The Girl Who Talked to Frogs

The Girl Who Talked to Frogs
by Tristan M.

Otto sat by the window of Ms. Greenwood’s classroom and watched the rain cascade down the metal support of a flagstaff. He knew the American flag hung at half-mast because a faculty member passed away over the weekend. The teachers wouldn't say who it was but, Otto had narrowed it down to five possibilities. He determined the number of faculty members employed at Felix High School, added the amount missing from the mandatory, morning assembly and ruled out the ones that never bothered to show up for their duties. Two history teachers, one science teacher and two cafeteria workers remained. He was perhaps within hours of figuring out who died.

“Otto,” Ms. Greenwood stood beside him with her arms folded. The class snickered. She placed a gentle hand on his shoulders. He jerked his upper-body defensively and nearly fell out of his desk. A few students gasped. Someone whispered “retard” under his breath. Ms. Greenwood sighed and shook her head. “Sorry, I… didn't mean to scare you. Can you tell us why Huck helps Jim escape slavery, even though he believes he will go to hell for it?”

Otto grinned, sat up straight, folded his arms and stared at a spot on the white board. “Well, obviously Huck believed that slavery was wrong, so wrong in fact his desire to free him outweighed the consequence of burning in hell.”

“Interesting theory, Otto. Is there any specific part of the chapter that led you to believe this?”

Otto sunk his seat. He already read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in seventh grade. He failed to understand why the English department required students to read the book again in ninth grade. He felt his classmates’ eyes beam at him like lasers. Eyes scared him. Whispers scared him too.

“Would you please read the chapter next time for class? And that goes for the rest of you. Don’t think that I can’t see the Cliffnotes hanging out of your binders. If you actually read the book, you’ll find that it’s not that difficult. You might actually enjoy it.”

The bell rang. The class poured out the door. Otto stayed behind.

Ms. Greenwood circled the classroom, picking papers and pens off the floor. Otto noticed that she tucked her honey blond hair into a chrysanthemum patterned bun. Ms. Greenwood typically wore her hair in a bun on Tuesdays, not Mondays. He felt something was off.

“Otto, what are you still doing here? Doesn't your bus come at this time?”

He tapped hands on the desk like bongos and hummed the chorus of his favorite new song.

“Is there something you wanted to ask me?”

“Yes, there is something I wanted to ask you. I wanted to ask you if you could tell me who died over the weekend.”

A pen fell from her hand and rolled into the clutter under her desk. Otto watched her lips tremble as she walked to the far left corner of the classroom. He wished he could read her thoughts. He wondered if she was going to be mad at him for asking. He averted her gaze as she turned around, paced toward him and fixated on his new shoe laces.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this but, her name was Ms. Pima. She was a new Biology teacher”

Ms. Greenwood’s voice shook as she spoke. She watched Otto rock slowly in his seat. She extended her arm a few inches and stopped before the dirty hood of his sweatshirt.

“How did…how did…how did…Ms. Pima die?”

“Otto, if I knew, I would tell you. I don’t. Now, it’s 2 p.m. I have to pick my daughter up from daycare. Would you please read the chapter tonight?”

Otto nodded.

Ms. Greenwood dropped her briefcase on the way out the door.

-

The halls of Felix High School dimmed as Otto scanned the biology classrooms on the second floor. He heard a secretary call the last bus over the loudspeaker. He knew his mother expected him to be on that bus and be home by exactly 2:25. Otto contemplated lying to his mom but, he wasn’t good at lying and she told him never to lie. Otto contemplated many excuses as he peered through the glass windows that enclosed the laboratories. He looked for a name on a chalkboard. He looked for a sign on the wall. He looked for any indication that a classroom might have belonged to Ms. Pima.

“What are you doing, Otto?”

“What am I doing?”

A girl with a lime green tee shirt, ripped jeans and messy red hair tucked under a Colorado Rockies baseball cap peered through the glass with him. He recognized Nikki Chambers from his first period Algebra class. She sat three seats behind him in the middle row. `She spent the class making origami frogs out of notebook paper. Otto sometimes stared at her in hopes of learning the process.

