Chapter Text
The fluffy look was back. At least, that’s how it seemed to Rebecca Gardiner.
Rebecca loved her cousin Mary. She felt a bit less like a cousin, and more like an older sister or an aunt, though in Rebecca’s mind Mary wasn’t quite like either of those, either. She was older and cooler and knew way more than Marianne, and she was younger and kinder and a much better listener than Aunt Jane (though she’d once overheard her dad complaining that his sister didn’t listen to anyone ever, so maybe that was more of an Aunt Jane thing than an aunt thing). The point was, Mary was special. She was smart, and helpful, and talked to her and her siblings like they were real people, and not like they were silly children.
Tom was like that, too, Rebecca thought. He wasn’t an uncle, or an older brother, or a cousin like Mary. But he was nice and funny and didn’t tell her parents that one time he’d caught her sneaking sherbet lemons from the candy stash under the bar at The Game Garden.
Tom was special, the same way Mary was special. Maybe that was why he and Mary kept getting the fluffy look around each other.
Rebecca didn’t say anything about it. She just held each of their hands as they made their way to the Natural History Museum. Marianne and George were well ahead of them, but she didn’t mind, as it gave her more of an opportunity to observe her cousin and her friend. It seemed that every time Mary looked at Tom, he was looking at something else…and every time he looked at Mary, she was similarly distracted. She wondered at how they never seemed to be able to look at each other at the same time, especially since the way they were looking at each other was so similar.
Fluffy. Definitely fluffy.
It was funny, Rebecca thought, how easily she could spot Mary’s fluffy look now, compared to when she had first seen it. It had started with the emails, of course. She and Marianne and George had noticed it pretty early on, even if Mary herself never seemed to notice she was doing it, and it had been Rebecca herself who’d first made the connection. She hadn’t meant to pry…but she had snuck a peek at Mary’s laptop once, when her cousin had been distracted by a customer and had forgotten to close it, and she’d discovered that Mary had been reading an email from someone. The name wasn’t of anyone she knew - it hadn’t been a real name at all, actually, just something that started with a T - but whoever was writing Mary had included lines from a poem. She only remembered because the poem had been about frogs. Something about being kind to them.
Rebecca hadn’t dared tell anyone exactly what she’d seen (thankfully, her older siblings had figured out the email connection on their own), but she had decided that it made complete sense for Mary to get a certain look on her face whenever she got an email from that person, because anyone who sent her nice poems about frogs had to be someone who liked her very much.
That was the key to the fluffy look: the liking. Mary liked her email friend – not in the way Rebecca liked Mary, or her siblings, but in the way that her mum and dad liked one another. Her parents had a fluffy look of their own, though it looked slightly different. More uniquely them.
If anything, that was what confused Rebecca the most. She would have expected Mary’s fluffy look to be different, like how Marianne’s look seemed to change whenever she developed a new crush on someone in her class. But the look Mary had when she was with Tom was exactly the same as the one she had whenever she got an email. And Tom seemed to look at her the same way.
Grown ups were weird, Rebecca thought. If only they’d just look at each other properly.
Rebecca was thinking about what she might be able to do to make that happen, when another person suddenly bounded into their path.
“Why, hello there!” the man said brightly, looking at Mary. He seemed to know who she was.
Rebecca looked up, holding Tom and Mary’s hands a little tighter in the presence of this stranger. Tom’s fluffy look was gone, she noticed. He looked a bit more like her dad did when Aunt Jane was around– smiling, but only just.
“Hello, Will,” he said. “What brings you to South Kensington this afternoon?”
“Oh, Catherine had me round for tea, and then I decided to have a wander. Quite a lovely coincidence, since I had no idea you would be in the area today!”
Mary adjusted her glasses with her free hand. “We’re on our way to the Natural History Museum,” she explained. “I take my cousins sometimes, and they asked Tom if he could join us.”
“They did, did they?”
There was a hint of suspicion in this Will person’s voice that Rebecca did not like at all, and she found herself responding to his question. “Why wouldn’t we want to invite Tom? Tom is our friend, too,” she said.
Will knelt down to face her directly. He stuck out his hand. “My name is William Ryder. I’m a friend of your cousin Mary, and of your friend Tom. Perhaps that means we could become friends, too?”
