Amphibian (2 page)

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.