by Ali Standish
“Oh, it’s just an old place no one’s taken care of,” Aunt Clare said.
“Yeah,” said Sammy, “because the old man who lived there disappeared.”
“Sammy,” Aunt Clare cautioned, flicking her eyes toward her daughter in the rearview mirror. “Don’t tell tales.”
“It’s true!” Sammy protested. “Everyone knows it. Ten years ago, he—”
“Sammy,” Aunt Clare warned, “stop scaring our guest. Anyway, we’re home now.”
Sammy raised her eyebrows at me as we pulled into the driveway. “Later,” she mouthed.
6
Sammy’s house wasn’t as big as some of the others on the street, and it didn’t have much of a lawn besides a clump of palm trees on one side of the drive, each frond like a tiny green firework. It was blue and sat on brick stilts, with a big staircase that led up to the porch and the front door.
“Wow,” I said. “It’s great.”
“It’s okay,” Sammy said as she darted from her seat. She reappeared by my side, slinging my backpack over her shoulders as Aunt Clare tugged my rolly bag from the back. I took it and dragged it awkwardly over the shell-strewn driveway so she could carry the ginormous watermelon.
“Just leave your bag there,” Aunt Clare said when we got to the bottom of the staircase. “Jai will get it for you.”
“My brother,” Sammy said.
When Aunt Clare had come to visit us that one time, she’d only brought Sammy along. I knew Sammy had a brother, but I’d never met him or her dad.
I left my suitcase and followed Sammy and Aunt Clare up the stairs and inside, where I gulped in the cool air gratefully. It smelled like boy sweat and sunscreen and frying onions.
“We’re home!” Sammy called. “Dad! Jai!”
I heard footsteps, and then a lanky man with tortoiseshell glasses appeared in the hallway. Sammy rushed over and wrapped her arms around him, and I felt a sharp pang of homesickness. Once Sammy had released him, he reached a hand out to me. “So nice to meet you, Miranda,” he said. He had a faint Indian accent.
“Hi, Mr. Grover,” I said, taking his hand.
“No, no,” he said. “Mr. Grover was my father. You can just call me Uncle Amar. I’m making fajitas for dinner. I hope that’s okay?”
“Mmmm,” Aunt Clare said, stepping forward and kissing him on the cheek. “Sounds good.”
The smell of the onions had made my stomach begin to growl, and I nodded eagerly. I could hear the sound of a guitar being played upstairs.
“Jai!” Aunt Clare called. “Come meet our guest! And get her bag, please!”
The guitar music stopped and a minute later a boy appeared on the stairs, maybe three or four years older than me and Sammy. He was tall, like his dad, and he had his dad’s black hair, Sammy’s hazel eyes, and Aunt Clare’s pale skin.
“Hey,” he said. “Jai.”
“Hi,” I said, staring at his band T-shirt because I didn’t know where else to look.
“Yeah,” Sammy said, following my gaze. “Jai got the music genes.” She turned to him. “This is Miranda. Be nice to her.”
“I’m always nice,” Jai said. “Except to brats.”
Sammy clicked her teeth. “I’m not a—”
“Go get Miranda’s bag, please, Jai,” Aunt Clare said. “Sammy, why don’t you take her up and show her your room?”
“Come on,” Sammy muttered, taking my hand and pulling me up the stairs. “You’re sharing with me. I’m not bragging, but my room is totally awesome. You’ll see why!”
She skipped down the hall and into her room. It was really neat—probably her mom made her clean it for me—and smelled less like sweat than the other parts of the house. She had a twin bed pushed up against the wall, a bedside table, a desk with a framed picture of her and two other girls, and a bureau covered in stickers. On the floor next to the bed, there was a mattress that had been made up with a pink blanket. She dropped my backpack on it.
“It’s cool,” I said.
“Yeah,” she agreed, grinning. “But here’s the really great part.”
She bounded to a set of curtains and opened them to reveal a sliding glass door. Then she pushed it ajar and slipped out. I followed her onto a wooden side porch with a staircase going up.
