by Cat Patrick
That was it.
I put my phone away and flipped around, hands clenched into fists, the storm rising up from my belly, growing stronger with every vertebra it passed. When it finally reached my mouth, it’d turned into an EF5-caliber issue.
“I hate her!” I screamed, my words echoing off the walls of the huge space. Tess looked like she’d been slapped.
“You have no reason to hate her!” Tess screamed back, looking angrier than I’d ever seen her. We were two storms colliding.
“I have a great reason!” I shouted. “She turned Colette against me! She’s a snake and she made Colette one, too. They talked about me behind my back and made fun of me and . . .” I sniffed to try to control the river of tears. “And thanks for standing up for me, by the way! I thought sisters were supposed to be there for each other!”
In a flash, Tess didn’t look angry anymore. Instead, she looked shocked, her eyebrows up and her mouth open a little. I turned around and walked toward the door leading outside.
“Wait, Frankie,” Tess said, following me. “I don’t know what you’re talk—”
“Hey, you kids!” the janitor shouted. In normal school hours, he was perfectly harmless. Now he was sweaty, angry, and scary. “You’re not supposed to be in here!”
I bolted through the door, and a few seconds later, Tess was outside, too. It was still light out, but the sun was closer to the beach now. The cloudy sky and long shadows gave the town an eerie filter as we ran across the street, through the mini-carnival, down Pacific, past the go-karts and horses, and into the inn’s parking lot. The only sounds I could hear were the slaps of our shoes on pavement and the blood pumping in my ears. Pirate was lying under the bench in the covered outdoor area; she raised an eyebrow at me.
“Tell Mom . . . ,” I gasped, “I’m sick . . .” I sucked in air. “And I don’t want dinner.”
I took off running toward the beach. Pirate barked, keeping up with me, her tags going tink-tink as she trotted along.
“Wait, Frankie!” Tess called again before I was out of earshot.
I didn’t stop: I couldn’t be inside. I ran toward the ocean until my feet and pant legs were soaked, and when a huge gust of wind barreled through, I screamed the loudest I ever have in my life.
chapter 14
Fact: Some animals seem to sense when weather disturbances like tornadoes are about to happen.
PIRATE HAD FOLLOWED me. She must have just known I needed a friend. I should have been going to the cottage for dinner, but instead, I walked along the shore with Pirate by my side, then planted myself on a huge log. It was closer to the dune than to the water, which meant it was more sheltered. Pirate lay at my feet and we watched a runner near the surf lean into the wind as she went by almost in slow motion, her hair blown back like she was coming up from underwater.
The waves were so choppy now that the tide was leaving huge, frothy mounds of bubbles on the sand. Then the wind blew the mounds along, and they looked like miniature icebergs. I zoned out, staring at one point, seeing the movement of the waves and the icebergs and the pipers all around in my peripheral vision.
The ocean made me feel calm. It had since the first time I’d seen it. I forget things sometimes, but I haven’t forgotten the first time we came here.
Mom picked us up on the last day of preschool with the trunk packed with so much stuff, my artwork and desk supplies had no place to go but under my feet.
“We’re going on an adventure!” Mom said when we were buckled up.
“Where are we going?” Tess asked.
“We’re going to the beach!” Mom said, but she didn’t seem excited. It wasn’t sunny out, but she was wearing sunglasses.
“The beach!” I shouted, thinking it’d be like the roped-off sandy area by the small lake near our house. “Yay!”
“When are we coming back?” Tess asked.
“We’ll see,” Mom said, pulling out of the parking lot. “How would you guys like to watch a show? I put your devices and headphones in the seat pockets.”
When we arrived after our five-hour ride, Mom stopped the car under the WORLD’S LONGEST BEACH sign and made us take off our headphones. Normally, I would have protested, but the sight of the ocean was distracting, and if you tell me something is the world’s best or longest or tallest something, I get curious.
“Look what we can do!” Mom said before she pushed the gas pedal and drove out onto the sand. “We can drive right on the beach! Isn’t this great?”
The drier sand yanked the car back and forth and the bumps made us jump in our seats. Mom rolled down all four windows and the sea air whipped our hair around the car. We made a left onto the packed wet sand and Mom drove along with the waves coming right up to kiss our tires.
“I love it here,” I said after only being in Long Beach about five minutes. Already, in preschool, the world felt daunting to me. I could tell right away that the beach would be a place that would make it a little less so.
“I’m scared,” Tess said, reaching over and grabbing my hand. “What if we drive under the water?”
“Then we’ll meet a narwhal,” I said, putting my free hand out of the car to surf on the wind. I loved that feeling.
“Can we go back on the normal road, Mommy?” Tess asked.
“I want to stay on the beach!” I said. “I want to live on the beach.”
Mom pulled over and parked the car on the dry sand, so the front windshield was facing away from the ocean and toward a four-story building. It had huge windows looking out toward the water, reflecting it back. Mom turned around and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were red and tired, but she was smiling.
“You can’t live right on the beach, Frankie,” she said, “but is that close enough?” She pointed at the building.
“We get to live there?” I asked in disbelief.
