Mrs. Boonchuy let out a yawn as she padded into the kitchen, expecting to have it all to herself so early in the morning; she'd have to make her own coffee, of course, but that was no big deal: she could have a peaceful few minutes of blessed solitude and think about the day ahead before chaos ensued as everyone else woke up.
It was an enormous surprise to her, then, to discover that there was an already full pot sitting on the counter waiting for her, the heady notes of cinnamon wafting invitingly up her nostrils; wordlessly, she filled up her mug, then sat down at the dining room table and curiously studied the creature sitting in a frog-like pose opposite her eating pancakes stuffed with chocolate-coated mealworms. It had arrived unexpectedly at her house and it was fair to say that she was still trying to make sense of its peculiarities.
"Mom," Anne said, forming the words around a mouthful of pancake, "it's really hard to eat when you're looking at me like I'm an exhibit in a zoo."
"Sorry," Mrs. Boonchuy replied, taking a sip of coffee; looking away also granted her a reprieve from the sight of the truly disgusting slop roiling around in Anne's mouth, and she found herself hoping that the mealworms had at least been bought from a pet store rather than found wriggling around under some nearby rock. "How are your pancakes?"
Anne made an iffy gesture with her hand. "D'you wanna try 'em?" She pushed her fork across the table, a quivering mass of batter and worm on the end of it. "They're nothing like the ones back in Amphibia, but they're passable."
"No, thank you," Mrs. Boonchuy said, her stomach churning. Properly cooked and served with Sriracha was one thing, but the thought of chucking bugs into everything was something else entirely.
"All right," said Anne, shoving the pancake into her mouth and chewing contentedly. "If you change your mind, there's leftover mix in the fridge. Just leave some for Sprig, though. It's his favourite way to start the day."
Mrs. Boonchuy stared at Anne for a long while; she flushed slightly at the realisation she was treating her own daughter somewhat like a laboratory specimen, but it was difficult not to given the circumstances: she'd arrived back home a foliage-laden mess after six months away, though a few showers and a new set of clothes had her looking somewhat like her old self. "It's just-" she hesitated, knowing how much Anne resisted any probing into exactly what had happened in Amphibia "-having you back at all is still very surreal to me, never mind everything else that goes along with it."
Anne cocked her head to the side, thinking. "You mean the Plantars? I know they can be a bit much at first, but they mean well and they're good people, er, good frogs." Mrs. Boonchuy watched as her daughter's expression became one of tenderness; for all their faults, it was clear to see that these frogs who had taken her in were very dear to her heart. "They're still settling in. Give 'em some time."
"That isn't exactly what I was talking about," said Mrs. Boonchuy with a shake of her head. Anne spoke the truth, though: even when they weren't trying to be, the Plantar family could be a bit of a handful at times. The youngest, a tadpole named Polly, had taken to antagonising their cat, Domino, at every opportunity, and the pair's duels frequently left a trail of destruction across the house. The older child, Sprig, was a cheerfully energetic rascal who wanted to poke and prod at everything despite being told not to. Especially when told not to.
And then there was their grandfather, Hop-Pop. In a way, he reminded Mrs. Boonchuy of her mother: so stuck in the old ways, so convinced that every ancient tradition should be adhered to, that you wished you had access to a time machine so they could witness for themselves just how truly awful living in the past would actually be.
Anne let out a small sigh, her appetite suddenly gone as her mother's steadfast gaze refused to abate. "Did I do something wrong?" Her mother's vibe was seriously off right now, and when she was like this usually it was because she'd done something that she shouldn't have.
"No; far from it, in fact. Since you've been back, you haven't done anything wrong at all," replied Mrs. Boonchuy. She smiled weakly. "That's what's freaking me out, I suppose."
"I thought you'd be pleased about that," said Anne, distractedly smooshing her remaining pancakes into a pulpy mess on the plate. "Normally you'd be trying to drag me out of bed right now." She looked at her significantly. "Normally you'd be yelling at me right now."
"I am pleased, but-"
"-But?"
