“It wasn’t a hundred and seven,” Davy said as his mother’s face dissolved into darkness. “It was a hundred.”
“My dad thought some of that might rub off on me,” Leroy said.
“You don’t even take Latin,” Davy said. Most kids didn’t take a language, given that the One worked as a real-time translator. It could help you speak one hundred languages instead of just one. “You’re in band and tech.”
I wondered how Davy knew that. He probably did a background check.
“Maybe you’ll rub off on us,” Delph said. “Tell your parents that.”
Rub off, I thought. It would make a good insult. I scanned the sky for another shooting star so I could make my own wish, which would be to unwish whatever wish Leroy Varney might have made about Delphinium.
Delphinium and Juliette crawled into their tent to get ready for bed.
It was quiet enough to hear the trees creak and the family with the guitar singing together, though not in harmony.
I opened my dad’s journal. I was still surprised he’d left it for me and not for Juliette. Except. Except I think he knew this was my trip. I turned to a page with a doodle of a pine tree and the words: Stopped in Heaven for night. (Not the real Heaven.) Hot but bearable. Raccoon stole our breakfast.
There weren’t a lot of details. I put some stats on the back of the page: how far we’d traveled, where the cooling stations had been out of order. It was weird to write instead of to dictate into my One. I wasn’t big on details, either. I wanted enough data to share in a report to the Disciples, but not enough to serve as evidence if we got caught. I put the book back in the satchel and started to drift off to sleep to the pulsing sound of real crickets. And then: ERRRRRRR.
“Shhhh,” I hissed.
“Digestive problems!” Leroy yelled out, in case anyone else in the campground was listening.
“Good night, Alph,” Delphinium called from the girls’ tent. In the stillness, it sounded like she was right next to us.
“Good night,” Leroy said, in a sort of burpy voice, which did sound a little froglike. Alph answered him.
“That’s not helping,” I said, sitting up.
ERRRRR.
“Is he going to do that all night?” called Juliette. Whatever affection she’d generated for our frog was eroding.
Alph croaked again and again—way more than he’d croaked on the island. But then, we’d only been on the island during the day. Frogs were more active at night.
“He’s lonely,” said Delphinium.
“Not everybody is going to believe it’s my stomach,” Leroy said.
“Nope. They’ll think it’s your butt,” Davy said.
“Wait.” I had an idea. It was simple, but sometimes those were the ideas that worked the best, like (but unlike) Leroy’s Bind-oh. The idea was this: If frogs were less active during the day, maybe all we needed was a little bit of light. Then Alph would think it was day and he’d talk less.
“That means we have to sleep with the light on,” said Leroy.
“Why not?” Davy said. “You know. For the frog.” Davy hadn’t spent much time away from home. I think the sounds—of the crickets, of the trees rubbing up against one another—were getting to him. I remember the first time he spent the night at my house, when I was nine and he was eight. He was nervous about going to sleep, so both of us stayed awake all night. He fell asleep in the pancakes.
“For the frog,” I agreed. Frogs didn’t sleep much, from what I’d read. But I kind of liked the idea of Alph staying up all night, watching over us.
I set my flashlight near the tank. Above us, dark shapes settled on the fly of the tent. I watched the shadows move, trying to figure out the type of insect from its silhouette.
Wide awake again, I flipped through a few more pages of my dad’s journal. When they crossed into Canada, I noticed a few French words, like sud and nord and vélo. On one page, he’d written a single word. Stars! Had he looked up at the sky, like me, with his mind completely blown? Even though we weren’t in Canada yet, I wrote on the page next to it:
Yes.
He’d left some pages blank, but near the end of the book, I found whole paragraphs instead of words. I moved closer to the light shining on Alph’s tank and read, in my dad’s cramped handwriting, what might have been his teenage manifesto.
