Читать книгу Amphibian - Carla Gunn - Страница 5

This morning Bird and I got in trouble. We were pretending to be spies. Our job was to decipher our enemies’ cryptic messages. In our Grade 4 classroom, Prime Enemy Number One is Mrs. Wardman. We were sure she had some undercover allies, but we weren’t sure who they were. So, to figure it all out, we were keeping track of Mrs. Wardman’s commands. At the point our covert operation was blown wide open, this was our list:

1. Kelsie, hold your tongue. (Beside this, Bird had drawn a picture of a tongue in a hand. It kind of weirded me out.)

2. Ryan, don’t play with your thing. (What Mrs. Wardman said to Ryan, who was spinning his X-Men eraser.)

3. Gordon, it’s time for your medication.

All I can figure is that the list must have slid off my desk while I was watching a spider by the window. I was thinking about how I sure hoped nobody mean spotted him. If Lyle caught him, he’d rip his legs off one by one. Then, just as I was thinking about how my grandmother always says, ‘If you wish to live and thrive, let a spider run alive,’ my eyes were pulled away from the spider and made to focus on something quite a bit bigger but not so interesting: Mrs. Wardman. She was standing over me. My brain blinked, and then I understood what that meant.

She said, ‘Phin! Are you even listening to me? Why are you staring off into space?’ Just as I opened my mouth to say something that wasn’t the truth, I saw her see the list. As she reached down to pick it up, it was like she was moving in slow motion, like when I flip a flipbook’s pages reeaaallllly slowly. When she stood back up, she looked at me and raised her eyebrows, and then she looked at Bird. She didn’t say a word, but I knew we were in trouble.

It didn’t take long for Mrs. Wardman to get her revenge. She moved Bird to the front of the room and left me at the back. Now all Bird’s stuff is in Kaitlyn’s desk and all of Kaitlyn’s stuff is in Bird’s desk. Kaitlyn didn’t like the picture of Dr. Evil on the inside of Bird’s desk, so she erased it. To top it all off, last week Kaitlyn was out sick with lice and I’m not so sure she’s completely cured.

In my pencil case I have a humongous blue eraser with the words Big Mistake on it. That’s what this day was. If I had an eraser of life, I’d start at the top of the morning and work my way down. I have a feeling, though, that whoever drew this day pressed the pencil really hard and even if I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed, little horrible bits of it would still be left behind.

When I got home, my mother was on the telephone, likely interviewing someone for a story. She’s a journalist. She works at an office building in the mornings but mostly at home in the afternoons. Sometimes when she gets off the phone or home from an interview, she’s really sad. She won’t tell me why, she’ll just say, ‘Hard story, Phin.’ That’s the code for don’t talk to her until after she comes out of her bedroom.

I lay down on her office sofa and looked up at the ceiling. I counted the face patterns I saw in all the little blobs of paint. Seven. And one looked just like a mouse.

When she got off the phone, my mom said, ‘Why the long face, Phinnie?’ So I told her about how Bird got moved to the front of the room and I got left at the back with Kaitlyn and Gordon who aren’t even my best friends.

‘Oh, that’s disappointing, sweetheart,’ said my mother, ‘but maybe it’s good to sit beside someone new for a change.’

‘But I don’t want to sit beside Kaitlyn – I want to sit beside Bird. That’s one of the only things that makes school fun.’

‘I know you don’t like it, Phin, but you can put up with it. And look at it this way – adversity builds character.’

‘What the heck does that mean?’

‘Well, when I was your age, Granddad used to tell me a story about a man who found a cocoon and thought he’d help the butterfly out by cutting it open. Problem was, the butterfly wasn’t ready to emerge and so it ended up with shrivelled wings and was never able to fly. What Granddad meant was that it’s good to struggle – it builds muscles.’

‘Well, that might be true, but I’m getting too much of a workout.’

‘That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’

‘Or weak or crippled,’ I told her. ‘And that which does kill you makes you dead.’

‘Oh, but just think of all the character you’re building.’

‘I have enough already.’

My mom laughed, ‘Yes, well, you’re certainly quite the character.’

I rolled my eyes at her and went to my room and got out my Reull drawings and stories. On the planet of Reull there are lots of different kinds of cats. I drew one called the Electric Cat, which you wouldn’t want to come across. I wrote about how if you mistake him for a domestic cat and take him into your house, he will shut down the power and you’ll get the shock of your life. His body reacts to things like TVs and electric mixers and sends a high voltage through them that ruins their motors. You cannot keep an Electric Cat as a companion animal.

My companion animal is Fiddledee. She’s a really furry black and white cat with blue eyes. I went to look for her in my closet where she sometimes sleeps on top of my stuffed animals, but she wasn’t there. So then I turned on the TV to the Green Channel. The Green Channel has shows about animals and nature and how humans are ruining the environment. The life on earth is in deep trouble. Deep, deep trouble. In fact, 25 percent of all mammal species are on the Red List of Threatened Species.

Partly because of this, my New Year’s resolution is to save at least one animal from going extinct. I have a cat-whisker collection in a matchbox. I also have feathers from different types of birds and some squirrel fur. This way I will at least have their DNA.

On the Green Channel I watched a show about sadness in animals. When an elephant in Africa dies, sometimes more than a hundred elephants will come from all over and trumpet around the dead elephant with their trunks up in the air. Then they cover his body with branches. When a baby elephant dies, often his mother won’t leave the graveside. Mother elephants love their babies. Once, after a man in Africa used his tractor to haul a baby elephant out of a mudhole, the baby’s mother rushed up to him and wiped the mud off his clothes with her trunk.

Last year when I was eight, I had to say goodbye to Granddad MacKeamish at a human funeral. Just a few months before that, I said goodbye to my father too. But he’s not dead. It just feels like it sometimes.

Today after school, I didn’t stick around the playground like I sometimes do. Bird had gone home with his mother, and besides, I saw Lyle over on the monkey bars and just didn’t feel strong enough to risk being picked on. My mother says Lyle is the spawn of similarly small-minded cretins and that I should just stay away from him. She says I’ll meet lots of small-minded, life-sucking cretins all through my life. Why does she torture me like that? The Lyles in my life are going to grow bigger and bigger and that’s supposed to help me feel better?

Sometimes I have really, really bad thoughts about Lyle – the being-picked-apart-by-vultures-and-bursting-into-flames kind. And one day I said póg mo thóin to him. It means kiss my something. It’s Gaelic and I learned it from my grandfather. Lyle just looked at me confused. He doesn’t speak Gaelic. In fact, he’s not very good with languages, period. In French class, he asked Mrs. Wardman what je ne sais pas means and she said, I don’t know. He got really mad and gave her the finger behind her back.

The reason I didn’t feel like I had enough strength left over to risk Lyle is because I was still thinking about how Mrs. Wardman was irritated with me again today. It happened in math class when we had to do logic questions. First we read this sentence: ‘Paula gave out 47 treats for St. Patrick’s Day.’ And then this one: ‘Paula received 50 treats for St. Patrick’s Day.’ Then we had to read ten statements and write T for true or F for false or M for maybe. For the question ‘Everyone who received a treat from Paula gave her one as well,’ I answered M for maybe, but Mrs. Wardman marked it wrong and put a T for true.

I just couldn’t figure out why Mrs. Wardman had done that so I went up to her desk to ask her about it. She said that since Paula got more treats than she gave out, she must have gotten a treat from everyone she gave one to.

I said, ‘But how can we know that for sure?’

She said, ‘Phin, it’s logic. Go back to your seat and think more about it.’

So I did. I thought really hard about it, but it didn’t seem like logic to me. How could anybody be absolutely sure that Paula got a treat from everybody who gave her one?

I went back up to Mrs. Wardman and told her I thought really hard about it, but it still didn’t seem like logic to me.

Mrs. Wardman sighed and said, ‘It is logic, Phin. Here, I’ll show you the answer in the teachers’ book.’ She showed me and, sure enough, it said exactly what she said.

I went back to my seat and thought some more, but still it didn’t seem like logic to me. So just to be sure I had it right in my head, I drew one hundred stick kids and put a big circle around forty-seven of them to show who Paula could have given treats to. Then I put a big circle around a different fifty stick kids to show who Paula could have gotten treats from. I took my drawing up to Mrs. Wardman’s desk and showed it to her.