Mom nodded. “It’s an inn, which is like a hotel. I’ve been offered a job as the manager. For as long as I work at the inn, we get to live in that little cottage over there.” She beamed at us. “Then we can come to the beach every single day.”
“Where’s Ronan?” Tess asked. “Is he coming, too?”
Ronan was Mom’s boyfriend before Charles. I barely remember him: when I think of him, he has a blurry face. I don’t think he was very nice to my mom.
“Remember our talk last week?” Mom asked. “Remember what I said about Ronan’s mistake and us moving out?”
“Can I go play on the beach?” I interrupted because I didn’t want to hear the story again. She said I could, and I went and chased pipers.
Lost in thought about the day we’d arrived, I didn’t hear someone come up behind me—but Pirate let me know: her tags tink-tinked when she raised her head to look.
“’Sup, Frank and Beans,” Kai said. I turned around and looked at him standing there with his skateboard in his hand, still wearing his yellow beanie, the sunset turning his face even more golden than it usually was. I’m not going to lie: it made me feel squishy like a sand mountain.
“Hi,” I said.
“Shove over,” he said, coming around the log to sit down with me. I moved as far away as possible without falling onto the sand. “What’re you doing out here? My dad’s convinced it’s going to storm. Hey, Pirate,” he said, scratching her head.
“Nothing,” I said, because that sounded better than telling him I was recovering from an epic meltdown. “Looks like your mom let you out of the shop.”
“Finally,” he groaned.
Pirate jumped up on Kai’s knees and started licking his face; I liked that he just let her and didn’t gross out. Pirate knew not to do that to me because I would gross out: I can’t help it. Kai just laughed, rubbing her ears with both hands. When he asked, “Who’s a good girl?” Pirate smiled at him.
He looked over at me with his nice eyes and good eyebrows. My hear
tbeat sped up and my hands felt clammy. Maybe I could feel nervous after all! I wanted to tell Tess, but then I remembered I was mad at her.
Kai was still staring at me.
“What?” I asked him, looking back at the ocean so he’d hopefully do the same.
“You didn’t write me back earlier,” he said. “Did you see my texts?”
“I didn’t get any,” I said, pulling out my phone, thankful for something to do. After I’d looked at Viewer so many times earlier and not closed the app, the battery on my phone had taken a hit. “It’s dead,” I said, holding it up as if he could see the tiny battery icon from all the way on the other side of the log. “Why’d you text me?”
“To tell you I remembered something about when Colette came to the store,” he said. Pirate settled down on his feet, and Kai kept petting her.
“What did you remember?” I asked excitedly.
“Nothing, just that she asked me where the Sea Witch lives.”
I sucked in my breath. “What?” All at once, my body went crazy, my heart jumping hurdles, my neck turning hot, the place where the Sea Witch had grabbed my wrist sending a twinge of pain.
Colette had asked where the Sea Witch lived.
I’d seen the Sea Witch at the police station.
Did the Sea Witch have Colette?
“Why did she want to know that?” I managed to ask Kai.
“Dunno,” he said super-casually. It made me want to scream and shake him—but then I’d have to touch him.
“She literally asked you for the Sea Witch’s address?” I blinked a bunch, as if it would clear up my confusion.
“No, she literally asked for the address of the person with the stuffed animals in their yard,” Kai said. “I told her that person was the Sea Witch. Then she asked for the Sea Witch’s address.”
“But why . . .” My mind raced. Why did . . . what would . . . but how . . . and when . . . ? “Wait.” I looked at Kai. “Why did she ask you that?”
“Ask me what?” Kai and Pirate were in their own world.
“Why did Colette ask you where the Sea Witch lives?” I shouted. “How the heck do you know that?”
“Whoa, calm your status, Franklin,” Kai said good-naturedly. “She buys those weird taxidermy animals my parents sell. She has a collection, I guess. They’re too big and heavy for her to take home herself, so she has them delivered.” Kai pulled out his phone and scrolled through for a second. Then he showed me a picture of a notecard with a name and address written on it. “See? I sent it to you.”
Leaning over to look, I shivered, still phantom-feeling the Sea Witch’s fingers wrapped around my wrist. The name on the card said Mikayla Sievich.
“See-vich,” I murmured, then it hit me. “Is that where she got the nickname? From her last name?”
“I guess so. And because she’s such a witch to all the kids in town. She stuck a knife in Dillon’s soccer ball once. For real.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, not totally listening to him. I was too focused on the Sea Witch’s warning: You never know what may happen to bad children running around with no parents.
Had the Sea Witch done something to Colette?
Kai cleared his throat. “Hey, that sucks that no one else believes you about when Colette made the videos.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, still more preoccupied by the conversation I was having inside my head.
“I mean, since you can choose the upload date,” he said.
My head snapped in his direction. “What?” I shouted. “Why are you just casually telling me all of these important things?!”
“You didn’t know that?” he asked.
“No, because you didn’t tell me!” I shouted.
He laughed, which might have bugged me if I thought that he was laughing at me in a mean sense. But Kai’s not like that.
“Okay!” he said. “So yeah, you can set your upload date to whatever you want. It’ll use the current date automatically, or you can change it to anything. Even the future.”