Saturday, July 21
189 countries are headed to Canada for the World Environmental Summit and the US isn’t going. China’s going. YEMEN is going. But we’re not going because President Tidwell says we can no longer sacrifice for the rest of the world. He says it’s time for everyone else to catch up with us and even though blah blah we agree in principal blah blah science is inexact blah blah so we’re staying home. Blah. It was a stupid speech. Therefore we, the undersigned, are appointing ourselves representatives for the US.
Teddy Goldstein
Chris Mellor
Timothy H. Mellor
Under that, he wrote a pledge, labeled the Planet Protector Promise. I’d never heard of the Planet Protectors. They sounded like an environmental version of the Boy Scouts. I wondered if the membership extended beyond my dad and his friends.
I promise to protect our planet
To preserve its resources
And to promote environmental stewardship
Wherever I may roam.
This conflicted with everything I knew about my father. But it was his handwriting, which was small and hard to read, it felt more like I was translating ancient texts than reading a journal. It was my dad before he’d turned into an old guy with a million and one environmental infractions. He’d talked about his trip to Canada as a joyride. He’d never mentioned that there had been another reason for going. Then again, neither had I.
In our tent, Leroy made a snoring noise.
“Is that part of his digestion?” whispered Davy.
I could hear Delph and Juliette talking quietly in their own tent, but this time, I couldn’t make out all of what they said. When the wind settled down, I caught: “Something something with them?”
“Something something just friends,” Delph said. I liked the sound of her voice, even when I couldn’t understand it.
“Well,” Juliette said. “At least the frog’s going to get lucky.”
The birds woke us before the sun did. Usually, what I’d heard about birds (other than seagulls and pigeons) was grim: A marsh bird flying north instead of south (and dying). A horned owl taking up residence in a Rec BoxTM (and dying). But something was still living out here, because at five in the morning, the birds started calling to one another. They had a lot to say.
We gave up on sleep at seven and built a small fire, boiling water for hot chocolate and soy-real. Juliette handed out raisins, five each. They looked like larvae, but they added a lot of flavor. Leroy beamed the weather forecast onto the side of the tent so we could all see it more clearly.
It hadn’t rained in weeks. But that, apparently, was about to change.
“If we stay on the pike, we should be able to keep going,” he said.
The rain hit around noon, drumming the pavement with hard drops that looked silver from a distance. Juliette didn’t complain, even though we didn’t have as much cover on the pike as we thought. We stopped for a minute. I stepped out from under the awning, even though the purity of the raindrops was questionable. There wasn’t a cutoff like there was in the shower.
“Ahab,” Delphinium called.
But I just stood there and let the water hit me. Delphinium stamped down her kickstand and came out from under the awning, too. She stood beside me, dripping and laughing, the water gathering at the end of her nose. We were connected, to each other, to everything.
The others stayed covered, but by the end of the next kilometer, they were soaked, too. The spray from our bikes hit our legs. Steam rose from the puddles that Leroy splashed through at top speed. Delphinium followed, her eyes bright, and the connected feeling disappeared.
“Why
is he here again?” I mumbled when I caught up to her.
It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but Delph gripped the handlebars tighter. “It was his canoe. Also? He’s our friend.”
I had enough friends. “Business partner,” I said.
My legs hurt from the day before, but I pounded out a rhythm, like we had on the water. Stroke, stroke, stroke. Push, push, push. By thirty kilometers, I didn’t feel the pain anymore. I barely felt my legs, really. By the time we stopped for the night to set up camp, I was filled with a weird, exhausted kind of energy. My clothes hadn’t dried. I imagined no one else’s had, either.
Juliette signed us in and waved her finger in front of the camera at Armstead Campground, which was just outside a former wildlife refuge.
No one else was around. I didn’t even stick a light in Alph’s aquarium. If he croaked during the night (the talking kind of croak, not the dying kind), no one would hear it.
Leroy and I walked up to the bathroom. The inside was covered with graffiti: Earth was here. Want to serve? CONserve.
On the hand dryer, someone had crossed out the ON in PUSH BUTTON, so now it said PUSH BUTT.
