A Frog Among Princes

I was never interested in kissing, and I had considered it a personal failure. Everyone seemed to want to kiss. Everyone seemed driven by a desire for physical intimacy. I desired something else, though I could not articulate it. All I could articulate was that I would not be fulfilled by a kiss. Depending on how you say it, people can take that different ways. They rarely took it the way I meant it, and the follow-up questions were predictable and easy to answer.

The ball was held late summer. I was born, unfortunately, during a heat wave, and therefore every subsequent birthday had to be celebrated during or on the edge of another heat wave. It was hard to evoke jubilation in a crowd of people that were melting. I immediately hated the day when I felt the uncomfortable trickle of sweat down my spine. Gogu was the only one to enjoy the heat.

I had mastered the art of entering my birthday party as inconspicuously as any guest. I wove through a crowd of Fiskers and Porches and Mustangs first. I was sure my parents didn’t know anyone who drove a Honda civic. The cars huddled together clannishly, like their owners. I could make out faces in the lantern-light. The garden was strewn with lanterns, and structures for the vine flowers to climb. Everything was wreathed with golden light and smelled like a flower shop had thrown up. Gogu had once told me that there was a way to assure roses would grow steadily and unhesitatingly in someone’s garden, and that was if they grew atop a body. It sounded very fairy tale to me at the time.

“How many people do you think have lived on this land?” Gogu had said to me. “Why do you think it’s so unlikely that one of them also died here? Beside, your garden is big enough for a morgue-full of people to have died and been buried.”

Just another way in which the upper class were privileged, though if someone had had the thought of planting roses in a warzone, I suppose those roses would outdo ours easily.

I let someone touch me on the elbow. This was normally forbidden, but this was not a normal night. I had to resign myself to others’ touch. Gogu was probably snickering from a potted plant somewhere, his ego inflating exponentially. But Gogu didn’t count as other; I didn’t think he had such a right to be as smug as he was that he was an exception to the rule.

“Lily!” Someone shouted. I couldn’t put a face to the voice, but someone saluted with three fingers, the gesture of the varsity swim team. I saluted and carried on.

He was here, and not too far away. I had to remind myself that I had submitted to this party more for Evan than because it appeased something nascent and empty in my parents. He looked very much like one of the Porsches in the front, which is to say shiny and untouchable and like he had nothing to do with me.

Gogu appeared on a day with rain. He appeared on a day with brilliant orange sun. I had just walked through my mother’s plot of garden, where nothing thrived beneath her un-green thumb, to the gardener’s herb garden. I preferred it to my mother’s flowers. The smells were richer, the plants more practical, and I did not have to hear about their difficulties or how much or little they needed to be watered.

I’d seen a frog leaping across the path and had decided to hurry it along, incase it was trying to make it across the entire garden, or in case someone else came along the same path and was not looking down for stray animals. The frog looked as unappealing as it could, in shades of green and brown that reminded me of the soggy bottom of a lake.

I shooed him away from the path and went inside. When I came to the door and found him sitting outside of it, I dropped a piece of cheese in front of him. I felt cruel only fifteen minutes later- I was fairly certain frogs could do nothing with cheese. The frog hadn’t left. There was an expression on his bumpy face that made me think of a child kicking their feet on a swing as they waited. I recall that after a full minute I had decided upon a name for part of his expression. He was decidedly smirking.

He jumped forward a little, close enough for me to hold, though I didn’t. “Thank you,” he said to me. His mouth moved strangely when he spoke, like it had to make awkward adjustments to the rest of his frog face to get words out.

“For what?” I said.

He shrugged a little, I’m sure. It was a movement like a cat shrug. Smooth and starting from the shoulders. But he finished with a shake of his rear. “Helping me off the path.”

“I didn’t really do anything. You hopped,” I said.

Gogu shrugged again. “The thought was there. Close calls do count, to me.”

Gogu stayed with me for weeks before he told me his age, before he told me his name and before he told me that he’d hidden under our abundant roses for a long time since hopping to the garden, and he had been speculating about who lay dead beneath them. I asked how long he had been under that rosebush, and how long he’d been wondering. Gogu had monumental patience, of the kind I would never have.

