Matylda, Bright and Tender

by Holly M. McGhee

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Guy. “It’s like she knew we were coming.”

  Guy could be so easy to convince sometimes. One year his mom bought a dozen boxes of Girl Scout cookies, and she put them in the freezer for safekeeping.

  “These are special cookies,” she told us. “They’re equipped with a satellite radar that will signal me if anybody opens a box without permission.” I rolled my eyes at Guy when she said that, because I knew that Girl Scout cookies didn’t come with satellite detectors. But Guy believed her.

  “It can’t be true,” I told him one afternoon, pulling a box of Thin Mints out of the freezer. Guy tackled me, holding my hands to my sides so I couldn’t open the box. He grabbed it and put it back in the freezer.

  “Ow,” I said. “You could have hurt me. You really believed her, didn’t you?” He shut the freezer door. “She doesn’t actually have a radar on the cookies, that’s not even possible. She’s just trying to keep you out of them.”

  “Don’t eat them,” Guy said, and I didn’t say anything back, ’cause I knew Guy wouldn’t risk it and I couldn’t convince him.

  So I went along with him and the big gecko too, even though I wasn’t 100 percent sold on her — just like with the cookies, I knew Guy wouldn’t budge when he was convinced. There weren’t very many to choose from, either, and Mike said she’d been here awhile. This could be her one chance. “What should we name her?” I said.

  “Let’s see,” said Guy. He studied her, and so did I. Her eyes were shiny, with a slit down the middle from top to bottom. Her face, scaly and dry, seemed as though it had been around for centuries, and her feet had gritty little toes that looked like starfish.

  “What if we call her Matylda?” he said. “With a y so it’s all her own.”

  “Matylda with a y,” I said to her, and she turned to me, saying hello, as if she liked the name. “Matylda of the Ancient Face and Starfish Toes.”

  “Matylda it is,” said Guy. “And her toes are starfish — you’re right.”

  My dad filled our cart with accessories. He wasn’t always easy to win over, but once he came around, he came around all the way and then a little more, and soon we had a fifteen-gallon tank, a heating pad, a reptile carpet, a light, a water pool, two privacy logs, and two plastic palm trees. He got a leopard gecko manual too, not that it was necessary with Guy around.

  My dad added another log to the cart. “Just in case she’s shy,” he said. “She’ll be able to go undercover.” I was thinking, Let’s not go overboard, Dad, but I was happy he was so enthusiastic.

  “Once she settles in,” Mike said, “feed her crickets. Live crickets. I’m glad you took that one — glad you found your match.”

  “We’ve got plenty of crickets in the yard,” my dad said. “Be fun to try to catch some. Thanks for your help, son.” He signed the exotic-pet permit and we left the store.

  Guy was my best friend, and now we had a pet. Matylda was lucky, because I knew Guy would put her first, too — the same way he had with me at the bus stop, when he ran to get my coat.

  Matylda lived in my room — her tank fit right on top of my dresser, which was wide and not too tall, with a large mirror attached. She had a choice. She could see the world as it was, or as a reflection. When Guy looked at her, she looked right back, eyes to eyes, till he finally grinned and broke the hold.

  “She definitely knew we were coming,” he said, bringing in a stool for me and one for him.

  “I really think she got those other two lizards to hide so you would pick her,” I said. In the mirror Matylda was watching me. “I think she heard that.”

  “Yeah, I bet so,” said Guy. “Those two things that look like holes in the sides of her head are actually ears. She’s got excellent hearing.”

  “I’ll watch what I say then.” I leaned in to look at her ears. “I can see right through her head,” I said.

  “Yup,” said Guy. “That’s what a solid ear canal looks like.”

  “Do you remember the Taters?” I said. “How we put their ears inside their heads?”

  “Of course,” said Guy. “But now we’ve got to help her adjust to the hand. That’s important and it can take a while.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What do I do?”

  “Best if she comes to you on her own,” he said. “So put your hand in the tank and wait. Don’t move it a lot or she might get scared.”

  I didn’t want to go first, didn’t want to stick my hand in the tank. It seemed as though she liked Guy better already.