“I’m guessing you heard about Ms. Pima.”

Otto nodded. “Yes. Ms. Greenwood told me that Ms. Pima died. She wouldn’t tell me what she died of. The administration seems to be keeping a secret.”

Nikki pressed her nose against the glass. Otto smiled. He liked the way freckles scattered her face like the stars in a constellation. He counted her freckles when he couldn’t figure out how she made origami. He liked how she noticed and didn’t mind. Other girls would have laughed at him or made fun of him.

“I…can tell you how she died if you promise not to tell anyone.” Nikki pulled away from the glass and cast her shamrock green eyes in his direction. “I mean it, Otto. You have to promise me that you won’t tell a soul. You have to swear on your life that you won’t tell anyone.”

“Okay.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

Nikki’s upper lip trembled. Otto noticed that she wore cherry red lip gloss like Ms. Greenwood. He wondered if the lip gloss caused her lips to feel uncomfortable. “Ms. Pima passed away of AIDS related complications. She was going to be my biology teacher but-”

“Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome?”

“Yes… that’s it. There’s something else too. Remember, Otto, you promised not to tell anyone, so please don’t. It’s just like that time you found me crying in the hallway after Todd dumped me and you promised never to tell a soul. Well… Ms. Pima was my mentor at the hospital I was diagnosed in.”

“Do you mean, you also have Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome?”

“No…I…I have HIV.” Nikki held her arm against her chest and gazed at the dusty floor.

Otto did not question why Nikki told him her secret. Instead, he remembered what he learned about HIV in his eighth grade health class and felt excited. Otto longed to meet an HIV positive person and ask them questions about their virus. Otto once wrote a letter to Magic Johnson in which he asked about his T-Cell count. Magic never replied.

“How did you acquire the virus?”

Nikki twitched and took a step back. “ Isn't that kind of personal?”

“You told me that you have it. Wasn't that kind of personal?”

“It was. That’s why I’m not telling you anything else.”

Nikki pressed her nose against the glass again, her face flushed with red. Otto copied her. She adjusted her hat and eyed an envelope on an empty teacher’s desk.

“What are you looking at?”

“Ms. Pima used to write me letters and leave them on her desk for me to pick up after school. It was kind of like a pen pal thing. When she got too sick, she promised she would have someone deliver her letters. I've looked for a letter every day.”

“ I've always wanted a pen pal.”

Nikki smiled and tried to find his eyes. His eyes fixated on something in the lab. She saw a janitor walking down the hallway and approached him. The janitor pulled out his keys after a few moments of talking and walked over to the door.

“Why do you need to get, kid?” He grunted, scratching his shiny bald head.

“We left our lab project in here.”

“Nikki we-“

Nikki remembered Otto couldn't lie. “My mistake, Otto. I left my lab project in here.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he grunted, unlocking the door. “You have thirty seconds.

She scurried in the classroom, grabbed the envelope off the desk, stuffed it in her jeans’ pocket and dashed out. She put an arm around Otto’s shoulders and directed him down the hallway. The shadows dipped the walls when the lights dimmed and flickered. The janitor slowly mopped his way toward them. Nikki pulled the crinkled envelope out of her pocket and tore the top open. Otto realized she lied but that fact slipped his mind when she unfolded it and started to read. The letter was dated from two weeks ago.

“ ‘Dear Nikki: Death is inevitable, so, I try not to think about it. I think a lot about you though and how much you've grown over the past year. You have handled yourself with grace and maturity. You are someone to be admired. I heard about an experimental treatment at Riverfront Facilities on Broad Street. They’re testing a new antiretroviral drug on HIV and AIDS patients. The drug is supposed to restrain the growth of the virus even more than AZT does. I’m far too sick for it but, perhaps, it could work for someone like you. Since you’re under eighteen, they do need your parents’ permission. Talk to your mom about it. Go forth and…”

Nikki folded the letter up and placed it in the envelope. She slid down the hallway wall and sat with her hands cradled in her face. The envelope toppled to the floor. Otto grinned from cheek to cheek. He read about these kinds of studies in the newspaper. His father told him they were “propaganda” and a “quick way for a witch doctor to make a buck.” Otto argued that these experimentations could work if they were properly funded.