He knows that now. Just like I know what his face looks like when he’s just been smirking and is trying not to get caught at it.

Most of the guests looked like they had just fallen into the part of a yacht, and like the only problems they’d ever had were the kind that someone encountered on a yacht. There were men watch tans on their shapely wrists, and women with hair shined like the carapaces of iridescent, dark beetles. They looked at me when I appeared, took in my dress that was so white it was nearly blue, and nothing like the sort of dress I would have chosen for myself. Someone plucked a rose for me; I smelled it in front of them, which seemed the thing to do. They looked charmed as I played two narratives in my head, one was the rose in front of me, smelling sweet and summery, the other was a body in front of me, smelling acrid and dissolved. I smiled through it and moved on.

There were guests that I would never have invited, had I been consulted on the guest list at all. Neither of us liked to look at one another so we glared at one another from different spaces in the garden. We were all adept at being where our enemies were not. Unfortunately, because Evan was also where I was not, one of my enemies was stationed next to him. She looked unmovable and testy, as I imagined Cerberus looked stationed outside the gates of hell.

It somehow did not matter that Evan was on the other side of so much hairspray and hatred. He spoke to me anyway. “Lily. There you are. I was going to come looking for you.” He looked particularly devastating then, in that way that people can in a ring of lantern light and handmade Italian silk shirts.

“Well, you don’t have to now. Here I am.” This seemed self-evident, but people in my generation seemed t say self-evident things all the time. Evan looked satisfied with it. The stony quality of Cerberus’ face had increased by degrees. There were other, smaller and less relevant Cerberuses around her that also seemed to sense a disturbance in their night. They looked furious, and like they were furiously trying not to be. “Unfortunately. I mean, it’s not been that great, so far.”

“It could be better,” Evan said, diplomatically. “If you like dancing. Or if you want to go for a walk. I’ll have you back before the clock strikes midnight.”

I could feel my mouth grimacing and I tried to turn it into a smile. Evan’s expression said he’d seen the transformation, so I made as hasty a recovery as I ever have. “I like walks. I’m great at walking. You can watch. Come on.”

There was a stumbling moment in which he came to stand beside me and I pointed him the right direction and we walked and gathered gazes and focused on not returning them. He stared at my shoulders in the dress. I stared at the roses in the dark.

Gogu had a low opinion or balls and parties, and that this one was thrown in honour of my birthday did not change that. He had, for a few years, been disgusted by the fair offered, and how little control I had over it. It was an opportunity for my parents to flaunt their own popularity, he’d insisted, and subsequently insisted that I need not actually attend, because who would notice until it was time to blow out the candles on the cake? He’d been furious on my behalf when my mother had presented me with a dress that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. He was confused when I told him I would go, and shrugged when I tried to explain that obligation was a perfectly legitimate reason to attend an event, even if I lost hours of my life to it and aged prematurely before the end of the night.

“You’ll hardly eat because you’ll be nervous and tired,” Gogu predicted. “You’ll be bored by all the conversation, because you’ll have heard it or you won’t have because you already didn’t want to, and you won’t dance.”

“I won’t be bored by Evan’s conversation,” I said. I’d spoken to Evan enough times to know this to be the truth. “He’s the only one I’m really going to talk to.”

“Unless you faint, because you’ll hardly eat, because you’ll be nervous and tired.” Gogu’s tongue leapt and caught a gnat out of the thick summer air. He looked dissatisfied with its flavour, or my argument or both. “You’ll get bored of his conversation and you won’t dance.”

“It’s my own party. I have to go. Cerberus will be there.”

Gogu didn’t smile, but frogs can look incredibly self-satisfied. He looked as wickedly pleased as any sort of viper I had ever seen. “She doesn’t have to be.”

I shook my head at him. “Don’t say that. I don’t care if she comes, as long as she keeps away from me. I just want to choose what I wear and not have to make a grand entrance. And not to talk to everyone.”

Gogu snatched another insect from the air, this one of the stinging variety. I hadn’t even noticed it hovering near my cheek until it was between Gogu’s amphibian lips instead. He caught me staring. “Well, you already know that’s not going to happen, Lily. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“Nothing. I wasn’t asking you to tell me anything.”