That’s when she sighed – again – and rolled her eyes. She said, ‘Phineas, there are fifty kids in Paula’s class, not one hundred. Now that’s enough of that – please go back and get out your social-studies notebook like everyone else. Mrs. L’Oiseau will be here in a minute.’

I could tell she was mad with me, so I went back to my seat. Her being angry made me angry, and it sure made that logic sheet cac, which is Gaelic for something most people do about once a day.

It did make me feel better to see Mrs. L’Oiseau, though. She’s Bird’s mother and she works as a Thumbody who travels around to all the schools in the city. She came into our classroom wearing a funny hat and dressed up like a big thumb – although she looked more like a big peanut to me.

She gave us each a sheet of paper and then got us to press our thumbs on an inkpad to make prints. It made me think of how it would feel to be a prisoner, except our prison was the school. I put eyes and whiskers on my thumbprint and made it into a cat. Bird put teeth on his, and it looked like I don’t know what. Then we cut out our prints and put them into round pieces of plastic and made them into pins, which we put on our shirts.

Bird’s mother told us that we’re all special, and that we should all feel good about ourselves because we all have our own thumb-prints and no two thumbprints are the same. I didn’t know how that made us special, but I didn’t say anything. No two worms have exactly the same skin pattern, and nobody thinks they’re special. On the Green Channel I learned that humans have 50 percent of their DNA the same as worms. And we’re 50 percent like bananas too.

After the Thumbody thing, school was over. It was kind of embarrassing seeing Bird and his mother walking to their car together, with her still dressed like a big thumb. I figured I may as well be embarrassed for Bird since he wasn’t embarrassed for himself. I think I even blushed for him. I do a better job at that anyway because his skin is dark and you can’t see his blushes very well.

When I got home, my mother was working in her office but she wasn’t on the phone. I was still upset about the logic problem so I told her about it. My mom agreed with me. She said Mrs. Wardman was making an assumption that wasn’t really in the problem; she assumed there were only fifty kids.

I said, ‘But doesn’t assume make an ass of u and me?’ I learned that from Bird who learned it from his cousin. He also learned from his cousin that you can guess the size of somebody’s penis – only he didn’t use that word – by looking at the distance between the tip of that person’s pointer finger and the tip of the thumb when he makes the letter L with his hand. But he’s wrong because I checked it out.

My mother told me that ass of u and me wasn’t a very nice expression, and that I shouldn’t use it.

I said, ‘Why is it so bad? It’s more of an insult to donkeys than to humans.’ But I was just pretending that I didn’t know the other meaning for that word. I still felt angry at Mrs. Wardman. I imagined her face on an ass – on a donkey ass, not on a human one.

My mother said that sometimes people – even teachers – make mistakes. She says that sometimes it’s not a good idea to point out to people that they’re wrong. She said that sometimes it’s better to just let it go and be right inside your own head instead of worrying what’s inside the other person’s head. I have to think more about it. Don’t people want to know when they’re wrong? Why does being wrong make people happy?

I told my mother that if I was wrong about something and somebody told me the right answer, then that would make me happy. She said she would always do her best to tell me when I’m wrong. I think she already does that, and that made me happy.

Then I went up to my room to draw and try to forget about whether or not Paula got treats from all the kids she gave treats to. Who gives out treats on St. Patrick’s Day anyway?

I drew the Oster, which was a species hunted by Gorachs – who think they’re the most intelligent beings in the universe – for their five-nostrilled noses, which the Gorachs used to hold things upright, like pens and pencils and things like that. Gorachs also liked to use them for sprinkler nozzles. They did this by drying them out for weeks and weeks and then using glue from the stomachs of the Tussleturtles (kind of like earth turtles but with bulging stomachs that slowed them down even more and made the Tussleturtles really, really wise because they were never in a hurry) to coat them so that they would be waterproof.

The Oster is now extinct. The other creatures of Reull are very, to-infinity sad about this. They know that with the extinction of the Oster, one more string of the web of life has been torn away forever.

Then I drew the web of life that was holding Reull in place in the universe. Lots of the web strings were in place but lots of them were broken. There can only be a few more destroyed before the whole planet falls into space.

Today we had to take Fiddledee to the vet. She has red in her poop, and Mom says that can’t be good. The vet’s name is Dr. Karnes. She is really big and has lots of sticking-up hair that looks a little like a lion’s mane and makes her face look bigger than it really is.

Dr. Karnes listened to Fiddledee’s heart, checked her body for lumps and weighed her on a scale like the one at the grocery store. Then she took her temperature. When my mother takes my temperature, she has an instrument that she sticks in my ear. Then she presses a button and the instrument beeps, and then she takes it out to read what it says.

Fiddledee wasn’t so lucky. Dr. Karnes had to put the thermometer in another place, and I can tell you it wasn’t her mouth. I held her while the vet did that because Fiddledee likes me best, and the vet said I would help reassure her that she would be all right.

I looked into Fiddledee’s eyes, and she looked just like the cats on those birthday cards with the bulging eyes that are supposed to show that they’re surprised by how old you are. I think I know now how the photographer gets their eyes to bulge like that.

Finally, it was all over and I let Fiddledee go. She climbed right back into her cat carrier, which was kind of funny because it took Mom and me a long time to get her in there in the first place.

Dr. Karnes said she doesn’t know for sure if there’s anything wrong with Fiddledee. She said we have to keep an eye on her and bring her back in another month to see if she’s lost any weight. We’re also supposed to watch her litter box for more red poop and to bring a fresh piece in for a test if it looks red. I hope there’s nothing wrong with Fiddledee.

When we left the animal clinic, we ran into a man my mother knows. He had a dog who got bitten by another dog and had to get stitches. My mother introduced me to the man, whose name is Brent. I said hi, but I decided I’d rather talk to his dog, so I did.

On the Green Channel, I learned that a human can check to see if he’s top dog by taking one of his dog’s toys or chewies and putting it in his own mouth and walking around with it proudly. I think it might be a better idea to only pretend it’s in your mouth. If the dog growls or chases the human, the human is not top dog. If the dog doesn’t do anything or just tries to play, the human is top dog.

Another test is to wet your dog’s food with your own spit and offer it to your dog. If the dog eats it, he’s submissive, but if he growls or won’t eat it, he’s dominant. To wet your dog’s food, you can just spit on it and not really put it in your mouth.

I patted Kooch on his head and his back and on the top of his muzzle and he looked happy. Submissive dogs look like they’re smiling. If you want a dominant dog to start being more submissive, you can hold his mouth into a smile once in a while, and that will start to make him feel more submissive.

That works for humans too. If a person holds his face in a smile, he doesn’t feel angry or dominant. I saw that on Discovery Channel.

Some biologists think a smile makes a human feel less dominant because the smile evolved thousands of years ago from the fear face. If you were afraid of your enemy, you would smile to show that you weren’t a threat. I think humans are sometimes big liars, though. Some of them smile to pretend not to be a threat and then have you for lunch. For instance, sometimes Lyle smiles at you as if he’s your friend – then next thing you know he’s got you in a headlock or he’s kicking you in the shins. The smile’s only to get you to let your guard down. My mom says that’s pretty much how it works at her office too.

Brent had on a light green shirt with a dark green and purple tie. He looked a lot like a leprechaun, partly because of all the green, but partly because he was really short – much shorter than my mother, who is really tall for a woman. My mother is a little bit taller than my father, but she’s a lot taller than the man named Brent.

I got the feeling Brent is one of those grown-ups who doesn’t really like kids but pretends to. I like people who don’t like kids and don’t even pretend to like them – like Mr. Byers, who owns the big apple tree that Bird and I play on. At least with Mr. Byers you know to stay away from him because he might grab you by the ear and march you over to the principal’s office like he did to Justin who fell out of the tree and into his backyard one day.

But with people like the man named Brent, their voices say, ‘I like you’ and ‘Aren’t you a cute little kid,’ but that’s not what their faces say. He reminded me of the alligator snapper turtle, which has a bright pink tongue that looks like a worm that lures fish right into his mouth. Or like one of those shiny cards that if you tilt it one way you see one thing but if you tilt it the other way, you see something different.

Afterwards, I asked my mother if she actually liked that man. She said she likes his company.

I said, ‘Is that man going to be your boyfriend?’

