One Small Hop

by Madelyn Rosenberg

  “I want to buy your frog,” he said.

  “I told you before, he’s not for sale.”

  “Everything has a price,” Simon said. “The trip out here was hard on him. What’s going to happen on the trip home? What if he doesn’t make it back? He found a friend here. A partner. Do you really want to separate them now?”

  My affection for Simon washed away like water. “Well, what about Elvira? We could take her with us.”

  “Then they’d both die,” Simon said. “Plus, you couldn’t afford her. No offense.” I didn’t point out that every time someone says “No offense,” they usually mean to be offensive. “Anyway, she’s not for sale.”

  “Neither is Alph.”

  “I’ll give you fifty thousand.”

  “Dollars?” How much money did this kid have?

  Simon looked at me and blinked twice.

  It wasn’t my decision. Davy and Delph and Leroy had been with me when we found him. Leroy had helped me catch him. And it was Leroy’s island. It was Leroy’s boat.

  “He’d be safe here. He’d be with Elvira. And you’d have fifty thousand dollars. Maybe you could buy another bullfrog.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “You can take the frog spawn,” he said. “Not all of it—we should have it in two places to increase the odds of survival. But when the eggs hatch, you won’t need to buy another frog. You’ll have tons of them.”

  “If,” I said.

  “When.”

  Pause.

  “You could come back and visit Alph any time you wanted,” Simon said. “I don’t get a lot of visitors.”

  I wonder why? I thought. He sounded like the host on Let’s Make a Deal, the nation’s longest-running game show, which started on actual television. Behind Door Number One, you get a fabulous prize. But if you pick the wrong door: a zonk. There was even a mathematical theory of probability based on the show. In my case, the zonk was a dead frog.

  What if I took Alph all the way home in his aquarium, and he died on the way, either because he suffocated in my satchel or because he was heartsick that I’d ripped him away from the only other creature of his kind he’d ever met? My experiment would be dead. My frog would be dead. My chance of becoming one of Darwin’s Disciples would be extinct. On the other hand, he’d made it here in good shape, hadn’t he? Well, okay shape, anyway. He was Blue Harbor’s last bullfrog. He belonged there. With us.

  I was down to two choices:

  (A) bring him home, or

  (B) give him a new one.

  Normally, I could figure out the most correct answer. This time, they both seemed right. They both seemed wrong, too.

  The others seemed to know something was up. They were watching us from across the living room. Especially Leroy. “It’s not just up to me,” I told Simon. “Go ahead. Tell them. Make your proposal.”

  So he did.

  Leroy did the math. “That’s ten thousand dollars apiece.”

  “But he’s not really for sale, is he?” Delphinium asked. She went over to get a better look at Alph, who was still with Elvira in a sea of frog spawn.

  “It looks like phlegm,” Davy said.

  Alph let out a long, belchy sound. It’s not like I had the ability to read the frog’s emotions or anything, but it sounded happier than the desperate croaks he’d been making on the island.

  In my brain, it had been simple: Sneak across the border, introduce the frogs, sneak back across the border, go home. If they managed to reproduce, great. If not, try the next thing. The next experiment. Another way to save the world.

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” Leroy said again.

  Maybe it had never been simple. It was getting less simple by the second.

  We spent one more night with Simon so the frogs could be together. Delph and Juliette did most of the talking, mostly to make up for my silence.

  “When we get home,” Leroy said in the morning, “I’m moving to that island until I find a frog of my own. I’m a pro at camping now.”

  “Alph’s the only one,” I said. “That’s the whole point.”

  “I’ll find a frog and sell him on the black market.”

  “Green market,” Davy reminded him.

  “Green market. But I’m only selling him to good guys. Like us.”

  I looked again at the frogs, who were apart now, but who still sat, side by side, rulers of the pond. Were we the good guys? We may have been better than the government. But I wasn’t feeling like a good guy. Trust no one, my dad had written. It felt like he was talking about me.

