One Small Hop

by Madelyn Rosenberg

  “Perhaps you can introduce him to me first.”

  I brought over the satchel and lifted the top. Alph stared up at us through the lid of his aquarium. Simon smiled. “Not that I didn’t believe you,” he said, “but look at the size of him!”

  “Let’s let him out,” Leroy said. He looked at Simon. “Or will that mess with your ecosystem?”

  I thought about that. The two frogs had grown up in completely different environments. What if they made each other sick? I was pretty sure Alph’s sluggishness had to do with transporting him in a stuffy bag for three days, but what if it was something else? Our chances of renewing the species would be over. I thought about Mr. Valentino’s story, about the kids with the puffin eggs. Now all the puffins were gone. Still, what other chance did we have?

  “He’s not looking as good as he was when we started the trip,” I admitted to Simon.

  “None of us are,” said Juliette, scratching an arm.

  Simon literally stroked his chin. “We need to let him adjust to the water temperature first,” he said. “Why don’t we put his aquarium in the shallows?”

  I bent toward the pond and set the aquarium close to the shore so it was standing in an inch of water. Elvira leapt in the other direction and disappeared into the deep.

  “Not exactly love at first sight, was it?” said Davy.

  “She’ll be back,” Delph and I said at the same time.

  “She’ll be back,” agreed Simon. I wasn’t sure if we were going to be friends or not. But like Leroy, he was going to be a partner.

  “How long do you think it will take?” asked Delphinium.

  “We should let him adjust to the temperature for a half an hour at least,” Simon said.

  “Right,” I said. “And then start adding some of the pond water to the aquarium so he doesn’t get water shock.” I wondered if that’s what had happened to the fish we saw in the Rehabilitation Center. Surely the government wouldn’t mess up something so simple. But they’d spent the past few decades saying the climate was fine. They were fighting with Canada. They could mess up something that simple. But we couldn’t. We’d brought Alph this far. We weren’t going to make any mistakes.

  “Then what?” Juliette asked. “We just watch them the rest of the night?”

  “Hold on a second,” Simon said. He turned and walked down a pathway that led to the normal part of his house. He came back a few minutes later.

  “You should spend the night here,” he said. “We can set up sleeping bags and keep an eye on the frogs.”

  “Yeah, except that our sleeping bags are all back at the campground,” Leroy said.

  Simon’s mother walked into the room with a stack of clean, fluffy towels.

  “Simon says you may be staying?” She placed the towels on one of the chairs. “I brought these in case you want to shower.”

  Juliette’s eyes brightened when she saw the towels. The idea of sleeping somewhere without mosquitoes was appealing, too.

  “I could go get the stuff,” Leroy volunteered.

  “You can’t carry it all,” said Delph. “I’ll go with you.”

  “I’ll go, too,” Davy said. At least Leroy and Delphinium wouldn’t be alone together.

  “Me too,” said Juliette, her chaperone gene kicking in. “If I get first shower when we come back.”

  “Is it okay if I st—” I began.

  “If you stay here and chaperone the frog date?” finished Leroy. “Knock yourself out.”

  “He won’t even be out of the aquarium by the time you get back,” I said.

  Simon and I sat and looked at each other. At the half-hour mark, he went to the next room and returned with a beaker. He bent, awkwardly, and filled it partway with pond water. “May I?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  Slowly, he got down on all fours. Then he reached out one of his arms and poured the water into the aquarium. When he was done, he backed away from the pond’s edge. I was sure now that something was wrong with his legs.

  “They’re wired,” he said.

  “What?”

  “My legs. That’s the easiest way to describe it. Impulse receptors. My brain tells them what to do and they do it; it just takes longer than most people.”

  “Have you always … ?” I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

  “We were in a car accident when I was three,” he said. “The control mechanism blipped out. My dad died. My legs sort of did, too, I guess. The technology’s good, but it isn’t perfect.”

  “So you just have to think about the movement and you move?”

  “I don’t even have to think that hard—it’s almost like you, when your brain tells your body to walk across the room. Almost.”

