Once Upon a Toad

  I shrugged. “Why else do you think they want to take her to Area Fifty-one?”

  “Is that cool or what?” crowed Connor, who I was beginning to think was a little dim.

  “No, it’s not cool,” I snapped. “Would you want to spend the rest of your life in some lab in the desert, being poked and prodded by scientists?”

  Olivia shuddered.

  “Uh, no, I guess not,” he admitted.

  “All right, then.”

  “We’d better do something about the toads,” said Rani, glancing around the rec room. “They’re kind of getting out of control.” She darted over to a cupboard on the far wall and returned a minute later with an armful of trash bags.

  “So how did this happen?” asked Rajit, taking one from her and using it to trap my latest offerings. “The toads, I mean. Well, that and Olivia, too.”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea,” I replied, grabbing a bag and opening it up just in time. I held it under my chin as I talked. “We both just woke up on Monday morning like this. And by the way, I had no idea that it would happen when I played my bassoon, too. Honest. I didn’t mean to wreck the talent show.”

  “Oh, yes you did,” said Olivia, spitting something into her hand. Two daffodils and another diamond.

  I smirked at her. “Well, your part in it, yes. My part in it, no.”

  “Catbox,” she muttered.

  “You deserved it.”

  “C’mon, you two,” said Juliet.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Rajit.

  “Hang on a sec, I’m going to call my friend A.J.,” I told him, pulling Connor’s cell phone from my pocket. “He’s in on this too.” Thirty seconds later I had A.J. on speakerphone.

  “This is Mission Control,” he intoned in a fake announcer voice.

  “Shut up, A.J. You’re on speakerphone. I’m here with a bunch of band friends.”

  “Oh,” he said sheepishly, his voice bouncing back to its normal tone. “Hi, band friends!”

  “Hi, A.J.!” they chorused back.

  “They want to know what the plan is,” I told him.

  “Do they know about the, uh—”

  “Toads?” I asked, bending over the trash bag again. “Yup. And I told them—well, some of them—that Olivia and I have to find my great-aunt and that she’s at Redwood National Park.”

  Rani and Rajit and Juliet looked surprised to hear this.

  “I’ll explain later,” I whispered to them, then continued, “She’s still there, right?”

  “Hasn’t moved an inch,” said A.J.

  “How does he know that?” asked Juliet.

  “We’re tracking her on GPS,” I replied, stretching the truth. I didn’t want to get into the whole NASA connection just yet.

  “I still don’t get it,” said Olivia. “Why are you so obsessed with finding your great-aunt?”

  “You just have to trust me,” I told her again.

  She shook her head. “Nope. I’m not going anywhere with you until you explain what’s going on.”

  I sighed out a toad. “The thing is, Great-Aunt Aby might be able to help us with all this.”

  “With all what?” asked Rani.

  My friends were all looking at me expectantly.

  “The toads,” I said, gesturing toward the trash bag in front of me. “The diamonds. Geoffrey. Everything.”

  Olivia laughed. “You’re kidding, right? Your great-aunt Aby, the crazy, orange-haired giantess—”

  “She is not a giantess!”

  “I saw her,” said Connor. “She kind of is.”

  I sighed again, scooping up the inevitable toad before it had even hit the coffee table. I knew that I’d promised my mother I wouldn’t say anything, but what else was I supposed to do? How else would anyone believe me?

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “She’s not exactly my great-aunt.”

  “So who is she, then?” asked A.J.

  “She’s, uh, well—actually, she’s my fairy godmother.”

  The room went dead silent, except for a furious croak from the bag I was holding.

  “That’s it,” said Olivia, standing up and brushing off the petals that had accumulated on the legs of her jeans. “I’m going home.”

  “Olivia!” I protested. “You can’t! What about Dr. Dalton?”

  “I’d rather deal with him than with a lunatic!” She snorted. “Fairy godmother? Do you think I’m stupid?”

  Yes, I thought, but wisely held my tongue. This wasn’t the time to pick another fight. “Hold on a sec,” I pleaded. “I know it sounds insane, but will you just think about it for a minute? Is it any crazier than what’s happened to us these past few days? I mean, look at us!”