“Never gets old,” Leroy said, standing under the dryer to try to dry out his clothes. I did the same. The sound of the hot air prevented us from having to make much conversation.
For dinner, we made stew, using dehydrated vegetable flakes that tasted better in the wilderness than they did at home.
We were all on our second bowl when we heard a rustling sound. A deer walked into the clearing of the next campsite.
“Oh!” Juliette said.
The deer’s fur was patchy, and her ribs were showing, but she still walked like she was performing in a ballet. Her eyes looked soft.
Delph grabbed a packet of soy-real and took some steps toward her, walking as gently as the deer.
“You’re not supposed to feed the wildlife,” Davy said, quoting the sign that had been posted at the check-in.
“Soy-real has eight essential vitamins and minerals,” Delphinium said.
“It’s starving,” Juliette added.
Delph poured the soy-real on the ground, and then backed away. The deer bent her head to eat. “It’s a stupid rule,” Delph said.
“They don’t want the animals to learn to trust humans.” I thought about the EPF lab. Not trusting humans was a good lesson.
The deer finished licking up the food and looked at us for more. She took a step toward Delphinium.
Leroy jumped up, put his thumbs in his ears, and waved his fingers around. “Arrronnnnnnnngggaa,” he yelled. He jumped, then pounded his stomach, turning it into a drum. The deer lifted her tail and fled.
“Why did you do that?”
“I’m teaching her not to trust humans,” Leroy said. “Just keeping wildlife wild. Or whatever the sign said.”
I wasn’t sure what was scarier: Leroy’s face when he was yelling “Arrronnnnnnnngggaa,” or the fact that he was making sense.
It was too hot to crawl inside my sleeping bag, so I lay down on top of it, thumbing through my dad’s journal. One of the Mellor brothers—Chris—had snored, too. My dad had drawn a picture of him on one of the pages. On another page, he’d sketched a flower, but I wasn’t sure what kind. He hadn’t labeled it. I looked for insights between lines like best ice cream ever and didn’t bring enough snacks, before flipping back to the notes about the environmental summit.
Used Planet Protector badges to get in. Didn’t work.
Arrete = stop.
Guard gave us free T-shirts and sent us home. Will try to sneak in for evening session. Tim saw door that looked enterable.
Weren’t all doors enterable? Was that even a word? On the next page, my dad wrote a single word: failed.
After that, it was back to food and sweat.
So that was it. He’d failed and forgotten all about the Planet Protectors. He’d quit. Though I did find, on the bottom of another page, another single word: beauty.
They must have been on their way back by then. And okay, maybe he was talking about Mr. Valentino’s ice cream instead of the great outdoors. But I chose to believe he was talking about the world around him—and the world around me—as I fell asleep to Leroy’s snoring.
The sound that woke me in the morning wasn’t Leroy, though, or Alph or the birds.
“Make it stop! Make it stop!”
It was Juliette.
I abandoned my sleeping bag, which was damp like everything we’d carried with us, and unzipped the flap.
My sister was standing in the middle of our campsite, waving her arms like she was trying to fly.
“I have warts,” she said. “From your stupid frog.”
“You didn’t touch the frog,” I said. “Besides, frogs don’t cause warts; that’s a myth.” Until recently, frogs themselves had seemed like a myth.
Juliette’s arms stopped moving and I saw big red welts in the gray light of morning. The welts were touching one another and at the center of each was a small droplet of blood, where she’d scratched. They looked like a ridge of small volcanoes.
“It itches so bad,” she said. “SO BAD.”
I knew that feeling. Delphinium crawled out of their tent, her hair looking like she’d brushed it with a tree branch, which was nicer than it sounded. “Maybe it’s poison ivy?” She looked pleased to be able to study a rash in person. She took out her One and scanned my sister’s arm. We waited, hoping it wasn’t another thing that would make us have to turn around.
“Aedes albopictus,” the One said. “Mosquito bites.”
