by Eve Yohalem
“Clock’s ticking. Now or never.” Jules shoved me toward the Windfall and headed for the grass in the other direction to avoid suspicion.
“Thanks for the pep talk,” I said to the air.
I tried to transform myself into a completely different human being, one who was brave and daring and could kill an enemy with a single karate chop. Basically, Lara Croft. While I channeled my inner superhero, Jules lay on the grass pretending to sunbathe. At least I hoped she was just pretending, since my future freedom depended on her. She waved at me. Not a friendly Hey, how’s it going? wave, but an urgent Get moving now! wave.
I climbed over the rail.
The door to the bridge was unlocked. Inside were more electronic instruments than I’d ever seen in one place, including the West Marine supply catalog. No wonder Fitz needed a ridiculously big boat. Knobs and monitors were spread out over a dashboard that took up the whole front and sides of the cabin. I could have been on a nuclear submarine.
Mounted on the wall over the door to the main inner cabin was a camera that sent audio and video to a website. I knew what it was because Jules had spotted it in the picture of Fitz in the East Hampton Star and found a small version online, which she then overnighted (“What? It’s only a hundred and fifty dollars. The accountant won’t see the bill for a month, and when he does he’ll figure my dad bought it”). I was supposed to glue our camera under the Windfall’s and hope that no one would notice it was there—and also hope that no one happened to be watching the livestream while I was installing it. But the Windfall’s camera was screwed to the wall high up, where I couldn’t reach. And the chairs on the bridge were bolted to the floor, so I had nothing to drag over and stand on. Not a step stool, not a bucket, not even a pencil cup.
Bear down and carry on, BB. That’s what Pop Pop would have said, assuming he approved of what I was doing. He definitely would have understood why I was doing it. Mom and Dad, on the other hand, most definitely would not have approved or understood. Which I was trying very hard not to think about.
Maybe, just maybe, if I stand on the counter along the wall, I can reach the camera from there.
I glanced out the window. Jules was safe on dry land, chatting with one of the guys who worked at the gas dock, but also, I was relieved to see, glancing around in a lookout-y kind of way. Still no sign of Fitz or his crew.
I pulled the bag out from under my sweatshirt and emptied my supplies on the counter. I’d come prepared with marine glue that I’d scooped into an old jelly jar from home. The glue was waterproof, sunproof, leakproof, and saltproof. It smelled like burnt tires, but at least I knew that once I stuck the camera to the wall it would stay there forever. Literally.
I smeared some glue on the base of the new camera with the back of a plastic spoon. Then I climbed onto the counter and eyed the old camera and wished that arms could do things like grow really long just because you wanted them to. And then, since this was real life and I wasn’t Elastigirl, I leaned.
You know that game trust, where you fall backward into the waiting arms of a friend and hope they catch you? This was like that except I fell forward, and I had to stop my own fall against the opposite wall one-handed without breaking my nose or dropping the new camera.
Victory!
Behold Blue Broen, a.k.a. Lara Croft! Feet on counter, hands on wall, body in midair, bag in mouth, hair in eyes, sweat all over, really bad itch in the middle of my back.
Keeping one hand on the wall, I positioned the new camera in place. And held it there for sixty seconds that felt like sixty years.
Waiting, waiting, waiting.
Noticing, noticing, noticing.
Noticing the piece of hair that was stuck to the side of my face that I couldn’t brush off. Noticing that the people I could see on the dock through the window of the bridge could see me too if they happened to look my way. Noticing the plastic spoon that was now glued to the fingers of my left hand forever.
I counted to sixty and was just starting to feel really good about my Lara Croft-y act of bravery and stealth when I heard three short blasts from a referee whistle—Jules’s warning signal. Seconds later a voice boomed, “Best egg sandwich in town!”
Fitz! And possibly his crew too.
Get out get out get out get out get out!
I jumped down from the counter. My heart beat like a woodpecker—which could have been because I was terrified but also could have been because being terrified makes my blood sugar spike, and I had no way of knowing which it was because my kit was in Jules’s bag.
