“If you journey here, then yes, I would consider it.”
“Where is ‘here,’ exactly?” I asked.
He paused for a long moment. Then he said it: “Wodiska Falls.”
“Why can’t you come here?” I said.
“Where is ‘here,’ exactly?”
I looked at Davy to see if he thought it was okay to say it. “Maine,” I said, without being specific.
“I offer the proper atmosphere,” he said.
“We have atmosphere,” Leroy said. Delph nodded.
“I cannot travel to you.” Mole Rat said that part fast, like he was trying to get to another part of the conversation. “If you can travel, we should move ahead. Time is of the essence.”
“Why?” Delphinium asked.
“Time is always of the essence.”
I thought about Leroy’s lobster. It hadn’t taken more than an hour for it to die.
I looked up Wodiska Falls on my One. It wasn’t in the Yukon, at least. I had to figure out a way to get to Canada.
And then I did.
“We can travel,” I said.
“In what? The Swan?” said Davy.
“Excellent,” said Mole Rat.
“Give us a few days to make the arrangements,” I said.
“It has been a pleasure,” Mole Rat said.
That’s not the word I would have used. Maybe I would think of a better one on the way to Canada.
“So, Dad.” We were eating dinner, my whole family, for a change, but nobody was trying to make conversation. “My friends and I decided we want to take a bike trip to Canada for spring break. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
It had been my father’s turn to cook and he choked on his to-fish. “What?” he said. “No.”
“You went when you were just about my age,” I said. “You and the Melon brothers.”
“The Mellor brothers. They were twins.”
“Right,” I said. “It’s just: You made it sound like you had the greatest time in the world and I was telling my friends how cool it would be for us to do something like that—for us to do what you did.”
My father stopped coughing and looked pleased for a minute. “You want to follow in your old man’s footsteps?”
“Some of them,” I said.
“Your father was older,” my mother said. “He was in high school.”
“Not that much older,” I said.
“Things were different then,” my mother said, acknowledging the thing she didn’t like to acknowledge—that the world had changed.
“I don’t know, Ahab,” my dad said.
“You said that all this”—I spread my arms out, to encompass the world—“was just a blip. You said that things were going to get back to normal. And if things really are going to be okay, fine, I can wait. I can ride my bike to Canada next year, or the year after that. But if it’s not going to change, if this is as good as it’s ever going to be, then this is my last chance. This is the last chance for me to do what you did.”
My mom stood up and bumped her legs on the table as she grabbed the plate of to-fish and took it into the kitchen. Then she came back and stuck it on the table again. Juliette had looked up at me the whole time I was talking. Now that I’d finished, she was staring at her own plate again.
My dad frowned like he was thinking, so I pressed on.
“We can take a bike pike for most of the way. We’ll camp in certified campgrounds.” I held out my arms. “We’ll spray. No bugs will come near us. And you can track us. The whole way.”
My father considered this. If I could turn him, then he could turn my mother. She sat down again, humming to herself, a nervous hum.
“Who’s going on this cross-country tour?” my father asked.
“Davy, Delphinium, and Leroy Varney.” I didn’t add “and Alph.”
“You seriously expect me to let you go on an overnight trip with a girl?” my dad said. “Isn’t Leroy the kid who got in trouble with the EPF?”
“You’re in trouble with the EPF,” I said.
“Wise guy.”
“And Delphinium isn’t a regular girl,” I said. I wasn’t sure how she’d feel about hearing that.
“I don’t want you going out there unchaperoned,” my mother said. “Without a responsible party. I’m not sure I want you going out there at all.”
“We’d be safe.”
“How do you know?” my mother said. “Nobody does this kind of thing anymore. Just the crazies.”
“Dad did it,” I said.
“More than thirty years ago.”
“I’d do it again,” my father said. “If I could.” I thought about that, my dad on a bicycle with the rest of us, sharing a tent. Snoring. It wasn’t ideal. But maybe—
“I couldn’t get the time off,” my father added. “You’ll have to think of another chaperone.”