My sister’s eyes got wide and she did that flare-y thing with her nostrils.
“It was probably just a GMO mosquito,” I told her. The government had been releasing genetically modified mosquitoes by the millions to try to get rid of the dangerous ones. They’d succeeded, too. For the most part.
“I’ve had mosquito bites,” Juliette said. “They didn’t look like this.”
“Maybe you got too many at once? It could be an allergic reaction,” Delph said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“I thought you were supposed to be a frog scientist, not a doctor,” Juliette said. Delph handed her some cream, and she slathered it on. “It’s not doing anything.”
“You didn’t give it a chance.”
“It’s still not doing anything.”
I reached down, got some dirt, and mixed it in my palm with water from my thermos. I smeared it on Juliette’s arm.
“Jerk,” she said. But it must have helped, because she dipped her own fingers into my palm and grabbed another glop.
“We should get you some allergy pills,” Delph said. She grabbed the first aid kit and riffled through it. “There’s only one here. We could have some delivered.” Usually, there were nearly as many ADS (Automated Delivery Systems) as bugs in the sky, but not here.
“It’ll cost us,” I said. “Let’s just stop in the next town. That’s where Valentino’s is anyway.” I’d been humoring my dad when I said we’d visit. But he’d drawn a picture of the storefront in his notes. And we were in the neighborhood.
“I can’t go into town like this,” Juliette said. She scratched her arm again and left a streak of blood, which mixed like paint with the mud. But she helped Delphinium move the tent to the sun to try to dry it out before they packed it up. They found a hole in it, which must have been how the mosquitoes got in. Leroy patched it with gauze, like he’d used on my satchel. Great. Score another point for Leroy.
I tucked Alph into my bag while Davy talked to his mom again. I think that’s one reason we bonded back in elementary school: Both of us had parents with high anxiety. We both wore raincoats when the forecast called for it. But while his mom showed her anxiety by calling every five minutes, mine showed it by pretending everything was okay.
When the conversation was over and our stuff was a little drier, we followed the path out of camp, riding along the empty streets. We found a store with medicine
for Juliette. And we found Valentino’s. The building was old and weathered-looking and the wood seemed to be held in place by thick coats of white paint. The sign out front wasn’t lit, but you could tell it had been once. The red had faded to a light pink.
I took the satchel off my bike and we walked to the door, which was open, a little, even though the sign on it said CLOSED. I pushed the door open a little more.
“Hello?”
A bell on the handle jingled.
“It’s like we’re going back in time,” said Delph. The barstools were orange, a sticky sort of plastic. The posters on the wall dated back to the early part of the century. And the guy behind the counter dated back further than that.
“It’s early for ice cream,” he said. “Don’t you kids have someplace to be?”
“It’s spring break,” Leroy told him. He patted out a rhythm on his chest, a human beatbox. “Uh, you open?”
“Could be,” said the man, who must have been Mr. Valentino. I got the feeling nobody had given him business in a while, given the empty streets.
“Our dad visited here a long time ago,” said Juliette. She still had mud on her arms. “He said we should stop in if you were still … open.” I got the feeling she meant to say “alive,” because Mr. Valentino looked like he was definitely a fragile species.
“Did he, now?” he said. “I used to get a lot of kids in those days. Not so much lately. Well, if your dad said to come, we can’t let him down, can we? I’m open.”
The menu on the wall described ice cream and shakes and sodas. “I just keep that for sentimental reasons,” the man said. “My real menu’s here.” He pointed to a small screen on the wall, where ice cream was now in quote marks. Delph ordered a blueberry cone, a Mainer thing to do, even if blueberries were hard to come by. Juliette ordered blueberry, too. Davy and Leroy went for chocolate. I ordered banana, because when you’re dealing with fake flavors, fake banana is always the best. It was good to sit inside in the artificial air. I could picture my dad sitting on a stool, licking his own banana cone.
One Small Hop Page 10