  “You go first,” I said.

  “All right. Come here, Matylda with a y. I’ve been waiting for you my whole life!” Guy slowly placed his hand on her brown reptile carpet, and Matylda walked right over and climbed on. Then, with no hesitation, she walked up his arm and curled behind his neck. “She’s cold-blooded,” he said, holding his head steady, “so she likes my body warmth.” I watched her there, nestling in, under his hair. She seemed to feel right at home with Guy. She peered at me from that warm place on his neck.

  “She sure likes it back there,” I said.

  “It feels nice,” said Guy. “But I can’t sit like this forever. You try it.” I thought Matylda understood, because she crawled down from Guy’s neck, one step at a time, not scared and not in a hurry. But when she got to the bottom, she stayed on his wrist.

  “Touch her,” Guy said. I reached out my finger and touched her back. I was nervous — she was exotic and rough and could move quickly.

  “Lay your hand out,” he said. “And relax.” I took a deep breath and laid my hand near her, but she didn’t come.

  “Don’t you like me?” I said, looking straight into her black eyes. She blinked and kept the hold, but she didn’t come onto my hand. Maybe she was saying no.

  “Not quite ready, Matylda with a y?” Guy said. “That’s okay — you’re doing great.” He picked her up around the belly. “You should go back in the vivarium now, anyway,” he said.

  “Vivarium?”

  “That’s the tank,” said Guy.

  He put her in.

  Matylda yawned.

  “She’s had a lot of activity,” Guy said. “She’s probably tired.”

  “Take a nap,” I said to her. “Go ahead.” It would be nice to have Guy to myself for a while.

  Matylda yawned again. And then she came right up to the glass and opened her mouth, yawning very widely this time. “Maybe she’s hungry already,” Guy said. “She does seem to be settled in.”

  Guy turned to Matylda. “Are you hungry?”

  Matylda nodded. “That’s a yes,” he said. “I guess she’s not tired.”

  “Do we have to give her live crickets?” I asked Guy.

  “Mike said so, remember? She’s got to stalk her prey!”

  “It’s kind of gross, though.”

  “But you’ll love it, won’t you?” he said to Matylda. “We’ll be back.”

  We found my dad in the basement. “Mr. Reed,” said Guy, “we have a problem.”

  My dad looked up.

  “Uh, not a problem exactly. We just need crickets for a very hungry lizard.”

  “We’ve got a hungry gecko, do we?” my dad said. “Like I told Mike, it’d be fun to try to catch some. There’s plenty in the yard. Be a shame to buy them. I’m not fast enough, though.”

  “Me neither,” I said quickly.

  “I’m fast,” said Guy. “But not quiet.”

  My dad liked challenges. He was kind of like a Cub Scout that way. “Hmm,” he said. “We need a simple one-way trap, with something to lure them in.” He got up and looked around his workroom. “Channeling your mother now,” he said. “Why not soda bottles, with a tasty lure inside?” He took two bottles out of the recycling bin and grabbed some scissors off the pegboard. He cut the bottles in half and tossed out the bottoms.

  My dad took the cap off one of the half bottles and nested the capless bottle, headfirst, inside the bottom of the other half bottle, the one with the cap stil
l on. “Voilà!” he said. “Let’s get some bait.”

  We went upstairs, and my dad handed Guy a baby carrot. “Drop in the lure. If my theory’s correct, the less intelligent crickets will assume that the carrot comes without a price. Those crickets will enter the bottle, and once they do, they won’t be smart enough to turn around and go out the hole they crawled through to get in. That’s the trade-off. They get to nibble the carrot, and we take them prisoner!”

  Guy dropped the carrot straight through the neck into the trap.

  “I get it,” said Guy, shaking the carrot around in the bottle. “Once the cricket goes in, it can’t really change its mind.”

  “Right,” said my dad. “No going back.”

  “There’s really just one way out,” I said. “Into Matylda’s tank.” It was the worst possible outcome for the cricket, but if Matylda needed to stalk prey, I was going to have to adjust to crickets meeting an untimely end. It was hard to believe that a simple Monopoly game had gotten us here. But at least the crickets were plentiful, if the cheeping I heard at night was any indication. We weren’t taking the last of the species or anything.