"It's nothing," said Mrs. Boonchuy, stifling a sigh of her own. Before she'd left for Amphibia, Anne would never have gotten up at the crack of dawn on a weekday, nor would she have made her own breakfast, nor would she have bothered herself to clean up the mess afterwards even if she had. So big a change in just six months seemed impossible, but the evidence was sitting before her very eyes. More than once, Mrs. Boonchuy had silently asked herself, "Who is this person and what has she done with my real daughter?"
To say nothing of the interesting changes in her dietary habits. Sundays were now known as Bugdays in the combined Boonchuy-Plantar household; Mrs. Boonchuy was not looking forward to having to spend time in such close proximity with Hop-Pop later, with him questioning every single one of her decisions in regards to meal prep, but she tolerated it for the sake of her daughter. Anne and Hop-Pop had become incredibly close during their time together, and Mrs. Boonchuy wasn't prepared to risk upsetting her through losing her temper at Hop-Pop's oafishness.
"All right, if you say so," said Anne doubtfully. Too quickly, she got up, her chair scraping the floor as she did so, and emptied the remaining pancake mush into the bin, rinsed her plate, then kissed her mother on the cheek before exiting the kitchen.
Mrs. Boonchuy smiled at the openly affectionate gesture – so unlike Anne's past self – before she remembered what Anne had been eating just now and her face quickly became one of disgust; casting her eyes around the kitchen for something to take her mind off things, she clocked the weathered jacket Hop-Pop habitually wore slung over one of the dining room chairs. It was a sad, sorry affair with patches all over. None of which even matched the jacket's original colour.
Scrutinising the garment with the eye of a seasoned seamstress – a skill she'd tried to pass on to her daughter – Mrs. Boonchuy found herself thinking, I probably have some patches the right colour upstairs, I'm sure he won't mind if I fix it up a bit.
As she picked it up, a stack of papers came fluttering out of the inside pocket; she made a concerted effort not to look at them – they were none of her business after all – as she bent to pick them up from the kitchen floor, but her eye couldn't help but be drawn to a word printed in bold in the title.
Mrs. Boonchuy skim-read the rest of the papers, a surge of both anger and sadness washing over her as she did so, and unconsciously her hand clenched into a fist.
Later that evening, it was exactly as Mrs. Boonchuy had feared it would be.
"With all due respect, Mr. Plantar," she said through gritted teeth – her terse tone was ill at ease with her words – while brandishing the ladle that she had been using to stir the pillbug stew in such a way as to suggest that it could, if necessary, be embedded in any of a dozen different parts on the squishy frog person's anatomy, "I think it goes without saying that a mother knows the best way to cook bugs for her own daughter."
It was one of those sentences that made you question the chain of events that had required it be spoken in the first place; Anne bringing home this strange frog family to live with them had been, to put it mildly, unusual, but Mrs. Boonchuy liked to think that she and her husband had adjusted admirably to his unusual dynamic. There was precious little they wouldn't do to make their daughter happy.
Completely oblivious to the danger that he was now in, Hopadiah Hop-Pop Plantar replied airily, an infuriatingly patient smile affixed to his face as if he was having to explain a difficult concept to a small child, "With all due respect to you, Mrs. Boonchuy, I know that conventional wisdom says to boil them first, then add to them into the sauce, but I think you'll agree that sauteeing them before doing that releases more of the flavour and it helps to keep the innards tender. I mean, who wants pillbugs al dente, right?" He stuck his tongue out as he made a cartoonish disgusted face to emphasise his point.
This had been a common occurrence in the Boonchuy residence ever since they had agreed with her request to take the Plantars in; it had taken a great deal of adjusting to the idea that Anne had developed a taste for entomophagy whilst trapped for six months in Amphibia. Somewhere, Mrs. Boonchuy was slightly resentful of the fact that their family vacations to Thailand and its wondrous street markets filled with all sorts of foods, including fried and roasted bugs of every variety, had been of little interest to her. A product of growing up in America, she supposed, where it was still a rare concept.