  “Does it hurt?” I said.

  “Yes and no,” he said. “I feel pain. The doctors say I shouldn’t, but I do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “We should take out some water before we add more,” he said.

  I dipped the beaker—real glass—into the tank, retrieved some of the water, and set it aside—Simon wasn’t sure about mixing new water into his pond, and this way, I could save it for later, to make the transition easier when we brought Alph back to the island.

  Simon handed me another beaker, and I filled it, pouring the water into the tank. Alph moved to sit underneath the flow, so the water was sliding down his back. He was definitely perking up. He was going to be psyched when he saw that waterfall.

  “I love sleeping in this room,” Simon said. “I hardly ever get to. It feels just like camping, I’ll bet.”

  “Have you ever been camping?” I’d never been myself before this week. I thought about the mosquitoes and the hungry deer.

  Simon shook his head. “I’m sensitive to something in the air. If I spend too much time outside, I get sick.”

  “Then where’d you find Elvira?”

  “Same place I found out about your frog,” he said. “The Othernet. I’m on there a lot. It’s … a way to get out. And break the rules.”

  I thought about Davy, a rule follower in real life but not in his virtual one.

  “How long did it take you to do all this?”

  “My whole life. My dad started it, before he died, with those two trees. He said he wanted to feel like he was outside all the time. My mom kept it up, as a tribute to him, mostly, but also because it was hard for me to get out. It was almost like my dad knew, she said. And then, when I got old enough, I started adding things. I’ve read about your government labs.”

  I made a face.

  “Ours are better,” he said. “But I thought I could do better than that even. I used to just have plants, but I started adding fish and birds.” I wondered if the Disciples knew about Simon. Even if his dad had helped him start things, he’d done a lot. What did I have? A half-built CarbonClean and a bunch of other projects I’d started but hadn’t finished. Simon had built an entire world.

  I took some more water out of Alph’s tank. Simon replaced it with pond water.

  Alph was looking good now, alert, with his front feet clinging to the walls of the tank. There was a knock on the front door and Mrs. Laffitte opened it for Delph, Davy, Leroy, and Juliette, who were all lugging as much of our stuff as they could carry.

  Mrs. Laffitte smiled at them, broadly this time. Maybe it was because Simon was smiling, too.

  “Can we have s’mores?” he asked her. “Like real camping?”

  “You already had cookies,” she said.

  “And hot dogs,” Simon said. “On the range?”

  “Simon, it’s eleven o’clock.” But I knew we were getting dogs and s’mores.

  Juliette took her towel and headed for the shower while the rest of us set up sleeping bags on a grassy spot near the pond. Simon’s mother came in with a sleeping bag for him, too, with a pad that went underneath. She rolled it out on the ground.

  We waited until Juliette came back—the Lafittes had a CarbonClean, so it was more than two
minutes—to let Alph loose. By now, he was trying to get out of the aquarium and he looked as healthy as he had the first time we saw him.

  “You can have the honors,” I told Simon.

  He lifted the screen and tipped Alph’s tank—not far enough for the water to spill out, but enough so that the side of the tank was more like a slanted floor than a wall. Alph froze, like the animal statues at the Rehabilitation Center, but only for a second. He took a small hop to the lip of the tank and froze again. Hop. He made it to a rock this time. Finally, he took a real jump, extending his back legs, which were longer than I’d imagined, like when you take a metal spring and pull on both ends. He hit the water with a bloop and disappeared into Simon’s pond.

  “ ‘One giant leap for mankind,’ ” Davy said. He was quoting from the first moon landing. “That’s us.”

  “We’re not leaping,” I said. “The frog is.”

  “We’re doing something,” said Davy.

  “Hopping,” I said. “One small hop.”

  Davy shrugged. “It’s still something,” he said.

  “Let the date night begin,” Juliette said. The allergy pills had kicked in and the bumps on her arms weren’t as swollen, so it was easier to tell where one bite ended and the next one began. I was going to say she was in a better mood because of this, but actually, she’d been in a better mood ever since we’d crossed into Canada. Maybe the Canadian air agreed with her. Maybe she finally felt good about chaperoning a frog.

