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All her life a toad has glowered at Amelia Friedman. She has lived an ordinary, sensible life, twenty-two years of it, and every time she thought to do anything different — even something so small as a wild haircut, or a spontaneous trip — she’s looked up to see the bile of the toad.

“That’s unnerving,” she says. “Stop toadying!”

That isn’t really an accurate description of what the toad was doing to begin with, but either way, it doesn’t stop.

Sometimes she cries from it. She wears her ordinary clothing and she lives her ordinary life and she cries because no matter how sensible she is she’s still a weird girl who gets glared and glowered at all the time by a toad nobody else can see.

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