The stairs led to a flat rooftop with a little railing going all around it, where there were a few lounge chairs and a table. From up here, you could see the whole town. Oak Street, and the top of the August Oak, the amusement park Sammy had told me about, with its familiar Ferris wheel, and the two big hotels. Beyond it all, the ocean stretched as far as I could see, unbroken except for a little island with a dark lighthouse poking out from a thick canopy of trees. I stared at the island, wondering why I hadn’t seen it in any of the postcards. For some reason, it gave me a nervous feeling that made me shudder, so I turned my eyes back to the ocean.
The sun was starting to go down, casting a shimmering orange glow over the water. From way up here, it looked pretty and calm.
“I’ve never seen it before today,” I said.
“What?” Sammy asked.
“The ocean.”
Her eyes fluttered wide. “Seriously?” she said. “Never?”
“Well, I saw it once from a plane, when my mom and I went to California. But that doesn’t really count.”
Down on the beach, families were dragging umbrellas and blow-up toys back toward their houses. The tinkling song from one of the park rides drifted up to us on the wind.
“This must be a really cool place to live,” I said.
“It’s okay. Not a lot of people live here year round. In the summer, lots of stuff opens up for the tourists, but most of my friends usually leave. In the fall, they come back, but then the amusement park and other stuff shuts down.”
“Sameera!” boomed a voice. “Dinner!”
Sammy rolled her eyes. “Dad still won’t call me anything else.”
“Why’d you change it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Some kids made fun of it, and people would get it wrong sometimes, so I shortened it.”
I frowned. I had thought Sammy was the kind of girl nobody would tease. “Why’d they make fun of it?” I asked.
“Look around tomorrow,” she said, grimacing slightly. “You won’t see many other Indian kids on August Isle. At least I don’t have to worry about my last name. ‘Grover’ is pretty easy to pronounce. People here usually don’t think it sounds Indian, but it is.”
I wrinkled my nose. The kids at my school made fun of me because I was shy and because I was good in math class and because I was bad in gym class and because I wasn’t pretty like Kelsey and Tiffany. But nobody had ever been mean to me because of where my family came from. That was a different kind of mean, one I hadn’t ever had to think about before.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt bad for judging Sammy before actually getting to know her. “Kids really suck sometimes.”
Sammy’s face broke into a metallic smile. “Yeah. But not us.”
“No,” I said, grinning back. “Definitely not us.”
“SUH-MEE-RAH!”
At dinner, I watched with interest as Sammy and Jai argued about whether or not one of Sammy’s favorite singers lip-synced at all her concerts.
Even though they were fighting, I got the feeling they weren’t really fighting. They were just fighting to talk. They were like one of those families on TV, where everyone is always rolling their eyes at everyone else, but really they’d do anything for each other.
I used to wish so bad that I had a little brother or sister to fight with like that. Someone who would follow me around and ask me annoying questions about everything. Someone who might think I was the greatest, coolest big sister ever.
But when I asked Mom, she told me she and Dad were done having kids, end of discussion.
So I invented an imaginary friend to keep me company instead. It was around the time I started school, I think. Right around when things started changing with Mom.
I could still remember that his name was Batty, though I couldn’t remember why anymore, because he was a boy, not a bat.
I did remember that we used to play together in the backyard, and once, we took a jar from the kitchen and went around catching fireflies. Batty said it looked like we had bottled up a bunch of stars, and then told me that he was going to be an astronaut when he grew up.
After that, we played astronauts and aliens a lot, and one day, I looked up from our game to see Mom standing in the doorway, staring at me like I really was an alien. It was the first time I had ever seen her look at me that way, and I knew instantly that I had done something wrong, and that I never wanted her to stare at me like that again.
“Who are you talking to, Miranda?” she asked.
“Batty,” I said. “My invisible friend. He’s going to be an astronaut.”
“Oh,” she said. Her frown tightened. “Well, maybe you should say goodbye to Batty. Then how about tomorrow I make a playdate for you with some kids at school? It would be nice for you to have some real friends to play with, huh?”
