The Frog

The frog was under Mr Pavlik’s third bin.

Theo found it at break. Frederick saw him find it. They were on the wall, and Theo had finished the first apple and eaten the bottom of the core and put it in his pocket, and was looking across the yard at the low brick building behind the gym where Castellanos sat in the window with his coffee, and lifting his hand, and Castellanos was lifting his finger; and then Theo’s eyes went past the window, and along the side of the building, to the bins, which stood along the fence in the corner where the sun never got, where the tarmac was always dark and there was moss in the cracks, and stopped.

“Freddie,” he said. “Look.”

Frederick looked. He could not see anything. There were the bins, seven of them, large and green, and the fence, and the moss, and a drain cover with a puddle round it.

“What?”

“Under the third one.” Theo was already off the wall. “It moved.”

He went across the yard. He did not run, because running at break was a thing Mr Kaminski had views about, but he went the way Lucía talked, as if he had a train to catch, and Frederick went after him, because he did not know what else to do, and at the third bin Theo got down on his knees on the wet tarmac by the drain cover in his school trousers and put his face close to the gap under the bin, where the moss was, and held very still.

“There,” he said.

Frederick got down too. He did not get down on his knees, because of the trousers, which were new and which Bridget had views about; he crouched, with his hands on his knees, and looked into the gap under the bin.

There was a frog in it.

It was small and brown, about the size of a walnut, with darker brown stripes across its back legs and a pale throat that went in and out, very fast, and two gold eyes, and it was sitting on a patch of moss in the dark under the bin with its hands turned in, like a very old man at a bus stop who has been waiting a long time and does not expect much.

“It’s a frog,” said Frederick.

“It’s a wood frog,” said Theo. “We had them in Milwaukee. In the park by my nan’s. They go under things when it gets cold. It’s getting cold.” He looked at it. “It’s in the wrong place. There’s nothing here. There’s a drain and some bins. It’ll get run over by the Countess.”

The Countess was Mr Pavlik’s floor-polishing machine, which he ran across the yard on Thursdays after school for reasons nobody had ever discovered, since you could not polish tarmac.

“What are you going to do?”

Theo did not answer. He put his hand into the gap under the bin, slowly, flat, along the moss, the way you would put your hand out to a dog you did not know, and the frog looked at the hand with its gold eyes and its throat going in and out, and did not move; and then Theo’s hand closed, very gently, round it, the fingers curved, and came out from under the bin with the frog inside it.

He stood up. He looked at his closed hand.

“Hello,” he said to it.

The bell went.

---

History was third period.

They were on Chapter Six. Frederick had known they would be on Chapter Six about now; he had done the sum in August, in the library, with the book’s contents page and the school calendar, and worked out that if Mr Ferrante took two weeks over each chapter, which was what the chapters were the right length for, Chapter Six would come in October. And it had. The Coming of the House of Hanover. They had been on it since Monday. On Monday Mr Ferrante had drawn a family tree on the board, a very large one, in red pen, with George the Third at the top and lines coming down from him in every direction like the roots of a tree, and lots of the lines stopping, with a small red cross at the end, and one line, at the side, going on and on down the board, through Ernest Augustus, to a box at the bottom that said ERNEST I, 1840, and then stopping, because the board had run out.

Nobody had looked at Frederick on Monday. Or rather, everybody had, once, when the line got to the box, and then they had stopped, because it was Monday, and the second week of October, and they had been looking at him for five weeks and had mostly finished.

On Thursday Mr Ferrante was on the assassination.

He paced. He always paced. He went up and down in front of the board with the red pen, stopping and turning and pointing it at people, and talking about Victoria in the summer of 1840, who had been twenty-one and very small and had been on a horse, in the picture in the book, and who had been shot, on Constitution Hill, in London, in June, by a man whose name Mr Ferrante said he was not going to tell them, on principle, because the man had wanted his name to be remembered, and Mr Ferrante did not see why he should get what he wanted.

“So she’s dead,” said Mr Ferrante. “On a Wednesday. In London. And who’s King?”

Hands went up. Lucía’s went up before he had finished the sentence. Frederick’s did not. He knew the answer, obviously; it was his great-great-great-something-grandfather; but he had found, over five weeks, that in history, of all the subjects, the answers had his family’s names in them, and that if he put his hand up for one of them, everybody looked at him to see whether he was answering it as a pupil or as something else, and he did not know himself which it was, and so he had stopped putting it up for those.

