Warts and All

by Melissa McShane

  “Prince? Me?” The frog croaked twice in a row. “Are you sure?”

  “No. But…I can’t think of anything else that would put the palace guards in such an uproar.” I went for the phone. “I have to call someone.”

  “Good. Who?”

  I paused with my hand on the receiver. “The palace?”

  “You can’t call them! What if it was someone at the palace who attacked me? I think the person who shouted at me was a guard.” The frog hopped from the bathroom to where I stood.

  “But I have to tell someone. Someone who can turn you human again.”

  “Why not you?”

  “What?”

  The frog bumped into my right leg, the one with the wand sheathed near my hip. “You’re a witch, aren’t you? So turn me human!”

  “I’ve officially been a witch for exactly sixteen days. Removing curses is advanced stuff.” I drew my wand anyway. It looked so ordinary, just a polished length of ash with nothing visible to show its magical powers.

  “You can try, can’t you? I don’t want to stay like this forever.”

  “What if I make it worse?”

  “There is nothing worse,” the frog said, “than sitting in a girl’s bedroom slowly drying out and feeling a growing craving for flies. Please. I feel my memories slipping away. What if I forget I was ever human?”

  His raspy voice was so plaintive my heart went out to him. It wasn’t a fate I’d wish on anyone, even if they weren’t a prince. I sighted along my wand, then sat cross-legged on the plum carpet and aimed it at him. “Hold still.”

  Prince Jonathan quivered, but otherwise didn’t move. I tried to remember the pictures I’d seen of the prince—tall, blond, handsome, with a smile that dimpled on one side—and held tight to that image as I flicked my wand at the frog prince.

  Nothing happened. Prince Jonathan croaked. “Did it work?” he said.

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “I could tell. I just hoped I was wrong.”

  “Let me try something else.” I stood and aimed my wand at the prince, this time picturing him not as his human self, but as a frog gradually transforming into a human. Again, nothing happened. I sighed and sheathed my wand. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Do you know any other witches or warlocks who might be able to help?”

  “My mother, but she won’t be home for hours.”

  “I might not have hours. I feel my memories fading.”

  Thunder rumbled again, and rain began pattering the window, becoming a downpour in seconds. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean when I try to recall anything, it’s like a soupy green mist. Even those memories of the palace I mentioned—they’re getting blurry.”

  “I wonder if a frog brain is just too small to hold a human consciousness,” I said. “Your Highness, I think I have to call the palace. Everyone there can’t be out to get you.” I picked up the phone and realized I had no idea who to call. It wasn’t as if the palace had some kind of hotline for reporting missing princes.

  “I suppose you have to,” the raspy voice said. The frog hopped over to lean against my foot. “I can’t help feeling it’s a mistake, though.”

  “If you think of some other option, let me know.” I dialed the operator, and when the perky-voiced woman came on the line, I said, “I need to speak with someone in the palace. Maybe…is there a central operator there?”

  “The only public number for the palace is the public relations department,” the perky woman said. “Let me give you that number, unless you’d like me to connect you directly?”

  “Please do.”

  There were a few clicks, and then the phone rang again. Almost immediately, someone picked up. “Public relations,” a man said.

  “Hi. Um. I, ah, have someone you’re missing,” I said, and immediately felt stupid. Someone you’re missing? I might as well have started with “two million in cash or the prince gets it.”

  “Excuse me?” the man said.

  “You were searching for someone at the palace grounds today. I have him. With me. He’s all right, don’t worry, but he’s…not himself.”

  “Who is this?”

  Self-preservation cut in. “A friend.”

  “Do you have a name, ‘friend’?”

  “I didn’t kidnap him! He sneaked into my bag and rode home with me, I swear.”

  There was a pause. “This is a prank, isn’t it,” the man said. “Miss, I can have you arrested.”

  “It’s not a prank! He’s a frog and he needs help. Please—”

  Click. The line went dead. I stared at the receiver for a while, listening to the dial tone. “Well?” Prince Jonathan said.

