Toad
Copyright 2002 R.D. "Jobey" Ellison

They say weather affects your mood. Now, I'm not inclined to agree with this They, that scholar otherwise known as Everybody ("everybody says so!"), but on this score They happen to be right. It was June - the first, I'm pretty sure - and the warm weather had been around long enough to lose its appeal. By now it wasn't a warm sweater wrapping around you; it was plain, lousy humidity.

Maybe I shouldn't have done it that day, I thought as I trudged home from the bus stop. For two years I'd been carefully plotting intricate plans to get Emily MacKenzie to sit with me on the bus. I had finally succeeded; Emily agreed to share my seat.

Well, so I had stolen her book and said I wouldn't give it back if she didn't comply - same thing, wasn't it? No one could have told me otherwise; I would have refused to believe differently.

It was miserable, her curled up far away from me as possible, knees up at her chin, feet pressed to the seat in front of us, and the weather roughly two hundred degrees in the overheated bus. She was going on, sulking, about the station wagon full of nuns she must've killed while D.U.I. in a past life or something. I had tried to be nice, not wanting to seem like a complete book-stealing jerk. I said I was going to the same high school as her after the summer (this inspired her nuns comment) and even tried to ask her about her book. I wasn't sure why I bothered with her: there was nothing I could call her but a freak. "I could see you liking a book-book, a story," I had told her.

"I like history," she had said in a distant tone; it had made her words sound worthless, like breadcrusts thrown out to pigeons.

"I don't." I had been thinking of the Bible. The way my parents name their children, I had the Bible memorized before I fairly understood a word of it, but, in any case, I remembered Cain and Abel. "Seems like in his'try the younger brother is always killed by the older one - and the middle gets nothing at all."

"Here's to hoping you're a younger brother, then," she had muttered, and then started chatting with two seventh-graders across the aisle. She hadn't spoken to them in years, but apparently they were a better option than me.

I was nearing Mrs. Pallin's Oriental water garden, which had reminded me of the conversation, making me brood even more. The Japeneseness of her "water garden" is rather cancelled by the Knoxville teens thrashing it with litter and spray paint. The wild cats and toads don't help, either. The cats do their business there, and in the spring toads go there to lay eggs. And those toads bring to mind another toad, my toad - the Toad.

The Toad would know how to get a girl like Emily MacKenzie's attention and what to do with it once it was his. The Toad would know how to make brainy, aloof Emily laugh, whereas I can have a whole room hysterical and she'll be over in a corner, nose in another book.

If the Toad were still around, my parents couldn't argue, was my figuring. Their big, accomplished, nice, perfect boy would keep them so busy being proud that they wouldn't have time to fight. No one would mess with Mikey at school. No one did with me, even though my name is bad as his, because the Toad was my big brother, but Mikey, burdened with the name of Miceh, only has me, and no one likes me the way they did the Toad. Mikey doesn't remember the Toad, and the Toad's name doesn't stop anyone from picking on his hair or his name or his dyslexia.

But life was full of what-ifs, I told myself, and laughed right in the middle of the broken-up Carrick sidewalk. If Mikey, the Toad, and I had been girls, we would probably be named Faith, Hope, and Charity. With this in mind, I ordered myself not to indulge in nostalgic, wishy-washy second guessing, and threw some rocks at the pond to make myself feel better.

I trampled on another block, crossing corners of yards mainly just to defy my mother's long lecture from the night before. I breathed in chlorine and sweat, kicked trash and flattened cigarette butts as I walked, and visualized, against the background of a lawn mower and dogs' barking, a vacation-less summer with Mikey in our rotten neighborhood where everyone was too poor to go anywhere and nothing happened. Maybe my parents would divorce this summer, as they had sometimes threatened another. I was too full of bravado to consider this possibility long enough for it to upset me, but promised myself to ask the judge if I could live with whichever one moved from here. My father might go to Alaska. He flew there once for a funeral and liked it - liked it better than the Toad's funeral, anyway.

