FWW Story 2

Bullfrogs and Butterflies

Jimmy hopped down the stairs to breakfast, bouncing his hand on the mahogany railing. Pancake and peanut butter smells floated through the air, and saliva started forming in his mouth. Suddenly he stopped, three steps from the bottom of the staircase, and his grin disappeared. Is today really Saturday? No, it couldn’t be. He counted on his fingers. Oh, no.

He jumped over the three remaining steps and slid on the hardwood floor into the kitchen. Standing by the griddle was his mother, singing while she flipped pancakes. On the counter lay a knife, and by the knife was the jar of peanut butter, but Jimmy didn’t really care about breakfast right now. “Mom, is today really Saturday?”

His mother flipped two pancakes onto a plate and winked. “Oh, good morning. You haven’t given me my morning hug yet.” Setting the plate by the peanut butter, she squeezed him to her chest. “And yes, it is Saturday.”

Jimmy slumped through his mother’s arms to the floor. “Mom, why’d you have to invite her over?”

“I’ve told you. Her mom’s going to be busy looking for a job all day, and she needed someone to watch her.”

“No, I mean, why did you have to sign up to take care of her? Someone else at church could have done it.”

His mother frowned. “I’m not arguing with you about this right now, Jimmy Alan Andrews. Eat your pancakes. Amanda will be here in thirty minutes.” Then she smiled. “And, if you’re nice to her, I’ll take you to Chuck-E-Cheese’s for dinner.”

Jimmy picked himself up off the floor and grabbed his pancakes and covered them in peanut butter. He allowed himself to enjoy his routine Saturday breakfast, but was careful to stay in a bad enough mood to be sure his mom knew he wasn’t happy with her.

The next thirty minutes spent waiting were interminable, and yet they went faster than the day he and Brendan went fishing without telling their parents. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Amanda, it was more that she was—well, a she. According to his friends, he wasn’t supposed to play with girls, and here he was, having one over to his house. In preparation, he had spent the entire week being mean to her, just so the other guys at school wouldn’t get the wrong idea about him. Amanda was still nice to him.

“Girls,” he scoffed.                                                         

At exactly ten o’clock a car pulled up in front of their house, and fifteen seconds later—Jimmy counted—the doorbell rang.

“Answer the door, would you, Jimmie?” his mother called from her bedroom.

Jimmy braced himself. He still couldn’t believe his mom was doing this to him. Wasn’t she a kid once, too? He thought about not answering the door. Maybe she’d leave. But then he’d be sure to get a spanking. So, full of misgivings, he opened the door.

There was Amanda, showing off her two missing teeth. Her blonde hair shone more golden with the morning sunlight behind it.

“Bonjour, mon ami,” she said. “That’s how French people say hi.” She was still grinning as she bounced past him and dropped her backpack onto the couch. “So, what do you wanna do?”

Run away, Jimmy thought. But then he remembered the promise of Chuck-E-Cheese’s. “I don’t know. Mom says I have to be nice to you ‘cause you’re the guest, so what do you wanna do?”

She pulled two dolls from her bag and shoved one into his hand. Its long red hair was messily tucked into a black beret, a scarf was wrapped around its neck, and it wore a plaid skirt and black pea coat. “That’s Jackie,” Amanda said. “Mine’s Susan. They usually don’t get along very well, but since you’re playing with us, maybe Jackie’ll behave. She’s usually the mean one.”

Staring in disbelief at Jackie, Jimmy imagined what the others would say if they saw him now.

“Do you have a French-y room we can play in?” Amanda asked.

“Um, ‘French-y’?” Jimmy said.

“You know, French-y.”

That helped. Jimmy led Amanda to a large room at the back of the house. No lights had been turned on, but the drapes over the long row of windows had been pulled back, filling the room with sunbeams.

Jimmy squeezed the doll in his hand as he swept his arm around the room. “This is my play room. But you can’t touch my LEGOs. Or my marble run.”

Amanda didn’t seem to notice the “you can’t” comments. She stood in the middle of the room and spun slowly, scrutinizing every toy and chair and shelf. Then, with a satisfied grin, she said, “This is great. Very Frenchy. And I just love the drapes. And the French doors.”

Jimmy said, “Or my planes.”

Once again, Amanda didn’t seem to notice. “Ok, first we need a house. If you’ll get some blankets, I’ll pull the chairs together.”

