by Eve Yohalem
I glared at Dad.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You’re supposed to be letting me handle this,” I said.
“I know.” Dad held up both hands in surrender. “You’re right. Old habits.”
Otis dropped my kit in my lap, and I tested while watching my parents out of the corner of my eye. Mom was literally biting her lip.
A few seconds later the meter told me my blood sugar level was 180.
“Good high, Otis.” I gave Otis his turkey jerky treat, and he lay down next to my chair to savor it. He looked relaxed, but I knew he was still on duty, sniffing whatever chemicals my body made that would let him know when my blood sugar went down to normal. “So that’s forty-five grams of carbs for the corn and the bun.” I typed the number forty-five into my pump.
“We’re having strawberries for dessert,” Mom said. “They were in season at the farm stand.”
I entered another fifteen grams for the strawberries, and the pump calculated how big a bolus of insulin I’d need to bring me down from my high and cover the carbs. “Three and a half units,” I told Mom and Dad.
The whole time I went through these steps, Mom and Dad watched me while pretending not to watch me. I understood why they wanted to double-check—no, triple-check—that I was doing everything right. Because what if I got it wrong? If my blood sugar went too high I could go into ketoacidosis, which is medicalese for feeling like your brain has the stomach flu. And if it went too low I could pass out. Or worse.
Diabetes has been around forever, but people started using insulin only about a hundred years ago. I think about that sometimes: If I’d been born in 1900, I’d have been dead before I was three. The only thing scarier to me than managing my diabetes myself is not knowing how to manage my diabetes myself.
“So tell us where you’ve sampled the water so far,” Dad said, sneaking a piece of burger to Otis under the table. We have a strict rule against feeding Otis table scraps, which is why all three of us try to do it without the others seeing. Even Otis keeps up with the act. He never begs. He just hangs around the table, quietly available to helpfully snarf down any juicy chunks of meat that happen to fall his way.
“Oh, you know. Not much. Just some stuff near Shelter Island.”
“Shelter Island? Aren’t you supposed to be concentrating on the South Fork?” Mom said.
I choked on a sip of water. “Well, not really Shelter Island so much as Northwest Harbor. And, um, Springs.” I’m a rotten liar. I stutter; I come up with dumb excuses; my nose may actually grow. Feeling guilty makes me even worse at it.
“Which is it? Shelter Island or Springs?” Mom asked.
“Um, both? I mean, I started at Shelter Island, because I forgot I didn’t need to sample that. I mean, I didn’t forget—I just thought it would be more accurate and thorough if I included the area near the big landmass in the middle of the fork. And then I did Northwest Harbor, and now I’m doing Springs.”
“That’s a lot for a week,” Dad said, pointing at me with his fork.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been working hard. Really hard.”
Rotten. Rot-ten. Rot.
Even though Otis wasn’t alerting, I tested again to make sure I was back in a good range.
“Better?” Dad asked.
“One-oh-two,” I said.
Dad’s shoulders relaxed.
“How are things going with Jules?” Mom asked.
“Surprisingly okay,” I said. The surprising part was that I wasn’t lying. When Jules wasn’t talking about life in LA or her favorite fashion designers, she actually had interesting stuff to say. Yesterday, for example, Jules had told me that back in the day, when sailors got shipwrecked and ran out of food and had to resort to cannibalism, they called it a “custom of the sea,” a True Fact so good that I put it in my journal. It’s possible that in her spare time Jules read things like history books and watched things like documentaries about physics.
“I’m glad,” Mom said. “Because the fund-raiser is going to be big this year. Ed’s really excited about it—he’s got a million ideas—a silent auction, a fruit fair—”
“A fruit fair?” I said.
“A celebration of fruit,” Mom explained. “Because it’s a healthy carb.”
“Maybe they should do a fish fest instead, since it’s a healthy protein.” Dad waggled his eyebrows at me.
“Dad,” I groaned.
