extinct. More common frogs went next. Wood frogs. Spring peepers. Until they were almost all gone.
“How did that little thing make so much noise?” Delph whispered behind me.
“He’s not so little,” I whispered back. “Look at him. He’s a monster.”
Slowly, slowly, I raised my net.
Then I lowered it down and—yes! I had just caught what was, beyond a doubt, the last frog in Blue Harbor, Maine.
“Nice catch,” said Delphinium, though it wasn’t like the frog had tried to escape.
“I just want to see it a little closer,” I said. “For now.” We’d caught a frog. A frog! No one had seen one in years. Would just catching one make me eligible to be a Disciple?
“What kind is it?” Leroy asked, drumming his hands on his leg.
“The rare kind,” Davy said. “Even more rare than your lobster.”
“It’s a bullfrog,” I said. “It has to be. They’re supposedly the only ones left.” The bullfrogs had been on the fragile species list for years, but they hadn’t passed over to extinct. They were stronger than the other frogs, and pretty much the only frogs in Maine that hadn’t been wiped out by a combination of pesticides, fungus, pollution, disease, loss of habitat, and climate change. They were the Hercules of frogs. But no one had seen one—in captivity or out—in a very long time. The government had made it harder to declare things extinct, but that was probably the only reason the bullfrog hadn’t been. Well, that and the fact that we were staring one in the face.
“At least it’s not a tiger,” said Delph.
“Tiger?” The hitch in Davy’s voice told me that he was afraid the frog wasn’t the only living thing on the island. I was afraid that it was.
“Inside joke,” Delph said.
“I’ve never seen one, not even in the tanks,” Leroy said. “That is one weird-looking critter.”
When my dad was in high school, they dissected frogs in biology, virtually, anyway. In my science class, we were preparing to dissect virtual worms. Frogs weren’t in the curriculum. Why bother dissecting something that didn’t exist?
“I don
’t get it,” Delphinium said. “How could it survive? It’s not that different here, is it? I mean from there?” She pointed across the water, at Blue Harbor.
“It’s cool, right?” Leroy said. The “right” gave him ownership. The “right” said, “I was on this island first.” He was a little farther away from the rocks, so his voice wasn’t amplified as much. Then he said, “I mean cool, temperaturewise. It feels cooler than on the mainland. Maybe that’s the difference.”
He was right: The air did feel cooler.
But that could have been for a lot of reasons:
(A) It really was cooler.
(B) Leroy was an expert in the power of suggestion.
(C) The frog was cold-blooded, and I was having some sort of empathy mind-meld thing.
Cold-blooded didn’t really mean the frog’s blood was cold, by the way. It just meant his temperature depended on the environment surrounding him, which in this case was the spring.
“So now what?” Leroy said.
The frog answered first. His throat filled with air. He looked like he was getting ready to hurl. Then he let out that sound again. EEERRRRRR.
This time, it sounded less like a tiger or scraping furniture or even cow, sick. It sounded kind of sad.
I started giving orders.
“Delph: Go get the aquarium. Leroy: Get some rocks and stuff and make a habitat. Wear gloves. Davy: Hold the net.”
I pulled out my One and started snapping photos: Close. Far away. The habitat. Leroy, standing in the background and holding up the peace sign. The frog, close-up again. I switched to X-ray mode to take a shot of its internal organs. I switched modes again. The next time it talked, I searched for an exact identification. It didn’t say, “Cow, sick,” this time. It said, “Bullfrog, American.”
The frog must be male, because females, according to the entry, didn’t usually vocalize. The One told us, in Andrea Ko’s superhero voice, that males do, loudly, to attract the ladies and to stake out their territory. They live—or lived—near ponds and lakes. Our spring wasn’t either, but at least that line proved that the hologram’s answer (“lake animals”) wasn’t totally wrong. Tigers loved the water, too, it turned out, so maybe she wasn’t completely wrong about that, either, just about the country they inhabited. Or used to.
One Small Hop Page 5