She paused for a moment – too long of a moment, if you ask me. Then she said, ‘Phin, I enjoy Brent’s company. We have a lot in common. Listen, Phin, if I ever were to have a boyfriend, it would never come as a surprise, okay?’

I said, ‘Good, because bad surprises upset my homeostatis.’ I learned that word in Discover magazine, but I had never had a chance to use it until then. When a person’s homeostatis is upset, he feels uncomfortable and is motivated to do something about it. For example, if you are cold, you will shiver and get a sweater. I didn’t want to think about what I would be motivated to do if Mom made that man her boyfirend.

Besides, my mother and he would make a funny-looking pair. They would be different than most mammals since the male is usually bigger than the female. There are some mammals where the female is bigger, but only a bit bigger. That would be like the spotted hyena. The female spotted hyena has to be bigger than the male in order to stop him from eating her pups.

Of the species where the female is a lot bigger than the male, many of them are spiders. For example, the average female golden orb spider is twenty centimetres long, but the male is only five to six millimetres long. Some of the golden female orbs are a thousand times bigger than the male. The male is so tiny that he can live on the female’s web and steal her food without her even noticing him. He mates with her usually while she’s eating and is distracted. But if she notices him, she will try to eat him too. I can always hope that happens to Brent.

My father looks better with my mother, but they got separated when I was eight. I live with my mom because my father travels a lot. He’s a foreign correspondent. Right now he’s in Helsinki. It is six hours later in Helsinki than it is here. That means my dad is living in the future.

Last night I drew land formations and natural disasters on Reull. Spikequakes are natural disasters where spikes come up out of the ground. Virex is a virus when everything you touch starts to get bigger and bigger and when it’s ten feet big, it explodes and your skin turns purple, then blue, then red, then green. Firex is when you get hotter and hotter but don’t catch on fire, you simply melt into a pool of fluids.

I showed them to my mother and she said, ‘Wow, Phin, that’s very imaginative. Do any nice things happen on Reull?’

I said, ‘Sure, there’s Mover Island, a piece of land that moves from place to place. The people who live there could go to sleep near a country like Canada and wake up next to a country like Australia or Greenland. The problem is, they’re hardly ever dressed for the weather and sometimes freeze or boil to death in their beds.’ That got me thinking about Lyle, who I would like to put on Mover Island.

At lunchtime I was swinging and playing a game in my imagination – until Lyle came along. In the game, I was swinging over a big gully. The object of the game was to swing high enough so that my feet looked like they were touching a certain cloud in the sky. If they couldn’t touch that cloud, I would be sucked into a gully of brain suckers. I had fun doing that until Lyle came over and did an under-duck and pushed me out of my swing. I landed in brain-sucker gully and was really mad. So I yelled some Gaelic words at him and then called him a name he’d understand. If Lyle was in a pit of brain suckers, and he was the only food they had in months, those brain suckers would starve to death. I really wished right then that I was a stinkpot turtle that releases a foul scent when its predator attacks. But the only thing that stank right then was Lyle.

Lyle ran to Mrs. Wardman. I watched him as he talked to her, and I knew he was snitching. Mrs. Wardman listened to him, and then she looked over at me and made a motion with her hand for me to come over. As I walked over to her, I had seventeen thoughts go through my brain. Then I had a thought about there being seventeen thoughts, and that made it eighteen.

Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Lyle says you called him a rude name. I don’t know what it was and I’m not even going to ask you, because saying it once is enough. I don’t want you to call names again, is that clear, Phin?’

I nodded my head, but I was really, really mad. I hadn’t told on Lyle for pushing me, so why did he tell on me for calling him a name? He does it all the time, and not behind my back like some of the other kids. Lyle’s the biggest front-stabber there is. I said ‘Whatever’ to Mrs. Wardman, but I said it really low so that she could hear me only in her unconscious.

I wished really hard that red fire ants would swarm Lyle. Their sting hurts as much as wasp stings. The problem is there aren’t many red fire ants around here. They’re usually where it’s warmer. Then I started thinking that maybe with global warming, they would begin a giant march north and eventually end up here.

This made me think about climate change and how the earth is heating up. Scientists say that if it heats up by more than two degrees, we’ll all be in big trouble, and it’s heating up even faster than anyone thought. Thinking this made me feel shivery inside. When I told Bird I was feeling worried, he tried to distract me by getting me to pretend the teachers could shoot laser rays out of their eyes and we should dodge them. But I just didn’t feel like it.

I tried putting a stick between my teeth to make my mouth into a smile, but it didn’t work. Bird said I looked like a jack o’ lantern, and then he put a stick between his teeth too. When he did that, I saw something black crawling toward his mouth.

I said, ‘Umm, Bird, I think you should take that stick out of your mouth.’

He said, ‘Why?’ but it sounded more like Eiiii.

Then I said, ‘Because there’s something about to crawl into your mouth, and it’s something that people might eat in Cambodia but we don’t eat them here.’ Actually, 80 percent of the world’s people eat insects of some kind, which means they can’t be all that bad for you, but just as I was about to mention that to Bird, he saw the beetle too. He flung the stick really far, and it hit a Grade 5 kid on the back. That kid turned around and pushed the kid behind him, who must have been confused. Bird started dancing around and shivering. He was still shivering and saying, ‘Gross, gross, gross,’ when the bell rang. That made me smile a little bit for real.

We mostly did boring stuff the rest of the day, so to keep myself from falling asleep, I made up a game to play each time Mrs. Wardman told us to take a Duo-Tang out of our desk. The game was if I reached in with my eyes closed and pulled out the right one on the very first try, I got fifteen points. If I got it on the second try, I got ten points. Third try was worth five points and fourth try got a big fat zero. The goal was to get at least fifty points by the end of the day. I only got to forty-five.

The only good part of the afternoon was silent reading, when I got to read a book about dolphins. I learned that a dolphin mother sometimes has a dolphin midwife with her when she gives birth. The midwife pushes the baby up to the surface as soon as he’s born so that he can get a breath of air. I also learned that if you plug a dolphin’s blowhole, that feels to a dolphin like how covering your mouth and nose at the same time would to you. I wondered what that would feel like. I tried holding my breath to see what it felt like, but I didn’t really think that would be the same.

After school, my mother showed up to take me home but I told her that I wanted to walk home today.

She said, ‘But, Phinnie, I’m already here.’

I said, ‘But I really want to walk home.’

My mother sighed and said, ‘Fine then, walk home.’

It was a good thing I did because on the way, I saw a plastic shopping bag on the side of the road. I picked it up and put it in my backpack because it could blow out to the ocean and a sea turtle or an albatross could choke on it. Albatross babies are fed things like plastic lids and Lego blocks by their mothers, who find them floating in the ocean and mistake them for food. Every year thousands of babies die because plastic gets caught in their throats and esophaguses, which makes them choke or starve to death. I wondered why the person who littered the plastic bag didn’t think of that.

When I got home, my mother wasn’t there. In a few minutes she showed up and told me that she had had a little talk with my teacher. This is never good news. I sucked in my breath and held it as long as I could. I remembered the rule of threes when I did this. The general rule is that you can live three minutes without oxygen, three days without water and three weeks without food. I was careful not to hold my breath for longer than the count of fifteen, because I wasn’t sure that rule was completely accurate.

My mother still hadn’t said anything else, so then I took another big breath and did the same thing over. She said, ‘Phin, what are you doing?’ I didn’t say anything right away because I was still trying to let out the air I had breathed in and didn’t want to break the pattern of it. She crossed her arms.

When all the air was out, I said I was just breathing, waiting for her to get to the point. She said she was getting there but was waiting for my full attention. I said I could never give her my complete full attention because some of it had to be used for things like breathing and blinking my eyes. She said most people could do those things without paying attention. I said not me because I had to keep part of my mind on those things in case they got out of control.

My mother said, ‘I heard you used a few select words today, Phin. What was that all about?’

‘Lyle pushed me. Twice.’

‘Well, I hadn’t heard about that part. Did you tell Mrs. Wardman?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you should have. Lyle needs to learn a lesson. You’d actually be doing him a favour by telling on him.’

‘I don’t want to do him any favours.’

‘You know what I mean, Phin. You’d be doing everyone a favour,’ said my mother.

Then I told her that Lyle had pushed me before today too. She got really quiet, and I could tell she was mad. She said that she would talk to the teacher about it and that I should stay away from that kid like she told me to before. I said I was trying to, but the problem is Lyle has legs too. And also a few times Mrs. Wardman made me do group work with Lyle – even though I told her my mother said I should stay away from that kid.