My foul humor spiked to new heights when I reached our house - the low-eaved one with rough, dark brown shingles and a front garden of my mother's scraggly flowers and unhealthy-looking bushes. The door was locked. Mikey's in kindergarten (for his second year, an occurrence that had suffered my deprecation), and the kindergarten gets out earlier than everyone else. Mikey's cautious, although back then I called it goody-two-shoeism and 'fraidy cat syndrome, and he usually locks the door.

I had a key in my bookbag, but it was a lot easier just to pound on the door and continue the motion even after Mikey finished fumbling with his key and pulled open the door. He had an apple in one hand, which explained his trouble. He'd be in more trouble, too, I vowed, knowing that it was the last of our apples. And Boomer, our dog and the only one in the house with a somewhat normal name, was eying the fruit as well.

"It's open," he said, annoyed, but then hung his head in penance for his impatience. As I stepped in, he jumped out of the way and said humbly, "How was your day?"

If, by any chance, I was anything like Mikey, who sometimes stares up at me with eyes actually moist in veneration, then it's no wonder the Toad stayed so straight and good, having two little brothers hanging on to his every move.

But today I was still bothered, and somehow that question struck me as sweet and old-fashioned and thus completely unacceptable.

"Isn't done yet," I mumbled, flinging my bookbag into a corner. "And would'ja lookit that. Done talking to one girl'n come home to another." It was only now that vague glimmers of my coming (mis)deed came to me. We bad kids don't actually stay up at nights thinking up our games to gray the teachers' hair and drive our parents to the grave; at least in my case, I usually talk my way into something that glitters as attractively as Eve's apple. But I'm sure Eve didn't wake up one day planning to induce her descendants with original sin. It came to her before she even considered the light and the dark of it.

"I'm not a girl," said Mikey, following me like a faithful pup as I instinctively walked to the kitchen.

"'Splain that hair, then."

"Y'know that! Mom'n Dad want it like this."

To be sure, Mikey had a point; ever since the Toad's crash, our parents had grown awfully sentimental and eccentric. So Mikey was stuck looking like a Beatlemaniac who swallowed a lot of Miracle Grow. I guess I was spared because I wasn't cute and hadn't Mikey's chubby, babyfat face. Even as a baby, the pictures show that I was a reincarnation-gone-askew that had mixed John Belushi and Adam Sandler's long-lost twin brother.

But now that the idea of Mikey's hair was fixated firmly in my head, I had lost my usual after-school appetite. "Hey, Mikey," I said, my voice suddenly amiable.

"What?" He sounded wary.

I suggested we have a picnic-snack, a proceeding Mikey liked the way little girls adore tea parties. This banished his suspicion ("Yeah - wow, cool!"), and he followed my order to go to our room and get the old Easter basket he kept for such occasions, his uneaten apple still in hand.

Instead of preparing some sandwiches as promised, I pulled out the drawer for the scissors, the large sort with orange handles. For a moment I stood there, just admiring the glinting silver in the sunlight from the window. Tellingly enough, I suppose, I felt like those people contemplating suicide who start writing sonnets about the knife's beauty. Then I realized that even in our room's pigsty, Mikey would eventually find the basket, and hurriedly clambored up the stairs. There was no point in tiptoeing; the way our stairs creak was patented in haunted houses.

"Hey, 'sit in the clos - "

"Aw, how sweet, getting me a basket!" I said brightly, bounding into our room.

Mikey looked a little more confused than his norm. "Hunh?"

"Well, believe it or not, little sister, I did some reading today." I placed myself so the door was blocked. "Fables'n legends'n stuff."

He just looked up at me, wide-eyed.

"And now" - I closed and locked the door with a grand flourish - "the J'n'M Theatre of Aesopish Productions presents its first rehearsal for Little Red Riding Hood! Lucky you, you get the lead - look 'nough like a girl, remember - and I'm the big bad wolf! Where's the basket?"