“This is great, Nikki. Perhaps this new antiretroviral drug will work for your Human Immunodeficiency Virus.”

“It doesn't matter because Jane will never let me do it. She doesn't want to believe that her daughter could actually die. My aunt has to pick up my medicine and bring it to me at school because those two won’t go anywhere near each other.”

“What about your aunt?”

“My aunt doesn't believe in experimental medicine."

“What if we just walked down there and saw what they did. Broad Street is only a mile from the school. Maybe they could tell your mom about it? They could explain how it works.”

“It sounds tempting but I don’t think she’ll buy it.”

“What do you have to lose?”

--

Otto forgot that his mom expected him home as he walked to Broad Street with Nikki. Nikki told Otto her mom would be too busy watching soap operas to realize that she wasn’t home. She mentioned that maybe her mom would agree with the doctors in her drunken state of mind. The autumn leaves scattered the sidewalk as they turned onto Broad Street. A small, brick building stood at the end of the street.

Otto counted her freckles as she walked a few paces ahead of him. He talked about his favorite science fiction novels from the last one hundred years. When Nikki tried to jump in the conversation, he cut her off. She sighed and bit her lip as Otto transitioned into a conversation about the origin of the HIV Virus.

“You know, most scientists believe that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus originated from primates in West-central Africa that were infected from the simian immunodeficiency virus. Some differ on how the virus itself was transferred to humans. As a person living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, how do you feel about this theory?”

“Um.”

They entered the Riverfront Facilities building and noticed thin people with gaunt expressions on their faces waiting in line outside a door marked “interviews” in black letters. The man at the end of the line looked like a skeleton with chunks of gray skin dangling from his skull. The woman in front of him coughed blood into a Kleenex. The teenager in front of her held a Walkman with hands that trembled and eyes that seemed to fade into their sockets. For the first time, Otto noticed her shamrock green eyes and recognized her fear. He remembered that his mom put an arm around him when he was afraid and wrapped his right arm around her back. Her body shivered.

Nikki smiled and blushed.

Nikki and Otto waited. The clock at the end of the hallway seemed to spin as a man in a white coat opened the door for another human skeleton to stumble in. Nikki and Otto waited in silence. His hand stayed on her shoulder blade. When the line of human skeletons moved, their bodies rattled and they projected fluid filled coughs. After about an hour, the man in the white lab coat opened the door and signaled for them to come in.

“You two look a little young to be seeking treatment.”

The room had white walls, a white ceiling and a white tiled floor. The ceiling lights illuminated the walls and blinded their eyes. Cages of red frogs with black spots stacked against shelves filled with medical books. Some of the frogs hopped across the floor, knocking over books and sheets of notebook paper with scribbles on them. Nikki kneeled down to a red frog and stared into its shiny black eyes. The frog stood no more than the size of her palm. Otto smiled at the frogs and poked his fingers into a cage to pet them.

“Those are Mexican Pinto frogs,” the man said, adjusting his lab coat over his collared shirt and brushing his neck length gray hair behind his ears. He pointed to two rotating chairs that sat in front of his desk. “My name is Doctor Black by the way. Please. Why don’t the two of you have a seat.”

Otto squinted as he sat down slowly. Nikki continued to stare into the frog’s eyes from her seat. “I’ve never heard of Mexican Pinto frogs. Have you, Nikki? Those look like Oregon spotted frogs. They’re about four centimeters in height and have slightly upturned eyes.”

Dr. Black smiled and folded his hands across their desk. He grabbed a transparent green pill and held it up between his index finger and thumb. “The…Mexican Pinto frog share similar characteristics with the Oregon spotted frog, but they have one distinguishing characteristic, a mutation that battles the virus when they’re injected with it. We’ve extracted this mutation and modified it for human use in an antiretroviral pill. This pill has helped extend the lives of my patients and I think it can do the same for you.”