Then came the part I was hoping wouldn’t come. ‘What did you call Lyle?’ asked my mother.

‘Lady,’ I told her.

‘You called him lady?’

‘Yes.’

‘Since when is lady a bad word?’

‘Since fourth grade.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, how about next time you insult Lyle you call him man instead?’

I just rolled my eyes at her. Sometimes she just doesn’t get it, but I was glad to get off that subject.

Then I said, ‘Mom, if I lie down on the couch, could you sneak up on me and cover my nose and mouth at the same time?’

‘Why?’ asked my mom in a surprised voice with a surprised face.

‘Please. Just do it, please.’

‘That’s kind of a creepy request, Phin. I need to have a good reason for doing something like that.’

‘What’s creepy about it?’

‘Well, Phin, it sounds a little like a smothering and, you know, I rather like you. Besides, I don’t want to spend the rest of my days in the penitentiary. I’ve written stories about some of those inmates, you know, and I don’t think they’d be very nice to me.’

‘Yeah sure, Mom, sure.’

‘Seriously, why do you want me to do that?’

‘Because I read in a book today that if you plug a dolphin’s blowhole, that feels to him like having your nose and mouth covered at the same time would to you. I want to know how that feels exactly.’

My mother said, ‘Oh, okay.’ So I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. A few minutes later, she covered my nose and my mouth with her hand – but only for a couple of seconds. She wouldn’t do it for any longer than that, but I think I know a little bit better what that feels like to a dolphin. Not good.

At lunch today, Bird and I went to the edge of the playground by the apple tree. The tree has a branch that sits straight out and it’s almost like sitting on a bench except that it is a lot higher off the ground and it bounces up and down a bit when we move around on it.

Bird and I were careful not to jump down on the side of the tree facing Mr. Byers’ house. At the beginning of the year we were told in school assembly that we could play only on the school-facing side of the apple tree. Mrs. Wardman even went out to show us where we could go and where we could not.

Bird said, ‘Can we step here, Mrs. Wardman?’

And she said, ‘Yes.’

Then he said, ‘How about here, can we step here, Mrs. Wardman?’

And she said, ‘No.’

He said, ‘But what about right here, Mrs. Wardman, can we step right here?’

And she said, ‘You can, but you may not, Richard, and your allowable questions are up.’

Richard is Bird’s real name. Everyone calls him Bird because his last name is L’Oiseau, which is bird in French. Bird likes his nickname better. It irritates him that Mrs. Wardman won’t call him by that, so he makes sure not to call her by the name she prefers either – just not to her face.

Bird stopped asking questions. But when Mrs. Wardman wasn’t looking, he stepped over to the side she told him he couldn’t step on, and then he jumped back before she looked around. But nothing happened to him when he was where she told him he shouldn’t be.

I don’t want to go anywhere near Mr. Byers anyway. He makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

One day I got Silly Putty stuck in the hairs on the back of my neck. I’m not sure how I did it – I think I forgot to put it away before I went to bed, and I lay down on top of it. When I got up the next morning, it was stuck to me.

I went to my mother and she said, ‘Geez, Phin, you’re turning green.’ She tried rubbing it off with soap and water but it wouldn’t come off. Then she tried baby oil, and she pulled some off but the problem was she pulled off the hairs on the back of my neck too.

I yelled because it hurt, and then I said, ‘Great, Mom, now how am I going to know when I’m scared of someone?’

She said, ‘Phin, sometimes you exhaust me.’ She says that a lot. But then she smiles.

When we were on the tree branch I told Bird that I thought I hated Lyle who pushed me yesterday and then told on me for calling him lady. Then I told Bird I would like to call Lyle an F-er to his face instead of behind his back.

The F word is one of the very first words I think of when I’m really mad. For example, in third grade we had to write down words that described our French partner, and the only word I could think of was the F word because I really didn’t like him. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t know what that word was in French – especially after he bit me. When that happened, I yelled the F word, but just inside my head.

This morning I woke up to an awful sound – it was like a wolf trying to howl after swallowing one of those birthday-party noisemakers. And it was standing over me.

I was a little worried about what I might see – maybe a pack of wolves having a birthday party and the cake just happened to be me – but I took a chance and opened my eyes. My mother was standing there and that awful noise was coming from her. She was smiling so I figured she wasn’t choking on something, so I asked her what the heck she was doing.

‘I’m yodelling, Phin,’ she said.

‘But you’re not on a mountain,’ I said. ‘You’re standing over me making that awful sound. I thought you were a wolf with something caught in its throat. If you were a wolf, you’d have to be the alpha because if you were a submissive, the others would attack you for making a sound like that.’

Since my mother seemed to be interested in awful sounds, I told her that a science show I watched was about how researchers asked people across lots of countries to rate how horrible different sounds are. The top five were:

5. a metal drawer being opened

4. scraping wood

3. scraping metal

2. Styrofoam being rubbed together

1. scraping slate with a garden tool, which makes the fingernail-on-a-chalkboard sound

I told Mom that I figured her yodelling would be pretty close to the top of the list if the scientists had used it in their study.

‘Ha ha,’ she said. ‘I actually think I’m pretty good. Anyway, I’ve been asked to give you a message. Your father is in Switzerland covering a story about how the permafrost is melting in the Alps and he emailed me and asked me to say hello to you and to give you a big lick from him.’ Then she reached for me and pretended to lick me and it felt like I was being mauled by a crazy wolf mother. I told her to stop before she gave me the creeps.

As I ate my breakfast, I wondered how close Switzerland is to where I live, so I went up to my room and got out my distance globe. It’s a globe where you touch one part of it with an electronic pen and then touch another part of it with the pen and then the globe tells you how far apart those two places are.

My father bought it for me on my last birthday so that I could always know how far away he was from me. I think he thought it might make me feel better to be able to see exactly where on the earth he was, but it doesn’t. Now not only can I see how far away he is but I can hear the exact number of kilometres. That’s like not only knowing that you’re about to get a needle but also knowing how far it’s going to go into your muscle. The robot-sounding voice said 5,403 kilometres.

I wondered which animals will start dying if the permafrost melts, so while my mother was having a shower, I got on to her computer and did a Google search. My mother told me to figure out the most important words when doing a search and type them in. So I typed in animals and melting and permafrost and it came up with 217,000 hits. One said that melting permafrost in Siberia is releasing carbon that’s been trapped there since the Pleistocene era. As it bubbles to the surface, it releases methane gas into the atmosphere, and since methane is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide, this means global warming will happen even faster than the scientists originally thought.

The article said that this news is not good for human and animal life. This made me worried and scared. My insides, even my heart, felt like they were getting skinnier and skinnier.

I turned off the computer when I heard my mother coming downstairs. She saw me sitting in her office and asked me what I was up to. I told her I was reading about the melting of the permafrost.

She said, ‘Phin, right now you should be getting on your snow pants and boots because there’s nothing melting here today – it’s minus 21 degrees.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘doesn’t it worry you that the permafrost is melting? The permafrost?’

‘Yes, Phin, sometimes it does, but I don’t have time to think about it right now. Now, come on, we have to get going – quick as a bunny!’

She handed me my jacket and snow pants, and I put them on, but what my mom said didn’t make any logical sense. If a starving grizzly bear walked up to a person having a picnic, would it be good for her to say she doesn’t have time to be scared because she hasn’t finished her sandwich?

When I walked into my classroom this morning, I noticed right away that there were two things out of the ordinary. The first was that Mrs. Wardman’s desk was moved over too far to the right at the front of the classroom. I sit in the back row, which has seven desks. The middle row has eight desks and the front row normally has seven. But today it had eight. I counted twice to be sure. Eight.

The other out-of-the-ordinary thing was that there was a lump on the show-and-tell table with a white sheet over it. It looked about the shape of the big box where I keep my Reull drawings.

When everybody sat in their seats, the extra desk was taken up by a kid I had noticed in the hallway hanging up her jacket. I don’t usually pay much attention to girls, but I noticed this one because I had never seen her before. Also because she’s a big girl.

