“What’s this?” The guard lifted my thermos, which I’d reattached to my bicycle.
“A thermos.”
“What’s in it?”
“Water,” I told him. Which was true. I’d left the remainder of the pond water there so that we’d have a place to stow the frog spawn when we got across.
The guard poured some of the water out of the thermos.
“We’re biking,” I said. “I need that water.” I didn’t see any drinking fountains. Not that the water would have been safe for the spawn, even if I had.
“You can purchase new water at the rest stop up ahead,” he said. He handed me my empty thermos. “Welcome home.”
I walked toward the others. Leroy finally cleared customs, too, and followed me. None of us said anything.
“He dumped my water,” I said through one side of my mouth as we walked our bikes toward the pike. Above us, drones flitted around like mosquitoes. I wasn’t sure if they were looking or listening. We rode out of view of the border, but a few of the drones were still overhead. We stopped, and Delph reached into her satchel and pulled out the umbrella she’d taken with us on our trip out to the island, the one that was supposed to make us look like a painting.
“Brilliant.” I spit the frog spawn back into the thermos and then passed it around so the others could, too. I didn’t see the rest stop yet. And we had no water to add.
“Maybe this will help,” said Delph. She pulled a small vial of water from her satchel. “It’s from Simon’s pond,” she said. “In case of emergencies.”
“How did they not see that?” Leroy asked incredulously. He held up his own test tube, but it was empty, as was his thermos of drinking water. They’d dumped them both at the crossing.
Delph added her water to the thermos. It only covered up the eggs about halfway.
“Any other ideas?” I said.
“Spit,” Delph said. It was the softball player in her. I found this very attractive.
I checked my One to see if anyone had conducted an experiment on the effects of human saliva on frog spawn. All I found was research on frog saliva, which wasn’t the same.
“We could use pee,” said Leroy. “It’s supposed to be more sterile.”
I wasn’t sure who made him chief scientist. “Pee could give them ammonia poisoning,” I said. “Spit’s better. And they’ve already been exposed to it anyway.”
“Okay, then,” Leroy said. And he spit a mouthful of saliva into the thermos.
We passed it around, spitting, until our mouths were dry and the top of the frog spawn was covered.
Juliette pulled out some of the water we’d refilled from Simon’s—from his sink, not his pond. She took a sip, and then passed that around, too, trying to recover.
“Sneaking across worked better,” Juliette said. “We’ll have to remember, for next time.”
I still couldn’t believe my sister was thinking about a next time—or that she’d sneak back across, especially when the thought of it had almost derailed our whole trip. I took another sip of water and handed back the thermos. We’d made it across the border. Now it would be smooth sailing (or pedaling) all the way home.
There are certain things you shouldn’t think or say out loud. “Smooth sailing” is one of them. Because that’s a sure way to make something bad happen.
The first thing happened just past the checkpoint, when we were crossing the bridge back into Maine. Davy stopped to take a picture and set his One up on the railing. But he hadn’t gotten off his bike to do it, and his handlebars turned at the last second. They knocked into the One, sending it over the side and into the river below.
“Nooo!” he yelled. He started to mourn before we even knew if the One was dead. The river was moving fast, swollen from a sudden rain. When we reached the end of the bridge, we left our bikes and scrambled down along the bank, going from rock to rock to get closer to where it had fallen. All we saw was water, foggy with mud.
All his codes and keys—gone. Also: “She’s going to kill me,” he said.
Two minutes later, Mrs. Hudson’s face bloomed out of my One. That’s how we knew for sure that Davy’s One was dead.
“Davy’s dot is missing,” she said. She’d been tracking him, the way we’d been tracking Alph, but with his One instead of a chip and some Bind-oh.
“It fell,” I said. “Uh, I’m not sure he can talk. He’s pretty upset.”
Mrs. Hudson knitted her eyebrows together and I turned my One around so she could see Davy, who was looking out at the water so we couldn’t see him tearing up.