I stopped playing with Batty after that. I was lonelier than I had been before I made him up.
Sammy and Jai’s argument ended when Aunt Clare said that neither of them knew what good music was and she would have to take them to hear a symphony sometime soon. Sammy and Jai groaned in unison.
When dinner was over, Sammy and I took our watermelon slices out on the porch and had a seed-spitting contest. To my surprise, I spat one all the way to the street and won.
“Oh my god,” Sammy laughed. “That was crazy. Like a superpower or something!”
I giggled. “Yeah. The most useless superpower of all time!” Sweet juice was running down my cheek, and I lapped at it with my tongue.
Aunt Clare appeared in the doorway as we were starting our third slices. “You girls better finish up and get ready for bed,” she said. “You have an early wakeup call in the morning.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah!” Sammy said, doing a little dance. “We have a surprise for you!”
She looked at Aunt Clare, who nodded.
“We’re taking sailing lessons!” Sammy exclaimed. “And we start tomorrow morning!”
The watermelon slice slipped from my hand.
7
Fear had always been a part of me, like my dimples, or my love for Hawaiian pizza.
I was scared of the dark, and of talking to strange adults, and of giving reports in class. I was afraid of baseballs, basketballs, footballs, and roller coasters. I was afraid that one day Mom would leave me for good.
I was also terrified of water.
When I started kindergarten, Mom insisted on taking me to swimming lessons.
“Please don’t make me, Mommy!” I begged as she dragged me closer and closer to the rippling pool. “Please, I don’t want to!”
If I got in the water, I knew, it would swallow me up. It would grip me with watery blue fingers and pull me down, down, down.
“We talked about this, Miranda,” Mom said. Her voice was rigid. “You don’t ever have to swim again after you learn, but you have to know how.”
I went limp, and she picked me up and swung me over her hip, but her frame was as rigid as her voice. She walked me down the first few steps into the pool, where the instructor and the other kids stood, mouths gaping at me as I screamed into Mom’s chest. “Please! Please! Please don’t make me!”
But suddenly my feet were in the water, then my knees, and then my chest. Mom pulled me away from her like she would a crab pinching her toe, handing me a floating kickboard instead. I clung to it, splashing violently at everyone around me until I finally realized that as long as I held on to it, I wasn’t going to sink.
Then I kicked back over to the stairs and ran out of the pool.
Mom and Dad both had to come back with me for private lessons, but eventually, I did learn to swim. And then I never set foot in the water again.
After my swimming lessons, I started having this dream.
In it, I’m wading in the water when suddenly something grabs me around the ankles and pulls me under. I’m splashing and spluttering and one of my arms shoots out, reaching for help.
“MOMMY!” I yell.
But she doesn’t come, and my legs and arms are getting tired. Too tired. Then, just as I’m about to sink beneath the surface, I wake up, gasping.
And that’s how I woke up on my first morning in August Isle.
Sammy was staring at me from her own bed, her knees drawn up to her chest. “Are you okay?” she asked, eyes round.
“Yeah,” I said, my breath coming fast. “Yeah, it was just a nightmare.”
“I get those sometimes,” she said. “I’m running downhill, and there’s this big wheel of Swiss cheese chasing after me. I hate Swiss cheese.”
I let out a shaky laugh.
“Come on,” Sammy said, throwing off her covers. “It’s time to get up anyway. Time to set sail!”
I gulped. The nightmare wasn’t over. It was just beginning.
The only swimsuit I owned had been given to me for Christmas two years ago by Dad’s great-aunt Lucille, who thought the pink frills on the hips would look “just ah-dorable” on me.
I had never worn it before, and when I put it on that morning, it was to find that it was two sizes too small for me.
Mom probably hadn’t remembered that it was so old.
She had finally texted me back after Sammy and I had gone to sleep.
August Oak! Beautiful pic. Miss you. Kisses.
I read her message at least ten times before Sammy and I went down to breakfast.