Fitz stood on the dock between me and freedom and insulin. Jules was good, but even she didn’t have any tricks that would stop him from seeing some kid he didn’t know on his boat. Somehow I had to get off the Windfall. Now.
I crawled out of the bridge onto the deck, trying not to picture my face on a WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE poster. I inched to the far side of the Windfall, which faced the water, away from the dock. Fitz couldn’t see me from here, but plenty of other people could if they bothered to look this way. The marina was like a parking lot for boats, all lined up one after another. People inside those boats, people walking by—any one of them might wonder what I was doing crouched on the deck of the Windfall with a plastic bag in my mouth and a spoon glued to my hand.
There was only one path to safety. I peered over the edge of the deck.
Bits of seaweed, twigs, and duck feathers bobbed around blobs of engine oil that oozed on top of the water. GROSS. Really gross. But probably not as gross as living in a jail cell.
Holding my breath to keep out the smell, I slithered down the ladder on the side of the boat and eased feet-first into June-freezing water. Bonfires, pizza ovens, tea kettles, Nora’s attic. I thought the hottest thoughts I possibly could while I dog-paddled through slime, grunting, straining to keep my chin above water under the weight of my wet sweatshirt. The bag hanging from my mouth splashed duck muck on my cheeks and hair. I paddled harder and some drops sloshed into my mouth. Normally I’m not hyper about germs—after all, I let my dog lick my lips—but engine oil and duck waste had just infiltrated my body. I clamped my lips tighter and paddled faster.
Finally, I made it to the boat next to the Windfall. Now I just had to circle that boat and climb onto the dock on its far side. Which would have been totally doable if the owner hadn’t chosen that exact moment to climb up from the cabin onto the deck. Which meant I couldn’t paddle. I had to put my head under the oil-duck-twig water… and swim.
Let’s just say the water was even more disgusting than it looked, and I’ll never eat fowl again.
I was climbing up the slimy algae-covered ladder to the dock when Jules’s shadow fell over me.
“That was so hard. You have no idea. I had to keep those idiots busy forever. Where were you?”
I flung the bag onto the dock and spit out a feather that was stuck to my lip. Mucky water streamed from my sweatshirt onto the dock. “Inside the—”
“Whatever,” Jules snapped. “We have a problem.”
“What?”
I found my kit in Jules’s bag, then turned my back so I could test without her watching.
“The camera needs to be connected to the Windfall’s Wi-Fi, but their network is password protected.”
I whipped around. “Are you serious? I broke the law and swam through garbage and made my blood sugar go up to two hundred and ten all to hook up a camera we can’t use because we don’t have the password?” I stabbed at the buttons on my insulin pump like they were eyes I could poke out and sent a quick text to Mom and Dad.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with it,” Jules said. “Just like I have to deal with everything annoying while you get to go off on adventures.”
Jules stomped toward the Windfall, and I stomped after her, dripping and smelly. “What are you so mad about? You’re the one who waited on shore, while I was the one who risked my life!” I said.
Jules whirled around. “Exactly. Do you think I got the fun par
t?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. I just drank garbage! Do you think I got the fun part?”
Jules and I death-stared each other for maybe a solid minute until the Windfall crew came back. Then Jules broke away—first, let the record show—marched up to one of them, and plastered a fake smile on her face.
“Excuse me? I’m Jules Buttersby. My dad is Edward Buttersby, the actor? Listen, my dad just sent me a rough cut of his new movie, and I really want to watch it here outside where my friend can dry out, but I need Wi-Fi. You people are going to be here for a while getting your gas or whatever, right? Do you mind if I log on to your network?”
The crew guy’s eyes got big at “Buttersby” and bigger at “new movie.”
“Sure!” he said.
“Great.” Jules pulled an iPad out of her tote bag. “What’s your password?”
“B-I-L-L-I-O-N,” he said.
“Seriously?” Jules said.
The crew guy shrugged. Jules typed and we waited.
Success. From this moment on, everything that happened on the Windfall’s bridge would be beamed to the cloud for us to hear and see.