  Simon’s mom brought out the hot dogs, pink protein logs that we ate on buns, covered with condiments.

  “Fabas indulcet fames,” Davy said. He didn’t wait for Leroy to ask before he translated: “Hunger sweetens the beans.”

  The s’mores were good, too. The marshmallow goo was perfectly toasted and sticky. The chocolate was perfectly melted.

  “Canadian chocolate,” Simon said.

  We decided to dim the lights so the bullfrogs would know it was night, and time for their hot date.

  I got into my sleeping bag, between Delphinium’s and Simon’s.

  We talked about dumb stuff, like school (Simon’s was low residency, like Juliette’s future college, instead of half residency, like ours) and the EPB (Canada’s version of the EPF). That reminded Davy of Derek, and that led us back to the story of Leroy and the lobster.

  “Can we not talk about that?” Leroy said.

  “If the lobster had lived,” Simon said, “they would have killed it eventually. Your EPF.”

  That didn’t make Leroy feel any better.

  “If he’d lived, they would have tried harder to figure out where he came from,” Davy said. “They could have found the island and everything on it. When it died, they stopped caring.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way before. “Your lobster led us to Alph,” I said. For some reason, I wanted Leroy to feel better, too. Besides, it was true.

  “You know what’s weird?” Delphinium said. “We wouldn’t even be in this room if the lobster hadn’t died. If you hadn’t had the bucket.”

  We were all quiet, thinking about that, I guess.

  “Why did you have the bucket?” I asked. “Did you know you’d find something?”

  “Honestly?” Leroy said. “I wasn’t sure the Swan would float. I brought the bucket in case I had to bail.”

  “You made a boat,” Simon said. “You found your own island. Like the Galapagos.”

  “Like this room,” Davy said. “This room is an island.”

  ERRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

  The broken motor sound came from the pond.

  ERRRR?

  We let Alph croak as loud as he wanted. I got chills on my arms, even inside my sleeping bag.

  “I wonder how long he’s been calling like that, waiting for someone to answer?” Delph said. “And then he comes to a strange place and, all of a sudden, he isn’t alone anymore.” She paused. “I might cry.” Which made me like her even more.

  “Now that,” whispered Juliette, “is true romance.” Which made me like my sister a little more, too.

  We heard a small splash. I imagined the frogs swimming toward each other in slow motion while violins and cellos played in the background.

  “Carpe noctem,” Davy said.

  “Is that Latin for ‘get a room’?” asked Leroy.

  “ ‘Seize the night,’ ” Davy told him, at the same time Delph said, “Don’t ruin the moment.”

  “We could serenade them,” Davy said. I’d heard Davy sing enough to know this would not be enhancing the moment.

  “In Latin?” Leroy asked.

  “I’m in love with yooouuuu,” Davy began. He was giddy. We all were. “A love that’s true and bluuueeee.”

  “Green,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A love that’s true and green. Because they’re frogs.”

  But I joined in on another chorus. Even Juliette did.

  Above us, through the ceiling, we could see the stars again. There weren’t as many as we saw from the woods—maybe because of the glass, or because we were in a town now and there was more light pollution—but we could see them just the same.

  I could hear my friends’ breath getting heavier and sleepier, but I didn’t feel tired. I just lay there, listening to the sounds of the fans and the frogs.

  “Ahab?” Delphinium whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. That made two of us; two of us awake in Simon’s utopia. Frogtopia.

  “Is this going to make a difference?”

  There are three things you can do when the girl you like asks you a deep question in the middle of the night and you don’t know the answer:

  (A) turn it into a joke,

  (B) answer truthfully, or

  (C) ask her a philosophical question back, thus avoiding her question but letting her know you’re taking her seriously.

  I wanted to answer B, but the truth was, maybe Alph and Elvira would forget how to mate, and all this would have been for nothing. The truth was, even if they did figure out what to do, we could be raising a bunch of tadpoles who’d die one by one, like the puffins. The truth was, Elvira could lay eggs that wouldn’t even hatch.

