The Youngest One by Nancy Springer Page A

sprawled at ease on the concrete.
    Jessie started to feel worried about it.
    “You can’t just sit there, funny face,” she told the toad. “Some butthead will do something to you.” Some kids in her nabe had got hold of a turtle once, and pounded it with rocks until it broke open. Jessie had tried to stop them, but it was like trying to stop Mom from drinking, no way. A bunch of kids had grabbed her by the arms and made her watch while the other ones killed the turtle. Remembering, Jessie felt sick.
    “Get out of here, toad.” Standing up, Jessie nudged it gently with her foot, feeling like she didn’t want to touch it with her hands. She’d heard that touching a toad would give you warts, and while she didn’t really believe that, the toad did look kind of gross. Anyhow, she didn’t know whether toads had teeth, and what if it bit her?
    Shoved by her toe, the toad didn’t even blink. Maybe toads couldn’t blink. It didn’t move, either, just sat there with its yellowish belly fat spread like a soft suction cup on the sidewalk.
    “Move, toad!” Jessie inserted her sneaker toe under its hind end.
    The toad didn’t budge.
    “Come on!” She tried using her foot like a lever to get the toad moving.
    Contentedly it sat the way she’d propped it.
    “Oh, why do I care?” Stepping away, Jessie turned to keep on walking wherever she was going.
    Nowhere.
    While the toad sat where some creep with size-thirteen Nikes could stomp it flat.
    Jessie shook her head, rolled her eyes, and bent over. She whispered, “Yuck.” When she straightened, she held the toad in both hands in front of her. Spread across her cupped palms, the toad felt flabby, clammy, and not real likely to move. Kind of like a big cold fried egg, only squishier.
    “Sweet are the uses of adversity;
    Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
    Wears yet a precious jewel in his head…”
    Dozing through English class the next day, Jessie sat up suddenly to listen. Toad? Hidden under her bed at home, sitting in some moist dirt in a cardboard box, was a toad, and Jessie wondered what to feed it. She had brought it various wormy things she’d found underneath loose bricks, but the toad had shown no interest in the creepy-crawlies.
    “What does Shakespeare mean by this?” the teacher was asking. “What is ‘adversity’?”
    No one wanted to answer, of course, but eventually it came out that adversity was sort of adverse weather in a person’s life. Like, bad luck, or hard times.
    “Now, in Shakespeare’s era, people believed toads were horrible, ugly animals associated with witches, poisonous to touch,” the teacher said as if she thought anybody cared. “But they also believed that often bad things carried their own cure. In a way we still do believe that. For instance, people still say ‘fight fire with fire’ or ‘hair of the dog that bit you.’”
    This wasn’t helping Jessie any. She started to lose interest.
    “…considered the toad venomous, yet at the same time they believed that inside the toad’s head was a jewel, a precious gemstone. And they believed that this toadstone provided a magical cure for poison.”
    Sure. Whatever.
    “So by this simile, Shakespeare is saying that, in a hidden way, hard times can be a blessing for us.”
    If that teacher thought that whatsit, adversity, was such a good thing, she ought to try having a departed father, a drunken mother, and disappearing brothers. Jessie tuned out.
    *
    Home from school, Jessie found no one there, as usual. No father, no mother, no brothers. But, letting her book bag drop to the kitchen floor, she reminded herself that there was a big peaceable toad, unless… It never seemed to move, like, maybe there was something wrong with its legs, but what if it had remembered how to hop? What if it had gotten out of the box and gone away?
    Taking the stairs two at a time, Jessie ran up to her room, lunged to her knees, and eased the box out from under the bed.
    Squatty, lumpy,