A Rain of Frogs

“Tell me a story” she said, and looked at me with expectation.

She was in what I called “girl mode” – sometimes she seemed as old as the wind, and others, like tonight, she seemed the ten year old girl she really was.

“What kind of story?” I asked her. I was secretly glad for the distraction. It kept me from paying too close attention to how down I was feeling. It kept me from worrying about how I would get back down the ladder without using my hands.

“Any kind! Please Adrian? Anything at all will do. I just want to be distracted.”

She kicked off her shoes and sat on the arm of my chair, careful not to bump into the casts. Her arms wrapped around my shoulders, and curled around me, cuddling me like a giant stuffed animal. It was too hard to resist her wishes under normal circumstances, let alone when she was like this. I sighed, but not out of aggravation.

“All right Amy. I’ll tell you a story.”

And so, safely aloft in the Silo, wrapped in her arms and the scent of her hair, I told her a story.

Something I doodled while in a meeting today.

Boys pulled uncomfortably at their collars, while girls tried to smooth their unfamiliar dresses down. Most hadn’t had to dress like this since their first Communions, and though many of them attended the church every Sunday, all of them seemed out of place in the stifling dark heat of the house of God.

The rites of Catholicism were clothed in ties and frills.

I stood off to one side of the church, beside the stained glass depictions of the Stations of the Cross that made this church an attraction for Catholics and tourists alike. They had been done by a local artist who went on to some level of International fame before overdosing and drowning in his own vomit.

Above my head was Pilate’s accusing finger, rendered in guilt and glass, ordained to mete out death and history. The rain running down the outside of the window gave the illusion he was weeping.

Carrie’s casket was closed. We had eventually found out that she had hung herself. Reports from the local newspaper noted that a police investigation hadn’t been necessary – a suicide note had been left.

As the family had chosen not to disclose the contents of the note, the reasons for the girl to hang herself were still open to speculation. The rumor mill had been quiet – the prevailing theory around town now was that the father had been mistreating her.

I’d never been to a funeral before, I had no idea of what to expect. There were emotional eulogies by her parents, by her grandparents, and surprisingly, by Jay, who told those assembled that he had lost both a sister and his best friend. I felt awful for him. I couldn’t imagine his pain.

God called his flock home at the appointed hour, the priest told us, called them home to a better place. How her suffering was over now, and she was happy in her new place.

I slipped out into the rain before the end. As I walked home under a grey, scudding sky, walked through the rain and puddles, I wondered to myself what sort of god would call his people home by making their lives so painful they’d hang themselves in a closet and leave their families empty and broken.

I remember so clearly, the day we found out about Carrie.

We trooped into class as we always did, some of the children laughing or playing, others quietly going about the business of getting ready for another day of school. I remember that I was wearing a green army jacket against the late fall chill in the air. My sister had bought it at the army surplus store. It’s funny, the things you remember.

It took only seconds to notice that Sister Maria Corvi, standing at the front of the classroom, was dressed in black instead of her usual sober grey. Her face was grave, her lips pressed tightly together. One by one the other students stopped what they were doing and looked at her, until the entire class was silent. We were all held by the sense of dread that filled the room.

I remember that Jay wasn’t in class.

“Class, it is my sad duty to inform you of the passing of one of your fellow students here at Holy Trinity school last night. A mass will be held later this week in memory of Carrie Adams.”

The class gasped collectively. Jay’s little sister had died? I felt a pang. Carrie had been one of the few people in my class last year who hadn’t treated me like a complete stranger. Despite attempts by Sister, no schoolwork was accomplished that day.

By our first recess, the rumor mill had established that Carrie had committed suicide. By second recess, the method of demise was established as a gunshot. Or she had hung herself. Or she had cut her wrists in the bathtub. By third recess she was pregnant and had killed herself out of grief, despite being only nine years old. They seemed morbidly fascinated by this grim news, and even more fascinated with making it as dramatic as possible.

Because I was not so immersed in the cliques and cultures of the school, I was able to watch the aftermath from the outside. I found it disturbing how they thrilled and thrummed with the news, how they picked at the corpse like crows. They were genuinely sad, but it almost seemed that the death of one of their own punctuated and underlined their own vitality. Made them feel more alive.

I remember thinking that this would make Jay hate me even more. I remember feeling bad that I was thinking about myself instead of Carrie and her family and the sadness they must be feeling.

It’s funny, the things you remember.

“Think smoking’s cool?” she said.

Amy was smoking a cigarette I had stolen from my sister, trying it on for size, playing at sophisticated and elegant. She was meeting with mixed results. In fact, she looked exactly like a child playing dress-up with a lit cigarette.

“I don’t know. It seems kind of funny. It sure can’t be healthy, sucking smoke into your lungs. On the other hand, there is a certain coolness to it, perhaps because a lot of people who smoke are also cool. Maybe smoking is cool by association?” I was trying to draw her, capture the playful discomfort she was displaying, but finding it difficult.

She had kicked her black mary-janes into the corner, her white school socks were balled up beside them. I wouldn’t walk around bare-foot in the silo for fear of contracting something horrible from the ancient pine floor, but Amy was ever fearless.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s bad for you. Cool by association is quite an idea, probably the truth. Do you think if cool people stopped smoking it would become less cool?” she asked.

After a few moments of posturing with the cigarette, she flopped down into her chair and curled her legs up underneath her. The soles of her feet were black with dust, little dark footprints against the whiteness of her feet.

I thought about her question for a moment, wondering what she was pushing for. “Probably. I mean, if something so obviously foolish is cool only because cool people do it, it makes sense that if cool people stopped doing it, it’d be less cool. Right?”

She laughed and inexpertly flicked the ash into a chipped teacup that I had found outside at the base of the ladder. I tried to capture the loose strands of hair that fell around her face from the messy pile of hair on top her head.

“That certainly goes without saying.”

I found myself completely unable to draw. I put my sketchbook away and leaned over to pluck the cigarette from her hand.

She picked up my sketchbook and pencil and began to draw in an undirected, haphazard way. “Maybe that’s why smoking doesn’t make you cool. Smoking’s not cool at all, only cool by association. So one cannot become cool just by associating one’s self with smoking. You cannot become cool by association to something that is cool only by association.”

I thought about it for a second, mentally traversing the maze of twisty thoughts she had just laid out. “Okay. So what’s your point?”

There was a long silence broken only by that crystalline scratching of the pencil in her hand over the course tooth of the paper in my sketchbook. I crushed out the cigarette and kept looking at her.

“The point is, the people in your class are never going to like you just because your sister helps you dress in cool clothes and tells you the cool bands to listen to. You’ll never be cool by association to the things that are only associatively cool. Only by association to things that are actually cool.”

She leaned forward, till her nose was inches from mine. Whenever she got this close to me, I could smell her hair, the shampoo she used. This time it was mingled with the smell of cigarette smoke on her breath.

“If you want to be liked, you need to understand what makes people like people, you need to get someone who is liked in your class to like you.”

She slapped my sketchbook down on my lap. In the center of the page was a crowd of scribbled, crude people clustered together. Off in the corner of the page was a tiny scribble of a boy with a cigarette.

“Otherwise you’ll be on the outside forever.”