“Wait. You mean you’ll let me go on this trip if we can find a chaperone?”
“No,” my mother said. “Absolutely not.”
But my father shrugged. A shrug was only a gesture or two away from a nod, and a nod meant a yes.
But a chaperone? Who would my parents think was responsible enough to take four middle school kids to Canada and back?
Juliette reached across the table for the salt substitute and poured it over her to-fish. She put the shaker down so carefully, it didn’t make a sound when it hit the table.
“I’ll go,” she said.
If she weren’t my sister, Juliette would have been the perfect choice. She could do no wrong in my parents’ eyes. Her grades were above average, she called if she was coming home late, and she’d held a part-time job for the last two summers at a place named Nice to Soy You. Plus, she’d already been accepted into Welch College, where she planned to major in business in their low-residency program. That meant that she’d go away to school four times a year, for ten days at a time. The rest of the time, she’d attend classes virtually, which would save my dad buckets of money, thus elevating her to an even higher status. Grown-ups loved her.
But she was my sister. She didn’t call me Slime Boy, but she’d called me a whole lot of other things that were almost as bad. When I fell in the harbor and had been possibly exposed to the Renegade Amoeba, she didn’t give me her shower time without making me pay. I had no doubt she’d make me pay for this, too. But when she signed on to our trip, my dad officially came over to our side. We worked on my mom next. It was Juliette who got her to come around, after a whispered conversation. Leroy’s parents signed on next, along with Delph’s. Davy’s mom was the only holdout. In a way, Davy was a holdout, too.
“Maybe I can just go virtually,” he said. We were crouching by the spring while Delphinium and Leroy were exploring.
“It’s not the same virtually,” I told him.
“That’s the point,” Davy said. “Mistakes matter more in the flesh. Where you can see people. And they can see you.”
“We’re not making a mistake,” I said. “We’re introducing two frogs.”
“You’re not supposed to take wildlife to other states,” he said. “Or other countries. We could cross-contaminate and wipe out the species.”
“It’s already wiped out,” I said. “Anyway, you’re the one who discovered the other frog.” In our friendship, I had a lot of ideas. Davy made them happen.
“That was different,” he said. “That was in the ether. Not in real life.”
I thought about the games Davy played in the ether. Games where you could plan a whole world and fix it up however you wanted. This was a chance to do that, sort of.
“They brought pandas to the US all the way from China,” I said.
“Foxes?”
“A type of bear,” I said. I called up an image on my One and a panda lumbered through the air between us, cocking its head to the side.
“They’re gone?” Davy asked.
I nodded.
From the creek, Alph made the ERRR sound.
“Yeah, all right, then,” Davy sai
d. “If my mom says it’s okay.”
My dad talked to Mrs. Hudson for us. It was the last thing I expected.
“Listen, Kim,” he said. He’d used his own One, which was better than mine, and proof that he didn’t hate all technology. I could imagine his big, round face in the Hudson’s living room, lifelike, instead of pixelated. “It’s not like they’re going to be completely on their own. Juliette’s a responsible girl.”
“I don’t know, Ted. It’s a scary world out there. People who spend time outside? They are not normal people.”
“With today’s technology, it’ll be almost like you’re riding along with him,” my dad pointed out. “You can keep track of him, you can see him. Heck, you can practically kiss him good night.”
There was more, but I’m pretty sure that was the line that convinced her.
“You’ll have to check in with me three times a day,” she told Davy. “At least three times. Am I clear?” We had to hand over our proposed route, which was close to the route my dad had taken when he and the Mellor twins had crossed the Canadian border, accommodating for miles of road that had been washed out. And we had to find covered, state-certified bike pikes with cool air. We had to swear to wear our helmets and protective clothing, that we wouldn’t go too fast, that we would look both ways, and that we’d call the emergency number if we saw anything suspicious. Other than that, we were supposed to enjoy what Mrs. Hudson called “the freedom of youth.”