  “He thought it was a prank. He threatened to have me arrested.” I set the receiver down and sat on my bed. “Now what?”

  Prince Jonathan leaped onto my bed and sat next to me. “I never asked your name,” he said.

  “It’s Chloe.”

  “Thank you for trying to help me, Chloe. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”

  “Me too.” It wasn’t entirely true. I wasn’t royalty-mad like Stacy, who would have gone into hysterics at having a prince in her bedroom no matter what shape he was in. But the frog was…sweet, actually, and nice, and there was a part of me that couldn’t help wondering if princes were ever attracted to ordinary girls like me. If I could figure out how to reverse the spell, he’d be grateful, and maybe that gratitude would turn into something more… I shook myself.

  “Something wrong?” the frog prince said.

  “Just trying to think of a solution.” In the stories, princes fell in love with ordinary girls all the time. But those were just stories. I had to live in the real world, in which princes never even met ordinary girls, and if I restored Prince Jonathan, he’d say thank you and we’d never see each other again. And now I was being stupid. He’d lost most of his memories; suppose his real personality were something abrasive and horrible? In which case, I was developing a crush on a jerk. No, I was developing a crush on a frog. I needed the prince to return to his human self and get out of my life before I did something stupid.

  Something stupid.

  Just stories.

  What was it all the stories had in common? A kiss. The miracle of true love’s kiss, able to wake sleeping princesses and rouse the dead. Or return someone to his true form.

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  The frog croaked.

  “It’s probably stupid, but it can’t hurt.”

  He croaked again, then hopped into my lap, a trusting gesture that made my heart ache. “I’m not your true love, so maybe it won’t work, but I think…” I picked up Prince Jonathan. “Do you understand?”

  The frog prince croaked again. Fear struck me. “Can you speak? Say something!”

  He croaked rapidly, his small sides heaving. “Oh, no,” I said. I puckered up my lips, realized if this worked, I’d be holding a full-grown man at eye level, and set the prince on my bed. Leaning way down, I pressed my lips to his mouth. It was soft, and unpleasantly moist, and tasted bitter.

  Lightning flashed, followed immediately by the loudest thunderclap I’d ever heard. I cried out and flung my hands over my ears, squinting against the brightness. In the next moment, I realized the lightning had actually been inside my room, which stank of ozone. I jerked away from the frog to find him gone. In his place, a young man sprawled across my bed, his dark hair standing on end, his blue eyes wide and horrified. He was definitely not Prince Jonathan.

  He was also completely naked.

  I shrieked and closed my eyes. “I’m sorry!”

  “I’m sorry!” the young man said at the same time.

  I grabbed handfuls of my bedspread and threw it over him. He snatched it up and wrapped it around his waist. “Who are you?” I shouted.

  “I don’t remember. Why can’t I remember? What did you do? Did you kiss me?”

  Wonderful. He wasn’t a frog anymore, but he wasn’t
the prince and he still didn’t remember who he was.

  Footsteps sounded outside my room. “Chloe? Are you all right?” my father called.

  My eyes met those of the stranger. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just, um, startled by the lightning.”

  “Mom called and said she’d be late. You want me to pick up dinner?” The footsteps drew nearer.

  The young man’s face was almost comical in its dismay. He headed for the bathroom, tripping over the trailing ends of the bedspread. “Um, yeah, sure,” I said. “Anything’s good.”

  The bathroom door swung shut just as my door opened and my father stepped inside. “Jared and Delia want Thai food, if that’s all right,” he said, then, “What happened to your bed?”

  “I, ah, spilled grape juice on the blanket,” I said. “It’s soaking in the tub before I put it in the wash.”

  “You should be more careful, pumpkin,” Dad said. “I’ll let you know when dinner’s here.” He gave me a hug and left the room.

