Amphibian

a novel by
Carla Gunn

copyright © Carla Gunn, 2009

first edition

The facts and opinions in this novel belong to the narrator, the fictional Phineas William Walsh, and are not necessarily entirely accurate or a reflection of the opinions of the author or publisher.

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Gunn, Carla
     Amphibian / Carla Gunn.
ISBN
978-1-55245-214-1
     I. Title.
PS
8613.
U
57A65 2009      
C
813'.6      
C
2009-901300-2

For my sons
and other amazing animals

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
TV
s 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.