Darkly, Mrs. Boonchuy wondered if telling Hop-Pop about the Thai predilection for frogs would be enough to change his supercilious attitude.
Returning to the matter at hand, she recalled Anne mentioning that though fruits and vegetables were plentiful over in Amphibia, pretty much the only extant source of protein was bugs, so purely out of survival she'd been forced into a diet rich in insects. Now – though they still had trouble wrapping their minds around this radical change – she claimed to actually enjoy them, so they'd agreed to incorporate them once a week into a meal for her and the Plantars (though they, unlike Anne, were content enough to pick them up from underneath rocks and eat them raw).
Unfortunately that's where the problems had started. Hop-Pop Plantar might've been considered a decent cook back on his own world, but here on Earth restaurant owner and professional chef Mrs. Boonchuy found his skills to be somewhat lacking; despite that, his habitual insistence that only he knew how Anne preferred her bugs to be prepared, had Mrs. Boonchuy finding herself in the unenviable position of being insulted both as a chef AND as a mother. Hop-Pop was a guest in her home and that meant she had to be accommodating of his quirks and eccentricities, that was true, but not if he was going to impugn the two things that she loved most in this world: her daughter and her cooking.
"Simplicity is the key," Hop-Pop said in that same aggravatingly chipper tone, waving his hand above the pan of the steadily-bubbling mixture to force more of the rich, earthy scent into his lungs. "If you prepare it properly it's quite similar to that, oh, what was it you served to us a few days ago?"
"Shrimp?" Though she had objected to bugs from an early age, Anne loved sea-food, and had even told her mother of a truly enormous crab that they'd once chowed-down on during one of her many adventures. After it had tried to kill them, of course, as so many other things had.
"That's right, though with all those fancy herbs you add to everything you do tend to lose a lot of the natural flavour."
"I'm so sorry," Mrs. Boonchuy replied in a voice dripping with sarcasm, the last of her patience ebbing away in time with the evaporating liquid in the pan, "that our pungent Earth spices are too much for your weak constitution to handle."
"That's all right," Hop-Pop replied so focused was he on the stew that he was completely blind to the scorn in Mrs. Boonchuy's tone. "That bland stuff you usually have – chicken or whatever you call it – needs so much fuss. Marinading, spices, sauces … insects don't need any of that." His eyes went wide. "Just the love and the patience to do things in the proper way."
Mrs. Boonchuy visibly bristled at that, her grip on the ladle turning her knuckles white. "You think I don't love my daughter enough to cook bugs properly for her?" Her voice was soft, barely above a whisper, yet the undercurrent of anger was palpable.
That finally brought Hop-Pop up short. He recoiled slightly as he caught sight of her expression and it finally sunk in just how much he'd offended Anne's mother, and he did his best to set his features into a contrite expression. "I'm so terribly sorry, Mrs. Boonchuy, I didn't mean to suggest-"
"-Suggest what? Listen, mung, you might've looked after Anne for six months, but I was doing the job for thirteen years before that. I've made food for her every single day of her life, and I know what she likes and how she likes it, okay?"
Hop-Pop sniffed as a new scent filled the air. "Um, I think the pillbugs are burning."
"What? Oh, praṇām." The stew, much like their argument, was now boiling over due to their forgetfulness in reducing the heat at the right time; the sauce had all but evaporated, and now the pillbugs were nothing more than dried-out husks of their former selves. Even the most desperate and hungry of Amphibian scavengers would've ignored them in their present condition. After turning off the stove and throwing the charred pan into the sink, Mrs. Boonchuy whipped off her apron and threw it at Hop-Pop's surprised face. "You carry on from here since you apparently know what's best for my child." With that, she stormed off.
A half-second later, Anne stuck her mop-top around the door. "Yo, is dinner almost ready? Getting kinda hangry out here," she said with a noise that sounded like her stomach strangling itself.
Hop-Pop sighed, folded up the apron and placed it on the countertop. "Dinner might be a bit late, Anne. There's something I need to do first."