Reluctantly, yet glad to get away from her for a bit, Jimmy went off in search of the blankets. It didn’t take him very long to find them, but after doing so he ran to his room and waited several minutes.

When he finally walked back into the play room, Amanda had pulled the chairs into a huge rectangle, with the wall with all the windows as one side. She had made the roof by pulling the long drapes over the backs of the chairs. Pillows from the couches served as a sort of fence.

“There you are,” she said. “I got tired of waiting, so I just made do with those lovely drapes. And I put it by the windows so we wouldn’t have to worry about it being all dark inside.”

Jimmy’s jaw fell with his blankets. “You’re smart,” he said. “I didn’t think girls knew how to make forts. Or houses.”

Amanda just laughed. “It can be our fort-house. We can make beds with those blankets.”

“Nuh-uh,” Jimmy said. “Boys don’t play house.”

Just then his mother, laundry basket on her hip, poked her head through the door. “Jimmy,” she said. Then she left.

Jimmy understood her perfectly. Turning back to Amanda, he said, “All right. I’ll play.”

When Mrs. Andrews came in with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches two hours later, they were making beds and decorating their house with toys. Amanda had convinced Jimmy to help her cut flowers out of construction paper and scatter them to make a garden, and Jimmy had even let Amanda help him build a new marble run around the pillow fence, complete with LEGO and model plane guards.

When the house was satisfactory and the sandwiches had been eaten, Jimmy forgot his abhorrence of girls enough to hold out his hand for a high-five.

Amanda smacked it without hesitation. “Il est si parfaite,” she sighed.

“What?” Jimmy asked.

“That’s French for ‘it’s so perfect.’ ”

“Oh. Why do you talk in French?”

“I’m practicing for when I go visit my daddy in France,” she replied. “When he called last month he said I could come stay with him when I learn it. We didn’t get to talk very long because he and Caroline were about to go to dinner. But he promised he’d take me to all the fancy restaurants.”

“Oh.”

Amanda ducked into their house and came back out with Jackie and Susan. Handing Jackie to Jimmy, she grinned and said, “You can be Dad. I’ll be Mom. And Jackie and Susan will be our kids.”

Jimmy wasn’t terribly sure about this, but he decided he might as well try, so he followed Amanda into the house and plopped down on the floor next to her.

She began calling him “Jimmy dear” almost immediately. This Jimmy could tolerate. When Amanda began to suggest that he call her “Mon ange,” however (“It’s French and so very sweet!”), that was where he drew the line. He wasn’t sure what it meant, and while it sounded “French,” it didn’t sound at all manly.

“No,” he finally said. “I’m not calling you that.”

“But, Jimmy dear,” she said. “It makes it more perfect. It’s what Daddy calls Caroline.”

“I don’t care.”

“Come on, Jimmy dear. Please?”

“No. And quit calling me that, or I won’t play with you.”

“Jimmy dear—”

“No! I’m leaving.” Jimmy stormed out of their house, knocking part of their wall over as he did, and fled to his room. He tried to slam the door, but it bounced off a ball he had left in the doorway and swung back open. Amanda was left, crying, with a broken house.

It took Amanda a while before she had built up the courage to go get him. Wrapping Jackie and Susan up in her arms, she tiptoed to his door and peeked in. He was on his bed, reading. He must have discovered last Sunday’s funnies, because he was grinning.

“Jimmy?” she said.

His smile flipped upside down. That wasn’t what it was supposed to do. “What,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.

“Do you want to come back to the house? You don’t have to call me mon ange. It’s okay.”

He faced the wall and kept reading. “No.”

“I brought Jackie for you.”

“I don’t want Jackie.”

Amanda turned back around the corner and slumped against the wall. She stared at Jackie for a bit, then threw her down the hall. “Why do you have to be so mean? Susan, why do you put up with her?”

An idea popped into her head. Amanda scurried over to Jackie, picked her up, and continued down the hall to the kitchen.

Jimmy was happy now. He hadn’t seen Amanda in almost thirty minutes, but he didn’t care where she was. His mom was busy scrapbooking in her room, and as long as she didn’t see Amanda, she’d have no reason not to take him to Chuck-E-Cheese’s later.

Jimmy thought about his comic books. The only girls in Spider-Man and X-Men were either the ones that needed to be saved or the ones with superpowers of their own. They didn’t make the hero play house with them. If anything, they helped the hero fight bad guys. Jimmy liked those girls much better.