Mikey rummaged some in our closet. (It's supposed to be a walk-in, but unless you know osmosis or have a bulldozer, there's no walking in it.) "Here," he said, coming out like an exhausted but triumphant Roman general with the basket held in the air and in a too-big white T-shirt that had once been the Toad's.

"Good lass! Now toss it out the window. We don't need it."

When he stared at me as if I might be ready for the white-coats, I repeated the order in a bark. He obeyed.

"Now what?" asked Mikey.

I tackled him onto the bottom bunk. It's a miracle of the first order that I didn't poke one of our eyes out with the scissors, especially as I was not thinking of safety in the least.

"Now, Miceh - or, no, let's see, Miceh, Mikey - Maria? - no - Michelle, there, right, perfect - now, Michelle, why, what long hair you've got!"

He struggled and flailed, but I had him pinned, my knees in his thighs and one hand on his chest. "Now here" - I knocked down his hand hard enough that he didn't try it again - "here's one fact about us poor, misunderstood big bad wolves. Sure, we seduce a few girls and howl past curfew, but we are very good at street hockey - and haircutting!" I started laughing and couldn't stop.

As I whipped out the scissors, Mikey's eyes told me his worst nightmares were coming true.

"And no way we can keep those long curls'v yours, not by the hairs of my chinny-chin-chin!"

I rationalized slight doubt by the plain fact that Mikey definitely needed a haircut. All the rest of the clippings came naturally and easily from the first, in a dominoesque effect.

Mikey was spewing forth reasons for me to stop, recounting how many times Mom and Dad had told me to be good or else, how many police officers had spoken to the school about the dangers of scissors, how many empty barracks were waiting at the nearest military school.

"What a reg'lar wizard you are with numbers, my dear!" I cried at this juncture, laughing recklessly throughout. He started blubbering again. I drowned him out by singing the Beatles song sharing his adopted name: "Michelle, ma belle - sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble - tres bien ensemble!" I certainly wasn't on key, but my pronunciation was perfect. The only French I know is that and the infamous four-letter, asterisk'd "street French," but I can say those flawlessly.

"You're doing a bad job!" was his next protest.

Of course I was, with only one hand. My justification for this was that the other hand was occupied keeping my captive down.

"It's go'win to be worser than b'fore!"

"Now's the part where you say how big my nose'n teeth are, Michelle!" I replied, cheery as Kriss Kringle himself.

Looking back with several months' worth of perspective, the detail most heightening this insanity was the bird outside the window, chirping.

"P-p - p… p - p-p… p…!" Mikey's eyes were frantic as he tried to talk. Usually Mikey was resigned to his fate at my hands, but he hated this entire affair. "P… p-p - pu - " I clapped the free hand over his mouth. He was reminding me of Emily MacKenzie, a distraction. I had flipped through her book on the bus, and in the front cover it said it was property of Emily P. MacKenzie. I had been curious as to what the P stood for.

"Okay now, Michelle." I was panting from the effort of keeping him down by this point. After the initial rush of adrenaline, my energy was declining, and he sensed this. "One more curl t'go. Kiss me, baby, while you're still a girl!"

I tilted my chin up, as if preparing for the kiss - and the window caught my eye. I looked at it more directly to find the muddy blob was actually there. Toads from Mrs. Pillan's water garden seldom made their way all a block over to our house. But more questionable was how it was on a two-story sill with no jump-off points nearby. In addition, the irony of it being a toad, at this moment, caught me still more.

Mikey tore me from my glued gaze by obeying the kiss order, presumably desperate to have this done with. My knees poking into him could not have been pleasant. So he leaned forward and kissed my chin.

"Didn't mean for you really to!" I snapped, about to slap him when I remembered the toad was staring. "Here," I said abruptly, rolling off and brushing hair from him. "Maybe Mom'n Dad'll let you get a decent cut now."

My mood swung from repentantly gentle to annoyed as Mikey, hair shorn, gave me a timorous, unsmiling glance before leaving, and the toad's stare intensified this feeling.