“Paredes.”

“Ernest Augustus,” said Lucía. “Her uncle. The Duke of Cumberland. He was King of Hanover already. So he got both.”

“He got both,” said Mr Ferrante, delighted, pointing the pen at her. “He got both, on a Wednesday afternoon, because a man with a pistol was standing in the right place on Constitution Hill. A man nobody liked. A man the English thought was a monster. He’d been King of Hanover for three years and he was supposed to be going back there to stay, and instead, on a Wednesday, he’s King of Great Britain and Hanover and America and everywhere else, and the English are horrified, and nobody on this side of the Atlantic knows a thing about it for a month.” He turned to the board. “Why?”

He went to his desk to get a new pen.

The red one was running out. It had been running out since Monday; the family tree had been drawn in a red that went pink at the bottom, so that Ernest the First was in a sort of rose colour, which Theo had said in a whisper made him look like he was blushing about it. Mr Ferrante kept the new pens in the top drawer of his desk, the left-hand one; Frederick had seen him get them out before. He walked to the desk, talking, because the only way to get news across the Atlantic in 1840 was a ship, and a ship could take, and put his hand on the handle of the top left-hand drawer without looking at it, and pulled.

Frederick looked out of the window.

---

He did it on purpose.

He had been watching the drawer for twenty-five minutes, since the beginning of the period, since the moment at the very start, before Mr Ferrante came in, when the room was filling up and noisy and everybody was getting their books out and talking about something on the television the night before, and Theo had got up from his desk by the window three from the back, and walked to the front, with his hand in the pocket of his sweatshirt, carefully, the way you walk with a full cup of tea, and stopped by Mr Ferrante’s desk, as if looking at the family tree on the board, which was still there from Monday, pink at the bottom; and Frederick had seen his other hand go to the top left-hand drawer.

He had not seen any more than that. He had turned his head.

He had turned it to the window, quickly, deliberately, and looked out at the yard, at the bike racks and the wall and the low brick building behind the gym where Castellanos was in the window with the coffee, and kept looking, and counted to twenty, slowly, in Swedish, because Swedish numbers were longer, and when he got to twenty and turned back Theo was sitting at the desk beside him with his book open at Chapter Six and his hands flat on it and an expression on his face of perfect, unbroken, almost holy calm.

So he had not seen anything. Not the part that mattered.

He had worked it out on the wall, at break, after the bell, while Theo was walking across the yard with his closed hand held in front of him like a lantern. He had worked out what was going to happen, roughly, if not where, and he had worked out what he was going to be asked, if anything happened, because somebody was always asked; and he had worked out that he could not lie. He did not know how. He had never done it. It was not that he was good; it was that he had been brought up by a man who reached for the record the way other people reached for a light switch, and who had a rule, and the rule was that you answered the question you had been asked, exactly; and if you had been asked whether you had seen something, and you had seen it, then the exact answer was yes, and there was no other.

So he had made sure he did not see it.

It had seemed, on the wall, an extremely clever plan. It seemed less clever now, with Mr Ferrante’s hand on the drawer.

---

Mr Ferrante opened the drawer.

He did not look into it. He went on talking, anything from two weeks to five, depending on the ship and the weather and whether anybody on board thought it was urgent, and put his hand into the drawer for a pen, still looking at the class, and stopped.

He stopped talking. He stopped moving. He stood at his desk with his hand in the top left-hand drawer and his eyes on the class and an expression on his face of a man who has put his hand into a drawer for a pen and found that the drawer has, since he last opened it, acquired an opinion.

He looked down.

The class looked at him looking down. Nobody knew why, yet. Lucía half stood up to see.

Mr Ferrante took his hand out of the drawer, slowly. He looked into it for some time. Then he shut it.

He stood there for a moment with the drawer shut. Then he opened it again, as if to check.

“Mr Ferrante?” said Lucía.

Mr Ferrante did not answer. He was looking into the drawer. The class could not see what he was looking at. It could see him, though, and what it saw was the youngest teacher at Ellicott, with a beard he was not good at yet, holding a red pen that had run out, looking into his own desk drawer with an expression of profound and terrible patience, like a man reading a letter that he has been expecting for some time.

Then the frog came out.