“It’s going to be a real festive o-cake-sion.” He grinned.
“Hal, you’re killing us,” Mom said.
“Heh,” Dad grunted with pride. Nothing makes him happier than a bad pun.
Fruit fairs. Huge crowds. Photo ops. “Can’t they find some other kid to be their poster child?” I asked.
“Not all diabetic kids are as healthy as you, Blue. You’re doing this for them too,” Mom said.
How many times had I heard that line? I wasn’t hungry anymore, but I had to finish my carbs anyway because I’d already taken insulin for them. I stuffed the rest of the bun in my mouth in one huge wad and dropped half the burger on the floor for Otis without even trying to hide it.
“So have you seen the Windfall out there?” Dad asked.
“Whuh?” I choked down the giant lump of bun that was stuck in my throat. “Oh. Yeah. But they haven’t found anything yet.”
ROT!
“What makes you say that?” Dad asked.
“I just figured if they found something, Fitz would have a big press conference about it,” I said, for once in my life sounding halfway convincing.
“Well, I hope they keep looking for a long time. Pump some money into the local economy. They won’t find anything,” Dad said.
“How do you know? You can’t be sure there’s no treasure out there,” I said, wishing yet again that he’d give me a real answer.
Dad pushed back from the table and picked up his plate, his good mood gone. “Trust me. I know.”
He left the kitchen.
I growled and threaded my fingers through my hair. “What did I say wrong?” I asked Mom.
She sighed. “It’s not you. Talking about treasure hunting reminds him of Pop Pop.”
“I just don’t get it,” I said. “What’s so bad that he won’t talk about Pop Pop or the family stories? And why did he sell my VOC coin?” I was still mad about the coin. I probably always would be.
Mom pursed her lips, thinking. Maybe, finally, somebody was going to tell me something real. Something that wasn’t “it’s private” or “you wouldn’t understand” or “when you’re older.”
Maybe not. “It’s not for me to say, sweetie. It has to come from Dad,” Mom said.
“But he won’t talk about it!”
More thinking. At last Mom said, “I can tell you this: Dad misses Pop Pop. He misses him a lot. And the stuff with the treasure? It’s complicated.”
Which was more than she’d ever said before, but not by much.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
True Fact: People think having a diabetic-alert dog means you can spend less time monitoring your diabetes, but actually it means you spend more time. I check my blood sugar as soon as I get up in the morning, before and after I eat, before I go to bed, and once in the middle of the night—plus, I do it whenever Otis alerts me.
The air conditioner in my room was broken, and the night was so hot and humid that every time I rolled over in bed I was afraid I was going to drown in my own sweat. I didn’t even need my alarm to wake me for my usual middle-of-the-night blood sugar test—something else my parents used to do for me that now I do for myself—because I didn’t sleep for more than twenty minutes at a time.
Poor Otis would have been way better off in my parents’ room, where it was cool, but he knows my blood sugar tends to go a little crazy at night, so he stays close to me, even though he can smell my blood sugar from any room in the house, including when I’m upstairs in the shower and he’s downstairs in the kitchen.
After melting all night—made
way worse by the huge furry dog in my bed and my lowish blood sugar, which wouldn’t go above seventy-five no matter what I ate—I was tempted to spend the whole day with my head in the freezer. Instead, Otis, Jules, and I were on the boat in choppy water, life vests on, Otis napping and Jules and me looking at nothing but swirling sand through our view buckets.
“This is pointless,” I said. “Let’s head back.”
“Why should we head back? I don’t want to head back.”
“But we can’t see anything.” And just a short twenty-minute boat ride from here there’s a freezer at home that I can stick my head in. Plus, my blood sugar’s still kind of low but I ran out of Skittles and I don’t want to have to resort to the disgusting orange glucose tablets that Mom bought instead of the strawberry ones.
“So? There’s plenty of other stuff we can do.” Jules seemed strangely hyper considering the air felt like steamed gym socks.