Bounding to my feet, I said the wolf was demanding a toll. "So give me that." I swiped his apple and bit it sulkily. Mikey just stood there, lower lip in a pout. "Well, go! Hope Boomer eats you; finishes my job, then."

He scampered away.

I plopped down on the bottom bunk - Mikey's - and bit down hard on the apple. It was encased in Mikey's sweat, but I scarcely tasted it anyway.

My appetite further decreased when I looked up to find the toad still there, eyes unwavering from me.

"What?" I said, and then shouted, "What? If I kiss you, do you turn into Todd?"

Then I started crying. Never then did I consider myself babyish and soft; neither do I now. But I cried fiercely that day; if truth be told, I sobbed almost out of breath at some points. First it was just self-anger, because I hadn't, since he died, called Todd anything but the Toad, or a sarcastic Todian - sarcastic because only our parents used his full name. Then I hated myself more for the tears, and then it just all faded into some drowning, suffocating emotion: I suppose it might have been grief.

Distantly, yet far too close, Boomer barked. Mikey gave a laugh shrill with seven-year-oldness and subdued with some emotion similar to mine. What's he got to feel sad about? I wondered, and before realizing Mikey had probably heard me crying and was asking himself the same thing, I stood up and hit my head on the bunk. Temper not improved by the bump, I flung the twice-bitten apple straight at the toad. It hit directly.

I sat up there for an hour and a half before my mother got home, staring out the window and thinking. I came to a lot of grand conclusions and Confucian truths, none of which were very practical and few of which I remembered by the next morning. And then I had the chance to do it some more, because my parents didn't know what to do with me except yell and then send me to my room for the night.

One of my thoughts that night was that I was a sorry mess; it's not very refined English, I'm afraid, but that's the term that came to mind for it. The other conclusion was that I was off to high school soon, a different one than even Todd had gone to, and had a chance to be known as something else. It was simple enough for a decent kid to become a bad guy, if one didn't want to be a decent kid any longer, but a bad guy can't become a decent kid very easily.

So I've tried, or have been trying. My friends now call me Joe; to me, that's a sign of acceptance. Everyone has shortened Todian and Miceh, but never mine before. Of course, they deserve it: Todd, our brightest, and Mikey, our best, because the world knocks Mikey down again and again and he still loves the world right back.

My father is moving out after the divorce papers are signed in a month or two. I'm staying here, because my mother has Mikey. We've been getting along, since he's young and idealist and forgiving, and he needs some help so his dyslexia doesn't hold him back a grade again. I can't always help him: for example, I only made things worse when I had a chat with his classmates about not harassing my brother. That was me trying to be a good boy, but sometimes bad boys have to speak to bad boys in our own language. That's just something else to keep in the back of my mind with my je m'appelle's until it's needed.

In my own schoolwork, my grades have improved a little, a few extra B's here and there, but hockey takes up most of my time and, in terms of being interesting, leaves all of my subjects in the dust except for French. I've grown much better at both hockey and French; I'd say learning how to cut hair decently is next. Then I can be a proper big bad wolf by my own definition.

If anyone is interested, Emily MacKenzie's middle name is Patricia. We're friendly now. But I think I've fallen in love with Jen Trawicki, and Emily isn't as remarkable now.

Todd's middle name was Patrick; it isn't surprising once you see the pattern to know my parents gave us middle names for saints. They even spelled the saint's names right. Todd used to joke that we narrowly escaped having Obedience, Poverty, and Chastity in place of our saints. I just recalled the Patrick from Emily's Patricia. Neither of them are hurtful subjects now. This spring, when I walk home, I won't throw rocks at the toads near Mrs. Pallin's water garden pond. Maybe instead I'll throw in all those bugs my mother says Mikey, Boomer, and I drag into the house. I doubt saints or such have to eat, but eating's fun, and fun was something Todd, sickeningly near being an angel even in life, was always in favor of.