It came out by itself. It came up over the front edge of the drawer, which was open about four inches, with its hands, the way you would climb out of a swimming bath, and sat on the edge, on the wood, and looked at the class with its gold eyes and its throat going in and out.

The class made a noise.

It was not a scream, quite. It was a noise that started as about thirty different noises and became one, a sort of rising roar that went up the scale and broke at the top, and Lucía stood up all the way and pointed and said it’s a frog, it’s a frog, there’s a FROG, as though this were news that might not otherwise reach the back; and Grant went scarlet from the collar to the hair; and June put both hands over her mouth; and Amira Ibrahim, in the row in front of Frederick, with a very straight back, said “Oh,” in a tone of the deepest satisfaction, as though something she had suspected about the world all her life had been confirmed; and Devon Price, who was behind somebody, got under his desk.

The frog sat on the edge of the drawer and looked at all of it.

Mr Ferrante looked at the frog.

Then he held up one hand, the one with the dead red pen in it, and waited.

It took about a minute. He did not shout, or say quiet, or bang anything. He just stood at his desk beside the frog with one hand up and waited, and the noise went down, from the front, row by row, the way the field of wheat had gone in the second week, until there was nothing in Room 9 but the radiator under the window, which was not banging, because it was not Room 14, and the sound of Devon Price getting out from under his desk, and the frog.

“Thank you,” said Mr Ferrante.

He looked at the frog. The frog looked at him.

“I’m going to ask this once,” said Mr Ferrante, to the class, without taking his eyes off the frog. “And I’m going to remind you of something I said on the first day. Does anybody remember what I said on the first day?”

Nobody said anything.

“Hartigan,” said Mr Ferrante. “What did I say on the first day?”

“You said you didn’t care what we thought, sir,” said Theo, beside Frederick, perfectly calmly, “as long as we could prove it.”

“I said I didn’t care what you thought, as long as you could prove it.” Mr Ferrante nodded slowly. “Thank you, Hartigan. That’s right. You were listening.” He put down the dead pen on the desk beside the frog. “So. Here’s a frog. It’s in my drawer. It didn’t climb in, because the drawer was shut at the end of second period when I put the register in it, and frogs can’t open drawers, I’m fairly sure, although I’ve never been asked to prove it. So somebody put it there.” He looked up at the class. “Who?”

Nobody said anything.

“I don’t want what you think,” said Mr Ferrante. “I want what you can prove. Did anybody see who put a frog in my drawer?”

Nobody said anything. Frederick sat very still, by the window, three from the back, with his hands flat on Chapter Six.

Mr Ferrante’s eyes went round the room. They went along the front row, and the second, and the third. They went over Lucía, standing, and June, with her hands over her mouth, and Grant, scarlet, and Devon Price, emerging. They went over Theo, beside him, and did not stop, any more than they stopped on anybody else.

And then they came to Frederick.

And for the first time in five weeks, in Mr Ferrante’s history class, they did not step over him.

They stopped.

---

He saw Mr Ferrante decide it.

He saw it happen in Mr Ferrante’s face, which was a young face, behind the beard, and not good yet at hiding things: he saw Mr Ferrante see him, at the desk by the window, three from the back, with his hands flat on Chapter Six, The Coming of the House of Hanover, which was the chapter with his family’s names in it; and he saw Mr Ferrante think, very quickly, that he had stepped over this desk for five weeks, every lesson, carefully, the way you step over a step you know is loose; and that every single person in the room knew he had; and that if he stepped over it now, today, with a frog on his drawer and a question that had an answer, every single person in the room would know why.

Mr Ferrante took a breath.

“Mr Hanover,” he said.

The room went very quiet indeed.

“Did you see anybody put a frog in my drawer?”

Frederick looked at him.

He felt the room look at him. It was the field of wheat again, all of it, at once, from every direction, every head in the room turned to the desk by the window three from the back; and it was a different kind of looking from the other times, from the first week and the yard and Chapter Six; because this time they were not looking at him to see what he was. They were looking to see what he would do. Which was a new thing. Which had never, as far as he could remember, happened to him before, not once, in any room, in his life.

He thought about the question.

He thought about it carefully, because it was a question, and he had been brought up to answer questions properly, and the way you answered a question properly was that you answered the question you had been asked, and not the one you thought you had been asked, and not the one you would rather have been asked.

Did you see anybody put a frog in my drawer?