Downstairs, I told Aunt Clare that Mom had accidentally packed my “old” swimsuit, as if I had more than one. As if Mom had actually helped me pack.
“Oh, that’s no problem,” Aunt Clare said. “We can take you to buy one after your lesson. Better eat up and then get your sunscreen on! We have to leave in five minutes.”
Once the three of us had piled into Aunt Clare’s minivan, we drove past the street with the creepy abandoned house and by the August Oak—where tourists were already snapping pictures—and Sundae’s. When we were almost back at the bridge, Aunt Clare turned into the harbor parking lot and stopped.
Farther down, there was a leaning wooden shack with a sign over it that said “Bait Shop” and then rows and rows of sailboats and speedboats and even the kind of huge boats I thought were probably called yachts.
By the parking lot was a little beach where a guy in a flamingo-pink swimsuit, sunglasses, and a backward baseball cap stood, waving to us.
“That’s Jason,” Sammy said. “My mom is in book club with his mom. That’s how she heard he was doing lessons.”
“See you in an hour and a half!” Aunt Clare called before pulling away. “Remember to put more sunscreen on if you get in the water!”
An hour and a half, I repeated to myself. It didn’t sound so long. Just the length of two episodes of Baking Battles, which was practically no time at all.
Or the length of two gym classes, which was basically forever.
“Come on down, girls!” Jason called.
A few sailboats were tethered to nearby posts in the water. They seesawed back and forth, knocking into each other. A Jet Ski zoomed by, sending white swells rocking toward the boats.
Somehow, I could feel them rocking in my stomach, too. Was it possible to be seasick just from looking at the sea?
Sammy was already bounding toward the beach, and I forced myself to follow.
Jason had blond hair and coppery skin. When he took his sunglasses off to wipe the sweat from under his eyes, though, the skin there was snowy white. I guessed he spent a lot of time in the sun.
“Hey, Sammy,” he said. Then he turned to me. “You must be Miranda. I’m Jason.”
“Hi,” I peeped.
“We’re just waiting for one more,” Jason said. “Ah, here he is now. I’ll go get some life jackets.”
I turned to see a boy ambling toward us.
Sammy hissed under her breath.
“What?” I asked. “You know him?”
“That’s Caleb Dillworth,” she said. “He goes to my school. He’s ugh. In the third grade, he stuck his gum on my binder when I wasn’t looking. Then I got in trouble for yelling at him.”
“Gross,” I said, wrinkling my nose.
“Hey, Sammy,” Caleb said as he approached. He was my height with scruffy brown hair, plump pink cheeks, and a wide nose covered by a thick layer of freckles that looked like chocolate sprinkles.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“My mom’s in the book club, too. She thought I should get out of the house,” he muttered. “Who’s this?”
I felt self-conscious when he looked at me, standing in my too-small swimsuit, the elastic digging into my blindingly white skin under the pink frills. I hoped he couldn’t tell that he was making me nervous, but boys like him usually could.
“She’s my friend, is who,” Sammy said. “So just mind your own business.”
“Let’s get started,” Jason called, hailing us down to the water. “I thought today we’d take the keelboat out together.”
He turned and pointed to the largest of the four sailboats, about the size of Aunt Clare’s minivan. “I’ll show you what it is you’re learning to do. Then tomorrow, we’ll start you on these guys.” He gestured to the smaller boats. “We’ll get into the parts of the boat, how to work the sail, all that good stuff. Cool?”
“Cool,” Sammy and Caleb said.
My mouth pressed into a silent line.
Jason handed us each a life jacket. “Strap these on and hop in.”
Sammy and Caleb buckled their life jackets and waded through the water to the boat, just a few feet from shore.
I watched, frozen in place. Beads of sweat rolled down my cheeks. I felt like a melting ice sculpture.
“What’s wrong, Miranda?” Sammy called.
“She looks like she has to use the bathroom or something,” Caleb said. “You can do that in the water, you know. Unless it’s—”
“Shut up, Caleb!” Sammy demanded. “Miranda?”
“Everything cool?” Jason asked, walking toward me.