“Like what?” Ice bath, iced tea, lie on my parents’ bed with their air conditioner on…
“Like… look at maps or clean the boat or… or…”
Jules really didn’t want to go home. And I bet her whole house was air-conditioned, not just the bedrooms.
She plunked her bucket down.
“We need to embark on a campaign of misinformation.”
“A what?”
“Send Fitz and the Fitzminions on a wild-goose chase. Tell them stuff that will make them think the treasure is someplace where we know it isn’t.”
I pictured the Windfall pulling up their anchor and motoring to Orient Point or Fishers Island or maybe East Shore, where the old nuclear power plant is.
Suddenly, the air felt a little less heavy. And the freezer could wait. Otis sensed my excitement; he lifted his head and sniffed.
“How do we do that?” I asked.
“Easy,” Jules said. “We lie.”
Turns out lying is like any other skill: It just takes practice. First I lied to Miguel at the Breakfast Buoy: “You know, my great-grandfather was part of a team that dredged the waters in Gardiner’s Bay back in 1932, so, um, there’s no possible way the Windfall will find any treasure there now.” Then Jules lied to Laurie at the dock: “I found some old maps in the town library, and guess what? There used to be a strip of land that connected Gardiner’s Point to Gardiner’s Island, so there’s no way there can be any treasure there now.” Then we went to the gas dock and Jules lied to the guys who pump gas: “So, this lobster fisherman was at my house the other day selling three-pounders to my chef, and he said his traps keep getting caught in an old wreck about ten miles away from the Windfall.”
Then we waited to see what the Windfall would do.
The next morning, Jules and Otis and I went to the Long Wharf, a pier at the harbor with a bunch of shops and restaurants and parking for cars on it. Small boats bobbed on one side of the wharf and gigantic yachts loomed on the other side. The air was even hotter and stickier than the day before, and it felt like it was going to pour any second.
Jules and I hunched over the iPad, sharing a pair of earbuds. Otis lay on the ground by our feet, panting.
“Do you think our lies worked?” I said.
“Shhhhh,” Jules hissed.
The minutes crawled by. Nobody on the Windfall said anything about changing locations. Instead, the crew complained about the weather, and Fitz complained about the crew, and Sonia the documentary director complained about the light, until, finally:
“Hang on. What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That. That blob on the screen.”
“You sure it’s not a shell?”
“It’s too big to be a shell.”
“Here! Take the wheel—I’ve got a good feeling about this!”
After which there was a lot of moving around and static and yelling. Jules had my arm in a death grip, but I barely noticed because my body temperature had shot up to six hundred degrees.
Fitz’s voice came out of the iPad:
“Listen up, people! Whatever we find down there—I don’t care if it’s the Golden Lion payroll or the lost city of Atlantis—you say nothing to nobody, hear me? From this second on, we are on information lockdown. You speak of it to no one, not even to each other. I control the information flow, got that?”
I yanked out my earbud and jumped up. Otis and I started pacing back and forth.
“We need to know what they found,” Jules said.
“I know.” Pace, pace, pace.
“They’re not going to say what it is out loud,” she said. “Fitz said they can’t talk about it, ‘not even to each other.’”
“I know.”
Jules joined us. Pace, pace, pace.
“And we can’t see it from the spy-cam because of the glue.” She held up the iPad. Even in the sun, you could tell it showed nothing but blur.
“I know.” Pace.
Jules stopped short. “We have to sneak up on them and look.”
Otis and I stopped short. “Not while they’re in open water. They’d see us coming a mile away.”
“There’s got to be something. Think!” Jules said.
There was something, but it was a crazy something. An illegal something.
A chill came over me, like an ice cube on the back of my neck.
“Every second that goes by is one second closer to Fitz putting whatever they found in a place where we can’t see it,” I said.
Jules smacked her forehead. “Duh!”