He had seen Theo get up. He had seen Theo walk to the front with his hand in his sweatshirt pocket, carefully, like a full cup of tea. He had seen Theo stop by the desk. He had seen Theo’s other hand go towards the top left-hand drawer.

And then he had looked out of the window and counted to twenty in Swedish.

He had not seen anybody put a frog in Mr Ferrante’s drawer.

“No, sir,” said Frederick.

It was true. It was perfectly true. Every word of it. He heard it come out of him into the quiet room, clear and level and exact, in the voice his father used for New Wessex, and he heard it land; and he did not look at Theo, at all, not even a little, in the way that you do not look at a thing you have decided not to have seen.

Mr Ferrante looked at him for a long moment.

Frederick could see him thinking. He could see him take the answer apart, the way Frederick’s father took apart a Bill, looking for the place where it had been joined; because Mr Ferrante was clever, and was a historian, and spent his whole life reading documents written by people who had been careful about what they said. And Frederick saw him find it. He saw him see that it was a very exact answer. That it was an answer to the question he had asked, and only to that question, and was perfectly sealed all the way round, like an egg.

“No,” said Mr Ferrante slowly. “You didn’t see anybody put a frog in my drawer.”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know who put a frog in my drawer?”

Frederick thought about that too.

“I’ve got an idea, sir,” he said.

There was a sort of noise in the room. Not a word; a breath, from thirty people at once.

“An idea,” said Mr Ferrante.

“Yes, sir. But you said you don’t care what we think.” Frederick looked at him. “Only what we can prove.”

The silence in Room 9 was absolute.

“Can you prove it?” said Mr Ferrante.

“No, sir.”

“Then you don’t know,” said Mr Ferrante.

“No, sir,” said Frederick. “I don’t know.”

Mr Ferrante looked at him for a long time. Something was happening at the corner of his mouth, behind the beard that he was not good at, and the beard was not good enough at hiding it, and Frederick saw it fight its way up through the beard and get halfway and be stopped, by an act of will, and held there, so that for about five seconds the youngest teacher at Ellicott stood beside his desk with a frog on his drawer and an expression on his face of a man trying, with every muscle he had, not to laugh at a twelve-year-old who had just used his own rule against him in front of the whole class.

“No,” said Mr Ferrante. “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

He turned round to the board, abruptly, and stood with his back to the class for a moment, looking at the family tree, at Ernest the First blushing at the bottom of it in pink; and his shoulders moved, once; and then he turned back, with his face perfectly straight.

“Right,” he said. “Nobody saw. Nobody knows. Nobody can prove anything. So, on the evidence, the frog got into the drawer by itself.” He looked at it. “Which is what the history book says about most of the things in it, if you read it carefully, so the frog is in good company.” He picked it up. He did it quite expertly, Frederick saw, with his hand flat and curved, the way Theo had done it under the bin, so that the frog sat in his palm with its hands turned in. “Hartigan.”

“Sir.”

“Take this frog back to where it came from.”

Theo looked at him with an expression of wide, grey, innocent bewilderment.

“I don’t know where it came from, sir.”

“Then take it,” said Mr Ferrante, holding the frog out to him across the front desk, “somewhere a frog would like.”

Theo got up. He went to the front. He held out his hands, cupped, and Mr Ferrante put the frog into them, and Theo closed them round it, gently, the fingers curved, and stood for a moment looking at his hands, and said, quietly, to them, “Hello,” in exactly the voice he had used under the bin; and then he looked up, and saw the whole room looking at him, and Mr Ferrante looking at him, and made his face go blank.

“Go on,” said Mr Ferrante. “You’ve got five minutes. Not the pond by the science block; the pond by the science block is a disgrace and the frog’s done nothing to deserve it.”

Theo went out with the frog.

Mr Ferrante got a new red pen out of the drawer, and looked at it, and looked into the drawer for some time, as if to check that it contained nothing else, and shut it.

“Telegraph,” he said, to the board. “There wasn’t one. Not till 1858. So the news went by ship. And the ship took two weeks to five, and the news got here in July. Write that down.”

They wrote it down.

---

From the window by Frederick’s desk you could see the yard, and the bike racks, and the low wall, and the end of the gym, and the bins.

He did not look. He wrote down two weeks to five, and underlined it, and wrote no telegraph till 1858, and underlined that; and then he looked, because it was a window, and it was beside him, and he could not help it.