Rebecca looked first at Mary, and then at Tom. He seemed like a nice enough man, and for Mary’s sake at least, she thought she should be polite. But part of her sensed that making friends with Will might hurt Tom’s feelings, and she didn’t want to do that, either.
Politeness won out. Still holding Tom’s hand with her left, she released her grasp on Mary’s hand in order to shake Will’s. “Rebecca,” she said primly. “Nice to meet you.”
Will stood, looking pleased with himself. “Lovely to meet you, Rebecca. Now that we’ve been introduced, perhaps I could join your party on your outing to the museum? It’s been ages since I’ve gone…and that way we can get to know each other better.”
Rebecca shrugged, annoyed that she had been tricked into letting a stranger crash their party. Didn’t he know that they’d specifically invited Tom to join them because they wanted Tom and Mary to spend more time together on their own?
Unfortunately, Will seemed to interpret her silent shrug as confirmation of an invitation. “Excellent!” He held his arm out for Mary. “Since Tom is escorting Miss Rebecca here, perhaps you would allow me to offer my arm?”
Rebecca narrowed her eyes. She knew that Mary would accept, if only to be polite. But she didn’t appreciate being thwarted.
“Ah, um…okay, sure,” Mary said.
Rebecca watched as Will proceeded to walk off with her cousin, her arm loosely linked with his. She looked up at Tom, and was sad to see him looking a lot less fluffy, and a lot more disappointed.
She tried to think of a way to cheer him up as they resumed walking, following at a bit of a distance. “I wish I knew how that frog poem went,” she said quietly to herself.
“What frog poem?”
Rebecca’s cheeks warmed as she peeked up at Tom. “I um…I was thinking about frogs,” she said. “I read a poem once about being kind to them, and I was trying to remember it.”
Tom seemed to brighten at this. “I think I know that one, actually.”
“You do?”
“Sure,” he said. He smiled, thinking to himself for a moment. “I believe it goes something like this:
Be kind and tender to the Frog,
And do not call him names,
As ‘Slimy skin,’ or ‘Polly-wog,’
Or likewise ‘Ugly James,’
Or ‘Gape-a-grin,’ or ‘Toad-gone-wrong,’
Or ‘Billy Bandy-knees’:
The Frog is justly sensitive
To epithets like these.
No animal will more repay
A treatment kind and fair;
At least so lonely people say
Who keep a frog (and, by the way,
They are extremely rare).”
Tom paused. “Was that the one you were thinking of?”
Rebecca grinned back. “That was it, exactly! How did you know it by heart?”
“I learned it when I was about your age, actually,” Tom replied. “There was a poetry contest at school, and we all had to learn one to recite in front of the class. I didn’t win–”
“You should have won!” Rebecca protested. “That poem is brilliant!”
Tom tilted his head in agreement. “It is a brilliant poem, even though it’s not so well known. It might actually be part of the reason I love poetry so much today. I guess you could say that even if I didn’t win that poetry contest, poetry won me.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he said with a laugh. “You know, that poem even helped me settle an argument once. I was emailing a very good friend of mine, and I was talking about how poetry could help encourage people to be kinder and more empathetic. She– I mean, my friend– seemed a bit reluctant to agree with me, but when I shared that poem with them, they couldn’t help but see things my way.”
Tom’s gaze seemed to drift over to Mary as he spoke, even as she walked ahead with Will. That's when Rebecca noticed it. The fluffy look had returned.
“Do you think you could recite it again?” she asked.
He grinned, and over the course of their walk he recited the poem at least two more times.
As he did, Rebecca came to remember things about looks she had seen, and poems she had read, and laptops she’d peeked at in the past. And that was when it hit her: it made sense that Mary’s fluffy look for Tom and for her email friend was the same. Because they were the same person.
She wondered if Mary knew this. Judging by the way Mary walked next to Will and not Tom, she suspected she did not. But she hoped Tom would tell her, and soon.
Rebecca lingered at the bottom of the steps when they reached the museum entrance. “You should talk to her,” she told him quietly.
Tom looked down at her. “Talk to whom?”
“To Mary,” she replied. “About the frogs. I think she’ll like that poem, too.”
The corner of Tom’s mouth lifted, ever so slightly. “I hope you’re right.”
She smirked at him. Grown ups really were very silly sometimes. “Of course I’m right. Mary loves frogs, just like I do. Just promise you’ll talk to her, okay?”
Tom nodded solemnly. “I promise.”