  It was close to six, time for Guy to go home for dinner. It wasn’t that he cared about eating on time, but food was a focus for Mrs. Hose. So we set the trap in the rhubarb patch, and Guy yelled to the world, “ENTER IF YOU DARE!” He was talking to the crickets, of course, but only I knew that. He turned to me and said, “Hands off the trap till I return.”

  “Not a problem,” I said. No way was I going to check it alone.

  Guy put on his helmet, hopped on his bike, and began to pedal, turning back to wave as he rode down the street. He kept looking back and waving as he pedaled away, not even watching where he was going. It made me think about sledding over the winter.

  We loved to go to Flood’s Hill, one town over, and Guy got a thin-as-paper flying-saucer for Christmas, the color of aluminum foil, with one fabric handle on each side. I got a big snow tube, a giant puffy doughnut — I think our parents must have planned it. We went right to Flood’s Hill the next day. Guy slipped the rope pull from my tube through his flying-saucer handles, and we went down tethered like that, almost getting dumped — a slick fast ride on the icy slope.

  Then Guy had the idea of going down together on one sled, so he sat in the back of his saucer, and I sat inside, knees pulled up tight. We hit a big bump, the saucer popped up, and we landed backward, continuing down the hill that way, not able to see where we were going.

  On the way up again, Guy said, “Sussy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Were you scared?”

  “A little.”

  “When we were backward?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t know where we were going.”

  “Me either,” he said. “It was like we were backward and forward at the same time.”

  “I’m okay with it,” I said. “As long as you’re with me!”

  “Me too,” said Guy.

  My mom was an event planner, and she often had to stay late in the city. When she finally got home that night, she poked her head into my room to meet Matylda. I wasn’t quite asleep yet. “I’m happy for you and Guy,” she said. “Happy that you have a new playmate.”

  “We do,” I said. “But she won’t come to my hand yet. I think she likes Guy better.”

  “Just give her time,” my mom said, walking over to the tank and tapping on the glass.

  “You’re lucky to have her,” she said to Matylda. “You hear that?”

  Matylda didn’t acknowledge my mom, but she was awake, crawling around her tank. I hoped she was listening, hoped she agreed.

  The next morning, the doorbell woke me up, and I got right out of bed ’cause I knew Guy would keep ringing till I let him in. From the top of the stairs, I could see him, his eyes big and eager, his mouth smiling through the panes of glass. “It worked it worked it worked!” he yelled. I threw on my sweatshirt, right over my pajamas, just to get to the door before my parents woke up.

  “I sort of hoped we wouldn’t catch any,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Guy.

  “I don’t feel that good about killing crickets.”

  “We’re not going to kill them,” Guy said. “Matylda is. They’re just feeders.”

  I doubted the crickets considered themselves just feeders.

  “If we didn’t have a lizard, I bet you’d call them crickets,” I said.

  “But we do have a lizard,” he said. “And we have to take care of her. She has to stalk!” I followed Guy out to the rhubarb, and he showed me the crickets, three of them, bouncing around in the bottle like pinballs. They were primitive and sharp, their spiky legs meant for jumping, their eyes beady, antenna long.

  “Last night, they were just three comrades playing in the rhubarb, figuring they had a lot more nights like that to come,” I said. “One of them probably saw the orange color, smelled the carrot, and thought it would be tasty. The others followed to stick with their friend. Anybody would do that, follow a friend’s path to stay together.”

  “You’ve got to think of them as feeders,” said Guy, holding the trap in front of me. “Feeders who have each other. Your dad’s trap design worked!”

  That was true. My dad would be thrilled. As for the crickets, Guy was correct; they were together, even if they’d soon be together in Matylda’s stomach. I had to accept it, ’cause I didn’t want to ruin the fun for Guy — he was so excited that the trap had worked, and getting a lizard had been his dream. It almost seemed like he loved her as much as he loved me. We ran to wake my dad.