Gogu considered me as he swallowed the angry insect. It might have been rattling in his throat but if it did, he didn’t show it. “I know. Just thought I’d say it anyway.”

Walking with Evan was almost exactly as I’d imagined. I smelled roses and felt heat jump between our shoulders. He was polite, only touching me to steer me, and keeping a polite distance between us. Our hands brushed. The wind shivered. The music was faint and then loud and then faint again. When I did see Cerberus’ face, it was violent as war.

We were living out a scene that would make anyone’s heart swell, and their hand flutter above their chest.

I knew Gogu was watching, though he wouldn’t reveal himself. He was only a shadow amongst other shadows.

“You look beautiful,” Evan said to me.

In the end, Gogu made my dress tolerable. Sometimes he disappeared and reappeared with trinkets. Shiny things he plucked off the street, as though he were a magpie rather than a frog. It was impressive that he managed to carry them from without to within the house and past my mother and the maid, who would have both tried to throw him in a French soup. I sometimes fantasized that they would see him, and each have a conniption. But those fantasies all ended poorly for Gogu.

This time it was not earrings or a necklace or a sewage-crusted ring he’d found all the way at the end of the drive that he brought back for me. It was one of the roses from the garden, which was perfect for securing to the front of my dress. It looked less unreal than it should have.

“If you’re going to act like a useless damsel, you should dress like it,” Gogu said, squatting on top of my chest of drawers as I fiddled with the petals. He watched me put on the shoes my mother had brought for me from some factory that did not pay their employees well enough.  “And this way, no one will smell you if you sweat.”

“Kind of you,” I said. “Don’t look.”

Gogu shut his eyes, though sometimes it was hard to tell. I also didn’t know if it made much of a difference, asking a frog to close his eyes. I kicked off the shoes, reached under the skirt of my dress, pulled off my jeans, and put the shoes on again. The cold fabric of the petticoat felt strange and sensual against my bare legs. Gogu’s eyes were open when I looked up again.

“Polka dots?” He looked at my skirt as though he could see my underpants through them.

I hissed, “Gogu!”

“I can’t see them now, calm down.”

It didn’t make a difference, really.

“The dress covers them up fine,” he said. “You just look uncomfortable in it. Too bad you can’t wear your jeans and boots. Not that I’m saying you should. I haven’t worn boots in a long time, so what do I know?”

This was one of the things I found interesting about Gogu. He had never told me exactly, but I was sure he hadn’t always been a frog.

Later, Gogu snickered at the lineup of cars in front of the house, like an automotive pageant. My own car wasn’t with them. It was up on blocks again, because it was always up on blocks, because giving up on the side of the road was how I knew it loved me.

“I like your Camaro better,” he said to me.

After I’d blown out the candles on my cake, and after Evan and I had both had a slice, some of which he’d tried to feed to me and I declined, he asked me for another walk. There was more intent in the shadows of his face now.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ve done enough walking tonight.”

“It is pretty tiring to be walking around the whole time. Want to go sit somewhere?”

“I think I want to sit on my own for a while,” I said.

Evan looked at me as though he was beginning to realize something, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about this realization. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased to have figured out some sort of puzzle, or wishing he hadn’t known he was up against a puzzle at all. Eventually he said, “Maybe we could go out sometimes. After school or something?”

Because I could hardly believe it was my own voice saying it, I listened very closely when it said, “I just don’t think we should. Thanks for keeping me company.”

I left the ball and went inside, and maybe only Evan noticed, or maybe Cerberus did as well, or maybe my mother did and I was already in trouble. I didn’t watch to find out. There was a feeling in my throat that meant I was going to emote terribly, and it made me as uncomfortable as anything else that night.

In the garage, just in sight of the Fiskers and Porsches, my Camaro watched me dustily as I leaned against it, dirtying my skirt. The top half of my dress was a little sweaty. The only thing that really still looked lively and perfect was the rose on my bodice.

Gogu ate the last of the gnats as I joined him. He hunched down on the hood patiently. His eyes reflected the porch light, and then the rose, and then my face.

Gogu smiled, pleased as a viper.

Art by Ludovic Jacqz

Text by Lucie MacAulay