I looked down at Otis, who was standing at attention, ready for anything. Which was good, because we’d never done anything as dangerous as what we were about to do. But then again, Petra and Abraham were even younger than me when they survived a mutiny and somehow ended up with a stolen fortune.
Suddenly, the chill on my neck turned to heat.
“Boat!” I ordered, Otis at my heels.
“Where are we going?” Jules asked, jogging after us.
“The Ruins.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
True Fact: Sometimes the thing you’re scared of is the wrong thing to be scared of.
An hour later, Jules and I stood at the wheel of the Mako, scanning the coastline of Gardiner’s Point, a.k.a. the Ruins, a.k.a. a tiny speck of land due north of the tip of the T-bone’s pointy hat.
“Let me get this straight,” she said, wind whipping her hair around her face. “The government of the United States of America says that no one is allowed to step foot on this island.”
“Right.” My heart was back at the top of the death-drop ride.
“Because they used it for target practice in World War Two.”
“Right again,” I said. Hands on the safety bar.
“So now it’s covered with unexploded bombs.”
“Yup.” Whooosh… boom!
Jules lowered her binoculars. “Have you ever been there?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ve heard that high school kids sneak onto it sometimes.”
She shifted the throttle into drive. “So it can’t be that dangerous, right?”
“I hope not,” I said, and took the wheel.
The only way to find out whether the Windfall had found an old shoe or something from a 350-year-old wreck was to sneak onto the far side of the Ruins, hike to the near side facing the Windfall, and spy through binoculars from the shore. So here we were, breaking the law again.
What would be next? Bank robbery?
“Here’s what we should do,” Jules said. “Let’s look at the Ruins on satellite images so we know where to walk.”
“I’ve tried,” I said. “The government used to pixelate it. Even now, you can’t zoom close enough to see anything.” Blacked out. DO NOT ENTER. Not only are people banned from going to the Ruins; people aren’t even allowed to look at it.
“That’s so cool.”
True Fact: It kinda was.
We motored to an old broken-down dock on the Ruins’ far side that looked strong enough to tie the boat to, but not stron
g enough to stand on.
“We’ll have to swim to shore,” I said.
Jules and I both had bathing suits on under our clothes. We stuffed our shorts and T-shirts and some supplies into a waterproof gear bag, and then the three of us stared over the side of the boat at the water.
“There could be a bomb right here under us,” Jules said, reading my mind. Except she said it in an excited front-car-of-the-roller-coaster kind of way.
“We’ll slide in gently and we won’t touch bottom,” I said. “Okay?”
Otis woofed.
“I’ll go first.” Jules swung a leg over the rail.
“No, let me.” I didn’t trust Jules to be careful, and besides, this whole crazy mission was my idea.
“You sure?” Jules asked.
No! “Yeah.” I climbed over the boat rail and hung from the side, questioning my sanity, then let go and started treading water. Otis watched me from the edge of the boat, ready to leap the instant I gave him the command. “Okay, give me the gear bag,” I said to Jules.
She passed it to me, and I swam one-handed to shore, breathing much harder than I should have needed to. I waited until the last possible second to put my feet down.
I took a few seconds so my heart could stop racing. The sand was full of broken mussel shells and shards of old metal trash. Jules and I both had on flip-flops, but Otis was going to have a problem. We would have to carry my wet eighty-pound dog to the walking path.
We could turn back now. Before anything bad happened. Like a bomb going off or the Coast Guard arresting us.
But also before we saw what the Windfall had found.
“Your turn!” I called to Jules. “Be careful.”
“Don’t worry.” She slid off the boat and swam to shore.
It turns out worry tastes sharp and bitter, like olive juice, which Nora once dared me to drink. I gulped and called, “Come, Otis!”
Otis jumped over the side and paddled toward us. When he got close Jules and I waded in and heaved him over the metal and shells to a rough, sandy path that led to the other side of the island. I had Otis’s front half, and he licked my nose while Jules and I carried him. The lick was Otis’s way of saying thank you, which I appreciated.