  The trash bag I was holding bulged with amphibians. Olivia was ankle-deep in flowers. Connor and Juliet were on their knees picking gems out of the pile. Rani and Rajit were scampering around the room as they tried to collect the toads still on the loose. The Kumars would probably be finding reminders of my visit for weeks to come.

  I was suddenly struck by how ridiculous the whole situation was. I started to laugh. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and pretty soon I was howling. I hadn’t laughed in days, and it felt good. No, it felt great. But laughing wasn’t such a smart idea. Each burst produced not just one toad, but a gush of them.

  “Cat! Stop!” shrieked Rani, rushing to position her trash bag under the amphibian waterfall. Watching her frantic efforts made me laugh even harder. I laughed so hard that tears sprang to my eyes.

  “Please, Cat!” begged Juliet.

  I pressed my hands to my mouth, but I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t hold it—or the toads—in.

  Finally Olivia reached across the coffee table and slapped me. Hard.

  I stared at her, stunned.

  “Sorry,” she said, not looking sorry at all.

  “I want this to stop,” I whispered shakily. “I want to be normal again, and I want Geoffrey back, and my mother said Great-Aunt Aby can help.”

  “Fine,” my stepsister snapped. “Have it your way. We’ll go find this stupid fai—this great-aunt of yours.”

  “Can you give us a hand with the toads first?” asked Rajit. “If my parents come home and see this, they’re going to, uh—”

  “Croak?” offered Rani, suppressing a slightly hysterical giggle.

  I grinned.

  “Don’t you start again,” warned Olivia.

  I shook my head vigorously and began to help with the toad roundup. A few minutes later we had things back under control, and the Kumars’ rec room was pretty much back to normal.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” A.J. announced over the cell phone speaker. I could hear him tapping away at his computer keyboard. “It’s nine p.m. You have exactly thirty-six hours until the handoff at the zoo. There’s a bus leaving Portland for Grants Pass tomorrow morning at six thirty a.m. It makes a few stops and gets in around two. You’ll have to hang out there for an hour or so, and then you’ll catch another bus to Crescent City, which is the closest town to the national park.”

  “How are we going to get tickets?” I asked. “Won’t the police have our pictures posted everywhere?”

  “I’ve already bought them for you,” he said smugly. “I’ll e-mail them in a minute, and you can just print them out. That way you don’t need to worry about any nosy ticket agents.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Rani. “How do you even know there’s going to be a hand-off at the zoo? Word of this is bound to get out, and if there’s some big manhunt for you two, it will be all over the news, and if the kidnappers think Olivia is missing, why would they show up?”

  She had a point. Time to improvise, I thought. I took out my pad of paper and scribbled a note to my father. “Do you have an envelope?” I asked Rani. She nodded and ran out of the room, returning with one a minute later. I stuck the note inside, sealed it, and wrote FOR TIMOTHY STARR in big letters on the front, then handed it to Connor. “See if you can get this in our mailbox
without anyone seeing you.”

  He frowned. “With all those reporters and police crawling all over the place? Good luck.”

  “Dude, I’m counting on you.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Rajit printed out our bus tickets. Olivia stared at hers, chewing her lip. “Won’t they be on the lookout for two girls traveling together, though?”

  “I know how we can get around that,” said Connor. “They’re looking for two kids, not five of them. What if Rajit and Rani and I go with you as far as the bus station? We can all carry instruments and say that it’s a band trip, or that we’re going to a woodwind ensemble competition or something.”

  “I don’t play an instrument,” Olivia pointed out.

  “And I can’t go home for my bassoon,” I added.

  “You can use my old flute case,” Rani told me.

  “And you can borrow my clarinet, Olivia,” Juliet offered. “I’ll leave it here with you when I go home tonight.”

  I looked over at Connor. “How are you going to get back here tomorrow morning?”

  “No problem,” he said. “I can get a ride from my brother.”

  “At six in the morning?”

  “I’ll tell him we have Hawkwinds practice and bribe him with my allowance.”

