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“Happy World Frog Day, Greasy Johnson,” Adam Young said one day in March, handing Greasy a piece of chocolate. “I made these for the class.”
“Uh…thanks?” Greasy looked at it with suspicion. Why would Adam be giving him a gift? If Greasy were a medieval king, he might force one of his subjects to taste it to ensure it wasn’t poisonous. But he was not a medieval king, and the other kids were happily munching on theirs, so it must be alright.
“Everyone deserves a frog today. Even my mortal enemies,” Adam said, his smile giving his face an otherworldly glow.
As Adam moved on to handing treats out to their other classmates, Greasy unwrapped the purple foil and examined the frog. This was no ordinary Freddo bar. Whatever mold Adam had used to make it was startlingly detailed, the skin showing bumps and pores just like a real frog. Greasy brought it to his mouth, but he couldn’t make himself eat it. He’d recently become a vegetarian, and though eating a chocolate shaped like a living creature wasn’t the same as eating meat, it still bothered him. He thought about throwing it away, but that also didn’t sit well with him. He decided to take it home with him. Surely he could find a good place for it somewhere on his cluttered shelves. For now, he wrapped it up and put it on his desk.
“Aren’t you going to eat that?” his right hand man Billy asked, seeing the confectionary amphibian on his desk. “They’re bloody delicious.”
“I’m saving it for a special occasion,” Greasy replied, moving it closer to him so that Billy wouldn’t take it and eat it. Luckily, Billy shrugged and decided to drop the matter.
Greasy cradled the frog in his hands on the walk home from school, ignoring any strange looks he got. Once he made it home, he went up to his bedroom and looked around for a good place to put it. Next to his books on fish keeping was a Kid’s Guide to Amphibians, which gave him the idea of trying to figure out which species this chocolate frog was modeled after. It was a bit absurd, but the frog was detailed enough that it seemed plausible.
He set the frog on the desk, then flipped through the book. The fact that “uniform chocolate brown” was not, in fact, a standard frog color threw a wrench in things. He was contemplating the question of if his chocolate frog would be the same size as the species it was modeled after when he heard a loud croak.
Shocked, he set the book down and watched the frog. “Did you really just…?”
The chocolate frog let out another croak, then blinked, hopping into Greasy’s hand. Its skin now felt warm and alive, unlike just minutes before. It then hopped onto his shelf of aquariums. First, it went to Big Red’s tank, the large, red-finned beta flaring at the frog in self-defense. Then it hopped over to the larger tank with neon tetras, who ignored it, the plecos, who looked up at it as if hoping it might drop food through the glass, and the pearl gouramis, who gathered around it like kindergarteners circling the teacher during story time.
“Can you join them in the tank, I wonder?” He flipped through the guidebook, as if an invisible hand might have written a new section on the care and feeding requirements of a frog that had just transformed from a piece of chocolate.
The frog decided to abandon the fish in favor of jumping into an empty quarantine tank meant for new fish. “Ah, that’ll do for now. Welcome to your new home, Freddo.” He had some work to do figuring out what the frog needed, not to mention convincing his parents to let him keep it without explaining its origin, but he was excited to have a new friend, even if it was technically a gift from the enemy.