Hop-Pop, after a brief search, found Mrs. Boonchuy sitting on the dinky wooden stairs that led to the front door of their house; in Amphibia it would already have been dark around this time, the baleful red moon casting its leery eye over the landscape, but in Los Angeles it was still painfully bright and muggy out, and he held up his hand to provide some shade from the burning sun. The humidity was one thing – he was used to that back in the swamp – but the sweltering heat could be downright oppressive at times. It was rather like the Dry Swamp outside the valley.
Ignoring his own mild inconveniences, he looked at Mrs. Boonchuy and saw the hurt she was desperately trying to hide. It was the same expression that had been etched into Anne's face after he'd told her the truth about hiding the Calamity Box, and it rocked him to his core to see it echoed so perfectly. "Mrs. Boonchuy," he said with as much remorse as he could muster, hands placed on his chest, "I'm terribly sorry about how I've acted. Not just now, but since we arrived here. You've been so kind, opening your home up to us, and I keep forgetting that we're not back on my farm. I'm overstepping my bounds at every turn, and I hope you'll forgive me."
"Mr. Plantar-" Mrs. Boonchuy wasn't sure how to continue from there. So many feelings had cropped up since Anne's return; an overwhelming joy was the main one, but also a deep, deep sadness that she'd lost out on six months of her daughter's life. A six months that had changed her irrevocably. It didn't seem like a lot, but so much had happened to her in Amphibia that she was almost a complete stranger compared to the person who'd left. If she was being callous, Mrs. Boonchuy would describe this new Anne as an improvement over the one who'd left – more mature, more centred, less headstrong – but she knew she'd be lying if she said she didn't miss the lazy, selfish girl with whom she'd quarrelled almost daily.
No, it wasn't that. Not exactly.
"Yes?"
"The truth is-" she swallowed even though the lump in her throat made it hurt to do so "-I'm jealous of you and the bond you have with Anne."
"Jealous? Why?" asked Hop-Pop incredulously.
Mrs. Boonchuy let out a weary sigh. She looked off into the hazy distance, thinking about all the hoops she'd jumped through to get her daughter to do, well, anything useful around the house. Threats to take away her 'phone, forbidding her to see Sasha and Marcy, taking her off the tennis team. "I've been Anne's mother for thirteen years and I could never get her to clean up after herself, or to take an interest in school, or even-" she frowned "-or even to not steal. You did all that and more in just six months." She looked at Hop-Pop, tears forming in her eyes. "How were you a much better parent to her than I ever was?"
"The stealing wasn't really her fault," replied Hop-Pop, recalling Anne's tearful account how they'd ended up in Amphibia in the first place. "Sasha and Marcy pushed her into doing it."
"She could've said no."
"Have you met her? She isn't really the no-type."
Mrs. Boonchuy managed an ironic laugh at that. "True." Peer pressure was such a horrendous thing because you naturally assumed that your best friends would also have your best interests at heart, but sadly, that wasn't always the case. Her husband had wanted Anne to have nothing to do with Sasha, but he was a wise enough man to know that the more you forbade a child to do something the more they'd want to do it.
The fact that Marcy had turned out to have some issues of her own totally blindsided them, though.
"It was out of necessity at first, the chores around the farm," Hop-Pop said by way of an explanation, sitting down in the empty space next to Mrs. Boonchuy, not quite looking at her. "I offered her room and board after she helped save the town from a monster, and she felt like she had to help out as payment. Don't get me wrong, she complained endlessly about everything and she was terrible at it at first-" there was a note of fondness in his tone "-but over time, like the food, she grew to love it."
"She's like that," Mrs. Boonchuy said wistfully. "Loving, I mean." It wasn't so much that Anne had changed that was the problem, it was the fact that she hadn't been there for any of it.
"She has the biggest heart out of anyone I've ever known, and while I don't claim to know much about these sorts of things, I think that's the secret of her superpower, you know? Love, empathy, compassion, whatever you want to call it." He shook his head. "But you have nothing to be jealous of at all. You're her mother, and I'm just some old coot she was stuck hanging out with for six months until she could get home." Anne's words at the first temple, that they weren't truly a family, still resonated with him even though they were spoken out of anger. They'd patched things up since, but he still couldn't help but feel a distance between them compared to their earlier relationship.