Jules snapped the iPad case shut and we turned to go.
“Hey, wait a second, Julia,” the crew guy said.
We stopped short.
I had a sick heavy feeling that was only partly caused by the smell wafting from my sweatshirt. The crew guy looked serious. As in, there was a serious matter he wanted to discuss with us. Trespassing, for instance.
I glanced at Jules. She gave me a Let me do the talking look.
But the crew guy said, “I’m a huge fan of your dad’s. Would you tell him that for me?”
Suddenly, there was oxygen to breathe again. Jules rolled her eyes. “I’ll tell him.”
“Thanks, Julia. I really appreciate it.”
The crew guy left with a big smile on his face. Jules made sure the iPad was back to using her phone, and we walked toward town to pick up Otis at Dr. Joshi’s.
“Does that happen a lot?” I asked.
“You have no idea,” Jules said. “Today was actually good. Most of the time I don’t have a name, not even a wrong name. ‘Oh, look! Isn’t that Ed Buttersby’s daughter?’ ‘Hey, Ed Buttersby’s daughter! Get me a part in his next movie?’ ‘Smile, Baby Buttersby!’ They all know me from his Twitter or People magazine.”
I understood what it felt like to have people think they know you based on something you can’t control. I tried to imagine what it would feel like if people were constantly asking me for favors from my dad. Or being nice to me because of my dad. Or doing me favors because of my dad. Bad, probably. Also annoying and insulting. And maybe occasionally convenient.
Suddenly, I remembered why we were there in the first place. “Let’s check and see if the spy-cam works,” I said.
Jules typed on the glass screen and toggled up the volume. Fitz’s voice boomed:
“Somebody get rid of this garbage egg sandwich and bring me two-forty MLs of my energy powder in a soy-almond base! And up the enzymes—my head’s killing me from having to listen to all the morons!”
“It works,” Jules said.
She turned down the volume a little, and I wrung out my sweatshirt one-handed.
“What’s with the spoon?” Jules said.
“Don’t ask.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
True Fact: Sometimes the only thing worse than knowing is not knowing.
I told Mom and Dad that Jules had offered to help me with my water project so they wouldn’t wonder why we were always together, and we spent the next week searching the bottom of the bay in ten-square-foot chunks. Even though I still didn’t want Jules there, I had to admit the search went a lot faster now that there were two of us and we each had our own view bucket.
While we searched, Otis snoozed or gnawed or kept watch for rogue seagulls. We couldn’t see the Windfall because we were at opposite ends of Gardiner’s Island. Instead, we kept Jules’s iPad running with just the audio from the spy-cam, since the sun made it impossible to view the video. Plus, it’s possible I got marine glue on the camera lens, because when we tested it indoors all we could see was blurry mush. We were now experts in what every member of the Windfall crew liked for lunch. We also knew that Sonia, the documentary director, thought crew-guy Damon was annoying, and that other-crew-guy Marc missed his boyfriend in Chicago. Also, everybody hated Fitz.
But most important of all, we knew that so far the Windfall had found exactly the same thing we’d found: nothing.
At the end of each day, I came home and checked the mailbox for a letter from Nora. At first I knew there was no way there’d be one, but I checked anyway. Now it’d been a week, though. Nora must have gotten my going-away card, but I still hadn’t heard from her.
“This is dumb, Otis. Nora and I don’t keep score.” Otis shook raindrops off his fur on the front porch. “I’ll write her again now, and her letters will get to me when they get to me.” Otis and I went upstairs to my room. He took the bed and I took the desk.
Dear Nora…
Too formal.
Nora…
Too cold.
Hey!
I crumpled the paper and tossed it into the trash basket under my desk.
I’d never written Nora a real letter before. I’d never had to. If this had been any other summer of our lives, we’d have been bowling or going to the beach or maybe writing a dictionary for Old Country, the secret language we invented in second grade after our class trip to the Renaissance fair. I should’ve been talking to Nora every day, but instead, I had no idea what she was doing or who she was doing it with, and she knew the same about me.