  “Just don’t try and bribe him with a diamond,” I warned. “You’ll give us away.” I turned back to his cell phone, and A.J. “So what are we supposed to do once we get to Crescent City?”

  “I haven’t totally figured that out yet,” my friend replied. “There’s a shuttle bus into the park, but the schedule is kind of sporadic. You might have to rent bikes or something.”

  I looked over at my stepsister. Miss Prissy Pants wasn’t really the athletic type. “Great,” I muttered, catching what came with it in midair.

  Cat Starr, Toad Huntress, had gotten pretty quick on the draw.

  CHAPTER 18

  Olivia and I spent an uncomfortable night on the floor under the Kumars’ pool table. Rani and Rajit draped it with a bedspread so that their parents wouldn’t spot us in case they came downstairs. I hardly slept a wink, expecting to be discovered any minute. There were so many things that could go wrong with this harebrained scheme, and so many reasons that the FBI might find us before we were able to catch the bus to Grants Pass.

  Plus, now I had something new to worry about. What if Connor couldn’t figure out a way to get the note to my father? In it I’d told him that Olivia and I were okay, and that somehow he had to make sure the kidnappers showed up at the rendezvous on Friday because we had a plan. Which wasn’t exactly true. The plan part, I mean. I was still improvising.

  I didn’t mention anything about Great-Aunt Abyssinia or Redwood National Park. That would need a whole lot more than just a scribbled note to explain, anyway.

  I must have fallen asleep, though, because the next thing I knew, Rani was shaking me awake.

  “What?” I said groggily. A toad popped out and squatted on my chest. I sat bolt upright, banging my head on the pool table above me. “Ouch,” I exclaimed, popping out another one. I rubbed the sore spot with one hand and brushed both toads away with the other. They hopped off under the sofa.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get them later,” Rani whispered. “We have to hurry; it’s almost six. Connor will be here any minute.”

  As Olivia and I crawled out from underneath the pool table, she passed us each some clothes. “Rajit and I talked it over, and we think you both should wear disguises.” She gave Olivia a Seattle Mariners jacket. “Rajit’s a big fan, and you two are about the same height,” she told her, then plopped a matching Mariners baseball cap on her head. “Stick your hair up under this, okay? It’s a dead giveaway otherwise. And you,” she added, turning to me, “are going to be Olivia’s little brother.” She passed me a faded Red Hawk Elementary School hoodie and a pair of round glasses. “They’re fake—no prescription. I wore them last year for Halloween. I went as a famous wizard.”

  I stood in the bathroom a few minutes later, looking at myself glumly in the mirror. It was depressing to think that I could pass for a boy. Olivia would never be able to pull off my disguise—she was already starting to develop a figure. Not me, though. I could pass for an ironing board. A vertically challenged ironing board, at that. I looked like a taller version of Geoffrey, only with glasses.

  Might as well go whole hog, I thought. Rummaging through the drawers, I managed to find a pair of nail scissors and started snipping off my hair.

  “Whoa,” said Juliet when I emerged a few minutes later.

  Rani circled me, eyeing my close-cropped head with a critical eye. “It’s a good look for you, actually. A little raggedy, but I like it. Short and sweet.”

  “You’ll definitely pass for a boy now,” added Juliet. Across the room, Olivia smirked. I resisted the urge to launch a toad at her.

  Rajit had come downstairs now too. He spotted me and grinned. “Hey, bro,” he said, punching me on the arm.

  I scowled at him, and he laughed.

  Even with her curly blond hair twisted up under the baseball cap, Olivia still looked like a girl. A cute one. She knew it too, and she gave Rajit her most dazzling smile.

  A tap at the side door signaled Connor’s arrival. He did a double take when he saw me, but at least he didn’t say anything.

  Rajit had printed out our bus tickets. He gave them to us, and then he and Rani and Connor shoved a bunch of money at us.

  “It’s all we have,” Rani told us. “Sorry it isn’t more.”

  “I don’t know how we can ever thank you,” Oliva told them.