I designed the map for our parents, which included the official checkpoint for where we’d cross into Canada. There was just one problem: We couldn’t actually go through the checkpoint. Alph was contraband. What if he croaked, right when we were having our bags checked? What if government officials impounded him? And us?
Mole Rat had pointed us to a wooded area, about two miles from the official checkpoint in Easton.
It seemed sort of obvious. Wouldn’t anyone trying to avoid the government checkpoint head for the woods? But the way Mole Rat figured it, the station was small, and there were woods all around. People who were doing the high-level illegal stuff would pass through at night, under the cover of darkness. We’d be doing low-level illegal stuff and would pass through during the day. If anyone saw us, we could just say we’d lost our way and hadn’t even realized that we’d passed from Easton into Gareth.
I wasn’t sure when to tell Juliette. If she knew, she might resign as chaperone. Maybe I’d tell her on the second day of our trip, when it would be harder to turn back.
Juliette tried to take charge before we even left.
“You can bring one small pack each,” she said. “Satchels for the bikes. You and Davy carry the tent stuff; the rest of us will bring food and water.”
“It’s my trip,” I said. “I’m the organizer.”
“So organize.”
“Well,” I said. “I guess what you just said makes sense.”
It wasn’t until we were packing up our breakfast bars that I remembered something I’d seen on the family calendar. “Isn’t this your senior weekend?”
Juliette shrugged.
“How come you’re not going with your class to Massachusetts?”
“Delphinium and I have dibs on the orange tent,” Juliette said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “You guys get the blue one.”
“The blue one smells like Dad’s feet,” I said. “What have you got against Massachusetts?”
“I’d just rather go to Canada,” she said. “Two changes of clothes per person.”
“Then it’s going to smell worse than Dad’s feet.”
Silence.
“You’d rather go to Canada with us than hang out with your friends,” I said. “Seriously?”
Juliette sighed. “Better Canada with you losers than to the corner with certain nameless seniors.” They had names, though. Peter and Elise.
“Well,” I said. “It’s nice of you to give up your break for us. So, you know. Thanks.”
She smiled a little. “Three changes of clothes.”
Soon, the only thing left to pack was Alph. But we had to catch him first.
Davy’s mother wanted to spend every minute with him before he left, and Delphinium had to watch her sisters, so the day before the trip, Leroy and I met at the canoe and rowed to the island ourselves. We maneuvered the boat pretty well, the two of us. Maybe you didn’t have to totally like someone to be good teammates. Even without Delph’s “stroke, stroke,” we got to the island quicker than we had with extra rowers. Of course there was less weight in the boat, so maybe it all balanced out.
According to my One, Alph was spending the afternoon basking in the sun on his favorite rock. But when I checked the screen after we beached, the rock was empty.
“He must have moved,” I said.
“Of course he moved.” Leroy looked over my shoulder. “He probably got hot. If I spent all morning on a rock, I’d be hot.”
I switched to the tracking screen. The light was still flashing in the same place. The same rock. But unless Alph’s mutations included invisibility, he wasn’t there.
We started moving toward the spring a whole lot faster. I inhaled through my nose so Leroy wouldn’t see how out of breath I was, then wondered how I was going to clock more than eighty kilometers per day on the bike.
I waded into the water to Alph’s rock. I didn’t even think about the possibility of sea lice. The rock wasn’t as empty as it had looked through the One. I picked up the tiny transmitter chip and walked back to the bank.
“Your Bind-oh didn’t hold,” I told Leroy. I almost called him a moron, only I was the moron, for listening to him. We’d used glue. This wasn’t science; this was arts and crafts.
“Hey now,” Leroy said. “If you’d cut through that cheekbone or whatever, you might have killed him. Would have.”
“I don’t know why I listened to you,” I said.
“Because my idea was better,” Leroy said, though not with the usual confidence.