A delicious, familiar smell had been drifting in through his half-open door for quite a while when Amanda bounced into the room. She was holding a tray.

“I’ve brought you something,” she said. “Your mom told me it was your favorite.”

Wait, Jimmy thought. Mom saw her? Oh drat. The thought that he may not get Chuck-E’s after all popped into his head, but it was quickly forgotten when he looked over the high rim of the tray. On the tray were two plates, and on each plate was an ice cream sandwich. But not just any two ice cream sandwiches—these were homemade, a special kind made from a scoop of peppermint ice cream between two chocolate chip cookies. They were heaven on earth.

Seeing the changed look on Jimmy’s face, Amanda grinned. “Mrs. Andrews helped me make them. I thought we could go back and eat them in our house. Do you wanna come?”

Jimmy wanted to yell, “Of course!” but he restrained himself. He thought he should still be mad at her. But then again, she had ice cream sandwiches.

“Yes,” he said calmly, then ran past her back into the play room.

He shoved the chair that he had knocked over earlier back into place and readjusted the blanket to cover it. He had only just crawled inside when Amanda came in, giggling. “Here’s the sandwiches,” she said. “Could you hold them while I come in, please? Thanks.”

Now, if two ice cream sandwiches are put in the ring against two six year olds, the six year olds will emerge victorious every time. On this particular occasion, the sandwiches didn’t last five minutes, despite both children’s desire to savor each bite and chew twenty times.

Amanda licked the drips of ice cream off her fingers while Jimmy slurped the drops off his. Amanda started giggling again. Jimmy frowned and pulled his fingers out of his mouth. “Ok,” he said, wiping off his fingers on his shorts. “What’s next?”

“What do you want to play?”

Superheroes. That’s what he wanted to play. But Amanda was a girl. They never want to do boy things. “Not house.”

“I’m tired of playing house, too,” Amanda said. She smiled mischievously. “How about superheroes?”

Jimmy blinked. Did she really say that? “Um, sure. But I only have one cape.”

Amanda thought for a moment. “I can wrap a blanket around my shoulders. Will that work?”

“Yeah.” Jimmy was actually starting to get excited now. “And we can be a team. Like the X-Men.”

“And Jackie and Susan can be the bystanders that we have to save,” Amanda said. She, too, was getting excited. Thanks for the suggestion, Mrs. Andrews.

“All right,” Jimmy said as he clambered out of their house and ran to a box by the opposite wall. Pulling out a black cloth cape with the initials “J.A.A” stylishly embroidered on the back, he fastened it around his neck. Amanda chose a soft red blanket from the pile on the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders several times until it was more of a poncho than anything else. The extra foot of blanket pooled on the floor around her feet.

They spent the next few minutes deciding on names and powers. Jimmy, a.k.a. Super Alan, went with the classic superpowers—flight, super strength, and super speed—while Amanda selected less physical abilities, such as control of fire and water.

“I’ll be Mandy Magie, a French magician,” she said. “So…what do we do now?”

“All right, Mandy,” Jimmy said. “The good people of Andrewsville have been captured by the robot aliens. We have to get them back. Come!”

With that, he charged outside, his cape flapping wildly. Pulling her blanket above her ankles, Amanda ran out the door after him.

It was six o’clock, three hours after they had begun their rescue mission, when Jimmy and Amanda triumphantly returned to the play room and collapsed inside their house—or their headquarters, as it was now called. Jimmie turned to the two dolls and said, “Now remember, kids, never try to fight an alien invasion on your own. That’s a job for superheroes like us.”

Amanda broke into fits of laughter, and Jimmy joined her. They were still chuckling when Mrs. Andrews came in.

“Jimmy?” she called. “Amanda?”

The two heroes crawled out of their HQ side by side. “Yes, ma’am?” Jimmy asked.

“I just got off the phone with Amanda’s mom,” Mrs. Andrews said. “Something came up and she’s on her way to get a last-minute job interview. She said she won’t be able to come pick up Amanda until eight.” She looked at her son. “I was thinking Amanda could come with us to Chuck-E-Cheese’s.”

“Oh, we never get to go there,” Amanda said. “Can I really come?”

Jimmy looked over at her, then turned back to his mom. He grinned.