Amphibian by Carla Gunn Page B

I say it and look at her, the more she doesn’t seem like my mother anymore. She seems stranger and stranger to me the more I stare at her and think the word
Mom
. It’s almost like she becomes an alien or something and if I do this for too long, I get scared and then I have to look at something else. When I look back to her again, she’s back to normal.
    When my mother was mad at me, she wasn’t at all normal. But then she lay down with me and she went back to normal. Especially after she fell asleep.
    I listened to her snore and thought about Cuddles some more. I am starting to think of a plan for getting him free. I am going to talk to Bird about it.

My mother told me that after school tomorrow she’s taking me to a psychologist. His name is Dr. Barrett and she says he helps kids with their problems, like worrying about things. My mother’s eyebrows were kind of scrunched up and her lips got a little thinner when she told me this. I told her she looked like the worried one, not me, and that maybe she’s the one who needs to go to a psychologist. She said maybe so, and that she’ll talk to him about her problems too. I wonder if she means me.
    I saw on the Green Channel that psychologists sometimes imprison animals in cages and do experiments on them. A lot of scientists who work for big companies also keep animals in cages and test soaps and shampoos and things like that on them. They put rabbits, mice, guinea pigs, hamsters and ferrets in restraining devices so they can’t move and then put chemicals on their skin and in their eyes. Sometimes they don’t even give them painkillers because they want to know how much it hurts. Sometimes animals break their necks or backs trying to escape the pain.
    Those scientists say animal testing is absolutely necessary. This doesn’t make any logical sense to me because other companies make the same sorts of things without any animal testing at all. So how can it be absolutely necessary?
    My mother said that Dr. Barrett works only with humans, not animals. She means not-human animals. But I’m not so sure about this whole psychologist thing.
    I saw Dr. Barrett today. After he explained to me who he is – somebody who can help me feel less worried – he asked me if I wanted to talk about anything in particular. When I didn’t say anything, he did mostly all the talking.
    He said, ‘You know what a thought is, eh, Phin?’
    I said I did. In fact, since I had sat down on the chair that was too high for me, I had four thoughts:
    1. Dr. Barrett smelled like parmesan cheese.
    2. I hate parmesan cheese.
    3. It smells just like throw-up because they have the same molecular structure.
    4. The U.S. military has tried to find a smell for stink bombs that everyone would find horrible but they can’t find one – not even toilet smells.
    â€˜You also know what a fact is, right, Phin?’
    I said I did. He asked me for a fact and I told him that a pistol shrimp has a small claw and a large claw, and when it snaps the large one shut, the two halves squeeze water out at such a speed that it’s the loudest sound made on earth by any animal. It can even deafen sonar operators in submarines. Dr. Barrett said, ‘That’s very interesting, Phin. That fact is in your head with lots of other thoughts, right?’
    I nodded my head.
    â€˜Well, here’s another thought for you, Phin: right now I’m having a thought about a purple people-eating monster. Is this thought like your pistol-shrimp thought? Is this thought a fact too?’
    I shook my head, but I felt like there might be a trap ahead.
    â€˜Because thoughts and facts aren’t necessarily the same, right, Phin?’
    I nodded my head.
    â€˜Do you know, Phin, that thoughts make emotions?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said.
    â€˜The trick, Phin, is to know that lots of the thoughts that make unhappy emotions like sadness and worry are not really