  But maybe they would. And that was part of answer B, too. “I hope so,” I told Delphinium. “Look. Some people need to believe in the tooth fairy or that the government is taking care of us or that, deep down, all people are good. And some people need to believe they can help save the world. I need to believe that.”

  “Saving the world,” she said. “Is that what we’re doing?”

  “I like that better than thinking we spent our whole spring break trying to send two amphibians on a date.”

  There was another splash from the pond. For a minute, with Delph next to me and the smell of real flowers in a room that seemed alive, and with Alph hanging out in a pond with his brand-new girlfriend, it felt like I could save the world. It felt like I could do anything.

  “Frog spawn!”

  I shed my sleeping bag and ran to join Simon, who stood by the side of the pond. His arm raised over his head in victory.

  I thought he might be messing with me, or maybe the places that sold fake dog poop sold fake frog spawn, too. But it wasn’t fake. The frogs were in Elvira’s favorite spot, hiding behind the waterfall. Alph was on Elvira’s back, his arms around her like he was getting a piggyback ride. Only they weren’t going anywhere. They weren’t even moving, except Alph’s throat, which went in and out.

  Elvira was sitting on a mass of what looked like clear glue with tiny specks of black, like a mass of eyeballs.

  Frog spawn. Based on the number of eggs, it looked like we could repopulate the entire planet. If they hatched.

  “There must be hundreds,” said Leroy.

  “How long do they stay like that?” Delph asked. She meant the frogs.

  “Could be days,” said Simon. He’d done his homework, too.

  “I would
just like to state that if we don’t get home by Friday, my mom will kill me,” Davy said. Our parents, mostly because of Davy’s mom, had basically given us just enough time to make it to Canada and back—unless we pedaled really fast.

  “We just have to let … nature take its course,” I said. That’s an expression my mother always used, but it had never seemed like nature had been on a proper course. Until now.

  “We should give them some privacy,” Juliette said.

  “Like they care,” said Leroy. “Have you no shame?” he asked the frogs. He turned back to us. “See? They don’t care.”

  “It really was love at first sight,” Juliette said.

  Simon’s mom called us for breakfast. I was hoping it would taste like the s’mores, but it turned out to be soy-real, just like we had at home, except with a French name, so it sounded fancier. Soja-vie!

  “Put the dishes in the sanitizer when you’re done,” Mrs. Laffitte said. “You can do your schoolwork later, Simon. I suppose there’s math in counting frog’s eggs.”

  Simon let us each pick a plum from his tree. They were small and purple and shaped like raindrops, the kind you draw when you’re in elementary school. Delph took a bite and then sucked on it a while, to make the sweetness last. We all did. Most of the fruit I’d eaten was either hard because it’d been engineered to repel bugs and fungus, or else it had been combined with the good parts of other fruit to create some sort of frankenfruit.

  “Save the pit,” Simon said.

  “Will it grow?”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t had much luck,” he said. “You might.”

  We spent the rest of the morning tooling around the living room.

  Simon told me where he’d gotten some of his seeds—not off the black market, but a green one. He had a room in his cellar where he’d been saving his own seeds and freezing them each time a flower bloomed and died. He gave me some to take back, the purple flox for Juliette, the jewelweed that had exploded on Delph, and some actual delphinium seeds, the blue kind, with white stars in the center.

  I thought we’d plant the other seeds in my lab and on the island, though I wasn’t sure I should mess with whatever balance was going on there. Non-native plants could be dangerous—even if the native plants were gone. Maybe I could try our yard instead, where there was no balance. But it was one thing to try to plant things inside a controlled environment, like Simon’s house. It was another to try to plant them in a world full of vigilante fungus. I liked to think we could do it, though. Maybe we’d start an institute with all the people who hadn’t given up yet. Maybe we’d find a way to start over. Simon Laffitte seemed like he could make things happen. And we were in sync. At least, that’s what I thought until he pulled me aside after lunch.