  I stood perfectly still in the center of my room, listening to his receding footsteps until the only sound was the rain on my window and my rough breathing. Slowly, I walked to the bathroom door and pushed it open.

  The bedspread lay puddled on the floor next to the tub. The window was open, and cold rain spattered me with every gust of wind that whipped the curtains into a froth of fine white gauze. One of my towels lay in a peach-colored pile by the window. The other was missing. I walked in a daze to the window and looked out over the garden, but saw no one, no flash of peach, no tousled dark head silhouetted against the shrubbery. I stared out the window for a good five minutes, getting solidly drenched, before shutting it and going to change my clothes.

  ***

  “I can’t believe you didn’t call me,” Stacy said. She tore the top off her straw’s paper wrapper, held the straw to her lips, and blew the rest of the wrapper like an arrow at my chest. I half-heartedly swiped it aside. “A prince in your bedroom.”

  “He wasn’t a prince. I don’t know who he was,” I said, discarding my straw’s wrapper in a more conventional way and then stabbing it into my drink’s plastic lid. I sucked down frosty pink lemonade fast enough to give myself a twinge behind the eyes.

  “Prince, not a prince, the point is, you had a cute guy in your room and you didn’t even get his name!” Stacy leaned back and examined me with narrowed eyes. “You’re really bothered by this. You saved his life! You should be celebrating.”

  “I know. But I’m worried. Suppose he never regained his memory? He was mostly naked and all alone—anything might have happened to him.” I hadn’t been able to forget his face, those wide, startled blue eyes. Worse, I hadn’t been able to forget how his lips—the boy’s lips, not the frog’s—felt on mine, soft and warm and, for a moment, moving in an unmistakable kiss.

  “He remembered who he was and made it home safely. Do you know how I know? Because a cute naked boy wandering the streets who doesn’t know his own name is news, and even your family gets the news.” Stacy took a long drink of her soda and let out a feminine burp. “So don’t worry. Unless what you’re worried about is that you’ll never see him again.”

  “Why should I see him again? There’s no reason for it.”

  “If he’s as nice as a person as he was as a frog, he’ll be back. If only to return your towel.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me whether he does or not.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m serious. I’m satisfied that I did a good deed.”

  “And it’s just my imagination that you’ve taken a second look at every dark-haired young man who passes.” Stacy leaned forward. “Oh, I’ve just thought of something awful. What if he’s a Linley boy?”

  “Stacy!”

  Stacy laughed and drank down the rest of her soda with a slurp. “I’m off to ballet,” she said. “If you see him again, I insist you burst in on my lesson and drag me away to give me the gory details.”

  My cheeks were hot enough to melt the last of my ice. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  I walked with her the few blocks until our paths diverged, then trudged on alone. Today was as cold as yesterday should have been, with clouds showering the streets with an intermittent drizzle that was worse than the outright downpour had been. I turned up my collar and shoved my hands into my jacket pockets, feeling like a private eye from some ‘30s noir film. I’d go home and finish my homework, which included inventing a Magical Experience for Miss Brenley. She’d never believe the one I’d had yesterday.

  “Chloe?”

  I stopped and turned, wondering who was calling my name. Then I felt rooted to the spot, struck by the same lightning bolt that had shattered my room the day before. He stood across the street, his dark hair mussed by the wind, shoulders hunched into a Linley Prep letterman’s jacket. He held a plastic shopping bag that was so prosaic I had a moment’s doubt that this was happening. Surely this was some stranger who just happened to look like my frog prince, and when he turned away, the spell would be broken.

  The young man looked both ways, then loped across the street between cars, arriving at my side a little out of breath. “Hi,” he said, then looked as if he’d exhausted his conversational reserves.

  “Um. Hi,” I said.

  “Ethan,” he said. “My name, I mean. It’s Ethan. It took me a while to remember it. Ethan Arbuckle.”

  “Oh.” It was a nice name. It suited him far better than Jonathan.