  “Are you kidding?” Rajit replied. “With the diamonds you gave us last night, we’ll be able to pay for college.” He grinned. “I’m just not sure how we’ll explain it to our parents, though.”

  “You can tell them the truth once this is over,” Olivia told him.

  Connor passed me his cell phone. “All charged up,” he said.

  I nodded silently. I wasn’t in the mood for more toads this morning.

  I shouldered my backpack, and we gathered up our instrument cases and slipped outside. It was still dark out as we walked to the city bus stop at the top of the hill. The bus arrived a few minutes later, and we climbed aboard. My heart was racing like a metronome set to prestissimo, but I needn’t have worried. The other passengers were just a bunch of yawning commuters heading to their jobs downtown. Nobody paid us the slightest bit of attention on the short ride, even though two of our pictures were plastered on the front page of the newspapers they were reading.

  Rani was right; word of our disappearance had leaked to the press. Connor was right too, though. People were looking for a pair of kids, not five.

  The bus station, though, wasn’t quite so easy.

  “Policeman approaching from the left,” said Rajit. “Let’s go over here for a minute.”

  We followed him to a doughnut kiosk and waited as he ordered half a dozen to go. The policeman glanced at us briefly as he walked by, but Rani and Connor started talking loudly about the all-state woodwind competition we were supposedly heading to, and tossing around terms like “aperture” and “tempo” and “glissando.” Olivia and I stayed completely silent. This was not the time for a spontaneous eruption of any kind. The policeman’s gaze dropped to our instrument cases, then slid right over Olivia and me as he walked on.

  “That was close,” said Connor after he left. “Stick together, now.”

  Moving as a unit, we made our way across the station to where the bus for Grants Pass was waiting. Connor and Rani and Rajit crowded forward with Olivia and me toward the line of passengers.

  “See that family there?” Rajit whispered, and I nodded. “Go stand close to them. The driver will think you’re their kids too.”

  I grabbed Olivia’s arm and steered her toward a harried-looking couple with a baby and a pair of toddlers. Rajit’s plan went off without a hitch; the driver barely looked up as we handed over our tickets and boarded th
e bus.

  My stomach gave a little lurch as we pulled out of the station a few minutes later and our friends waved good-bye to us from the curb. We were on our own now. As I waved back, I wondered if we were doing the right thing. What if we couldn’t find Great-Aunt Abyssinia? And even if we did, would she be able to fix the muddle she’d caused? We had less than twenty-seven hours left until the rendezvous at the zoo. If there even was one.

  Only one thing was certain. It was too late to turn back now. Olivia and I were officially on the lam.

  CHAPTER 19

  Have you ever tried to pay for a cheeseburger with a diamond?

  “You have got to be kidding me,” said the lady behind the counter at the Pie-in-the-Sky Diner. She squinted at the sparkling stone that Olivia had just handed to her. “Honey, we take Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and cash. No rhinestones.”

  I took my notepad and pen out of my backpack. It’s not a rhinestone, I wrote. It’s real. I tore off the piece of paper and gave it to her.

  She looked at it and plunked the gem down on the countertop. “Right. And I’m the queen of England.”

  I sized her up. The name tag on her blindingly pink uniform read PEARL, but it might as well have read ONE TOUGH COOKIE. Her fingernails, which were tapping the formica countertop impatiently, were the same bright shade as her lipstick and dress, and that sky-high updo of hers looked like she’d set her hair dryer control to “stun.”

  I elbowed Olivia and emptied my pockets. I had fifty-seven cents left. Olivia had two crumpled dollar bills and a quarter. We’d spent the rest of the money our friends had given us on granola bars, yogurt, and juice at one of the earlier stops. I shoved the pile of coins and bills across the counter and pointed to the picture of the cheeseburger on the laminated menu. We had almost enough money for one, and we could split it.

  Pearl sucked her teeth as she counted up our money. “Sorry, kids. You’re still a little short.”

  Please, I wrote on the pad. My stomach had the good sense to rumble just then. It was two thirty in the afternoon. Breakfast had been a long time ago.

  She looked at me sharply and frowned. “What’s with the notebook, young man? Are you mute or something?”