One Small Hop

by Madelyn Rosenberg

  “We should name this place,” I said, still watching the spot where the waters met.

  “It probably already has a name,” said Leroy.

  “I think islands have to be bigger to have names,” Davy said. “This is probably something like Island Number Three. Insula tertia, if they’re using Latin.”

  “Which they wouldn’t be,” Leroy said. “Cough. Dead language. Cough.”

  “We could name it just for us,” Delphinium said. “It’s a great idea.”

  I was glad to have a great idea attributed to me, since Leroy had spent the whole trip looking like a hero. He’d discovered the island and a lobster. Sure, he’d killed the lobster, but to everyone but me and maybe the EPF, that seemed to be beside the point. He’d built a boat.

  “Any ideas?” I asked.

  “Leroy found it,” Delph said. “He should choose.”

  Great, I thought. Welcome to Leroy Land.

  But Leroy just shrugged. “How about ‘Bob’?” he said. “When in doubt, you should always go with ‘Bob.’ But if you disagree, you can call it whatever you want.”

  “Hope Island?” asked Delphinium.

  “Except that,” Leroy said.

  “Too precious,” said Davy. I secretly agreed.

  “Homaridae?” I said.

  “What’s that even mean?” Leroy asked.

  “It’s the family name for lobster.”

  “It sounds like a cheese,” Leroy said. “How about Extra Credit Island? I wouldn’t have made the boat if Duckworth wasn’t about to flunk me.”

  “Look,” Delph said. “A claw.”

  I leaned in closer to get a different angle on a shape hidden among the rocks. It was a claw. And it was attached to a lobster, a live one. It was small—about half the size of the first one Leroy had found. But unlike the lobster in the metal tank, this one was moving. I studied its shape—his shape.

  “You did it!” Davy cheered like Delphinium had just discovered gold or uranium or something. Which she kind of did.

  “Shh,” Leroy said as the lobster backed toward a rock. “You’ll scare it.”

  “Can they even hear?” asked Delph.

  “Low-frequency sounds, I think,” I told them. “But they can sense our presence. See the way he’s raising his claws?”

  “How do you know it’s a he?”

  “The ladies have broad, um, tails.”

  “You’re kidding,” Leroy said.

  “Nope. It’s for the eggs.”

  “Who even knows this stuff?” Leroy asked.

  “Ahab,” Davy answered. “So now what?” He looked at me. Everybody did. But I didn’t have anything to catch him with. And like Leroy said, we weren’t calling Derek’s dad. Just last month, the ranking officer at the EPF containment unit had been caught selling “rehabilitated specimens” to China. And he kept his job.

  “Let’s just watch him a minute,” I said.

  The wind blew. Sand stung our ankles and the sun blazed down like it was trying to melt us. Next time, we’d need more protection. I thought of my grandfather’s old hip waders, which were still in the garage, near the Soov.

  “He’s kind of beautiful,” said Delph. The lobster was, in fact, prehistoric-looking, darkish brown, with beady eyes and a tail that looked like someone had ripped it off a moth. But he was alive, and that—the alive part—made him the most beautiful thing we’d seen in months.

  I blocked out everything Officer Ripley said—everything I knew—about the ocean in the twenty-first century. I took a careful step forward. The water seeped through the fabric of my shoe, warm but with a cold, sharp undercurrent.

  “I just want to get a little closer,” I said.

  “Hold on.” Delphinium went over to the canoe and grabbed her softball glove.

  “It’ll get wet,” I said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “It might get …” I searched for a word to describe all the things that could happen to that glove—Polluted? Contaminated? Infected? But the stream seemed to have some sort of magic to it. Maybe Delphinium felt it, too. I put the glove over my hand. Then I picked up a piece of driftwood and placed it in the glove. I held it out to the lobster to see if he’d grab for it.

  He didn’t. I kept my other foot on a dry rock and started to crouch down.

  EEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

  The noise, low and deep, came from up the hill. It didn’t sound like an animal. It didn’t sound human—more like an old gasoline-powered car engine, one that wasn’t running right. I don’t think I jumped. I don’t remember anyone falling into me. But somehow I pitched sideways into the water. It wasn’t just my foot that was wet now; it was all of me. Water from the stream and the harbor seeped into my pants and shirt.

  I looked around, wildly. Should we find the thing making the noise? Should we run from the thing making the noise? I stood up, dripping, and apparently introduced a third option.

  “We’ve got to get him home,” Delph said. “Now.”

  She didn’t mean the lobster, who had already scuttled out of sight, and she didn’t mean the engine thing. She meant me.

  “I’m fine,” I said, standing up.

  “You’re not fine, Ahab.” Her words were short. She sounded like she was trying not to cry.

  “Delph.” The water hadn’t killed me that time I’d made the bet with Davy, had it?

  “Just shut up,” she said. “There’s a reason no one goes into the harbor anymore, isn’t there? A reason.”

  “The lobster looked okay.”

  “The lobster has adapted,” Davy said. “You haven’t. Remember what happened the last time? And you could already have some weird kind of flesh-eating—”

  “Get in the boat,” Leroy said, cutting Davy off.

  “What do you think made that noise?” I said.

  “Maybe it was a flesh-eating—” Davy started.

  “We need to find it,” I said. I meant it. I didn’t just want to find the thing. I needed to. And okay, so maybe it would tear us to shreds before we got it in the canoe, and maybe there’d be no place to keep it if we did get it home. But I needed to see what else was alive out here.

  “We’ll come back,” Leroy said. “After you’re detoxified, or whatever. We’ll bring all that equipment you mentioned. And other stuff.” I could tell “other stuff” meant “weapon.”

  “Please?” Delph said.

  It could have been all in my head, but my skin picked that moment to start itching. “Yeah, okay,” I said. I handed her glove back. Water dripped from the laces. I didn’t think she’d touch it, but she did, holding it away from her, between her finger and her thumb.

  We got back in the boat. Since I was already wet, I stood in the water and shoved us off. As we rowed away from the island, we listened for the sound again, but all we could hear was the churning of the water and Delphinium’s voice, softer and less optimistic than usual: “Stroke, chugga chugga. Stroke, chugga chugga. Stroke, chugga chugga. Stroke.”

  My clothes stuck to my skin, and by the time we made it back to shore, the itch had turned into a sting. I could almost taste salt, but I tried not to lick my lips because Delphinium was right; I knew what was in the water. Garbage, chemicals, toxic algae blooms. Oil. Dye. Bleach. Paint thinner. The under-the-sink, please-dispose-of-properly containers from houses that had been swallowed by the ocean. And there were bacteria, including the flesh-eating kind that Davy had mentioned and the brain-eating kind that he hadn’t.

  Some of that—maybe even all of that—was on me. The second lobster seemed to be all right, but like Davy said, his body might’ve mutated to deal with the harbor’s changes. My body had never mutated, unless zits counted as mutating. I had to get clean.

  The thing is, I’d already used up my shower quota for the day. So had my parents. The only person who hadn’t was Juliette, my sister, who always saved hers until Friday night, in case she had a date. She was my only hope.

  I parked my bike in the garage next to the Soov, car
eful not to let the handlebars touch the paint. I sneaked upstairs without my mother seeing me and knocked on Juliette’s bedroom door.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “It’s me.”

  “Like that’s going to make a difference,” she said.

  “Juliette, open up. It’s an emergency. Please?”

  She opened the door a crack. “What do you want?”

  “I need to talk to you.” I stared at her right eye, which was all I could see.

  Then I had to choose:

  (A) Be honest. Tell her I fell in the harbor and hope that the fact that we had the same blood coursing through our veins would be enough to make her donate her shower time.

  (B) Offer her money. Only, I’d spent most of my savings on parts I’d been buying to build my own CarbonClean, a water recycler that would give us all unlimited shower time. (Real CarbonCleans cost thousands of dollars and my dad wouldn’t buy one; he was still counting on the government to miraculously end all water restrictions.)