Theo was crossing the yard with his hands cupped in front of him like a lantern. He did not go to the pond by the science block. He did not go to the grass at the back of the gym where the litter was, or the flower beds by the front steps, or anywhere a person who did not know where a frog came from might have taken it. He went straight across the tarmac, without hesitating, to the corner by the fence where the sun never got, and the moss was in the cracks, and the drain cover had a puddle round it; and he knelt down on the wet tarmac by the third bin, in his school trousers, and put his hands into the gap underneath it, and opened them, and took them out again empty, and stayed there, kneeling, looking into the gap, for a long time.

In the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, Castellanos was sitting with his coffee, looking at him.

---

“I didn’t put a frog in anybody’s drawer,” said Theo, at lunch.

Lucía stared at him across the round table.

“You did. Everybody knows you did. Mr Ferrante knows you did. He made you take it back.”

“He made me take it somewhere a frog would like,” said Theo. “Because I’m good with animals. Everybody knows that. I’m good with animals and I was nearest.” He ate some of the orange thing. “I didn’t put a frog anywhere.”

“Theo.”

“Prove it,” said Theo.

Lucía opened her mouth, and shut it, and looked at Frederick, as though Frederick might help; and Frederick ate his sandwich, which was ham today, with a note that said EAT IT ALL, and looked at the radiator, which was not banging, and did not help at all.

On the wall, at a quarter past three, after gym, while Theo did up a shoelace that did not need doing up, Frederick said, very quietly, so that nobody else could possibly hear:

“Why did you do it?”

Theo finished the shoelace.

“Do what?”

“The frog.”

Theo looked up at him, from the shoelace, with his grey eyes, or green, Frederick still could not tell, and the expression that was about to say something funny and had decided to wait.

“What frog?” he said.

Frederick looked at him.

“Theo. It’s me.”

“I know it’s you.” Theo stood up and put his bag on his shoulder. “I didn’t put a frog in anybody’s drawer, Freddie. You didn’t see me.” He considered. “You said so. In front of everybody. You said no, sir. You don’t lie.” He shrugged. “So I didn’t.”

And he went off towards the front gate and the buses, and did not look back; and Frederick stood at the bike racks and understood, slowly, with a feeling in his chest like the one just before you laugh in church, that he had just been told, by the only person in the world who could have told him, that his own exact answer had been taken, and accepted, and was now, permanently, the official record; and that Theo Hartigan, who had found a wood frog under the third bin and held it in his hand and said hello to it, was going to deny it, to him, to his face, for as long as he liked.

---

His mother was in the car by the bins. It was Thursday.

She asked him in Swedish how the day had been, and he said in Swedish that there had been a frog, and she said a frog?, and he said in history, in a drawer, and she said whose drawer, and he said Mr Ferrante’s, and she said and who put a frog in Mr Ferrante’s drawer, and he said that nobody had seen anybody put a frog in Mr Ferrante’s drawer, and she turned her head and looked at him, in the back of the car, for some time.

“Nobody?”

“Nobody, Mamma.”

His mother looked at him a moment longer. Then she looked out of her window.

“I shall not ask,” she said, “whether you know.”

“Thank you.”

The car went past the shops and the stop.

“Sir,” said Castellanos, from the front, to the windscreen, in English.

“Yes?”

“The young man found a frog at break, sir. Under Mr Pavlik’s third bin.” A pause. “I saw it from the window.”

His mother turned her head and looked at the back of Castellanos’s head.

Frederick sat very still.

“Is it in your note?” he said.

Castellanos drove. They went over the bridge, where the car slowed down and nothing happened, and the river was grey, and it was October, and there were leaves on the water.

“No, sir,” said Castellanos.

“Why not?”

“It isn’t unusual, sir,” said Castellanos. “Not for that young man.” He looked in the mirror, briefly, at Frederick, and then at the Queen, and then back at the road. “And I didn’t see him put it anywhere. I saw him find it. And then I saw him take it back.” A pause. “What happened in between was in Room 9, and I can’t see into Room 9 from Mr Pavlik’s. It’s the wrong side of the building.”

His mother looked at Castellanos for a long moment in the mirror.

Then she turned to her window, and put her hand up to her mouth, and Frederick saw her shoulders move, once, the way Mr Ferrante’s had, by the board, looking at Ernest the First; and they drove up the Axis in the October light with the leaves coming down off the trees along the middle of it, and nobody in the car said another word about frogs at all.