Mrs. Wardman went over and stood beside her desk and said, ‘Children, this is Mitty. She’s new to our class. Please say hello.’ And then we all said, ‘Hello, Mitty.’ I felt sorry for and happy about Mitty at the same time. I felt sorry for her because she had a weird name and was also big, which meant that Lyle was bound to give her a hard time. I could already think of a few bad things that rhyme with Mitty, and I knew that even ‘waste of flesh’ Lyle, with brain cells for nothing but thinking up really mean things, was bound to think of them sooner or later. Mitty was definitely in for it.

But I felt a bit happy too because having Mitty in the class might take some of the pressure off me and a few of the other kids since Lyle would have someone else to pick on. I felt a little guilty about feeling happy about that – but not guilty enough to stop thinking it. Maybe that’s what people mean when they say misery loves company. Maybe when misery is spread out it’s not so hard to take. Maybe it’s like when we have reading groups and there are five in each group instead of three, which means you don’t have to answer Mrs. Wardman’s questions as often.

After we said hello to Mitty, we sang ‘O Canada.’ Then Mrs. Wardman announced that we were going to gain another new friend in our classroom – a class pet. She said we had to use our logic skills to guess what was under the sheet. I was a little worried when she said that because of the last time we did a logic exercise. She gave us ten minutes to write down what we thought was under there.

I thought nine thoughts:

1. There are only a few animals that are domesticated and would make good companion animals.

2. One is the cat.

3. We can see things eight times smaller than cats can.

4. Another animal that makes a good companion is a dog.

5. It can’t be a cat or dog because they would be making noises.

6. A horse could be an animal companion.

7. The show-and-tell table couldn’t hold a horse.

8. Some people think pigs make good domesticated companion animals.

9. We shouldn’t eat our companions.

But I only wrote one: It is not a cat, a dog, a horse or a pig. I didn’t have a guess as to what was under the sheet because I had ruled out all suitable companion animals.

Mrs. Wardman told us to pass in what we had written down. Then she said, ‘Okay, are you ready for the big surprise?’ All the kids yelled yes and Gordon nearly fell out of his chair because he jumped out of it and then plopped back into it really quickly, which made it tip. Mrs. Wardman told him to be careful because he could fall backwards and split his head wide open.

Then Mrs. Wardman pulled off the sheet slowly and said, ‘It’s a … frog! Who guessed a frog?’ she asked. Nobody raised a hand. Then she said, ‘Welcome your new class pet, everyone!’

I raised my hand and Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Yes, Phin?’ I asked her what kind of frog it was. It looked like a White’s tree frog to me but I wasn’t absolutely sure. It was smaller than my hand and a greenish turquoise colour, which is what they look like, but White’s tree frogs are nocturnal and I doubted that Mrs. Wardman would get a pet that would sleep all day and be awake all night when we weren’t even here.

‘It’s a White’s tree frog,’ said Mrs. Wardman.

Mrs. Wardman told us that frogs make excellent pets because they are quiet and don’t need a lot of care. I wondered how that makes a pet excellent. Wouldn’t a rock be a good pet then too? I only thought this – I didn’t say it because Mrs. Wardman would think I was being sarcastic. I wasn’t being sarcastic, I was being serious. But I didn’t say it anyway.

Next Mrs. Wardman told us that we all got to vote on a name for our class frog. I knew that since this was a White’s tree frog, it was male and not female because he had a greyish throat and females have white throats. Each of us wrote one name on a piece of paper and put it into the voting jar. I wrote Cuddles. I meant to be sarcastic that time, but I didn’t have to put my name on it so I knew I wouldn’t get in trouble for it.

Then Mrs. Wardman went to the jar and asked us what the chances were that our entry would be chosen. Gordon shouted out, ‘One in twenty-three,’ and Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Yes, Gordon, you are right, good thinking.’

But both she and Gordon were wrong because I heard Katherine and Amy talking in the row in front of me and I knew that they had both voted for Kermit. That would mean that they had a two-in-twenty-three chance of having their name chosen and the rest of us would have a one-in-twenty-three chance but only if there were no others of us who chose the same name as someone else.

Mrs. Wardman put her hand into the jar and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘The name of our class pet toad is … Cuddles!’ she said. She smiled and some of the kids clapped and cheered. Mrs. Wardman asked whose name was Cuddles, which I didn’t think she’d ask. I raised my hand slowly and she said, ‘Nice name, Phin, congratulations.’ Then we opened our readers to page 123.

Nobody seemed to think that was weird – a frog that was quiet, slept all day, didn’t need much attention and that you couldn’t cuddle called Cuddles. Sometimes sarcasm just doesn’t work.

Today at school a kid got in trouble – big trouble. Her name is Jody and she got caught telling other kids that eating breath mints will make them jump higher. The teacher said this is pretending to take drugs and that there’s a zero tolerance policy for drugs. After Jody got her misbehaviour, she started crying so hard that her mother had to come get her.

I felt bad for Jody, which made it hard to concentrate on my spelling exercises. The word activities were all about animals. One of the questions was ‘Lions live in the j _ _ _ _ _.’

I raised my hand and Mrs. Wardman came over. I asked her if this was a trick question since there’s no J word for savannah. She said, ‘Phin, the answer is jungle. Just write jungle down.’ Then she walked back to her desk.

I thought about not telling her that lions don’t live in the jungle because I could tell she was irritated with me. I knew this mainly because when she told me to write jungle, her eyelids fluttered and she took a deep breath.

I thought about it for a few seconds. I remembered what my mother had told me about how maybe I shouldn’t point out to Mrs. Wardman that she’s wrong when she’s wrong. But then I decided that she should know the right answer. She was the teacher and it wouldn’t be good if she was teaching everybody the wrong thing for years and years and years. So I raised my hand again.

‘What is it, Phin?’ said Mrs. Wardman. She said this from her desk, which made what I had to say a little bit tricky. I didn’t want to say it out loud in front of everybody but now that I had raised my hand and she had answered, I had to say something.

‘The answer to question seven can’t be jungle,’ I said, ‘because lions don’t live in the jungle. They live on the grasslands and savannah.’

Then all of a sudden other words popped into my head, but they didn’t stay in my head. It was almost like they dropped down out of my brain and into the back of my throat and I had no choice but to spit them out – it was either that or choke. But after they came out, I immediately wanted to grab them from the air, shove them back into my mouth and swallow. But it was too late. The words ‘and frogs shouldn’t live in cages, they should live in wetlands’ were out into the air making their way to Mrs. Wardman’s ears and all I could do was hope for the best.

Mrs. Wardman didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She just looked straight at me and then she said in a really low voice with her mouth hardly moving, ‘Phin, then just leave that one out, for pity’s sake.’ She didn’t say a thing about what I said about frogs.

So I left the jungle answer out. I should have known it was going to be a stupid exercise. On the first page there was a picture of a polar bear and a penguin sitting on the same ice floe. On the same ice floe! They live on opposite ends of the world, for pity’s sake. Whatever that means.

I couldn’t get to sleep last night at all. I tried to. I tried counting sheep. I got to 1,011, but then the sheep started bumping into the fence they were jumping over. I think that was because I was getting a bit tired and couldn’t make them jump high enough after about 1,000. When they hit the fence, they would fall down. That didn’t make me feel sleepy.

Then I tried to think nice thoughts. I thought of the animals on Reull. I thought of Whirly Eye who has one big eye but also little eyes at the tips of his tentacles so that when he whirls around he can see in all directions. He is never surprised by what may be around a corner because all he does is put out one of his tentacles to look for danger. Whirly Eyes have predators but they’re hardly ever caught, not even at night, because the eyes take turns sleeping – half of them sleep during the daytime and half during the night.

That made me think of dolphins here on earth. The left and right sides of a dolphin’s brain take turns sleeping so that one part can watch for danger. Whales and seals and manatees do this too but no other mammals do.

There are thirty-five different species in the family Delphinidae and five of them are critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable on the Red List of Threatened Species. Most of the others could be in big trouble too but scientists don’t have enough information about them to know for sure.

Lots of different species of birds can sleep one half a brain at a time. The eye that is controlled by the part of the brain that is awake stays open and the other one droops closed. If birds sleep together, the brains of the birds at the ends of the rows sleep one part at a time but both sides of the brains of the birds in the centre sleep because they feel safe.