  (C) Evasive maneuvers. Ask for her shower time but don’t tell her why.

  (D) Jump in the shower without telling her. The alarm would go off and no water would come out when Juliette tried to use it, but sometimes it was better to apologize after you did something than to ask permission first.

  I’d already knocked, though, so I started with C. “Could I borrow your shower time?”

  “What? No.”

  “Please,” I said again.

  “Why?” she said. “Not that you don’t need a shower.” She wrinkled her nose, but I didn’t smell too bad, at least not that I could tell.

  “Because I’m your brother,” I said.

  “Because I’m your only brother,” I added.

  “Because it could be a matter of life and death,” I finished.

  “How is taking a shower a matter of life and death?”

  So I went for A, the truth. “I sort of fell in the harbor.”

  “You what?” The door to her room opened the rest of the way. “Ahab, what were you—”

  “I was trying to get something,” I said. “And a wave came. It stings and I need to get whatever it is off my skin as soon as possible. Don’t tell Mom.”

  “Thanks for that, Captain Obvious,” she said. But she actually looked concerned.

  “Please?” Third time’s a charm. “You’re the only one who can help me.”

  “I have a date.”

  “You won’t be able to keep your date if you have to go to my funeral instead,” I said. She shook her head, but I knew I’d won. “Come on, Jules.” It felt like dozens of needles were poking at my skin.

  “What will you give me?”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “I’m not talking about money,” she said. “I’m talking privileges. Energy points. What will you do for me?”

  “I won’t bug you when you go on your date.” I raked my fingernails across my left arm. It didn’t help. I tried slapping my arm instead.

  “Not if you know what’s good for you. What else?”

  “I’ll make your bed.”

  “But then you’d have to come into my room,” she said. “No way.”

  “What do you want, then?” I gritted my teeth, not because of anger; because of the itching.

  “Shower time. Not today but tomorrow—”

  “It’s gonna take more than one shower to get all this off me,” I said.

  “Then Monday,” she said. “And Tuesday. I get your shower time next week.”

  “Deal,” I said. I reached out my hand.

  “I’m not touching you,” she said. “But deal.”

  I ran to the bathroom and closed the door. If I ever did finish my own CarbonClean, I wasn’t going to tell Juliette about it for at least a month.

  I peeled off my pants and shirt, then my underwear. There were small welts covering my ribs and stomach. They were bright red, as if I’d been dipped in boiling water, but that could have been from the scratching. My legs seemed mostly okay. I looked down to make sure those parts hadn’t been infected and found more spots on my inner thigh. I turned on the shower just long enough to wet my body and the soap. Then I turned the water off while I scrubbed. I soaped behind my ears and my neck and under my pits and between my toes. I shampooed my hair. I used the shampoo on my torso, too. Finally, I turned on the water and let it spray, full blast, for the last ninety glorious seconds. But the water didn’t make the itchy-stingy feeling any better. It made it worse. Then the buzzer went off and the water stopped. I looked in the mirror. Spots covered nearly everywhere my clothes had been. I toweled off and used my washcloth like a pot holder to lift my wet clothes. Then I ran to my bedroom before anyone could see me.

  I locked the door and grabbed my One. It was an older model, like everything else we owned, but still pretty sleek, silver and round, about the size of a river rock. I held the screen over my stomach where the spots were the worst. “Scan,” I said.

  Please don’t let it say flesh-eating bacteria, I thought.

  The One beeped, and a projection beamed onto my bedroom wall.

  “Seabather’s eruption,” my One said. I’d set it to use the voice of Andrea Ko, an environmental activist who sounded calm yet inspirational, sort of like a superhero who does a lot of yoga. “Also known as sea lice.” It was better than “flesh-eating bacteria,” but Andrea’s superhero voice made it sound like sea lice was an archvillain. Andrea, by the way, was rumored to be a D²—one of Darwin’s Disciples.

