Whether I did something spectacular or sneezed myself out of a chair, nobody cared, and almost nobody said my name. Luckily, my mom dropped off some new clothes and nobody really noticed my wardrobe change (…or that it hadn’t rained in weeks). My guess is that we wasted a half-hour looking around at the dry gravel. Salazar, charged outside with a mop and brought me with him to point out the puddle. I tried to convince everyone that I had fallen into a puddle at recess. A few years earlier, I accidentally peed my pants because my zipper had gotten stuck in the bathroom at the last moment. I never got into trouble and barely ever stood out on purpose. Teachers always wrote “needs to participate more” on my report cards (with a smiley face to make my parents feel better). I wasn't the type of kid who got attention. But, the bigger question was why it was so interested in me. Could a frog even be rude? I wasn’t sure. On top of that, it had been staring at me for at least five minutes by then. It bothered me that it didn’t already know that. I wanted to lecture it, to explain that frogs don’t wear glasses. There was no denying it: the frog had put on a tiny pair of glasses. And when I realized what it was, I forgot all about class, and Miss Weaver, and Martin Shandals. More importantly, when I looked again to see if it was still there, I noticed something new. I was certain that Miss Weaver would see the frog within moments, but I was wrong. “Whenever he acted up in class I’d say, ‘we’ve got a real comedian on our hands don’t we?’ And I was right!” she said with a guffaw. I knew exactly what bad joke she would end the story with, but much less about long division. We were supposed to be learning long division, but something had reminded her of Martin. Martin had transferred schools half way through the year, so I always felt to me like that one shouldn’t count. I tried to listen back in to Miss Weaver, just in time to hear the end of her story about Martin Shandals, the now-famous comedian. I knew right away, in a way that I could think better than I could say, that this frog was different. Stagwood Forest was just beyond the schoolyard and it was riddled with frogs, but they always avoided people. Maybe some frogs blinked, but with its eyes smushed against the glass, this one didn’t. I couldn’t stop looking at the frog and it couldn’t stop looking back. And if I hadn’t been trying to decide whether my dragon should have four legs or two, I might not have looked out window at that exact moment, dropping my pencil on the page. If it had chosen to press its little green face against any other window, I might not have seen it. I had barely gotten started when it appeared, and changed Stagwood, and me, forever. But, on that day, I never even got to the first pair of wings. And they each had a story that I wanted to tell. They’d have horns where horns don’t go, fur where scales should be, and all the wings. Most days, I drew imaginary places and then spent the rest of the time whipped up creatures to live there. So, instead of trying my hardest to listen, I spent most of class drawing in my notebook. The State Senator who was a teacher’s pet.
#BRAVE FRONTIER WHICH GUARDIAN OF LORE PROFESSIONAL#
The professional football player who got excellent marks in Math. But, by the second week of school she had started repeating herself, just like her outfits.īy then, I knew all the stories by heart. The first couple of times weren’t bad, maybe even kind of interesting. She was obsessed with tales of former students who had become some kind of famous. The biggest problem, though, was the stories.
It was the kind of boring that made your eyes shut without permission. For another thing, she was mind-numbingly boring. For one thing, she did, in fact, wear the same outfit every day the colors changed, but she always had on striped pants and a striped jacket. Before the school year started, I’d heard a few rumors about her, and within a week I realized that they were all true. Miss Weaver had been my teacher for a few months, and was known around Stagwood Elementary for the stack of black hair that rose a foot above her head. I was sitting in class when I first saw it.
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