  “Goodbye to romance,” Juliette said as I sliced off a clump of frog spawn and put it in my aquarium. She’d voted on selling Alph to Simon, though not for mercenary reasons. Leroy voted to sell, too. Delph and Davy voted with me, though they didn’t seem so sure about it.

  I mixed some of Simon’s pond water with the water from back home. Then I pulled on some protective boots so I wouldn’t harm Simon’s ecosystem, and waded to the waterfall. The spray hit my face as I reached down to grab Alph from the rock. Even through my gloves, he felt slimy, the healthy kind of slimy.

  He looked at me, a long, sad look. I had a hard time deciding whether:

  (A) I was imagining it,

  (B) he was depressed about leaving, or

  (C) he was hungry. (I’d caught some bugs in Simon’s yard for the return trip, but I was saving them.)

  Anyway, even if the answer was B, Alph wouldn’t be alone for long. The tadpoles would hatch and turn into frogs.

  Unless they didn’t.

  I waded back to the shore and settled Alph in the aquarium on top of the eggs. Then I loaded the aquarium into my dad’s satchel. Alph let out a long, throaty croak. It sounded like a moan.

  Silence again, except for the waterfall, where Elvira sat alone. I kept hearing words in the rush of the water—don’t-do-it over and over and over.

  “Oh, ALL RIGHT.” I pulled the aquarium out of the satchel. “Keep him,” I told Simon.

  “Excellent.”

  “Wait, what happened to ‘All of us are making this decision, we’re partners’?” asked Leroy.

  “It’s the right thing,” I said. Right for the frog. Just right.

  “Who do you think voted to let him stay? Oh, wait, I remember: ME.”

  “For the money,” I said.

  He glared at me.

  “It is the right thing,” said Delph. She was standing directly behind me, so I could feel her words as well as hear them.

  I wasn’t going to be one of the youngest people ever initiated into Darwin’s Disciples. That would be Simon, if they found out about him. Me? I was just going to be a kid who had caught a frog once. A kid who had caught a frog and let him go.

  Juliette threw her arms out wide. “Hello to romance,” she said.

  I handed the aquarium to Simon. “Take good care of my frog,” I said.

  “Our frog,” Leroy said. “Take good care of our frog.”

  I unpacked the screen pouch, where I’d put the bugs for the trip home. “Here,” I said. “Give them this for a wedding present.” It sounded angrier than I meant it to, given that this was supposed to be a big happily-ever-after.

  “Remember, we get visitation rights,” Juliette said. I stared at my sister. “What?” she said. “He’s part mine, too.”

  “So about the money,” Leroy said. “If he’s keeping the frog …”

  Delphinium gave him a look.

  “He offered us a deal,” Leroy said. “A really good deal.”

  “It doesn’t feel right. Taking the money,” I said.

  “Well, it feels right to me. I could use that money,” Leroy said.

  Simon turned toward Leroy. Slowly, he set the aquarium on the ground. “What if I gave you money in a different way?” he said. “Over time. A grant.”

  “A grant?”

  “Like researchers get at universities.”

  “I’m not a researcher,” Leroy said. “I’m a builder.”

/>   “What would we research?” I asked.

  “Whatever you wanted,” Simon said. “Frogs. Plants. You could buy tools and materials and set up a proper lab. I’ll bet you could build your own greenhouse if you wanted to. You could do a lot, with money like that.”

  “The EPF has money like that. They aren’t changing anything,” Leroy said.

  “The EPF isn’t us,” I said.

  “Am I included in this ‘us’?” Leroy asked.

  “We’re partners,” I said.

  Leroy stiffened a little. Maybe he had overheard me and Delphinium talking that time. “It’s still not the same as a new bike,” he said.

  “Yeah. Well. Your old bike probably runs better than anything out there.”

  Leroy started to grin. “Yeah,” he said.