This thought made me think of feeling safe and then I wondered if Cuddles was feeling safe. I started to worry that he was lonely there in the aquarium cage without any of his species around to listen to. Last summer, my mom and I went to a marsh-mallow roast in the amphibian park where there are three different types of frogs. As it was getting dark, they made a lot of noise. But for Cuddles in his lonely cage in the quiet school there would be nothing for him to see or hear at the very time he’s most awake. That made me worried and sad, so I got up to find my mother.

I found her working in her study. She didn’t even look up from her computer because she knew it was me behind her. When I was little she told me not to make faces at her, that she had an eye on the back of her head and could see me. I believed her because anableps are fish that have two eyes to see the world above the water and two eyes to see below.

Before I even said a word, my mother sighed. ‘What is it, Phin? Why are you up when I put you to bed over an hour ago? How are you going to do well in school tomorrow if you’re tired? Don’t you know I have a lot of work to do after I put you to bed? Don’t you understand that?’

She said it in her sandpaper voice and she didn’t even have her ‘I’m a ticking time bomb’ sign around her neck. She sometimes uses that sign to signal to me that I’d better not give her a hard time. I hate it when she asks me a lot of questions in a row because then I have to remember them in order so that I can answer them in order. It’s hard to remember after about three or four and it’s even harder to answer them all really quickly because most often she doesn’t give me time.

I complained to her about this once and she said that some questions are rhetorical, which means that they’re asked for a purpose other than to get answers to them. She said for example that asking ‘Why me?’ when something bad happens is an expression of emotion more than a question that you want answered. But when I say ‘Why me?’ I usually really am looking for an answer. But mostly I never get one so maybe that makes it rhetorical too.

The problem with rhetorical questions is that I usually don’t know which ones are real and which are not. So the answers to my mother’s questions were:

1. I am worried about Cuddles.

2. I can’t sleep.

3. I’ll be fine, school is easy.

4. Yes.

5. Yes.

But all I ended up saying was, ‘I can’t sleep because I’m worried about Cuddles’ – which I guess answers two of her questions at once.

She said, ‘Phin, for the love of God, Cuddles will be fine. He’s safe in his aquarium.’

I said, ‘The being-in-the-aquarium part is the part that worries me. And I think he might be in pain because of it.’

She said, ‘Phin, he’s a frog! A frog! He doesn’t even know where he is.’

I said, ‘How do you know that? How does anyone know that?’

She said, ‘Phin, you have to stop anthropomorphizing. Do you know what that means?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why is that wrong? Why the heck do you think animals don’t have pain and feel scared? They do, you know. The Green Channel has lots of shows about that.’

‘Phin, please – it’s late. Just go back to your bed and try to think nice thoughts.’

I said, ‘I’m all out. And I can’t sleep. I know this is one of those nights that I won’t be able to sleep – not even a little bit.’ Then I had a sudden thought and ran to Fiddledee’s litter box and checked for red poop because I hadn’t checked it for two days. I lifted some of it with the scoop and looked really carefully. It looked mostly black, which was a relief.

My mom said, ‘For the love of God, Phin, get up those stairs to bed.’ I ran up fast in front of her because she didn’t look happy and I thought maybe her brain cells might go all wonky and she might pounce on me or something. But then she sighed and said, ‘Let’s go to bed and get some sleep.’ She let me climb into her bed, which is very big, a king’s bed.

I said, ‘I love you, Mom.’

She said, ‘I love you too, Phin. Now go to sleep.’

I didn’t say anything else after that because I wanted her to not be mad at me and I wanted her to be happy and I thought maybe this was as good as I was going to get tonight. I snuggled close to her and she put her arm around me and kissed the back of my neck.

But do you know what I think? I think that some people can’t stand to think that animals feel a lot like human beings. I think it’s hard enough for people like my mom to write and hear about what’s happening to other human beings around the world – let alone other animals too. Knowing that so many more of the earth’s animals feel sadness and pain is just way too much hurt for their minds to let them see.

My mother woke me up this morning saying, ‘Good morning, sleeping beauty.’ She kissed my cheek and I opened my eyes. She had a pad and a pencil and said, ‘What can I get you this morning, sir?’

I said, ‘How about toast and peanut butter?’ I must have been still sleepy because then I remembered I’d decided not to eat peanut butter. Last night I checked the ingredients on the jar and it contains palm oil. I told my mother to forget the toast and peanut butter because of the palm oil.

She said, ‘But you’re not allergic to palm oil.’

I said, ‘Don’t you even care about the orangutans?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked my mother. I told her that the peanut butter we have is made with palm oil and that palm oil comes from palm-tree plantations that have been built where the orangutans used to live. Now those orangutans are endangered because so much of their habitat has been destroyed.

‘But, Phin,’ she said, ‘we already have the peanut butter and so we’re not going to help the monkeys by not eating it.’

‘They’re not monkeys,’ I said, ‘they’re primates. And it’s the principle of the matter.’

My mother sighed and said, ‘Okay, Phin, if you don’t want peanut butter, what do you want?’ But then she remembered she was pretending to be a waitress and her voice got nice again. She said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, we’re out of orangutan-free peanut butter this morning, is there something else that you might like?’

I said, ‘Mom, the peanut butter doesn’t have orangutans in it – it’s made with palm oil that comes from plantations that are being built on orangutan territory and making them go extinct!’

My mother slammed closed her notepad and said that her sanity was going extinct. She said, ‘I’ll get you some orangutan-free Shreddies. They’ll be on the table waiting for you.’ Then she left the room.

My mother doesn’t understand and I don’t know why. Actually, I think I do know why: I think it’s because she’s too busy. She’s always hurrying around. I’m not too busy so I know there are almost 400 species in the order Primate and one third of them are vulnerable or endangered or critically endangered on the Red List of Threatened Species. All of the orangutans are endangered or critically endangered. In fact, all the individual remaining primates in the twenty-five most-endangered species could fit in one single football field.

I know something else too. I know Cuddles is in trouble. And I know I have to do something about it.

Today at school, I carefully checked Cuddles for any signs of sickness. Frogs can get fungus diseases that make them dry out and lose weight. I’m really worried about him in there but I don’t think he’s losing any weight. In fact, to me he looks like he’s getting heavier, but that might be because he’s sitting on a white sheet today whereas a few days ago he was sitting on a black one.

I learned that trick about black and white from my mother. Once she was trying on pants at the mall and one pair was white and she asked me if she looked bigger or smaller in the white pants. She definitely looked bigger in the white ones, and so I told her that I thought she looked the best in those. My mother always trusts my opinions on fashion because she says I’m only nine and practically incapable of telling white lies.

Later I asked her why it was that she looked bigger in the white pants and she said, ‘What do you mean I look bigger? I thought you said I looked best in the white ones.’

‘You do look best in the white ones.’

‘But do I look bigger in them?’

‘Yes.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘You look better when you look bigger.’

‘Phin,’ she said, ‘women don’t want to look bigger, they want to look thin.’

My mother told me that people in our culture think thinner women look younger and better-looking and that she was trying to buy an outfit to make her look young and pretty.

I told my mother that in the animal kingdom, animals are always trying to look bigger because the bigger they are, the less likely they are to be attacked by predators. For example, the bull-frog blows itself up to look bigger and fiercer, and so does the puffer.

My mother sighed and said, ‘Well, that’s good – at least I won’t be eaten today.’

Mrs. Wardman had to change Cuddles’ sheet because he pooped on it. Frog poop is kinda brownish and you can see the things they eat in it. I could see some cricket parts in Cuddles’ poop. We’re supposed to take turns feeding him crickets and my turn is who knows when since we’re going by last name and mine starts with W. Well, actually, I do know when. I’m kid number twenty-two and we’re only at kid number nine.

The other kids seem excited about dropping crickets into Cuddles’ aquarium, but I’m not. All I can think is poor Cuddles, a tree frog from Australia snatched out of his tree, packed into a crate and sent on a plane to a pet store, who ends up in an aquarium in a classroom in a foreign country with only a single tree branch to climb on with a bunch of ugly faces staring in at him through a glass wall. This isn’t the least bit exciting – it’s really, super, to-infinity sad. Cuddles should be in his natural environment living his natural life with other White’s tree frogs in Australia.

I just couldn’t stop thinking about that and even when I got home from school all the cells in my body felt like they were buzzing. To calm myself down, I went to Pete’s Pond in Africa. Well, not really, just virtually. I typed in the address on the internet where you can see and hear the the animals around the pond at that very minute. Since it was night in Africa, I couldn’t see much, but I could hear noises. I closed my eyes and pretended I was right there with them.