“Davy. Child, look at me. Are you all right?”
He gave her a thumbs-up sign, even though we all knew he was feeling thumbs-down—worse, now that she’d called him “child” in front of us.
“Where did you drop it?”
Davy didn’t answer. I turned the One so that her flickering face was staring out at the river. “There.”
“What are you doing in that water?”
“We’re not in it, just near it. We were up there.” I showed her the bridge.
Then she gave us a lesson on engineering, and the danger of bridges. I don’t know how else she thought we were going to get from one place to another. I tried to explain that the trail included the bridge, but she didn’t listen.
“I’ll be keeping your number, Jonathan,” she told me, using my real name. “I’ll be in touch.”
Great. Now I had inherited Mrs. Hudson. Davy didn’t turn away from the water until she was gone. We searched a little longer, putting all our Ones on search and scan, but we didn’t turn up anything. Finally, we slogged back up the hill.
We didn’t have as much energy as before. Maybe we were pedaling slower, without Alph’s croaks to urge us on. The sun began to set before we reached the certified campground, so we pulled off in a small wooded area. Leroy collected dead wood for a fire and put stones around it to keep it contained. The stew was nearly boiling when Mrs. Hudson popped out of my One to check on Davy, who still wasn’t saying much. Delphinium used her own One to check in with her parents. We put the Ones away after that so Davy wouldn’t feel as bad about his loss. If we hadn’t, we might have been quicker about setting up the tents. If we hadn’t, we might have heard the warning.
The first we saw of the storm was the dark clouds that blotted out the last traces of the sunset. The sky went from hot pink to a sickish green, before fading to black. The temperature dropped. The air buzzed with electricity.
“That is one ticked-off sky,” Leroy said.
Juliette pulled her One out of her pocket again, but it was as dark as the sky. “Engage,” she said. It didn’t. None of them did.
Delph’s eyes got wide as the sky rumbled and the rain came. Steady sheets. We stood under a tree as hail interrupted the rain and then the rain returned. It hit the ground so hard and so fast that it pooled up, as if the trees weren’t even thirsty. Our fire dissolved into water and ash. The stewpot filled with rain and sloshed over the sides.
Thunder again. Loud. A tree limb crashed to the ground. We barely heard it, but we felt it.
“This is not the safest place to be during a thunderstorm,” I said.
“It can’t last long, hard as it’s coming,” Juliette said. “We should shelter in place.”
That’s what they had us do in school when a weather event was coming.
Leroy grabbed our tent and set it up like he was trying to win a world record. I wasn’t sure it counted as shelter, but we all scooted through the flap.
“You were right,” Juliette said, wrinkling her nose. “About the smell.”
“Dad’s feet,” I said. It was worse in the rain.
The tent was supposed to be waterproof, but water still seeped through the top and the bottom.
“Put the Ones in here,” Leroy said, pulling out a container.
Thunder exploded around us. I counted the seconds between the lightning and the thunder and divided by three to account for the speed of so
und—a kilometer every three seconds. The storm wasn’t getting farther away. It was getting closer.
Outside we heard the plink of more hail bouncing off our bicycles, which were pressed up next to a tree.
The frog spawn was still in the satchel. And okay, the satchel was probably as good a protection as the tent was, and the thermos was hard and metal. But I couldn’t leave it out there.
I unzipped the tent.
Juliette opened her mouth, but she must have realized right away what I wanted to get. She knew she wasn’t going to stop me.
BOOM.
I waited until the next lightning flash, then bolted toward the bikes. I opened the satchel and grabbed my thermos.
“Two one thousand.” I was ready for the thunder when it came.
Then lightning split the sky. I heard a crack and then the rain, the hail, all of it disappeared.
I opened my eyes, but I didn’t remember closing them. I saw the blue of the tent, smelled the smell of dirty feet. I didn’t remember running back there. I felt a squeeze and looked at my hand. Delphinium was holding it, a good indication that I was dreaming.
