balanced in this enterprise, for unleashing a destructive force that was dependent on mass and the sureness of gravity was to toy with a minor demon. Each rock would began its irresistible tumbling momentum, and in their minds a voice would say with perfect clarity:
There it goes, and nothing can stop it.
There was a rush then, a liberating feeling of handing their future over to the whims of fate. The rocks crashed down until the sun had sunk too low and shadows arced from the tree-tops to claim their hill. The boys went home then to await sleep and dreams of falling rocks.
The next morning, school loomed like a battleship glimpsed through fog, gray and foreboding. Jeremy saw his fingers tremble as he stuffed books into his bag. He put himself into Commando mode as best he could. A plane interior formed in his mind, with rows of camouflaged soldiers. A sergeant was saying:
"When we hit the ground, you find cover and stay there. If you are caught out in the open, you get in the mud and start crawling until you can find a position to return fire.”
Jeremy nodded to himself.
"What kills a lazy soldier?" barked the Sergeant.
"Shape, Shadow, Silhouette," responded Jeremy quickly.
He finished packing his bag with black wings of fear unfurling from his shoulder blades, a canopy that kept the morning sun from his upturned face.
"Shape, Shadow, Silhouette," repeated the boy, and the enveloping wings parted a little.
He repeated these words as a mantra all the way to school while keeping a steady patter on fence palings with a stick pulled from a branch. Slowly, he saw the street drop away and the hedgerows of Normandy seep into being from the passing houses. His stick ceased its rhythmic sound and Jeremy saw it was now held fast by the encroaching foliage. Shell craters gaped in the road, issuing gray smoke. Jeremy could glimpse his Sergeant on one knee up ahead, looking back and smiling. He gave the thumbs up, and the Sergeant waved him forward with his Sten gun.
Over the break from school, Nathan's tormentors had graduated to the term "Fat boy.” Ian could hear those words clearly for half a block as he free-wheeled his bike down the crest of the hill behind their school. Nathan was walking, head bowed, with three boys goosing his back. Ian was downcast. He had hoped to meet with his friends before classes started. They would debrief on the current status of the frog and plan to meet in the library later. Now, Nathan was probably withdrawing deep down to where his inner monsters could console him. The real world would hold little appeal for the rest of the day, Ian knew. Cursing, Ian skirted the school perimeter until he was sure he was safe and then drove his bike hurriedly inside once the bell rang.
By mid-morning, the three friends were uneasily sharing a math problem. Nathan was moodily regarding the floor while Ian and Jeremy talked. Their schoolwork was soon completed by Jeremy and placed aside.
"We head for the far playground at lunch and hang there. We'll need to be quick out of the door though," said Jeremy.
Ian considered this for a moment.
"They'll still come looking for him," he said. "Maybe not us, but definitely Nathan. They were like vultures picking on a dead thing this morning.”
Although he could hear this quite clearly, Nathan made no attempt to speak, his thousand yard stare terminating deep within the earth below.
"OK, there's that big tree down beside the workshop," said Jeremy. "We get down there via the hedge, in the shadows.”
Ian nodded. Waves of rain were steadily washing over the library roof. Ian glanced out the window towards their hill and smiled. He knew their drainage works in the trenches would hold. There was a vacant lot next to Ian's house and they had spent a day hauling plastic pipes from there up to their position.
If our defences wash away in the first rainstorm, then we will have failed, and all this work will have been for nothing, Jeremy had said to them gravely. But thanks to their preventative work, water would now be spouting into the ferns below their trenches rather than scouring them from the face of the earth. Ian nudged Nathan to tell him this but his friend did not respond.
Their lunchtime plan failed. The trio were spotted and chased down without difficulty, their every evasive manoeuvre effectively countered by skilled pursuers. To Jeremy, it seemed that the rotation of the world was slowing. Rain droplets could be seen pulsing in mid-air. Ian was quickly pinned by two boys; another pair of arms grabbed Jeremy in a crude half-nelson. Paul Forster - the Arch-Inquisitor of this afternoon's session of torment - was saying something to Nathan, alternating his words with shared laughter amongst his friends. Every sound that reached Jeremy was discordant, like fairground music heard from under water. Nathan's head was bowed. His dark hair fell away from his forehead in rain-slick bangs. He was hit then, once in the belly.
