mother. I told her to stop before she gave me the creeps.
As I ate my breakfast, I wondered how close Switzerland is to where I live, so I went up to my room and got out my distance globe. It’s a globe where you touch one part of it with an electronic pen and then touch another part of it with the pen and then the globe tells you how far apart those two places are.
My father bought it for me on my last birthday so that I could always know how far away he was from me. I think he thought it might make me feel better to be able to see exactly where on the earth he was, but it doesn’t. Now not only can I see how far away he is but I can hear the exact number of kilometres. That’s like not only knowing that you’re about to get a needle but also knowing how far it’s going to go into your muscle. The robot-sounding voice said 5,403 kilometres.
I wondered which animals will start dying if the permafrost melts, so while my mother was having a shower, I got on to her computer and did a Google search. My mother told me to figure out the most important words when doing a search and type them in. So I typed in animals and melting and permafrost and it came up with 217,000 hits. One said that melting permafrost in Siberia is releasing carbon that’s been trapped there since the Pleistocene era. As it bubbles to the surface, it releases methane gas into the atmosphere, and since methane is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide, this means global warming will happen even faster than the scientists originally thought.
The article said that this news is not good for human and animal life. This made me worried and scared. My insides, even my heart, felt like they were getting skinnier and skinnier.
I turned off the computer when I heard my mother coming downstairs. She saw me sitting in her office and asked me what I was up to. I told her I was reading about the melting of the permafrost.
She said, ‘Phin, right now you should be getting on your snow pants and boots because there’s nothing melting here today – it’s minus 21 degrees.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘doesn’t it worry you that the permafrost is melting? The permafrost?’
‘Yes, Phin, sometimes it does, but I don’t have time to think about it right now. Now, come on, we have to get going – quick as a bunny!’
She handed me my jacket and snow pants, and I put them on, but what my mom said didn’t make any logical sense. If a starving grizzly bear walked up to a person having a picnic, would it be good for her to say she doesn’t have time to be scared because she hasn’t finished her sandwich?
When I walked into my classroom this morning, I noticed right away that there were two things out of the ordinary. The first was that Mrs. Wardman’s desk was moved over too far to the right at the front of the classroom. I sit in the back row, which has seven desks. The middle row has eight desks and the front row normally has seven. But today it had eight. I counted twice to be sure. Eight.
The other out-of-the-ordinary thing was that there was a lump on the show-and-tell table with a white sheet over it. It looked about the shape of the big box where I keep my Reull drawings.
When everybody sat in their seats, the extra desk was taken up by a kid I had noticed in the hallway hanging up her jacket. I don’t usually pay much attention to girls, but I noticed this one because I had never seen her before. Also because she’s a big girl.
Mrs. Wardman went over and stood beside her desk and said, ‘Children, this is Mitty. She’s new to our class. Please say hello.’ And then we all said, ‘Hello, Mitty.’ I felt sorry for and happy about Mitty at the same time. I felt sorry for her because she had a weird name and was also big, which meant that Lyle was bound to give her a hard time. I could already think of a few bad things that rhyme with Mitty, and I knew that even ‘waste of flesh’ Lyle, with brain cells for nothing but thinking up really mean things, was bound to think of them sooner or later. Mitty was definitely in for it.
But I felt a bit happy too because having Mitty in the class might take some of the pressure off me and a few of the other kids since Lyle would have someone else to pick on. I felt a little guilty about feeling happy about that – but not guilty enough to stop thinking it. Maybe that’s what people mean when they say misery loves company. Maybe when misery is spread out it’s not so hard to take. Maybe it’s like when we have reading groups and there are five in each group instead of three, which means you don’t have to answer Mrs. Wardman’s questions as often.
After we said hello to Mitty, we sang ‘O Canada.’ Then Mrs. Wardman announced that we were going to gain another new friend in our classroom – a class pet. She said we had to use our logic skills to guess what was under the sheet. I was a little worried when she said that because of the last time we did a logic exercise. She gave us ten minutes to write down what we thought was under there.
I thought nine thoughts:
1. There are only a few animals that are domesticated and would make good companion animals.
2. One is the cat.
3. We can see things eight times smaller than cats can.
4. Another animal that makes a good companion is a dog.
5. It can’t be a cat or dog because they would be making noises.
6. A horse could be an animal companion.
7. The show-and-tell table couldn’t hold a horse.
8. Some people think pigs make good domesticated companion animals.
9. We shouldn’t eat our companions.
But I only wrote one: It is not a cat, a dog, a horse or a pig. I didn’t have a guess as to what was under the sheet because I had ruled out all suitable companion animals.
Mrs. Wardman told us to pass in what we had written down. Then she said, ‘Okay, are you ready for the big surprise?’ All the kids yelled yes and Gordon nearly fell out of his chair because he jumped out of it and then plopped back into it really quickly, which made it tip. Mrs. Wardman told him to be careful because he could fall backwards and split his head wide open.
Then Mrs. Wardman pulled off the sheet slowly and said, ‘It’s a … frog! Who guessed a frog?’ she asked. Nobody raised a hand. Then she said, ‘Welcome your new class pet, everyone!’
I raised my hand and Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Yes, Phin?’ I asked her what kind of frog it was. It looked like a White’s tree frog to me but I wasn’t absolutely sure. It was smaller than my hand and a greenish turquoise colour, which is what they look like, but White’s tree frogs are nocturnal and I doubted that Mrs. Wardman would get a pet that would sleep all day and be awake all night when we weren’t even here.
‘It’s a White’s tree frog,’ said Mrs. Wardman.
Mrs. Wardman told us that frogs make excellent pets because they are quiet and don’t need a lot of care. I wondered how that makes a pet excellent. Wouldn’t a rock be a good pet then too? I only thought this – I didn’t say it because Mrs. Wardman would think I was being sarcastic. I wasn’t being sarcastic, I was being serious. But I didn’t say it anyway.
Next Mrs. Wardman told us that we all got to vote on a name for our class frog. I knew that since this was a White’s tree frog, it was male and not female because he had a greyish throat and females have white throats. Each of us wrote one name on a piece of paper and put it into the voting jar. I wrote Cuddles. I meant to be sarcastic that time, but I didn’t have to put