Nora would understand about Jules. She’d say, Think of Jules as a circus clown. She prances around the big tent, doing silly clown things, piling into cars, honking noses. While you, Blue, you watch and say, “Ha! Look at that slightly amusing and rather annoying clown! I will laugh at her, and then I will go about my business ruling the world.”
I decided I’d try writing again after dinner and went downstairs to help Mom. Since it was raining, we were eating in the kitchen instead of outside on the back deck like usual. Mom sat shucking corn directly into a garbage can wedged between her knees, her hair piled on top of her head and secured with two pencils.
I moved a giant vase of mixed flowers to the counter so Otis and I could set the table, our nightly chore. “Lamb’s ear feels like Otis’s ears,” I said, rubbing a velvety leaf between two fingers.
“And its flowers smell like pineapple,” Mom said.
I sniffed, but the flowerless leaves didn’t have a smell. “Napkins, Otie.”
Otis took the yellow napkin holder off the counter and carried it to me in his mouth by the handle. On the radio, the DJ was “spinning songs from the seventies” at WLNG, the local Sag Harbor station.
A rock song came on, and Mom did her best air guitar to the opening riff. I just watched, thinking about Nora and letters we hadn’t written and ballast piles I hadn’t found.
“Blue, you left me hanging!” Mom held out empty hands.
I admit it: I air-guitar with my mom. And we lip-sync instead of sing because I inherited my lack of musical ability from her and we both know it.
“Sorry. I’m just not feeling it tonight,” I said, trying to force a smile.
She brushed a piece of hair out of her face with her forearm. “Still no letter from Nora?”
“Not yet.” I folded another napkin.
Mom gave me a good long look. “How about we make that potato-rosemary bread you love tonight so we can toast it with cheese for breakfast tomorrow? We haven’t done that in a while.”
“Maybe.” I wished I could talk to Mom about the hunt. I hated keeping such a huge secret from my parents. But Pop Pop and treasure were very sore subjects for Dad. I wished, for the zillionth time, that I knew why.
Dad came in from the patio, where he’d been grilling under an umbrella, raindrops spattering his favorit
e Pearl Jam T-shirt and his hair, which is black and curly like mine. He put the plate with the burgers on the table. “Head hug,” he said.
I leaned over so he could wrap an arm around my head and squeeze. Mom put the corn in a big pot of boiling water.
“How’s the project going, Belly?” Dad crouched over Otis, giving him a massive belly rub while Otis’s whole body corkscrewed around in a state of ecstasy. Dad claims he’s Otis’s favorite belly rubber, a title I challenge. He also says he’s Otis’s favorite wrestling partner and jogging buddy, but I remind him he’s Otis’s only wrestling partner and jogging buddy.
“The project’s going okay.” It turns out guilt tastes like spoiled grapes, mushy and sour.
“It’s good to see you making new friends. Being alone all the time isn’t healthy.”
I pretty much dropped off the planet friend-wise last fall when Pop Pop got sick. At first, I’d visit him during the times we’d usually sail together. I’d read aloud from his favorite books about a sea captain and his doctor / spy best friend from the 1800s. Pop Pop would interrupt every few lines to make sure I knew all the nautical terms, which made it kind of hard to follow the story, but I didn’t complain. Later, when Pop Pop got sicker, I visited every day and read pages and pages until he fell asleep.
“Spending every day with Jules isn’t healthy,” I muttered.
“You wouldn’t have to spend every day with Jules if you’d done your homework during the school year like you should have,” Mom said in a singsongy voice. “It’s your own fault you’re in the doghouse.”
Every time Mom tells me I’m in the doghouse for something, I want to point out that Otis’s house is our house, so she’s actually insulting her own home. But I never do, because no matter what Jules might think, even though I’m almost failing out of school, I’m not stupid.
Mom took the corn out of the pot and put it in a bowl lined with red-and-white-checked dish towels. “Dinner’s ready.”
Headbutt.
“High or low?” Dad said to Otis before I could get the words out. Otis gave Dad a high-five paw.