“Hey, you’re awake.” Leroy’s voice had an echoey quality to it.
“Jonathan, you jerk.” Juliette sounded pissed, but she looked puffy, like she’d been crying. Over me?
“Why?” My voice sounded like my mouth was full of gauze from the emergency kit. Something hurt. My head. My arm. My ankle. I smelled something burning, but it wasn’t just the drowned campfire. It smelled like the first explosion I’d made with my chemistry set, or the way the Soov smelled when my dad started it up.
Delphinium squeezed my hand again. I hoped my fingers didn’t feel too sweaty.
“Did we get struck by lightning?” I said. Maybe it had altered our electrical structure and we were turning into superheroes. Frog Boy. Climate Girl.
“Not we,” Leroy said. “You.”
“Transitive property,” said Davy. “You got struck by a tree. The tree got struck by lightning.”
“Where are the eggs?” The gauzy feeling was going away. A panicky feeling replaced it.
Leroy held up my thermos. There was a dent in it, but I didn’t see any cracks.
“Are the bikes okay?”
“They were,” Leroy said. “I can check. The rain’s let up.”
“For now,” said Juliette as Leroy scooted out of the tent.
“How did you get the tree off me?” I looked through the tent flap, toward Leroy, but Davy pointed to Delphinium. “It was mostly her,” he said.
Delph let go of my hand and made a muscle. “Pitching arm,” she said. So she was the superhero. I could live with that.
“You can’t ride a bike like that.” Davy looked at me like I was his fallen commander. Juliette stood up like she’d received a battleground promotion.
“I’m going for help.”
“We should stick together.” Leroy was back, his hair plastered to his face. He didn’t offer a report. I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.
“I’m going,” said Juliette. “The storm’s over.”
“For now. Those were your words,” Leroy told her. “Aren’t there lines of storms?”
Pain spiked through my ankle and up my leg before I could agree. My face must have shown it. That was why Davy said I couldn’t make it. His face looked like it had the day he came to see me, after we’d made the bet, and my mom had said I was too sick to come out. I’d watched him through the window and wished I wasn’t sick, and it wasn’t because I wanted to be better. It was because of Davy’s face.
“Here.” Delph handed me a small yellow pill.
“Thanks, Doc,” I said. I turned my head and that’s when I saw my arm. There was a towel over it, but through the towel, I could see red. I’d cut myself before, enough to get down to the fat and muscle, though not the bone. It didn’t hurt now. But it looked like it should have hurt. A lot.
“Holy—”
“We think you sliced it on a rock when you fell,” Davy said, looking away. “That’s the working hypothesis.”
Hypothesis sounded better than giant gash. The word calmed me down.
The thunder blasted, loud again, and the wind attacked our tent. If we weren’t in there weighting it down, it would have blown away.
“See?” Leroy said.
“So maybe I’ll stay a few more minutes,” Juliette said. She opened the container, tried to turn on her One, and put it back. The thunder came again, in a roll this time, instead of a bang.
“Who cares if it’s raining?” Juliette started singing. My mother sang that song when we were kids. “Who cares if it’s blue? Who cares if it’s raining? I want to dance with you.” The song’s about a guy who doesn’t care that it’s raining (obviously) because he’s finally found true love. Juliette usually has a good voice, but now she was singing loud and off-key, maybe so no one would feel bad about joining in. Well, no one but Davy, who registered a meteorological objection.
“If the sky was blue, it wouldn’t have been raining,” he said. “The sky would have been gray. Or green.”
“Metaphor.” Leroy shrugged and went back to singing. “Who cares if it’s storming? There’s sunshine in your eyes. You came without a warning and blew clouds from the skies.”
The thunder came again. Juliette didn’t remember the third verse, so she sang the first one again. The third time through, no one joined in and we went back to listening to the storm.
