Bren woke to an ambiguous dawn and walked to school under a brightening sky, but across the Hudson the shore of New Jersey still crouched under a line of black clouds. Off there in the west, where New York weather was made, the battle was still undecided. This being Thursday, only two days before the dance program (for which there was no rain date), it seemed late to adopt a wait-and-see policy. Bren stopped before the entrance to the Perkins School and considered the kidnapping of a small but lively animal from one of its overcrowded rooms. After a bit he shrugged and went on in. He had all day to worry and reconnoiter.
At lunchtime he climbed to the fourth floor and peered through the glass panel of the door to the biology lab. Mrs. Packard was seated at her desk before a mountain of exam papers. She was the only teacher who had even thought of giving a test during the first week of school. Now she would probably stay late to grade them. Bren craned his neck trying to see the frog tank, which was just out of his line of vision. Suppose it was empty; then all this mental anguish would have been for nothing. Bren squared his shoulders and opened the door. He walked briskly to the frog tank, observed that it was teeming with life, and turned to meet the gimlet eye of Mrs. Packard.
“Young man, were you looking for something?” she said.
“A friend,” Bren answered hurriedly. “I was looking for a friend in your class, but he’s not here.”
“Not among the frogs?” Mrs. Packard asked. From any other teacher this would have been a joke, but Bren felt that levity was not intended and would be ill advised in return.
“Not anywhere that I can see,” he said. “But thank you anyway, Mrs. Packard. Goodbye.”
He closed the door to the biology room and wandered down the stairs, pondering his problem. So much depended, finally, on the presence or absence of Mrs. Packard after school that he decided to put it out of his mind and look for Erika. The school, though small, was full of odd corners where students at noon were eating sandwiches, reading books, or talking. An exhaustive search of the high school building, however, failed to turn up Erika and used the remainder of Bren’s lunch hour, nor was she in physics, which was the only class they had in common.
Hungry and discouraged, Bren tried to apply himself to the laws of acceleration. This was a subject dear to the heart of Edward Bear, who, in the interest of making the abstract concrete, had set up a sloping wooden chute running the entire length of the classroom. The extreme gentleness of the incline permitted Mr. Behrens to run to the bottom and catch the rapidly accelerating little ball that he had started at the top. This he did several times to the delight (if not, perhaps, the enlightenment) of his class. Bren felt more cheerful as he watched—frogs and the inexplicable absence of Erika forgotten during his favorite teacher’s enthusiastic performance.
Erika got back to school only in time for the last two classes of the day and would not have bothered to come at all but for the hope of seeing the brown-haired boy with the meltingly open smile. “Relentlessly normal” was the way she described Bren to herself, wondering at the same time why this should appeal to her usually more exotic tastes. She also wanted sympathy and had not yet made any close friends to listen to her complaints. For Erika had not only missed a diverting physics class, she had acquired a large, prickly mouthful of braces on her nearly perfect teeth. “Nobody’s going to want to kiss me for a few years, that’s for sure,” she muttered to herself as she climbed the steps to the school. “Might as well cuddle up with a barbed wire fence.”
The last two classes were boring, like the day itself, which continued to be overcast, and Erika felt her spirits sink slowly through the plodding lectures like a waterlogged leaf in a stagnant pond. Finally the last hour dragged to an end, and she was free to search for Bren. A more patient person would have waited by the door, but Erika was not patient. She thought his last class was on the top floor next to the biology lab, so she began to climb against the descending stream of students, pausing at each floor to look up and down the hall. On three she was stopped by Mr. Behrens, who wanted to deplore the fact that she had missed his performance. “And now you’ll never understand acceleration, poor girl,” he finished. “There’s no return engagement or even an encore.”
“This is devastating,” Erika said. “Whatever shall I do?” It was hard to be sprightly without opening her mouth more than an eighth of an inch, and this she had resolved not to do.
“You could read the book,” Mr. Behrens countered, “but the movie’s more exciting. What’s the matter with your mouth?”
Erika bared her teeth for the first time in a ferocious smile.
“Blindingly beautiful,” said Edward Bear. “I hope you don’t bite.”
Fond as she was of her physics teacher, Erika was beginning to worry that Bren might escape by some means other than the only stairway. “Just people who stand between me and the girls’ room,” she said and, squeezing past him, ran up the last flight of stairs to the fourth floor.
Bren was not in the economics room, and there was only one more place to look. Erika peered through the glass door of the biology lab. An arresting scene met her eyes.
The big, bare room appeared to teem with frogs, and through the frogs strode Bren in desperate haste, stooping and snatching at the elusive throng. Erika stared and then began to laugh. She opened the door, and Bren turned, a gleam of manic fury in his eye.
“Shut that door, idiot!” he shouted, then stopped, one hand clutching a struggling frog, the other his already disordered hair, as he saw who it was. “Oh, my God. You of all people,” he said. “What have I done to deserve this?”
“What have you done, period?” Erika asked. “Do you need, maybe, some sort of help?”
“Do I need help? What does it look like I need? Help me put these unspeakable creatures back where they came from. I had no idea they could move so fast.” Bren waded cautiously over to the frog tank with his victim.
Erika had managed to grasp the situation, if not the reason for it. She held the lid of the tank while Bren popped the first frog in and hastily closed it again.
“That’s good,” he said. “This is definitely a two-man job. I could be here all night, and if Mrs. Packard comes back…” He rolled his eyes to heaven and went back to catching frogs. Between the two of them, the work went fairly fast. Erika, having less to do, watched with fascination. Nor did she miss the final act when Bren, turning his back to her at the farthest corner of the room, stuffed the last frog down the front of his shirt and buttoned it up to his throat. Wisely, she decided to say nothing about this curious sight.
