3. THE TREEHOUSE.

Soy had the frog in his hands within seconds. He was always good with outdoorsy stuff like
that. His mom was usually busy with his siblings, so Soy was left to play outside a lot. By
third grade, he had caught a pet turtle, salamander, and flying squirrel. Unfortunately, his
older brothers Rick and Hank stole the squirrel and kept it in their room. Once a week they
played a game where Rick threw the squirrel from the second story window, and Hank caught
it midair with a trash can as it glided down. Soy tried to get them to stop, but they never
listened. It wasn’t until a particularly windy fall day that he caught a gust and flew over their
heads to freedom.
The frog didn’t put up much of a fight. I started to wonder if it actually wanted to be caught.
“Do you believe me now?” I asked.
Soy peaked inside his hands, and then lifted his head with wide eyes. "Well… this frog is
wearing glasses. I’ll give you that.”
Both of our minds were racing with questions.
“Let’s bring it to my treehouse, so we can figure this out,” I said.
I had built most of the treehouse in my backyard myself. My mom and dad insisted on one of
them being there when I used certain tools, but that was about it. Building things always
made me feel good afterwards, and I had gotten pretty good at it. The treehouse had been
done for a while, but there were still a few things I wanted to add to it before winter.
When we got there, I told Soy to use the elevator. It was really just a rope with a weighted
pulley system, but I called it the elevator anyway. We used it when we needed to carry things
that we couldn’t bring up on the ladder. I climbed up and then lowered it down for him. All
those years of critter-handling had paid off, and he got it inside the treehouse without any
problem. I shut the door and quadruple-locked it, so that the frog couldn’t run away (and also
to give us some privacy).
“Okay, Soy,” I said, "let him loose."
Soy lowered his hands and opened them, letting the frog hop to the floor of the treehouse. I
had a small drafting table, drawings, and bits of wood all over, which provided plenty of
places for the frog to hide. Luckily for us, it didn’t move at all.
Instead it looked up at me, and in a loud voice said, “What do you mean, ‘him’?”
Soy fell backwards from a crouch onto his rear. The frog was looking right at me, waiting for
an answer, but all I could do was shake my head.
"It’s rude to assume I’m a ‘he’, don’t you think? I happen to be a girl,” said the frog proudly.
Soy was now holding his head with both hands.
“It can talk!!” he said in disbelief.
"Calling me an ‘it’, after I just told you I was a girl, is just plain inconsiderate, Soy!” she
insisted.
I knelt down closer, looking for anything that might make sense of it all. Maybe the frog was
a robot? But nothing about the way it moved was robotic. And would a “Made in China”
sticker really make me feel better? It… she… had just called my best friend by his first name!
Soy was so flabbergasted that he was gnawing on his backpack strap, so I doubted that they
had met before.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the frog, kneeling down, “we didn’t mean anything by it. Truly.”
The frog hopped even closer and said, “You’ve always been kind.” Then she whispered, “It’s
a powerful thing. Remember that.”
“I will,” I said, amazed that I had just gone from meeting a talking frog to taking advice from
a talking frog in a matter of seconds.
“But, um, if you don’t mind me asking, how is it that you can talk?” I said.
By that point Soy had half of the backpack strap in his mouth.
The frog crooked her head at me slightly. “Do you think that humans are the only animals
that can talk?” she asked.
I was startled. Was it possible that animals could talk, and somehow no one in the world
knew about it? Was everything that I thought about animals wrong? I took a seat on the floor,
too. Soy spit out his strap.
"That’s not okay,” he said. “I tell my pet iguana all of my secrets. If he can talk, I need to
know who he’s been talking to.”
The frog gave out a little laugh, then she said, “Oh, I’m just kidding. Animals can’t talk any
more than humans can flap their arms and fly.”
I was embarrassed, but mostly relieved.
“What about some kind of iguana sign language?” asked Soy, still nervous.
Ignoring Soy's question, I asked the frog, “How is it that you can? Talk, I mean."
“For starters, I’m not a frog,” she explained. “The only reason that I—”
Without any warning, there was a knock on my treehouse door.
“What are you up to in there? Why is this door closed?” asked my mom sternly.
I searched my brain for an answer that didn’t have the word frog in it.
“Soy and I were, um, we were doing homework, and the breeze kept blowing our papers
away." I replied.
“He’s a clever one” the frog whispered to Soy.
I gave the frog a signal to be quiet. It may have been the first time in the history of the world
that one had spoken, but for the time being, she needed to stop. If my mom heard a girl’s
voice, I was worried she might break through the door again. She had a habit of doing that
any time something seemed suspicious. It was only a week before that she had seen the
smoke from one of Soy’s firecrackers and broken through three locks. I added the fourth the
next day, but it was becoming clear to me that metal was no match for “mom strength”. So,
for the moment, I needed this frog’s vocabulary to shrink back down to “ribbit”.
“Well, come on inside the house. There’s a man from the school board here who needs to
speak with you.” She lowered her voice and spoke softly into the crack of the door. “He looks
pretty official. He’s got a fancy suit and a shiny yellow bowtie. Don’t worry though, he told
me me you’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Yellow?!” screeched the frog.
“What was that, honey?”
“Oh… I said, ‘Hello!’” I lied, using the best high-pitched voice I could muster.
“Honey, ‘Hello’ usually comes at the beginning of conversations. We’re pretty far into this
one,” she answered.
“Ah, right. I just sometimes forget when you’re supposed to say it,” I replied nervously.
“Oh… I didn’t realize. Maybe we can work on that, sweetie,” she said, closer to the door than
ever. “Because that’s definitely a problem. Just hurry up and come down, please.”
I heard my mom climb down the ladder, then watched her go back inside the house through
the sliding back door. The frog jumped up onto the open treehouse window in a panic. I was
amazed at how high she could jump, and knew at that moment that she could have left any
time that she had wanted.
“Whatever you do, don’t mention me,” the frog whispered frantically. “I’ll find you later.”
And with that, she jumped out the window into a bush below.