They were easy to catch: all you had to do, once you'd zeroed in on your frog, was to race your hand out in front of their hop rather than grab right for them. You'd feel its little head butt against your palm and close your fingers and there it was — they practically hopped right into your hand. If frogs were that stupid, they were asking for it.
Colin pinned the frog to his palm and pinched it up with the fingers of his other hand. He could feel the pulsings of life and fear in the frog's slick cold body, no bigger around than his pinkie. He could see its tiny eyes bulge and shine without expression and the flesh under its jaw throb. It kicked its little legs. Colin listened for anyone else in the field — footsteps or voices of kids walking along the banks, the war cries of the boys with the motocross bikes. It was the last school day before Spring vacation, but there was only the distant sound of cars going by the 7-11. Colin held the frog's body in the fingers of one hand and squeezed its legs together in the fingers of the other. Then he turned and turned as if he were sharpening a pencil or winding a watch, feeling the little crackle of the hard mass inside the soft mass as the frog's pelvis shattered and the tiny pieces ground together. He twisted the frog's legs four or five times and when he finished he put the frog in the water and watched. It was supposed to be like a propeller at the rear of a boat — he always imagined the legs spinning around to their original position, propelling the frog through the water. But the legs never did, or at most they made a lame half-turn back around. The frog was still alive and twitched its little arms. Colin got tired of watching and cupped his hand and splashed it out of sight somewhere a yard or two down the ditch.
There was something exciting about doing it and something a little disappointing after it was done, but the only cure for that was to go on to the next frog. He moved up the ditch a few feet and this time he made his grab almost immediately after he'd knelt and started twisting almost immediately after he'd made his grab. He'd felt meditative a few minutes ago and like he was just going to watch the frogs or catch one or two and let them go, but now he was frantic. Sometimes it got like this and he told himself he should go home and drink a glass of milk to settle his stomach, but he knew he would go on and on. He threw the stupid frog away and caught another one. He was wringing it like a tiny green rag when he heard her.
"Are you — oh my God! What do you think you're doing? That is so totally gross!"
It was Katie Peasinger. Colin felt a flush of shame, as if a curtain hiding not just the frog torture but the chubs and the turd-clench had been torn back, and yet he felt thrilled at the same time and almost relieved. Still, he felt compelled to fib.
"I— I found him like this." He dropped the frog into the water where it flexed its bent body helplessly.
"I saw you! I watched you do it. You are so busted, you freak."
Colin didn't know what to say. In retrospect he could have asked Katie what she was doing there, but at the time he was too flustered to think about the strangeness of her sudden appearance in the ditch. She seemed to have risen from the stream itself and now stood waist deep a few feet to Colin's right, dripping with slime and silt. His heart beat fast like the pulse of his frog victims.
"This is how serial killers get started, y'know," said Katie. "There was this show on cable. All the big-time psychos got their start torturing animals."
The first moment of panic passed, and Colin felt his presence of mind return. "Remember what Mr. Witt told us in biology? All those frogs with three legs and two heads or whatever popping up everywhere because of the pollution? I think there's got to be chemicals in the water here."
Katie leveled a finger at Colin. A strand of algae hung off the tip and droplets fell as she wagged the finger. "I saw what you did, and it was, like, so totally the sickest thing ever."
Colin tried changing the subject. "Are you on your way home?" He looked for Katie's books or backpack but didn't see anything, just Katie, waist deep in the small stream he hadn't thought deep enough to dunk the two big eggs of her ass in.
"I am home," said Katie, rolling her eyes and lifting her arms. The wet silt covering her shoulders and breasts shimmered in the sun like some kind of mica-flecked halter top. "What are you doing here? Is this like your psycho-killer home invasion already? Don't you have to pass through a phase of, like, sticking firecrackers up a cat's butt or something?"
"No, it's just — I always come here. Or not always, but sometimes."
"Well, nobody invited you," said Katie. "And that was one of my little brothers." She pointed to where Colin's last victim had finally stopped twitching itself in smaller and smaller circles in the water.
"Oh, um, I'm really sorry, but—" He thought for a moment. He should have been too embarrassed to stay, but it was the first time that he was actually having a conversation with Katie Peasinger — and in her home, even! — and he wanted to keep it going as long as possible. Something about getting caught in the act made it possible to finally speak to her. "But if he was really your brother, wouldn't you be more upset?"
"Oh, d'you think I'm pulling your leg, now?" she said. Colin hadn't realized that Katie could be so witty. "But seriously—" she went on, "we lose so many of them every season, it's amazing when one of them actually makes it to the point worth giving them a name. It's birds that do it, mostly. And dogs. You learn not to get too attached." So Katie had a fatalistic side as well. But just when he thought they might be getting comfortable with each other she fixed him with a look of scorn. "Or kids. Kids like you, but usually a lot younger!"
His heart fell. Who had he been kidding? All the girls his own age wanted to go out with older boys, who had cars. He didn't stand a chance. There was nothing to do but apologize, so he apologized. Then he apologized some more. He was getting his chub back.
Katie didn't want to hear it. "OK, OK, alright already! You'll just have to replace him before my Dad gets home."
"I am so, so— Excuse me?"
"We'll just have to make more before my Dad gets home. He'd kill you, which would be fine by me, but I might get grounded too if he thinks I invited you here." The brown water around Katie's waist began to roil as she moved towards Colin. She put her muddy cold hands on his shoulders and pushed as she surged out of the mire. It must have been the powerful hindquarters still half-hidden in the murky water that allowed her to press him with such force against the bank. But as she hopped onto Colin her weight dragged him down the muddy slope so that he was half in and half out of the water himself. He floundered beneath her, craning his neck to keep his chin above the surface.
He could feel his pants being tugged open and then something happening to his chub that made his breath catch. There was a smell that reminded of him of the dishes his mother would order at that Asian place, only stronger. He wanted to see Katie's face but couldn't — one minute the sun was in his eyes and the next the wet dark flesh of her breast was smushing his nose. She made hiccupping noises and scissored her legs and bore down again and again. Colin finally gave up and moved with her.
When he came it was like everything flushing out of him, out of his balls and bowels both. Everything he'd been saving up, everything he'd held back — she exacted the total tribute. Something happened to Katie too at about the same moment, a bubbling between her legs like the jets of a jacuzzi, which expelled his fading chub. She gave a huge, final hiccup and collapsed on top of him.
Colin was trying to think of something to say when Katie hopped off; he heard the splash and felt a spray of droplets. He lay for a moment in the sun before trying to get up. The smell of his evacuated insides was a little gross but it wasn't such a bad feeling overall. He knew that something permanent had happened.
Finally he sat up and looked at the ditch where Katie had disappeared. Maybe she'd been too embarrassed to say anything. The silt hadn't completely settled but it was not too cloudy to see that the algae was covered again, just like a few weeks back, with a slick coating of translucent slime. On closer inspection, he knew, there would be scads and scads of tiny globes in the slime, like in tapioca pudding. The globes were too slick and small to crush in your fingers — they'd just squirt out this way and that.
Not that this time Colin tried to crush any of them. He snuck back onto campus and managed to shower and change into his gym clothes in the locker room before the basketball squad came in from practice. He stuffed his wet, smelly clothes arm-deep into a covered trashcan and went home.