“How do you know that? Are you sure?”
“I’ve done it,” he said, nodding. “For the edits that me and Dillon make sometimes of us doing board tricks and stuff.”
“But why say a video was uploaded on a different day than when it was?” I seriously could not believe that he hadn’t told me this until now.
“Dunno why other people would want to,” Kai said, “but Dillon has this thing about only posting on our channel on Thursdays. He says, like, people will get more excited to see our board tricks if they have to wait a few days for them.” Kai shook his hair out of his eyes and added, “It’s lame because we only have seven followers, but whatever. The only problem is if he puts a video on our account with a date from the past, it doesn’t hit me up that there’s a new video . . . so I don’t see it.”
“Wait, so you mean that if you make a video on a Friday, you can upload it but change the date to the day before, a Thursday?”
“Yup.”
“Or you could upload a video today but change the date to say it was uploaded two years ago?” I asked, trying to understand what Kai was telling me.
“Yup yup,” he said.
“And if you did that, people wouldn’t get a notification that a new video was uploaded . . . because the date was in the past?”
“You got it,” Kai said before cracking up. “Oh man, one time I wiped out extra in a video that Dillon posted with a different date. My sister obsessively checks the channel because she has a crush on Dillon, and she saw it and was making fun of me, and I didn’t even know what she was talking about to defend myself . . .”
My thoughts were on a Tilt-A-Whirl: changing video-upload dates, Colette making the videos again, Colette asking Kai about the Sea Witch, the Sea Witch being at the police station. The warning.
“I have to find Tess,” I said, interrupting whatever Kai was saying about his epic wipeout. He looked bummed, which I noticed, which I felt proud for noticing, so I forced myself to use the hard word. “Sorry for interrupting you.”
“S’okay,” Kai said, standing up and brushing the sand off his jeans. “I gotta go anyway; we’re going to a movie.” He stretched like he’d just gotten up from a nap and looked off to the right, toward the inn. “Oh, hey, you don’t need to go far to find your sister. She’s coming this way.”
Kai and Tess waved at each other, but Kai didn’t wait for her to reach the log before he left. I thanked him for the information and tried not to feel sad that he was leaving.
“There you are,” Tess said, crunching closer through the sand.
She sat down on the log next to me, but leaving space between us, shivering and pulling her jacket tighter. My log was getting a lot of traffic.
“Frankie, will you please tell me what Colette and Mia did—why you’re so mad?” Tess asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said quickly. I really didn’t, but not because it was painful or because I thought we’d fight again. Well, that stuff, too. But more because I wanted to get all of the other stuff in my brain out of my mouth, so she’d help me figure it out.
Everything except the Sea Witch’s warning. For some reason, I wanted to keep that to myself. Maybe I thought it would scare Tess too much—and she was being weird about being scared today. Maybe I thought she’d brush it off like she had with my earlier ideas, when she didn’t believe me about Colette making the dare videos recently. Maybe I just wanted to know something that no one else did.
“That’s what you’ve been telling me for months—that you don’t want to talk about it,” Tess was saying, “but that thing you said in the gym about me not . . . sticking up for you? I don’t know what you mean.” She paused, then added, “I even called Mia and asked her about it.” I looked at her, surprised. “She said she didn’t know what I meant, but I . . . I don’t know. I feel
like she was being weird. Will you please tell me what happened?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said, and she looked hopeful, “but not right now. Kai told me two things when he was here—and those things are more important than a fight.”
“Do you promise we’ll talk about it later, though?” Tess asked. And somehow, her caring enough to make me promise made my anger at her stay away. I nodded, and she smiled. “Okay, tell me what Kai said.”
chapter 15
Opinion: The Wizard of Oz is probably the most popular movie with a tornado in it ever.
“IS IT OKAY if Frankie and I go to a movie after dinner?” Tess asked, looking at Mom with big innocent eyes. She was sitting straight up in her chair and smiling a little, and I made a mental note to practice that posture later. It seemed to be effective, judging by the fact that Mom hadn’t immediately said no.
“Together?” Mom asked. She looked at Charles and he shrugged before blowing his nose with a huge honk in a dinner napkin. Gross.
“Yes,” Tess and I said at the same time.
“It is Saturday night,” Tess said.
Mom narrowed her eyes at us. “Are you two up to something?”
“We just want to go to a movie,” Tess said. Then she made her tone sound sad. “We just want a distraction. Watching a movie is good for that. There will be other kids there, too.”
“That’s understandable,” Charles chimed in, his nose stuffy. “But because of Colette, it’s hard to want to let you two go off on your own at night.”
“Stop giving the dog crab,” my mom snapped at him, frowning. “It’s expensive.”
“Sorry, Pirate,” Charles said to the beggar by his side. “The lady of the house says you’re cut off.” He sneezed and I moved my chair away from his.
“We’ll be careful,” Tess promised. “Can we please go? It’s only a few blocks away.”
I stayed quiet, letting her handle the negotiations.
“I don’t know about this,” Mom said, looking at Charles. They stared at each other for like a whole minute, seeming to have a conversation telepathically. Finally Mom sighed and looked at us. “You’ll walk there and back together?”