  “What else would you do with the money?” I asked. “A new wardrobe?”

  He shrugged.

  “You can buy your own hip waders,” I offered.

  “My own hip waders and I can build stuff?” he said.

  I nodded.

  So did he.

  I looked at Simon. “Why?”

  “You don’t trust my altruism?” he asked. It was a Davy sort of word.

  I shrugged.

  “It’s because I can,” he said. “And will.”

  There were people all over the world who could but didn’t. Simon could and did. Now he was offering to let us do something, too. Of course, he was also taking something away.

  We got the rest of our stuff loaded.

  “If we’re not bringing Alph, should we put the frog spawn in something else?” Leroy asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To make it easier to sneak across,” he said.

  “Great idea,” said Delphinium. How many great ideas could one person have? “What would we put it in?”

  “A thermos,” I said.

  “Since we’re not carrying live contraband,” Delph said, “why do we have to sneak? We’re frog free. Can’t we just go back through a checkpoint? That way Davy’s mom won’t freak out if she’s tracking us.”

  “We never checked in,” Juliette said. “If they see five Americans leaving Canada but nothing that says we crossed over, won’t they be suspicious? We might be better off sneaking back.” I couldn’t believe she was even suggesting it.

  “We can tell him somebody forgot to fill in the paperwork,” Leroy said. “Telling people things is my specialty.”

  “We can change the records,” Davy said. “That’s mine. I can find a back door. If Simon will let me tap into his network.”

  Sometimes it takes an awful lot of rule breaking to keep from breaking another rule. But Davy scanned our index fingers and went into Simon’s bedroom. He came out thirty minutes later.

  “Five Americans visiting Canada for spring break,” he said. “We’ve been here since Monday morning, if anybody asks.”

  The spring break part wasn’t even a lie.

  We finally posed for our photo with Alph before we left. Simon took it. Delph thought Simon should be in it, too, so we took another on a timer with him and Elvira. I hoped someday it would have historical significance. I hoped it was the start of something. Simon let Elvira go back into the pond. Alph wriggled in my hands, eager to follow.

  “Well,” Leroy said. “I guess we’d better say goodbye to the last frog in Blue Harbor, Maine.”

  “Goodbye, Alph,” Delphinium said. She air-kissed him, just above his forehead.

  “Bye, big guy,” said Leroy.

  “Be a good dad,” Davy said.

  “Remember the right way to treat a lady,” Juliette told him.

  When I’d researched frogs, I’d learned a bit about their memories—enough to know they didn’t really work like ours. “I’ll always remember you, Alph,” I said. He looked back at me with his amber eyes and I crouched down near the water. “Don’t forget me,” I whispered, and let him go.

  Alph leapt out of my hands. His splash sent ripples everywhere.

  I heard a few sniffles. Some of them were mine. I stood up. “He’s not going to be the last one,” I said. I grabbed the thermos of frog spawn and held it above my head, like I was the Statue of Liberty. We looked up at the thermos. It wasn’t lit, but it was still a torch.

  “I’ll see you all soon,” Simon said.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “You will.”

  It didn’t take long to reach the border, now that we were pros. Also, we were riding on main pikes instead of through the woods. I mostly trusted Davy’s hacking skills, so I wasn’t especially worried about making it across. Then I saw the sign, in English and French, about handing over all liquids for “review.”

  “I thought they only did that for air travel,” Juliette said. “We’re on bikes.”

  “They can do whatever they want,” Davy said dismally.

  “Darn it,” I said, forgetting to substitute a science experiment. I’d given up Alph. I couldn’t give up his progeny, too.

  Ahead of us, the border patrol was opening car trunks and scanning them with a wand. I saw them take a bottle of what looked like just water and pour it onto the parched ground. They didn’t even use it to water the plants.

  “Let’s go back,” I said. “We can cross somewhere else.”

  But Leroy nodded his head toward the guards. “They’re watching us,” he said, without really moving his lips. “If we turn around and leave, they’ll think we have something to hide.”