  He held out the shopping bag. “Your towel. I washed it, just in case…I mean, it seemed like the thing to do.”

  I took the bag. “So you…remember everything? You’re all right?”

  “I’m fine. Embarrassed, but fine.”

  “Why are you embarrassed? I’m the idiot who thought you were the prince.”

  “That was a perfectly reasonable assumption, given that I had no idea—” He shook his head. “Look, do you want to sit down for a minute? Let me buy you coffee, or something to drink, anyway. You must have a million questions.”

  I nodded. We set off down the road. After a few paces, he took the shopping bag from me without a word. It was such a sweet, chivalrous gesture I was struck mute, or would have been if I’d had anything to say.

  We stopped at a coffee shop and ordered drinks, coffee for me, hot chocolate for Ethan. We sipped, and stared at each other for a while, until Ethan said, “I spend a lot of time at the palace, studying art—it’s like a museum, you know? So it’s almost as familiar to me as my own home. But it means I’m used to going places the public can’t. I was taking a shortcut across the grounds and startled a guard. He was new and reacted without thinking. Those wands they carry are set to turn intruders into frogs, or squirrels, something small, anyway. It’s a non-lethal deterrent that’s meant to be short-term. But the guard panicked, and I got away. Climbed into your backpack, and…you know the rest.”

  “So all that activity…they were looking for you?”

  Ethan saluted me with his cup. He was really very handsome, with his thin face and bright blue eyes, and I felt myself blushing and drank more coffee to hide the fact. “They couldn’t let it out that a guard had accidentally zapped a student. They’d gotten as far as calling my parents when I finally made it home. I think there’s talk of reparations, though I tried to stop them firing the guard.”

  “I guess you can’t have someone that trigger-happy in a sensitive position.”

  “I guess.” Ethan drained his cup and set it down with a decisive tock. “I wanted to say thank you. You know, now that I’m in my right mind and not a frog, or naked, or anything like that.”

  “You didn’t have to flee out my window. You might have been hurt.”

  “I didn’t want to make trouble for you after all you’d done. I very nearly forgot I was human, so I owe you my life.”

  Handsome, sweet, and considerate. I felt my assumptions about Linley boys dissolve like chalk in the rain. “My parents would have understood. But…thanks.”

/>   He pushed back his chair. “Can I walk you home?”

  It wasn’t necessary, and there was no way I was turning him down. “All right.”

  We walked in silence again, and I searched for something to say that would make me sound sophisticated and interesting—sound like anything other than a fifteen-year-old beginner witch with, I had to admit, an epic-sized crush on the boy walking next to me. Nothing came to mind. The closer we came to my home, the more convinced I was that we would reach my door, he would say goodbye, and I would never see him again. And I wanted so desperately to see him again.

  Ethan slowed as we neared the blue garden gate. “I’ve heard of this place,” he said. “Your mother’s?”

  “Yes. It’s more beautiful in the height of summer.”

  “I’ll have to come back then.”

  We walked a few more paces to the front door, and I held out my hand for the shopping bag. He looked at it as if he’d forgotten he had it, then gave it to me. “Thanks again,” I said. “For coffee, and the explanation…and everything.”

  “Like I said, I owe you my life.” He pulled the edges of his jacket closer together against the cold. “Which makes this awkward.”

  “Makes what awkward?”

  He blew out his breath. “Asking you to go out with me.”

  I once more felt rooted to the spot, my face numb and my eyes dry because I’d forgotten how to blink. “I mean, I was a frog, and you probably remember that every time you look at me,” Ethan went on, “and you saw me naked, and that’s got to be an interesting memory, and basically I feel I’ve humiliated myself as much as anyone can in front of a beautiful girl and still manage to face her and—”

  I laid my fingers over his lips, stilling his torrent of words. “You think I’m beautiful?”

  He blinked. “Of course. But it’s more than that. I don’t know any other girl who’d be willing to kiss a frog on the off chance it might save someone’s life. That makes you amazing.”