Frog Freakout (7 page)

If anybody had been awake to see it, they would have been amazed at the sight of a stout senior, clutching a stack of kids' gadgety games, dashing across a field like a sprinter, accompanied by three frogs, leaping ahead of her in energetic bounds.

“Wheeeeeeee!” Charlie had quite got over her near death experience and was hugely enjoying the fun. So were Josh and Danny. Their back legs were immensely powerful and catapulted them about a foot and a half with each push off.

“Oooh—yum!” said Charlie, halfway through a leap. Danny glanced across to see some long spindly legs and a wing wriggling out of the side of her mouth. “What was that?” she asked. “It was like popcorn in the air! Who's throwing me popcorn?!”

“That would be a mayfly,” said Josh, narrowly avoiding Petty's Wellington boot.

“Eeeeugh!” shuddered Danny. But a second later, his tongue shot out of his mouth at incredible speed and collected another winged snack.
Crunch! Munch!
It was gone before he realized it. And it tasted good! Like Cheetos. “Aaaaargh! I can't believe I just did that!” croaked Danny, while Charlie whooped with delight.

“We're here!” said Petty, and they all plopped onto the wooden deck of the office cabin. Petty crept into the office and took the games straight to the confiscation cupboard. Josh, Danny, and Charlie landed with three small damp thuds on the desk and watched Petty carefully unlock the door and place the games inside. Up on the wall, the clock showed it was three minutes to Drill Sergeant's six o'clock alarm . . .

“Hurry UP, Petty,” whispered Josh.

Petty relocked the cupboard. Then she very carefully pushed open the door into the bunk room behind the office. At once a gale of snores could be heard. Petty crept in, a huge silhouette in the dim light, and the three frogs followed, trying hard not to plop too loudly on the wooden floor.

Drill Sergeant lay on his side, snug in his pajamas under a duvet, snoring loudly. His back was turned to them as Petty reached across to hang the key on the wall hook just above the head end of his bed. On the bedside table, the digital clock read 5:58 a.m. As the amphibian crew stared at it, shivering with nerves, it flicked to 5:59 a.m.

“Hurry!” Charlie couldn't help whispering, jumping up in the air with anxiety. Unfortunately she landed with a loud slap exactly in the lull between snores. Drill Sergeant snorted, snuffled, and energetically turned over. Petty Potts hit the deck like an athlete, dropping the key with a loud thud—just as Drill Sergeant's eyes blearily opened. She crouched low down on his mat and scrunched up her face, waiting for the awful moment of discovery, while three frogs sat in a row behind her, their mouths hanging open in horror. For a few seconds, there was silence.

Then the alarm went off.

In the shadow of Petty's crouching backside, Josh and Danny slammed their hands across their wide mouths to stop a scream of terror shooting out. Charlie put hers over her big eyes . . . and a high-pitched squeak did make it out of her mouth—but fortunately the shrill beeping of the alarm hid it. Drill Sergeant grunted and began slapping across to the bedside table to shut off the noise. His slappy hand missed Petty's dismayed face by an inch and eventually hit the clock. It fell into silence again, and Danny, peering past Petty, noticed that a digital word had sprung up above the numbers, which now read 6:00 a.m. It said “SNOOZE.” Snooze? That meant another five minutes, didn't it? Yes! Drill Sergeant rolled onto his back and made grunty, slurpy noises as his
tongue gradually unstuck from the roof of his mouth and his jaw fell open. His eyes were shut. He was going to have a snooze!

Danny could stand it no longer. He grabbed the key from the floor, jumped up onto Petty's shoulder and then leapt for the hook. Employing all his basketball skills, he stretched his arms out and threw the key at just the right angle so that the little metal ring would drop down over the hook. Half a second later, there was a ringing metallic clink as he scored.

“Yeeeeesssssss!” Charlie and Josh couldn't help shouting. Then “Noooooooo!” as Danny landed on Drill Sergeant's face, one leg in his open mouth.

What followed was a bit crazy. Drill Sergeant bawled “Plawaaa!” and shot up in bed, scrabbling at his face and thwacking Danny down onto the duvet. Danny screamed loudly, and then, realizing that he had to keep the man's attention while Petty crawled out of the room, he did a little dance. He did a hand jive and a shimmy across the duvet while Drill Sergeant stared at him in astonishment, his mouth still wide open and his eyes bulging. He looked like a frog himself. He didn't see the old lady shuffling across his floor on her hands and knees with two leaping escorts. He was far too busy wondering how a frog had learned to disco dance.

Finally, the alarm went off again, and in the second his audience glanced away, Danny hopped off.

“We DID it!” Charlie jumped up and down outside the girls' cabin. “We got the games back in the cupboard! We got the key back on the hook! Nobody will ever know! I won't be sent home!”

“No,” said Josh. “Nobody will notice anything strange at all, will they?”

“Aah,” said Charlie, noticing she was still a frog. “But it will wear off soon, won't it?”

“I can't find my antidote,” Petty was whispering, hoarsely, bending down from above. “You'll just have to get back into bed, all of you, and wait for it to wear off. It shouldn't be more than twenty minutes. I'll see you at breakfast!”

And she was gone.

“This has been the best adventure ever!” said Charlie. “See ya!” She jumped into the cabin through an open window, and as no girly screams followed, Josh and Danny guessed nobody had seen her get back into bed.

They got back into their own beds the same way and happily neither Callum nor Sayid noticed, being fast asleep.

It seemed like only minutes later that they were all getting up for breakfast, although it was 7:30 a.m. Josh and Danny got into their clothes and put Wellington boots on very quickly while the others weren't looking. They hurried into breakfast and sat down at Charlie's table.

“Um . . . everything . . . OK?” hissed Josh as Charlie dolloped golden syrup on her oatmeal.

“Mostly OK,” said Charlie. They looked down and saw that she had Wellingtons on too, even though it was a sunny day and everyone else was in sandals or sneakers.