Dr. Black passed the pill to Otto and Nikki. When Otto looked at the pill he gleaned from cheek to cheek. When Otto placed the pill in Nikki’s palms, she looked at the frog instead. The doctor shuffled through his lab coat for a pair of keys.

“I would like to explain more, but I was supposed to close a half an hour ago. Since I’m going to guess you two are under the age of eighteen, you’ll need to come back with your parents to consent to the treatment and an eight thousand dollar deposit. Bring them by tomorrow at three.”

Before Otto and Nikki could utter a word, he grabbed the pill from their hand, dimmed the lights and ushered them out of the room. Otto and Nikki exchanged blank expressions as the doctor walked quickly down the hallway and disappeared into the rainy afternoon. Otto tried to find Nikki’s eyes, but she focused on a spot on the carpet and let a tear stream down her face.

“Why are you crying, Nikki? Dr. Black said this pill helped extend the lives of his patients.”

“When I was first diagnosed, Ms. Pima gave me a frog. She was green, but she had spots like the frogs in that laboratory. I named her Bella…after my little Italian grandmother. Grandma Bella lived with us until the day she died. I talked to her every day when I came home from school. She could understand English, but she couldn’t speak it, so she just listened and smiled. It’s easy to have the same conversations with Bella. Don’t laugh…but I talk to her every day after I come home from school. I know it’s stupid, but I like to imagine she listens when she stays in the palm on my hand absolutely still and croaks. Even if my mom or my Aunt gave me permission to do this, I would always think of a frog like Bella suffering with what I have.”

“A frog like Bella could help you live,” Otto whispered. He touched his fingers to the freckles on her face and wiped a tear away. “It’s biologically impossible for frogs to speak, but if your frog could talk and had the same mutation as these frogs, she’d want you to live.”

Nikki grabbed Otto and pulled him in for a hug. Otto didn’t normally like hugging, but he felt himself sink into her grasp and feel warmth. They walked side by side out of the building and into the rain. They saw an African American woman in a long gray coat lean against the side of the building. A red spotted frog sat in the palm of her hand. She motioned with her head for Nikki and Otto to come over. The rain splashed from her afro-textured hair onto the frog. It stayed absolutely still and croaked.

“You two are children,” she said in a hoarse voice, shaking her head and sighing. “That man has sunk to a whole new low, trying to get kids to take his magic voodoo pill.”

“What do you mean?” Nikki asked. The woman held out her palm to Nikki and Otto. They petted the frog with their fingers. It croaked and stayed still. “Do you mean those pills don’t really work?”

“Unfortunately, yes. And there are no such thing as Mexican Pinto frogs. This is an Oregon spotted frog. Dr. Black ships them in every week. It doesn't have a type of mutation.”

“I knew it,” Otto said, clenching his fists.

The frog hopped into Nikki’s hands, stared into tearful eyes and croaked.

“ I've tried to report Dr. Black’s office several times, but the authorities have never followed up on their investigation. I was a patient of his many years ago. I hate seeing what he does to his patients and those frogs. It’s illegal and it’s disgusting.”

“What am I supposed to do now?” Nikki said in a whisper.

The woman smiled. “Have you been taking your medicine regularly?”

Nikki nodded.

“Is your T-Cell count stable?”

Nikki nodded.

“Then live, darling. Live your life. You have so many years ahead of you. And the longer you live, the more likely it is that modern science will find a real cure.”

Otto watched numerous red spotted frogs hop down the wet blades of grass from the sides of the building. The woman smiled at them and a slid a screwdriver out from the pocket of her coat and gripped it tightly between the palm of her hands. Nikki and Otto watched frogs by the hundreds hop through the grass. They stared in wonder, smiled and felt adrenaline pump inside them.

“Now if you excuse me, I have some work to do.”

The woman bowed to them and disappeared into the building. Nikki and Otto ran with the frogs into the parking lot and danced together in the rain.