Free Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore Page B

his rearview mirror he could see us sorting our money. We had brought forty dollars with us and were counting what was left.
    “Where you girls work?”
    I didn’t say anything. I looked out the window, past the traffic, toward the lake.
    “Storyland,” said Sils. There was something brazen and high from the pot in her voice. “I’m Cinderella there,” she added. I could tell she wanted, just for the fun of it, to shock him somehow.
    “Is that right?” He looked in the rearview mirror again, to check her out, I supposed. But instead he looked mostly at me. As if I were the guard or the interpreter. “I used to work there myself as Humpty Dumpty—before they got that ceramic, mechanical one.” Now he turned hopefully to look at us both in the backseat.
    “Really?” I said.
    “Should we call you Humpty?” asked Sils.
    “Sure.” He smiled.
    “We can’t call you Humpty,” she chided. “We’ll have to call you, um—Humphrey!” and we burst our laughing, in a stoned, mean way, but he laughed with us, and we all just sat there in the night traffic laughing in the uncontrolled, hysterical way of people who rarely got what they wanted in life though they also didn’t try very hard.
    We didn’t stop. The laughter built—especially his—to tears and gasps. Three fools from Horsehearts—how funny! We
    couldn’t stop. Even after our cabbie grew quiet, Sils and I sank against the cab doors and snorted, while he sighed and cleared his throat, silently taking the correct turns and driving us the ten miles back to my house. I thought of the time in fifth grade when our science teacher had made some of us be planets and positioned us in town according to where the planets would actually be, relatively speaking. The downtown library was the sun, and Jerry Murphy, who was Mercury, was positioned right there on the library steps. He was dressed in red and carried a little sign with the name of his planet on it. Sils had been Venus and was made to stand by the Civil War monument, two blocks away, draped in gauzy material meant to resemble clouds. But I was Pluto, and had to stand several miles outside of town, in the middle of the countryside. The teacher drove me there herself. And I stood there all afternoon, in black leotards, next to a dairy farm and a cornfield, with my little sign that said Pluto. The local paper came by and took my picture and Sils’s older brothers drove past in their car and honked and hooted. Despite the humiliation, I felt close to Sils then. Because of her brothers. Because we were in outer space together, and her brothers had come by to see me.
    Which for some reason was how I felt now in the cab, with the cabbie, and our all laughing together. I felt, perhaps because of the pot, like we were all planets in the same solar system—which was all I had ever wanted or asked from people, anyone, ever.
    “Thanks,” we said when we got out. And we tipped him twenty dollars, “just to blow his mind,” Sils whispered.
    “Do you think we did? Do you think we blew his mind?”
    He hadn’t looked to examine the bills. He’d just stuffed them into his pocket.
    “He’ll look. He’ll see,” said Sils.
    When we went inside, only Claude was still up. He wassprawled on the couch, under a blanket, watching TV like a sick person. In the last six months he’d been growing in the pale, disproportionate way of adolescents and leggy plants—his limbs and feet sending themselves out past his cuffs like antennae. But he was still a little boy and self-conscious. I always suspected him of having a crush on Sils.
    “Hi,” he grunted, turning his head just slightly to see us, then he blushed and turned back to the television.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “Hi, Claude,” Sils said a little flirtatiously.
    “Hi,” he said again.
    “Did LaRoue already come in?” I asked, suddenly worried.
    “Yeah,” he said absently. That was all. We tiptoed back to my room, trying not to squeak the floorboards and bring