  “The skin condition known as seabather’s eruption was common through the first quarter of the twenty-first century. It began in the warmer, gulf waters of Florida, and later spread through both the Pacific and Atlantic, with cases reported as far north as Maine and into Canada. The lice, also known as thimble jellyfish, are difficult to see with the naked eye. The result, however, is easy to see, in red lesions that cover the body, particularly in the areas where swimsuits or clothing are worn. The rash went into a decline as ocean sport and sea bathing lost popularity, but the severity of each case increased, as did allergic reactions. Symptoms accompanying the eruption can but do not always include: itching, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, malaise, headache, muscle spasms, depression, swelling, and, in rare cases, death.”

  Andrea Ko sounded almost cheery when she said “death.”

  Nausea. Yeah, I was feeling that. I hoped I could avoid everything else, especially the death part. I ran another search to come up with the cure, which boiled down to prescription medication, which I couldn’t get without my parents knowing. Other suggestions included time, rest, and black salve. We had some of that. My mother put black salve on everything. There were tubes in the bathroom, in the junk drawer in the kitchen, in the glove compartment of dad’s precious Soov. I went back to the bathroom, grabbed a tube, and smeared at least half of it onto my chest. Then I put on my loosest shirt—long sleeved, to cover my arms. I stayed in my room until my dad called me for dinner. I got to the kitchen just in time to catch Juliette leaving for her date. No, I thought. No way. My sister was holding hands with Peter Ripley, Derek’s brother.

  “Nice to see you, Peter,” my mother was saying. “Oh, and here’s Jonathan. I believe he’s in your brother’s grade, isn’t he? Jonathan, do you know Peter?”

  “Yes.” I used as few syllables as possible.

  “Hi, Jonathan,” Peter said. “It’s so wonderful to see you.”

  My skin was already crawling, but with Peter in the house, it was worse. He smiled so I could see all his teeth, which were perfect, of course. My mom and Juliette had to know he wasn’t being sincere. I mean, who talks like that?

  Everybody in Blue Harbor—with the possible exception of my sister and my mother—knew Peter Ripley was a jerk. Delphinium said every time she went to the bathroom during a Blue Harbor football game, there was some girl in there crying over something he’d said or done—or said he’d done in those rare instances when he hadn’t done anything at all. Juliette and I didn’t
always get along, but she was my sister. Peter was a cockroach.

  Juliette smiled and adjusted the strap on her sundress. It was blue, and her shoulders sparkled with this shimmer stuff she used sometimes. Her hair was dark and curly like mine, but long, so it grew down instead of out.

  “Shouldn’t she have a sweater?” I said “sweater” but I was thinking “armor” or “hazmat suit.” I looked at my dad, who was whacking the refrigerator to get it to stop buzzing.

  “Since when are you my wardrobe consultant?” Juliette asked.

  “I think she looks lovely,” Peter said.

  I tried my mother. “What about the elements?” The word hung heavy in the air.

  “I’m wearing lotion,” Juliette said. “And the sun’s going down.”

  “Studies show that lotion alone—”

  “Oh, bring a sweater, just to humor him,” said my mother.

  “I’ll roast,” Juliette said. “I’ll roast and melt.” But she ran upstairs to get a sweater. “You promised not to mess this up,” she hissed as she walked past me.

  “You’ll have her home on time?” my father said to Peter. “Otherwise, I might have to call the police. Oh, wait.” He winked. “That’s your dad, isn’t it?”

  Peter laughed, like my father was actually funny. “You don’t have to worry about me, sir.”

  I didn’t say anything as Juliette ran back downstairs carrying a sweater, grabbed Peter by the hand again, and yanked him out the door, as if exposing him to us was the thing that was dangerous. The door slammed shut behind them.

  “Well,” my mother said. “What a nice boy.”

  “That was Peter Ripley,” I said. “He’s a jerk. He’s scum. He’s …”

  “He’s Angus Ripley’s son,” my father said. His voice had a trace of a growl. “Well. If things work out, maybe Angus will do something about those green slips.”

  “It won’t work out,” I said. You’re the one who needs to do something about the green slips, I thought. “Peter Ripley has dated about a million girls.”