When I woke up this morning, I had a feeling that something really bad was going to happen. It made my chest feel empty and my stomach ache, almost like my heart was dangling by a string into my belly. Usually I don’t feel like that except for when I wake up in the middle of the night, but then I feel good again in the morning.

I felt yucky and couldn’t eat much breakfast and when my mom dropped me off in front of the school, I told her that I still didn’t feel right. I told her I had a bad feeling that I couldn’t get rid of. She said, ‘Phin, I feel like that some days too but my feelings don’t make bad things happen. Your thoughts can’t do that either, Phin. You’re not magic.’

I asked her how she knew that for sure and she said, ‘If my thoughts could make things happen, then there would be some people at my office with giant ears and no mouths. So far that hasn’t happened.’

‘The luna moth has no mouth. It can only mate and lay eggs and then it dies because it can’t eat,’ I told her.

My mother said, ‘Phin, you never cease to amaze me.’ Then she told me to jump out of the car because she was going to be late for work. I didn’t want to get out, but I did.

I spotted Bird over by the teeter-totters. He was hanging around two kids from Grade 2. The kid with the white hair was showing Bird the T-shirt he had on under his jacket. It had a picture of a chart like the one at the eye doctor’s office where the letters start out really big and then get smaller and smaller. It said ‘Iseedumbpeoplelookingatmyshirt.’ That made Bird laugh when he figured it out.

Bird and the white-haired kid and the other kid and I played freeze tag while we were waiting for the bell to ring. I kept having to be It because I couldn’t run very fast. My head and my chest felt heavy and I figured the part of my brain that normally controls my legs was likely being used up by thinking about something bad happening.

I got tired of being It, so I went up onto the top of the slide and made a list in my head of some of the bad things that could happen today:

1. Mrs. Wardman might have been abducted by aliens who implanted an alien’s consciousness in her body.

2. My mother could get necrotizing fasciitis in the paper cut she got on her finger when she pulled a notice out of my backpack.

3. Today a species that all other species depend on could become extinct. That would mean the end of the living earth.

4. I could get spontaneous human combustion.

Even though my logic told me that these things likely wouldn’t happen, my imagination fooled me into thinking they might. This made me even more worried and my chest started to get really tight and hurt. It turned dark purple and the only way to get it to stop hurting was to think of it as being light purple and then to think of it as being mostly whitish. Sometimes when I concentrate hard, I can think my chest white with only a few purple spots, but I couldn’t do it. Besides, I didn’t want my chest to go white because then I wouldn’t be prepared for the bad thing that was about to happen. Purple is a good colour for quick reflexes.

During first and second periods, my mind tried to play tricks on me. It tried to make me think that maybe my mother was right and I was wrong and nothing bad would happen today. My mind went: ‘Something bad is going to happen’ (times 82), and then it would say, ‘Nothing bad is going to happen’ (times 3). Then it went, ‘Something bad is going to happen’ (times 54), and then it said, ‘Don’t be crazy, nothing bad is going to happen’ (times 23). It kept going on like that until the ‘something bad’ thoughts were the same in number as the ‘nothing bad’ thoughts, and then, finally, the ‘nothing bad’ thoughts were more than the ‘something bad’ ones, and I felt nearly back to normal. My chest stopped hurting and went whitish.

My mind almost had me fooled. Almost, but not quite – which is a good thing because it was about then that my mother’s theory was proved wrong. I used to keep track of all the times my mother was wrong but as I get older, she has started to be wrong a lot. Today she was wrong again. Just like my feeling told me, something bad – very, very bad – happened: Cuddles started making really weird and really loud noises. I knew this was a distress call.

Mrs. Wardman went over and looked in his aquarium. Kaitlyn asked if we could look too and she said yes. We all got up and stood around the aquarium and that’s when Cuddles jumped into the glass wall and fell backwards. Then he got up and did it three more times. On the fourth time, he stayed still and didn’t make any more croaking noises.

I was really worried that he had zoochosis, which is what animals can get when they’re taken out of their natural environment and put in teeny cages. It’s kind of like psychosis – which is what humans get when they’re driven crazy like in solitary confinement in prisons. All you have to do is visit just about any zoo and you’ll see zoochosis. It’s when big cats pace back and forth, back and forth, bears and elephants sway from side to side, and the giraffes twist their necks over and over again. I think it must be extra hard to be in a zoo if you’re a giraffe – such a long neck and nothing to look forward to.

I asked Mrs. Wardman if she thought Cuddles was sick or something, and she said, ‘No, he’s fine.’

I’m not at all sure about that. My guess is that Mrs. Wardman is wrong even more than my mother is.

I looked carefully at Cuddles in his aquarium and I wondered if maybe the water at the bottom had too much chlorine in it. Or maybe he needed more than the fake tree branch to climb on. Or maybe he doesn’t like the feeling of the big rock under his sticky-pad feet when he climbs up on it to get out of the water. Or maybe he doesn’t like the dead crickets and mealy bugs that Mrs. Wardman buys for him at the pet store – most frogs will only eat insects that are moving. Or maybe the pine chips at the bottom of the tank are not the right kind for him? Do they even have pine trees in Australia? There are so many things that could be wrong for Cuddles because that glass aquarium is not his natural habitat.

I was still so worried about Cuddles that just before bed I called Grammie to see if she knew what might be wrong with him. She used to work as a biologist and knows more about animals and plants than anyone else I know.

The phone rang and rang and rang. I was about to hang up when finally she answered. She sounded like she had been sleeping even though it was only 8:30. I think she sleeps a lot these days. Even when she’s awake she looks a little like she’s sleeping.

‘Oh, Phin, it’s you, sweetheart,’ she said. She sounded happy it was me but her voice was quieter than it used to be.

Since I hadn’t talked with her in a few weeks, I told Grammie all about how there’s a White’s tree frog trapped in a glass aquarium in my Grade 4 class.

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ she said.

‘You think so? Nobody else seems to think so.’

‘Well, there are different opinions about that, honey, but if it makes you feel any better, I think White’s tree frogs belong in trees.’

It did make me feel better. But my grandmother said she didn’t know what could be wrong with Cuddles. I’m going to keep a close eye on him.

A few days ago, I emailed my dad a story about the very last Ozie couple on Reull. I worked really hard on it because I really wanted him to like it. Because he’s a journalist, I think he’ll be proud of me if I can show him that I can write really good stories.

I got nervous when I was just about to press the Send button. I read over the story again. It looked to me like I’d gotten all the grammar and spelling right, and that it had a beginning, middle and an end, just like they teach you in Language Arts. But to be sure, I asked my mom to read it first. She said it was incredible and that I’m a fabulous writer. But Mom would say that even if all I wrote was my name.

Here is my story:

On Reull there was a small animal called an Ozie that looked like a dog but that was no larger than a rat. The Ozie absorbed carbon dioxide through its skin and cleaned the air just like plants do. Its digestive system made the carbon dioxide into Ozone, which it farted out all the time. The Ozone farts floated up into the sky and healed the atmosphere of Reull.

The problem is, there were only two Ozies left – one male and one female.

One day, the last two Ozies went out for a walk and were captured by a Gorach scientist who was hiding in the jungle. The scientist put the Ozies in a cage where they cried and cried. He thought about how he could make hundreds of Ozies in his lab to heal Reull’s atmosphere. He got more and more excited as he thought about how the other Gorachs would love him now that he’d found a solution to all of their problems.

But then later that night, the scientist looked at the Ozies, wondering what they would taste like. They looked a bit like a creature he had tasted before – the Coonit. The Coonit was one of the most favourite foods of the Gorachs. The richest Gorachs got to eat Coonit every day and the poorer Gorachs were very jealous of this.

The scientist tried really hard not to think of cooking the Ozie. But each time he heard one of them fart, the more he drooled and drooled. Each fart was like the smell of a Coonit to him.

Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He grabbed the screaming and farting male Ozie and killed it and cooked it up to eat. It tasted even better than he had imagined – even better than a Coonit. He was so excited about its taste that he ate it all in about three seconds.

The scientist still had the taste of the Ozie in his mouth when he killed the female Ozie without even thinking. After she was cooked and eaten, the scientist screamed in horror. He had just discovered the Ozie, which could have been the solution to many Gorach problems, but then, because of his appetite, he ate the very last one.