Mrs. Boonchuy looked at Hop-Pop with a reproving smile, realising what he was trying to do. "That's nonsense and you know it. It's pretty obvious to anyone that knows her that she thinks of you as another grandfather, and I know you think of her as a granddaughter."
Scratching the back of his neck, Hop-Pop said, "Well, I wouldn't go that-"
He was cut-off by the sudden brandishing of a sheaf of papers. It was very, very quiet for a moment. "-Oh, I see you found those."
"When I was cleaning up, yes." She felt the need to add: "They fell out of your jacket pocket, I didn't go snooping or anything." Mrs. Boonchuy's initial reaction upon finding the papers had been one of devastation – how dare this frog try to steal my daughter away from me – and she'd fully-intended to go straight to Hop-Pop to discuss it, possibly at dhab-point, but when she'd taken a moment to think things through rationally she'd realised that he'd only been trying to do what he thought was best for Anne. In a way, it was his fatal flaw: he always thinks he knows what's best for everyone.
Though Anne was still sketchy about her time in Amphibia, the gist of her early adventures seemed to be trying to recreate things from home: going to the beach, making pizza, adopting a pet, working in a restaurant. Mrs. Boonchuy realised that the reverse was true now: Hop-Pop was a dimension away from everything that he knew and took for granted, and he was trying to maintain some degree of control over things to keep from losing his mind in this strange world.
Hop-Pop took the papers from Mrs. Boonchuy's outstretched hand and made an appearance of examining them closely; he already knew every word of what they said, but it gave him something to do that wasn't giving a rapid, thorough and very good explanation.
"Were you really going to do it?"
"I picked them up just before we left for Newtopia. I'd been thinking about it for a month or two – making it official, I mean – and I figured there was a good chance that all this stuff with the Calamity Box could go wrong, then Anne would be stuck in Amphibia for a long time with nothing but the clothes on her back." He hesitated slightly. "I just … I wanted her to think of my place as her place, too, not somewhere she was crashing for a few months, you know?" He read the heading of the papers again: TOWN OF WARTWOOD – REPORT OF ADOPTION. "Can you believe stupid old me was starting to get all misty-eyed about the idea of Anne and Sprig watching over the farm after I was gone, looking after Polly ..."
With no legal guardians to sign Anne over to him, it would've been up to the Mayor of Wartwood to make the decision as to whether or not to ratify the document. Hop-Pop doubted that would've been a problem, though: he might've been a shady character, but even Mayor Toadstool had eventually warmed up to Anne … as had the entire town. Strange to think it had all started with them believing her to be a hideous monster who might eat them at any moment.
"Anne Boonchuy-Plantar does have a nice ring to it, doesn't it?" said Mrs. Boonchuy. She couldn't honestly say she was in love with the idea of her daughter spending her life working on a farm in a swamp in another dimension, but it was something that clearly meant a lot to Hop-Pop and she couldn't help but be touched by the notion that he loved her enough to want see that she had a home even if something happened to him. It was clear to her that their bond had transcended friendship to family. The pain of those lost six months wouldn't quite fade, she expected, but she could learn to make peace with it when it had brought so many positives into their lives. "Mr. Plantar," Mrs. Boonchuy said, swallowing the residual pain she still felt, "I owe you so much for taking care of her all this time. Thank you."
"It was my honour, Mrs. Boonchuy," Hop-Pop replied, placing his hand on his heart. "You raised a wonderful daughter and you should be very proud of everything she's accomplished."
Anne stuck her head around the door and practically shouted, "Are we gonna eat now?" When she saw that her mother and adoptive grandfather were finally regarding each other with something like affection, she quietly withdrew, saying, "Oh, you guys are having a moment. Cool." She was silent for a moment. "I'm totally ruining this, aren't I?"
"Yes," they said in unison.