Rather than doubling over, Nathan merely clutched at his pocket frantically. This resulted in him being held down and a perfunctory search, from which Paul rose with a single triumphant fist raised high. Jeremy felt his throat tighten. Their frog peeked warily from between Paul's fingers. A piteous wail issued from Nathan and he fought hard against the restraining arms. Forster's eyes shot down to the ground and he seized a small rock from under the hedge. Holding this aloft in his left hand, the animal in his right, he enacted a pantomime to emphasize the absolute inevitability of the coming union: frog and rock, frog and rock, frog and rock. Nathan almost broke free as Forster dangled the amphibian before him for a final look. Jeremy shut his eyes and heard a wet smack a few moments later, then another and another.
The bastard, Jeremy thought. He should have just killed the thing, he didn't have to splatter it.
He opened his eyes again and saw the exultant look on Forster's face dying as Jeremy watched. Finally, a frown settled there. Paul rose and seemingly did not notice the rock slip from his grasp.
"The fuckin' thing won't die," he said.
His use of that word caused a giggle from his retinue which he silenced with a glare. There was a single croak from the frog. Nathan finally stood, his captors entranced by the frog's slow progress across the wet grass. Its soft body was undented, a very paragon of frogginess. Then something quite unexpected happened: Ian shook himself free also, snatched up the frog and mashed it with the rock against the anvil of his palm. Then he dropped the small green object and planted a sneaker heavily upon its head. He knelt, gave Nathan a smile, and held up the frog by a single leg; it flipped about in space, as unscathed as before.
Nathan's voice was odd then. No anger in it, just a matter of fact tone that their teachers employed when describing the due date of an assignment.
"This frog is unkillable.”
His eyes were fierce beneath the wet hair. Nathan could feel his fear transmute to a cold righteousness. The frog's heartbeat, sensed through his fingertips, was steady and slow. This was the antithesis of his own, which had begun to hammer with fear as he was caught and had not yet begun to slacken. High above, weak sunlight had broached a halo of clouds . Where light touched the frog's eyes, they glinted with something unknowable. The air was sharpened by a post-rain coldness. Jeremy walked over and stroked the amphibian’s back, awestruck.
"He was smacking that rock down as hard as he could, wasn't he?" he asked.
Ian nodded silently and spoke directly to Nathan.
"I wasn't taking a chance just now. We already knew it was ... unkillable.”
Jeremy frowned, saying:
"Isn't it immortal? Unkillable just means you can't kill it right now, but maybe you can in the future.”
"Unkillable," Nathan said with a grim finality.
His friends looked at Ian, for there was intense deliberation behind his eyes.
"We need to test it," he said simply.
Jeremy nodded and the two boys looked at Nathan. It was he whose attachment to the frog was clearly the strongest. In the conflict between the obvious scientific interest and the potential loss of their pet, Nathan's natural curiosity won out.
"Okay," he said. "But even if
it can't die, I don't want it to suffer too long.”
Jeremy and Ian agreed and they remained warily on guard until the lunch bell rang again.
The incident with the frog conferred on them the status of semi-untouchable. This was a welcome development. Nathan was the recipient of a perfunctory round of "Fat boy" every morning, but this was a surgical strike compared to the carpet-bombing he had endured previously. Ian was bolted in his locker one afternoon, but went without struggle. If he was entirely honest with himself, he appreciated to have his place in the social pyramid affirmed. It was not a matter of his dignity surrendered to them. Like every bullied child, Ian understood that this was the eternal way of things.
Tears and pleading would not dissuade his tormentors. For that matter, nor did his acceptance; but it certainly saved time for everyone involved. Jeremy's heart sank at least once every day, when he found himself alone in a classroom with a closing circle of smiling boys. After the frog renaissance, he almost forgot his destiny was not his own, that the Paul Fosters of the world had his suffering never far from their thoughts.
Later that week, the boys assembled at Nathan's house. His father had a small workshop which they had quickly converted to a crude laboratory. Nathan was whispering platitudes to the frog while Ian and Jeremy assembled tools. Finally, Ian motioned for the "Test subject", as he required them to call it, to