Amphibian (5 page)

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.