“Whatever,” Christian shouts after him, as he struggles through the tall grass at the edge of the field, glitter frogs hopping up and away from his stomping feet, their bulging eyes watching him. “Text me when you feel like talking about this like an adult!”
Aaron rides home, stuffs his bike in the garage, heads for his room. There are frogs all up and down the stairs. Even though he likes the stupid aliens, he wants to kick them out of spite. He wonders if he drop-kicked one down the hall if it’d bounce off the back wall or splat horribly. The frogs hop away from him, as if they can tell what he’s thinking, and he feels awful. “Sorry,” he whispers, a roiling sickness in his guts. He can’t get the image of a splatted glitter frog dripping off the wall out of his head.
There are about a hundred of them in his bedroom when he gets the door open. Unlike the glitter frogs in the hall, these ones don’t scatter when they see him. He wonders how they get through closed doors and what they’ve been doing in here alone all day.
He swipes his tablet on and tries to distract himself with Facebook, which mostly works. Well, until Christian’s status changes to single.
Aaron stares at the notification. The thick feeling in his throat is the same one he gets right before he cries. “I didn’t mean that,” he says to nobody in particular, though of course the frogs are listening.
One of the glitter frogs jumps up onto Aaron’s shoulder. Its back is such a dark and stormy blue, speckled with metallic flecks, that it looks like the night sky. Aaron picks it up and holds it in his hands, feeling the cold fluttering of its heart and breath. It smells odd, like a spice barely remembered from childhood. He wonders if the frogs are alive, or if they’re robots, or if it’s just a grand, mass hallucination. “Well, you were there, some of you.” Aaron says, “Tell me why he did it.”
The frog doesn’t say anything, even after Aaron lifts its face to the screen, showing it his Twitter feed. The feed is full of tweets by Christian that are definitely about him, though they don’t mention him by name. The glitter frogs never say anything.
Aaron puts the frog down on his desk. He lowers his face so their eyes are on the same level. Another frog, this one striped red and black, jumps onto his computer tower without displacing the rejection letters piled on top. From underneath, looking up, Aaron can see the Harvard crest. That response? No. Princeton: no. Yale: no, not even. Don’t even think about it. And Dartmouth? Ha.
The night sky frog ribbits. It sounds disgruntled. Aaron sighs; the puff of his breath makes the frog blink. Here is the pain of his future collapsing on itself and the realization that no, he’s not that great. He’s not great at all. He’s completely, devastatingly average. Seventeen years of denial couldn’t change that.
“I wish for once I could be the one leaving, not the one being left behind,” he says.
The frog stares at him; its wet eyes reflect the cloud-studded sky out the window.
Tumblr gif set, eight images: Rescue Dog “Saves” Frog. Taken from a YouTube video of the same name, filmed on a smartphone in portrait mode.
One: A mottled green and purple glitter frog swimming in someone’s backyard pool.
Two: A golden retriever paces left on the pool deck. Barking.
Three: Glitter frog is still swimming, minding its own business.
Four: Retriever leaps into the pool, and the splash repeats incessantly in the browser window until you tap over to the next gif.
Five: Retriever paddling toward the pool stairs, glitter frog held in its soft jaws.
Six: Retriever puts down frog and backs two steps away. The frog blinks and its throat expands with a mighty, pissed-off croak.
Seven: Retriever lying next to the frog on the pool deck, wagging its wet tail.
Eight: Retriever licks frog. Frog retracts its eyes to escape the overeager tongue.
The last time he ever sees Aaron is when he watches the other boy walk away from their fight. He’ll come to think of it as the stupidest fight that he’s ever had. He’ll spend years wondering if Aaron would have still run away if they hadn’t broken up with each other on Facebook.
Aaron’s parents come to Christian’s house two days later, looking as though they’ve been crying, or not sleeping, or both.
“Have you seen him?” “Did he say anything about where he was going?” “If you hear anything, will you tell us?” “Does he have any other accounts online that we don’t know about?” “Did he say he was meeting anyone you don’t know?”
And Christian has no answers for them, sitting in the dining room with his own parents nearby, their faces also drawn and worried, as though running away might be contagious.
He’s still no help later, when it’s the cops come to ask almost the exact same questions, or when the school counselor asks him how he feels about it, or when mutual friends, voices low and quavering with awe, ask what exactly he said to Aaron?
“Nothing. I told him I got into Dartmouth, that’s all. I didn’t think it was a big deal. I don’t know where he went, he didn’t say anything about leaving. I don’t know why he left. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Christian isn’t sure what he expects, but he knows that people can’t vanish without a trace, especially if they don’t have that much money and extra especially if they still expect to graduate from high school.
Everyone is so nice to him.
Except that the frogs are starting to avoid him, a scattering cloud of various colors every time he steps into a room. They’re still watching him, the way they watch everyone, but from a distance now. From under the bed, not from his desk. From the shower curtain rod, not from beside the sink. From behind the Xbox, not from the arm of the couch. When he can catch them out, hiding behind a cup of pencils or a pillow or the venetian blinds, Christian thinks they look strangely content. Like they know something.
There’s a SoundCloud user who records the glitter frog songs almost nightly and puts them up raw. This is unusual, as most users remix their recordings into songs. On one track, a flurry of comments at the four minute mark:
Whoa, is it just me or does this sound like a code?
FROG CODE!!!!1
Dont b fukin stupid
No, it kinda does.
Y WOULD ALIENS USE MORSE CODE!?
its just u
He’s looking for somewhere to sleep that doesn’t smell like pee. Before he left home, he wouldn’t have thought it’d be this hard, but he learned better pretty quickly. Timing is also important. You don’t want to wait until it’s too late, because then all the really good places to sleep are taken. You don’t want to go too early, though, because if you’re too early, there’s a much higher chance that a janitor or someone will notice and kick you out.
So far, every place that he’s checked smells like pee. Usually he can smell it before he even gets under the awning. It’s the spots that don’t get rained on that smell the worst. They get pissed on and then forgotten, and the piss bakes into the concrete when the weather gets hotter, drier.
It’s not hot or dry right now. The air has that heavy, waiting feel. It’s cold enough to make people complain about May being too late in the year for chill, northern winds. Occasionally a single raindrop falls.
The frogs don’t seem to mind. When the rain falls to the stained concrete, the frogs rush to it, a wave of glittering color that bunches and scatters. Tristan used to like the frogs, when he was younger. He used to fall asleep listening to them outside his window, in the house, sitting on the edge of his pillow, their voices not-quite harmonizing. That was before stepfather number three dragged the family into the kind of turmoil Tristan thought was restricted to TV movies until it happened to him. But after Tristan ran away, nobody paid much attention to him, including, and perhaps especially, the frogs.