“Your idea was better yesterday,” I said. “Today it stinks.”
“It worked,” said Leroy. “If you’d come up here yesterday and tried to catch that stupid frog …”
“If you think he’s stupid, you don’t have to go to Canada,” I said.
“You don’t want me there anyway,” he said. “Why’d you even ask me to go?”
“It’s your island,” I said. “It’s your boat.” I didn’t tell him it had been Delphinium’s idea to ask him along. I turned the transmitter over in my fingers, like it’d give me a clue to where Alph was hiding.
My eyes jumped from rock to rock to rock.
“Ahab.”
“Quiet, I’m looking.”
“Ahab.” Usually, the words came out of Leroy’s mouth like they were in no hurry to get anywhere. But the way he said my name was rushed, urgent. I looked up and saw him pointing. I drew an imaginary line from the end of his finger. A few meters away, looking like a piece of dead wood, was the second alive thing we’d found at the spring. Only it wasn’t another frog; it was a snake. And it looked poised to strike. Its tongue flicked in and out of its mouth. It knew I was there; it must’ve. But it wasn’t looking at me. The snake was staring farther downstream, where a pair of eyes was raised just above the water, staring back. So there was some good news: We’d located Alph. The bad news: He was about to be somebody’s dinner.
Slowly, painfully slowly, Leroy grabbed a real stick and stepped onto a rock, closer to me, closer to the snake.
“Don’t kill it,” I whispered.
“You think that’s all I do? Kill things? I’m just moving it.”
“It looks like a copperhead,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It’s poisonous.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“Because of the head shape?” That’s how I’d figured it out. Seeing a snake in the wild was pretty rare—though not as rare as seeing a bullfrog. Mr. Kletter had an ancient poster in his classroom, warning us to stay away from the snakes whose heads were all angles;
the safer ones had heads that were round.
“No,” Leroy whispered. “I just figured if a snake was going to keep us from catching one of the last frogs in the universe and illegally transporting him to Canada, that snake would pretty much have to be poisonous. It’d have to be. Get the container ready.”
I backed away from the creek to where I’d hidden my net and Alph’s home away from home. Then I moved upstream to fill the aquarium with creek water. I threw in a little algae and some rocks. I had some live roaches that I’d found, but those were at home, in the gardening shed. I set the aquarium on the ground and held up my net, moving back to where Leroy was standing with his stick. We made eye contact, and I nodded.
Leroy took another step and crossed to my side of the stream. I tried to remember how poisonous copperheads were. If we got bitten, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing I could fix with black salve. If we got bitten, we’d need medical attention. And we wouldn’t be going to Canada.
Slowly, Leroy took his stick and edged it toward the snake. The snake moved, fast. Leroy made a sort of shrieky sound as he whisked the stick under the snake’s body. He flicked it, hard. The snake went flying upstream as I brought the net down over Alph. He tried to jump. The top of the net moved up with him, then down. I scooped him up and put him in the aquarium.
I looked over to where the snake landed. He was stunned, but only for a second. He raised his head and looked at us like we’d offended him.
“Think we should go after the snake, too?” Leroy asked.
I wanted that snake, poison fangs and all. But there was no time. Besides, it wasn’t like we were going to bring him with us to Canada. Davy would freak if he knew he’d even been on the same island as a living, breathing snake; there was no way he’d share a tent with one. And who were we going to get to take care of a copperhead while we were gone? My parents? Derek Ripley?
“I don’t think we can,” I said.
“Yeah, well. That’d really be testing your matchmaking skills, finding him a girlfriend.” He punched me in the arm, so the water in Alph’s tank jiggled a little. Then he started laughing, this happy, maniacal laugh, the kind that said we’d just done something ridiculous and dangerous and possibly even death-defying, but we’d come out of it okay. I laughed with him. We laughed the whole way down the hill, and onto the beach, and into the boat. I hoped we’d still be laughing when we reached the border.
One Small Hop Page 8
