Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

“Carson” — everyone else called me Kit, after the pioneer who was born in an adjacent county — “when most students ’round here need help, they look up for guidance. Now, unless you worship J.D. Bracy as your chief deity, you were cheating back there.”

I don’t bother to deny it. No sense to it. Not when you’re caught red-handed and red-faced. I’m wondering how to look my disappointed parents in the eyes when Waverly does something I don’t expect.

“Carson, I wrote on your test: ‘STUDENT GOT SICK AND NEVER FINISHED.’ Now you’ve got another chance to take the ACT in six weeks. That’ll mean a lot of extra studying, but we’re going to get through it, bro.”

I look at him with tears hiding behind my eyelids. “Why... why are you doing this for me? No one...”

Waverly pulls his scraggly blond hair back into a ponytail. “When I got in real big trouble recently, I realized we all make mistakes and that everybody needs a second chance.”

And every Saturday I came back to school for some tutoring. Maybe it was because I spent the extra time with Waverly that I felt I got to know him pretty well. He was usually so upbeat he was infectious. I mean, Sheriff Bowles was all over him like flies on a bull. Waverly would get pulled over for coming to a rolling stop, speeding, or failing to signal a turn, but Judge Fanning would never fine him more than a buck an offense (which taught me to never underestimate the power of a woman). And through it all Waverly’d be grinning, a living smiley-face like those Miss Large used to stick on our papers.

But then along about the end of October the sheriff stopped harassing him, and we expected Waverly to be even happier. Instead, he seemed miserable. Adults just don’t make sense. Some days he looked too tired even to show us how to make those paper airplanes that soared over school property out onto Route 52. We’d catch him going over to the door and looking around or staring out the classroom windows as if something was out there we couldn’t see.

All that changed for a while when we got to the next story in Toad Lit. The day seemed different from the moment Principal Pike interrupted class with a package that was marked SPECIAL DELIVERY. Well, Waverly just leaves this thing the size of one of my mother’s hat boxes sitting on the corner of his desk, and he seems to pay no attention to it. Now we’re all like kids at a birthday party who have just got to open a present the moment we spot it, but Waverly sits there in the lotus position on Miss Large’s once-sacred desk recounting Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, going on about how Prince Edward changes clothes with his exact twin, a pauper boy, and lives his life in disguise. Now I was just wondering if Waverly had chosen to say something about this Twain book because WACK had gotten Huck Finn banned when I saw the box move. Leah jumped. So did Delbert. That sucker leapt right from Whitley’s hands and hopped toward the desk. A couple of kids shook their heads, settled back, and I swear the box moved again. Now I’d never been to one of those séances, but at that moment you could have easily convinced me that spirits were loose in that classroom.

Finally Brad gets up and heads for the box. “If you’re not going to open it,” he says, “I am.”

Leah just looks all goo-goo-eyed, and everybody knows her puppy-love crush on Waverly is starting to reach full, adult doghood.

“Is that the largest Mexican jumping bean in captivity?” asks J.D.

“ ‘It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, maybe, but it ain’t,’ ” says Waverly. “ ‘It’s only just a — ’ ”

“Frog,” I finish, remembering our homework assignment was to read that short story by Twain.

“Fab, Carson,” says Waverly. And he begins to unwrap the box. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, I present for your entertainment... Notorious.” And from the box he pulls this huge green and squatty thing the size of a house cat with big eyes. “Bufo alvarius, commonly known as the notorious jumping frog of Calaveras County.”

“Now,” says Whitley, picking up Delbert, “Waverly and me, we each gots one of our own.”

Waverly explains how he got a friend of his in California to send him the frog. Now Notorious wasn’t a champion or nothing, our teacher stresses, but he was still competitive.

“How far you think he can leap without any buckshot in him?” says J.D., who must have read the story, too.

“Let’s find out,” Waverly answers, and draws a line in chalk at the front of the room. Then he has Whitley set Delbert down. Now frogs are like your kid sister or brother — they never perform when you want them to, but finally Whitley sweet-talks his little buddy into leaping.

I put my pencil down at the spot, and we measure the long jump. “Six feet, seven and one-half inches.”