“Nice weather for frogs,” Delph said. Now she pulled out the Ones to see if any of them flickered. I wondered what my frog—Simon’s frog—was doing at Simon’s. How many storms like this had he survived? Delphinium must have known I was thinking about him, because the next thing she said was “You know, maybe we should just name the island after Alph.”
“Second the motion,” said Davy.
I could get behind that, too. Even though it hurt to do it, I nodded.
The rain pounded the earth, too much, too soon. We could hear the trees, their roots ripping up soggy ground as they fell. We heard the squall of the wind.
Then we heard another sound. Not the falling of a tree or the croaking of a bullfrog. It was louder and steadier. There was a blinding light.
“I’ll check it out,” Juliette said.
“Me too.” Leroy stood up, as much as he could in the tent. “You copes?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just wait here.”
I wasn’t copes. What I was, was useless. What did you do over spring break? I imagined the prompt from my English teacher. And what had I done? Gone to Canada with my friends and Leroy. What did I have to show for it? I hadn’t saved the world. I didn’t have a frog, I’d broken a few bones, probably, and I’d stranded my friends in the middle of a storm.
Juliette screamed, shaking me out of my pity party. But it wasn’t a scream of horror.
“It’s Dad,” she said. “And he’s got the Soov.”
The motorized, gasoline-powered, emissions-belching Soov was here, in the middle of the woods. This was the first time I’d known it to be anywhere but in our garage or the July Fourth parade. You could tell that my dad didn’t drive it much. From my spot in the tent, I could see the headlights zipping back and forth, getting closer. I could hear brakes and the quiet when the engine stopped and Juliette’s voice talking over the rain. Leroy moved the tent flap, and the headlights filled our tent with blinding brightness. Then they turned off, too.
“How did you even know to look for us?” Juliette said as the others filed out of the tent.
“Davy’s mom. When she couldn’t reach you, she called me. I’d seen the weather report and thought I’d drive out here. Save Kim from a heart attack.”
“Are we going back in the Soov?” That was Davy.
“This car,” said my dad, “was the only thing big enough to fit all of you. What was I going to drive? The Piquant?” I pictured the hydro we shared with our neighbors. Pro: It could drive itself.
Con: It would have only fit three of us. “Anyway, who’s going to be out on a night like this to see me drive it?” He paused. “And where the hell is Ahab?”
“Here.” I waved my good arm through the tent flap.
“There was an accident,” Juliette said. He didn’t wait for her to finish. I heard the Soov door open and a pair of feet sloshing through the mud. The tent flap lifted and my father’s round face appeared. He scanned me up and down, methodically, the way scientists do when they’re watching for a deviation in their results.
“Arm?” he said.
“And ankle.”
“Can you put any weight on it?” I tried to wiggle it. Bad idea; pain raced through my leg.
I shook my head, wondering why it hurt so much when it was other parts of me that felt broken. “And head,” I added.
He bent down and lifted the towel that was covering the bleeding part of my arm. Then he put it back and looked away. “I’ve seen worse,” he said, but he didn’t sound convincing. “Let’s pull that on a little tighter.” He wrapped the towel around me so I could feel the pressure. Then he reached down and scooped me up. Pain raced through my ankle when it moved. I saw light, but it wasn’t from the car. “Easy,” my dad said. “Easy.” He put me in the back seat of the Soov. My wet clothes stuck to the seat.
“Pack it up, kids,” he said.
He did not mean me. My friends packed up our gear and loaded it into the Soov while I lay splayed out in the back. He was right: There was room inside for all of us. The Soov even had an attachment for our bikes.
Juliette took the passenger seat. Davy, Leroy, and Delph sat in the wayback, leaving me the whole middle to myself and my ankle, which felt like it was on fire.
“One of you help Ahab,” my dad said. Between the two front seats, I could see the silhouette of his face. I thought about Derek and his dad, carbon copies of each other. My dad and I were nothing alike—not our hair, not our height, not our ideas about the universe. He’d never saved the world. But he might have tried once. And he’d come north to save me.
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