LITMIR.BIZ

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mother slammed closed her notepad and said that her sanity was going extinct. She said, ‘I’ll get you some orangutan-free Shreddies. They’ll be on the table waiting for you.’ Then she left the room.

      My mother doesn’t understand and I don’t know why. Actually, I think I do know why: I think it’s because she’s too busy. She’s always hurrying around. I’m not too busy so I know there are almost 400 species in the order Primate and one third of them are vulnerable or endangered or critically endangered on the Red List of Threatened Species. All of the orangutans are endangered or critically endangered. In fact, all the individual remaining primates in the twenty-five most-endangered species could fit in one single football field.

      I know something else too. I know Cuddles is in trouble. And I know I have to do something about it.

      Today at school, I carefully checked Cuddles for any signs of sickness. Frogs can get fungus diseases that make them dry out and lose weight. I’m really worried about him in there but I don’t think he’s losing any weight. In fact, to me he looks like he’s getting heavier, but that might be because he’s sitting on a white sheet today whereas a few days ago he was sitting on a black one.

      I learned that trick about black and white from my mother. Once she was trying on pants at the mall and one pair was white and she asked me if she looked bigger or smaller in the white pants. She definitely looked bigger in the white ones, and so I told her that I thought she looked the best in those. My mother always trusts my opinions on fashion because she says I’m only nine and practically incapable of telling white lies.

      Later I asked her why it was that she looked bigger in the white pants and she said, ‘What do you mean I look bigger? I thought you said I looked best in the white ones.’

      ‘You do look best in the white ones.’

      ‘But do I look bigger in them?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

      ‘You look better when you look bigger.’

      ‘Phin,’ she said, ‘women don’t want to look bigger, they want to look thin.’

      My mother told me that people in our culture think thinner women look younger and better-looking and that she was trying to buy an outfit to make her look young and pretty.

      I told my mother that in the animal kingdom, animals are always trying to look bigger because the bigger they are, the less likely they are to be attacked by predators. For example, the bull-frog blows itself up to look bigger and fiercer, and so does the puffer.

      My mother sighed and said, ‘Well, that’s good – at least I won’t be eaten today.’

      Mrs. Wardman had to change Cuddles’ sheet because he pooped on it. Frog poop is kinda brownish and you can see the things they eat in it. I could see some cricket parts in Cuddles’ poop. We’re supposed to take turns feeding him crickets and my turn is who knows when since we’re going by last name and mine starts with W. Well, actually, I do know when. I’m kid number twenty-two and we’re only at kid number nine.

      The other kids seem excited about dropping crickets into Cuddles’ aquarium, but I’m not. All I can think is poor Cuddles, a tree frog from Australia snatched out of his tree, packed into a crate and sent on a plane to a pet store, who ends up in an aquarium in a classroom in a foreign country with only a single tree branch to climb on with a bunch of ugly faces staring in at him through a glass wall. This isn’t the least bit exciting – it’s really, super, to-infinity sad. Cuddles should be in his natural environment living his natural life with other White’s tree frogs in Australia.

      I just couldn’t stop thinking about that and even when I got home from school all the cells in my body felt like they were buzzing. To calm myself down, I went to Pete’s Pond in Africa. Well, not really, just virtually. I typed in the address on the internet where you can see and hear the the animals around the pond at that very minute. Since it was night in Africa, I couldn’t see much, but I could hear noises. I closed my eyes and pretended I was right there with them.

      When I woke up this morning, I had a feeling that something really bad was going to happen. It made my chest feel empty and my stomach ache, almost like my heart was dangling by a string into my belly. Usually I don’t feel like that except for when I wake up in the middle of the night, but then I feel good again in the morning.

      I felt yucky and couldn’t eat much breakfast and when my mom dropped me off in front of the school, I told her that I still didn’t feel right. I told her I had a bad feeling that I couldn’t get rid of. She said, ‘Phin, I feel like that some days too but my feelings don’t make bad things happen. Your thoughts can’t do that either, Phin. You’re not magic.’

      I asked her how she knew that for sure and she said, ‘If my thoughts could make things happen, then there would be some people at my office with giant ears and no mouths. So far that hasn’t happened.’

      ‘The luna moth has no mouth. It can only mate and lay eggs and then it dies because it can’t eat,’ I told her.

      My mother said, ‘Phin, you never cease to amaze me.’ Then she told me to jump out of the car because she was going to be late for work. I didn’t want to get out, but I did.

      I spotted Bird over by the teeter-totters. He was hanging around two kids from Grade 2. The kid with the white hair was showing Bird the T-shirt he had on under his jacket. It had a picture of a chart like the one at the eye doctor’s office where the letters start out really big and then get smaller and smaller. It said ‘Iseedumbpeoplelookingatmyshirt.’ That made Bird laugh when he figured it out.

      Bird and the white-haired kid and the other kid and I played freeze tag while we were waiting for the bell to ring. I kept having to be It because I couldn’t run very fast. My head and my chest felt heavy and I figured the part of my brain that normally controls my legs was likely being used up by thinking about something bad happening.

      I got tired of being It, so I went up onto the top of the slide and made a list in my head of some of the bad things that could happen today:

      1. Mrs. Wardman might have been abducted by aliens who implanted an alien’s consciousness in her body.

      2. My mother could get necrotizing fasciitis in the paper cut she got on her finger when she pulled a notice out of my backpack.

      3. Today a species that all other species depend on could become extinct. That would mean the end of the living earth.

      4. I could get spontaneous human combustion.

      Even though my logic told me that these things likely wouldn’t happen, my imagination fooled me into thinking they might. This made me even more worried and my chest started to get really tight and hurt. It turned dark purple and the only way to get it to stop hurting was to think of it as being light purple and then to think of it as being mostly whitish. Sometimes when I concentrate hard, I can think my chest white with only a few purple spots, but I couldn’t do it. Besides, I didn’t want my chest to go white because then I wouldn’t be prepared for the bad thing that was about to happen. Purple is a good colour for quick reflexes.

      During first and second periods, my mind tried to play tricks on me. It tried to make me think that maybe my mother was right and I was wrong and nothing bad would happen today. My mind went: ‘Something bad is going to happen’ (times 82), and then it would say, ‘Nothing bad is going to happen’ (times 3). Then it went, ‘Something bad is going to happen’ (times 54), and then it said, ‘Don’t be crazy, nothing bad is going to happen’ (times 23). It kept going on like that until the ‘something bad’ thoughts were the same in number as the ‘nothing bad’ thoughts, and then, finally, the ‘nothing bad’ thoughts were more than the ‘something bad’ ones, and I felt nearly back to normal. My chest stopped hurting and went whitish.

      My mind almost had me fooled. Almost, but not quite – which is a good thing because it was about then that my mother’s theory was proved wrong. I used to keep track of all

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