  “Mr. Reed,” said Guy. “It worked it worked it worked!”

  “That’s what all the noise was about,” he said. He nudged my mom. “Ivy,” he said, “you’ve got to see this.”

  The crickets still bounced as my dad pulled back the screen top to the tank. “Hold the trap vertically and unscrew the cap,” he instructed Guy. The crickets were at the neck of the bottle with the baby carrot. Guy took off the cap and shook the bottle while my dad tapped a few times — the crickets shot headfirst into Matylda’s tank.

  “Eat and flourish!” Guy said, just like his mom always did.

  “Close the screen!” I shouted from up on the bed. I didn’t want to find a feeder in my room later.

  “All the way!” my mom said from the doorway. That’s something I shared with my mom — we weren’t bug people, even if they were comrade crickets.

  Matylda took in her new company, as if she had done this thousands of times before. Then it was over so fast — a stalk, a snap, an antenna or two sticking out of her mouth, and a gulp. Clean and bloodless. On to the next. I watched her use the mirror, and I was even more sure that she was clever. She eyed her next victim without attracting any attention at all, and then, at once — whoosh — she sprang and twisted and attacked. The cricket had no chance. After the third hunt, Matylda looked straight at us, still as a photograph, except for one final antenna sticking out of her mouth, a long one, twitching.

  “She’s impressive,” said my mom. She looked at me, still up on the bed. “You doing okay with your new roommate?” she asked.

  “I’ll get used to it,” I told her. “She’s got to stalk her prey. At least she’s fast.”

  “I’ll say,” my dad agreed. “Nice work, Matylda. We’ll catch some more for you tonight. We can probably use apples for bait, too, just in case they get wise to the carrots.” He and my mom left the room.

  I couldn’t stop looking at the antenna sticking out, still moving back and forth, slowly, the singular reminder of what had just happened. The rest of the cricket was inside Matylda. As if he could read my mind, Guy said, “Sussy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You worried about the cricket?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because of its antenna?” he asked. We were both quiet.

  “It’s between two worlds,” I said. “You know what I mean?”

  “Kind of.”

  �
��I mean, the antenna is still in this world, but the rest of her isn’t anymore . . . like the cricket’s here and somewhere else at the same time.”

  “I get it,” said Guy.

  “Do you think lizards can feel happiness and sadness, or just heat and cold?”

  Matylda was watching me, sizing me up.

  “They can feel everything,” he said. “Just look at her.”

  “I think so, too. Do you know where she came from?”

  “You mean before she got to Total Pets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We could ask Mike,” he said. “But my house first, for the best waffles on earth.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Maybe when we get back, that antenna won’t be sticking out.”

  The Hoses were picky about bikes, so we put ours in the garage as soon as we got there. We didn’t want to hear “A rusty bike is worse than none at all, and it can rain anytime, even when the sun is out” ever again.

  Touch the bell heart/hear it jingle, I said to myself, looking at the ornament on the Hoses’ door. Guy’s mom had told me more than once the bell heart was a wedding gift — and I loved the Christmas-y sound of the tiny red metal bells.

  I remembered a summer dinner we had with the Hoses the year before — deviled eggs and Ramapo tomatoes with fresh basil and mozzarella cheese — a cool breeze blowing through the screened windows. “I surrender to the Ramapo,” said Mr. Hose. “The perfect blend of sweet and acid.” He speared one with his fork, holding it up for us all to admire. “Nothing like it,” he said.

  But then he frowned. “A shame I have to go away tomorrow; do you think I can take some in my carry-on?” Mr. Hose wasn’t around that much ’cause he traveled for work, but when he was home, he usually made us laugh.

  “Do you miss your dad when he’s not here?” I asked Guy after that dinner. “Do you wish he were here all the time, like my dad is?”

  “That’d be cool,” said Guy, “but he doesn’t stop being my dad just ’cause he’s on a trip.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  I touched the heart, and we went inside, and as soon as Mrs. Hose heard us, she said, “Waffles almost ready. How’s the lizard-who-doesn’t-live-here-thank-goodness?”