  “We do have something to hide,” Davy said.

  “We still have rights,” said Juliette. “They need a warrant to search us.”

  Ahead of us, a guard was questioning a kid about half our age. The kid was crying. If the five of us turned around and left, would they let us go skipping off into the woods? I didn’t think so.

  “We need to find somewhere else to put the spawn,” I said. “Somewhere that they won’t dry out.”

  “My armpit?” Leroy asked.

  “Your mouth,” Davy said, in English, not Latin.

  “That could work,” I said. “A mouth is wet and it isn’t chlorinated.”

  “That was a joke,” Davy said.

  “It was a joke,” said Delph. “Now it’s a solution. Well. A possible solution.”

  I expected Juliette to be grossed out. “It won’t be the worst thing we’ve ever eaten,” she said.

  “Tasted,” I said. “Don’t swallow anything.”

  Delph pulled one of her barrettes out of her hair and handed it to me. “You can divide it with this,” she said. “I’d do it in the bathroom.”

  The guards were still watching us. “Okay,” I said. “Meet me by the bathroom door in five minutes.”

  I left my bike outside the restroom, which was white and bright, like a place you’d perform surgery instead of pee. I sat down in one of the stalls.

  You weren’t supposed to move frog spawn and we had. Splitting the spawn into bite-size chunks wasn’t good, either. Frogs laid tons of eggs because so few made it to adulthood. Now I was the main environmental hazard threatening their survival. I plunged the sharp end of the barrette into the spawn. Davy was right: It was a little like phlegm.

  Outside the bathroom, I handed out the pieces, hoping human spit wasn’t too warm, wasn’t another environmental hazard.

  We decided Delphinium would keep her mouth spawn free, in case we needed to do some fast talking.

  “After you, Good Influence,” Leroy said as we wheeled our bikes toward the line for pedestrians. He sounded the way Juliette did when she had her wisdom teeth pulled.

  Juliette insisted on going first, since she was the chaperone. She put her finger in front of the scanner as a guard took her bike and waved a wand around it. I wasn’t sure what they were scanning for.

  Another guard did the questioning. “Reason for visit?”

  “Pleasure,” Juliette said, moving only half her mouth.

  “A tourist?”

  “Yes.”

  The guard nodded her throu
gh. When I saw her breathe, I realized it was because before that, she hadn’t been breathing. I couldn’t believe she’d gotten through so easily. They didn’t even dump out any of her hair stuff. Delph and Davy went through next, with no problem.

  “You.” A guard was nodding toward Leroy. “Come through this line.”

  We exchanged glances as I stepped ahead in my own line and put my finger on the scanner.

  “Name?” the guard asked. He hadn’t asked any of the others. It was right there, in the scan.

  “Jonathan Goldstein.” I worked hard to keep my voice normal.

  “Destination?”

  “Home.”

  “Reason for visiting Canada?”

  “Pleasure.” That’s what Juliette had said. “And, um, recreation. We were camping.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” he said.

  I tried to channel Leroy. “Why not?” I said.

  “We have plenty of beautiful spots here in the United States,” he said. “When did you arrive?”

  “Monday,” I told him.

  “Time?”

  What time had Davy put in there? “I don’t remember the time.”

  “I am obligated to remind you that it is against the law to transport any agricultural products across the border, including produce. Do you have anything to declare?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No alcohol or firearms?”

  “No.”

  “Did you at any time during your international vacation talk to any person or persons wishing to harm the United States or its government?”

  “What? No.”

  He waved a wand over my backpack. Then he looked through it with a small baton. He used it to hold up a pair of my underwear. I hoped Delph was looking in the other direction. Ahead of me, another guard was unzipping the satchel on my bike. I almost smiled, and would have, if I hadn’t been afraid of squishing the frog spawn: The aquarium had stayed in Wodiska Falls.