Then I drew a picture of the last Ozie couple ever. I drew what they were thinking in a thought bubble. They were thinking, ‘Help, help,’ and even though all the other animals in the web of life on Reull heard their thought, nobody could do anything about it. They all cried, which made the Ozies cry all the harder, and that Ozie couple died knowing only fear and sadness.

After I sent my story, I checked the email every chance I got. It took my dad forty-one hours to write back. This is what he wrote:

Dear Phin,

I am impressed! That is a wonderful story and an excellent example of a satire. I really enjoyed reading it and hope that you’ll continue to write and to send me your work.

I hope you and Mom are doing well. Right now I’m in France covering the labour riots. I hope to get a chance to call you within the next few days. Say hi to your mom for me. Love, Dad xoxo

I went to find my mother. She was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. When I started to talk, she raised her finger to say just a minute. I sat down and counted the tiles from one end of the kitchen to the other. Still twenty-seven. Then she said, ‘Sorry, Phin, just wanted to finish reading that story I wrote.’

‘Don’t you already know what comes next?’

Mom laughed and said, ‘Well, sometimes the editor changes things around.’

‘Mom, Dad says hi.’

‘Thanks, Phin. How is your dad?’

‘I think fine. He liked my Ozie story.’

‘It’s an incredible story.’

‘What’s a satire?’ I asked my mom.

‘Well, it’s when someone writes something that ridicules people or things happening in society. Why?’

‘Because Dad says my story is a satire. But how could I have written a satire if I didn’t even know what satire meant?’

‘Well, Phin, we don’t have to have a word for something before we understand what it is.’

I thought about that for a moment. ‘I guess that makes sense.’

‘Remember irony? Satire is a bit like irony,’ said my mom.

My mom explained irony to me when she wrote a story about a man who ran into the very tree that he took the protective foam off to use for his sled. Mom said that is an example of irony of fate.

‘How about another muffin? Thank goodness for the word muffin or else we’d be eating a lot of cake,’ joked my mother.

I sat down and ate a raisin bran muffin. As I chewed, I thought about how I haven’t seen my father for nineteen days. Last time he was home, it was only for four days. I stayed with him in his apartment. There’s only one bedroom in it so I slept in his bed and he slept on the pull-out couch. We did lots of things together like play chess and go to the theatre and carve Ivory soap into little animals. But now he’s gone again, and I don’t even know when he’ll be home next.

Sometimes I wonder why my mother and father got separated. I remember when it happened, though. It was just a few days after they had a big fight, which was just after Dad got home from South America. On that day we were all in their bedroom and my mother was helping Dad unpack, and I was somersaulting across their big bed. I had just learned how to do a backwards somersault, and I was feeling happy because of it, and because Dad was home.

I remember that Mom and Dad were talking and Mom was putting away Dad’s clothes, and then she stopped talking. And then my dad stopped talking too, and I stopped somersaulting because it was really quiet all of a sudden. I sat up and looked at them. My mother was holding a piece of paper, and they both looked really weird. Then Dad asked me to go downstairs to watch TV for a while.

I don’t know what they said when they had the big fight, but I could hear that their voices were louder than normal, and I could hear what sounded like my mother crying. When she came downstairs later, her eyes were red and her hands were shaking. She sat down beside me and didn’t say anything, she just hugged me and I could feel her whole, entire body shaking, and I was really worried, but I didn’t say anything either.

Then, after a while, my father came downstairs carrying the suitcases he had just brought home. He came into the room and my mother got up and left, and my father sat down and told me that he was going to stay with my uncle Roger for a few days and that he would give me a call later to say goodnight.

A few days later, when my mother and I were out getting groceries, my father came and got his things, like all of his books from the study and his desk that used to be his father’s and the big picture of a sandpiper that he got in the Magdalene Islands. Then later my mother sat me down and told me that she and Dad were separating. She said that it was because some people just can’t live very well together. That didn’t make much sense to me. I asked why they can’t get along, and she said they have personalities that are too different from each other.

The thing is, my mother and father seem to have pretty much the same personalities. And they both like the same sorts of things. And they also have almost the same kinds of jobs. And they also both have me. So why couldn’t they just fight and then make up like other animals?

In the animal kingdom, when there is a fight among animals that depend on co-operation to live, they make up. For example, when two chimpanzees fight, sometimes one of the others butts in to help the chimp who is losing. When everything quiets down, sometimes the chimp who won the fight goes over to the other chimp and reaches out a hand to him and hugs him and kisses him and grooms him. This is called reconciliation by primatologists.

Once a teenaged female chimp called Amber went too close to another chimp’s baby and the mother got upset and hit her. But when the mother calmed down, she went over to Amber and kissed her on the nose and let her get close to her baby again.

I don’t understand why my mother and father couldn’t live together after their fight. Fighting is just a part of life. All the animals do it but those in the same social group – like my mom and my dad – mostly make up afterwards.

After my parents separated, my father started working even more as a foreign correspondent. Now he is hardly ever, ever home. Among primates, the only ones who just get up and leave the social group are the kids who are grown up. They go off to find another group so that they can mate. Parent primates don’t just pick up and leave. If there was anyone who was supposed to be doing the leaving around here, it should be me, when I’m older – not my dad.

Tonight before bed I couldn’t stop thinking about Cuddles. I thought about him when I was watching the Green Channel, I thought of him as I was eating my bedtime snack, I thought about him when I was brushing my teeth. I just couldn’t get him out of my mind. It was like he was in there hopping through my brain pathways and each time he made a turn, he split into two and went down two more roads and those roads split into two and so did he and so on and so on and so on until there were thousands of Cuddleses hopping all through my brain until it overflowed and frogs started coming out my ears.

I told my mother this and she got a weird look on her face.

Her lips twitched a little bit and then she said, ‘Phin, why can’t you stop thinking about that frog? It’s a frog, Phin. A frog! Would you like me to look up some information on the web to show you how little frogs know and experience compared to us? Maybe it would help you to stop worrying about him.’

I shook my head no. I already knew all about frogs. That was my problem.

My mother said, ‘You know, Phin, like I said before, you can’t think of a frog as though it’s a person. They’re just not as intelligent.’

I asked my mother if aliens came down to the planet earth and they were one million times smarter than humans, would it be all right to capture all the humans with nets and put them in solitary cages and feed them once in a while and watch them bang their heads against the glass until the day they died?

My mother opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Then she opened it again and closed it. She told me to jump in my bed and then she went downstairs to get me her relaxation CDs. They didn’t work. In fact, they made me feel more scared and worried. One CD was of thunder and lightning storms and all I could think of was being struck by lightning. The next one was of the ocean and it made me think of drowning. The next was called Rainforest. That was the worst of all. If you went to a rain-forest these days likely all you’d hear would be the sounds of power saws and big trucks and animals running and howling and crying because their homes are falling down all around and on top of them. That’s supposed to relax me? What I really want is for my mom to let me have a computer in my room so that I can listen to what’s happening at Pete’s Pond.

I got up out of bed and walked down the stairs really quietly. I peeked into my mother’s office and when she heard me I ducked and then ran in behind the couch so that she wouldn’t hit me with her mad rays.

She said, ‘Phin, what are you doing? Why aren’t you in bed? You know I have two hours of work to do after you go to bed, you know that! Why are you doing this again? You’re making me crazy! I have a deadline to meet and I don’t have the time to lie down with you, I just don’t, Phin, I don’t!’

I said, ‘I know, but I can’t sleep and the CDs aren’t helping a bit.’ She sighed a really loud sigh and slammed her book shut and walked me back up the stairs. I ran up them fast because I couldn’t see her behind me. She’s scary when she’s mad.

Sometimes I look at my mother and say Mom Mom Mom over and over again and the more I say it and look at her, the more she doesn’t seem like my mother anymore. She seems stranger and stranger to me the more I stare at her and think the word Mom. It’s almost like she becomes an alien or something and if I do this for too long, I get scared and then I have to look at something else. When I look back to her again, she’s back to normal.

When my mother was mad at me, she wasn’t at all normal. But then she lay down with me and she went back to normal. Especially after she fell asleep.

I listened to her snore and thought about Cuddles some more. I am starting to think of a plan for getting him free. I am going to talk to Bird about it.