“Whew! What a relief. Thanks a million, Erika. I couldn’t have done it by myself.” Bren’s smile was almost back to normal, and the small, wiggling bulge just above his belt would not have been noticed by the casual observer.
“Now are you going to tell me what this was all in aid of?” Erika asked.
“Not until we get out of here,” Bren said. “Come on, let’s split before the dragon lady comes back. I’ll walk you home,” he added. It seemed the least he could do, though what he was going to say once they were safely out of the biology lab was at the moment beyond even his powers of invention.
“Great, let’s go,” she said, and giving one last glance at the tank of hysterical frogs, they left. Mrs. Packard was toiling up the stairs as they came down, a stack of exam papers clutched to her bony chest, a look of generalized suspicion in her cold, blue eyes. “She’s going to wonder why her charges are so upset,” Bren said, “but what the hey, she’ll never guess.”
Erika giggled. “Unless we forgot one,” she said. “I could swear I saw one last frog hopping away toward the corner of the room.”
“You were seeing things,” Bren said firmly.
“Let’s hope so,” Erika said, and treated him to the full splendor of her smile.
They had now reached the sidewalk, and Bren stopped to look at her carefully for the first time. He saw a wonderful diversion from the subject of frogs—the spectacular mouthful of hardware that Erika had forgotten she had.
“That’s an amazing set of braces,” he said. “When did you get those? I mean, you can’t have had them all along.”
Erika clamped her mouth shut. “Thishafternoon,” she mumbled.
“What? Today? That’s why I couldn’t find you at lunchtime.” She nodded mutely. “But you’ve got to talk,” he went on. “You can’t go through life with your mouth shut.”
“Wanna bet?” Erika said, only a little more distinctly.
“You were talking in the bio room,” Bren said. “Come on. Open up. Lots of beautiful women have braces, though I didn’t think there was anything wrong with your teeth before.”
This comment was enough to pry open Erika’s jaws. “You’re damn right there was nothing wrong with my teeth,” she cried. “But everybody’s got to have an expensive orthodontist, didn’t you know? So I’ve got to have one too. Daddy ran out of nice things to give me, so he gave me these.”
This was news from another world to Bren, who stood at a loss for words, looking at the furious girl. Suddenly the front of his shirt gave a convulsive jump and Erika’s eyes widened. She had forgotten for the moment a subject of even more absorbing interest than her teeth.
“But let’s not talk about me,” she said, her eyes fixed on Bren’s middle. “I think frogs are a much more interesting topic of conversation, and I want to know all about them.”
“Of course you do,” Bren said. He was playing for time while his mind scrambled after explanations, each one more improbable than the last, for the ridiculous scene in the bio lab. “I mean, naturally, after finding me like that, more or less knee-deep in frogs. Anyone would wonder.”
“Anyone would, and I do,” Erika said.
“It’s a statistical project,” Bren said in a rush. “For math. You know how practical Miss Wentworth is, or don’t you? I forget you weren’t here last year. It’s part of the new math, I think. Like, no more meaningless theorems. No more dry examples. Everything must be related to life.”
Erika nodded gravely. “I can see the life part all right,” she said, “but the mathematics still eludes me.”
“Statistics,” Bren said. “I thought I’d count their spots and do a correlation.”
Math was, unfortunately, one of Erika’s strong points. “A correlation with what?” she asked.
Lacking a ready answer to this, Bren plunged on. “Anyway, you can imagine how impossible it was to count the spots on a bunch of frogs all hopping around in a tank and getting on top of each other, so I saw there was an empty tank in the corner and thought I’d take them one by one, count, put them in the other tank, then dump the whole lot back. But things got out of hand,” he finished with a helpless gesture that made Erika laugh.
“You’re really crazy,” she said. “I like that.”
“You do?” Bren asked dubiously.
“Absolutely. I hate ordinary, predictable people. Come on, let’s walk. I’ve got to get home and see if I can eat. Ugh! What a thing to look forward to.”
“You could take nourishment through a straw,” Bren suggested.
“For two years?”
“That’s true. You’d fade away.”
“You can’t be too thin or too rich,” Erika said, “but I think it would sap my strength and ruin my temper. What a marvelous afternoon.”
Bren nodded happily. They were walking up toward Broadway with the late sun shining warmly on their backs. “It’s turning nice for Saturday,” he said, adding to himself, “if I can only keep this damn frog alive.”
Turning right on Broadway, they passed the seductive windows of Zabar’s—“No, I really can’t give up eating,” Erika said. As they crossed Seventy-ninth Street, the river flashed blue at the bottom of the hill, and the rusticated stone of Erika’s building rose into view like a fortress.
Bren stopped at the tall gates and looked in at the fountains playing in the shadowy courtyard. “I always wanted to know someone who lived here,” he said. “What a neat place.”
“Come on up,” Erika said. “You can help me choose something to eat and then look the other way while I savage it.”
Bren was tempted, but only for a moment. The scrabbling sensation around his middle was growing weaker, and he wasn’t sure whether his mother would be pleased with a dead offering. There was also the strong probability that a more relaxed, indoor conversation with Erika would again turn toward treacherous waters. “I can’t this time,” he said. “There’s something I’ve really got to do.”
“Okay. ’Bye for now,” Erika said, and turned in through the gate.
As Bren started back up Broadway, he could hear the doorman’s cheerful voice, “Hey, Erika, what’d you do? Swallow a box of paper clips?” There was no reply.