by Eve Yohalem
Dad was out of his seat, and Mom was holding him back. You all right? she mouthed. I nodded.
Ed said, “Okay, everybody. No harm done. Just a few dishes. Look at that, it’s cleaned up already. Dry cleaning’s on me! Blue, why don’t you come on up now?”
Why don’t I teleport to China? Or swim to the moon?
I slithered to the front of the room, trying to pretend I didn’t look like an oversized preschooler with a drinking problem.
I uncrumpled my speech and leaned toward the microphone. Most of what I had written was smeared.
I cleared my throat. “Um, thank you, Mr. Buttersby.”
The tent was filled with people from town plus hundreds of unfamiliar faces, all waiting to hear what the clumsy diabetic girl had to say.
Plus Fitz.
Dad gave me a big thumbs-up. Jules toasted me with her ginger ale.
It didn’t matter that I couldn’t read my speech; I pretty much had it memorized since I basically gave the same one every year. It was all about what it’s like to have this lousy disease that no one can see that’s only going to get worse unless everybody in the room opened their wallets right this second and paid for a cure.
I was so sick of being the sick girl.
I cleared my throat again. “I want to tell you…”
Otis pressed his body against my leg. I sank my fingers into his ruff.
“Um, let me tell you…”
Mom. Dad. Jules. A cool lady with a birdcage for a hat.
Otis ducked his head under my palm. I scratched between his ears and thought about all the things I was expected to say that I didn’t want to say.
I’m done talking about the sick girl.
I took a deep breath, and…
“Let me tell you about my service dog, Otis.”
Mom and Dad gave me a Huh? look. They knew this wasn’t how my speech was supposed to start.
“The funny thing is,” I said, “we didn’t mean to get a medical-alert dog when we got him. Actually, we didn’t even mean to get a dog. We were just trying to get my teeth cleaned.”
Only a few people laughed at my joke. I glanced over at Jules, who circled her hands in a Keep going motion. So I did.
“I was at the dentist’s office for a checkup one day when I was six. There I was, in the chair with the spit-suction thing dangling out of my mouth, when all of a sudden, I heard a cry.”
I’ll never forget that cry. It was soft and soulful and sad. Full of yearning and loneliness. Starved for love and understanding. Or at least that’s what it sounds like now in my memory.
“See, Eloise, the hygienist, is also a dog trainer, and she’d heard about a German shepherd shelter puppy nobody wanted. He was a runt, he was hyper, and he was scared of kitchens. The first owners gave up on him. I mean, who would want a pet like that?”
I scanned the audience. People seemed to be paying attention, or at least no one was checking their phones, which I took as a good sign.
“Anyway, Eloise had told the shelter she’d try to work with this hopeless, possibly mentally ill dog, and she had him with her at work that day. After the cry, I was out of the chair in a second. I didn’t even bother taking the paper-towel-on-a-chain thing off my neck.” That got a few more laughs. “I followed the cry to a crate in the corner of the exam room, kneeled down…”
I paused for dramatic effect.
“And there was Otis.”
Another pause. How could I possibly describe the epic humongousness of Otis entering my life? I looked down at him, my hand still on top of his head, and Otis twisted his neck around so he could lick my palm.
“Otis was so little back then!” I said, remembering every adorable detail. “Just a pair of big maple-syrup eyes in a fuzzy black face. He had crooked puppy ears and a skinny puppy tail that thumped thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.”
Exactly in time with the beat of my heart.
“So, guess what? It turns out that it’s really hard for parents to say no to a free puppy for an only child, especially when nobody in the family is allergic.”
That got a bigger laugh. Maybe this public-speaking thing wasn’t so bad after all.
“It also turns out, as you can see for yourselves, that Otis is the opposite of a runt. He was hyper because he’s ridiculously smart and bursting with brainpower. And he doesn’t hate kitchens. He just has a crazy-sensitive nose, and when he was little he got overwhelmed by too many smells.”
Mom and Dad were holding hands. Dad winked at me.
“At first, Otis was just like any other puppy—assuming any other puppy was the world’s best puppy. He loved food and naps and sniffing things and finding things and eating left shoes and rolling in mud and running like a maniac on the beach.”
And me. He loved me most of all. Which was good because I loved him most of all too.
“After a while, my parents started noticing that whenever I had a blood sugar episode, Otis would plaster himself to my side and lick me until my levels were back to normal. They didn’t think too much about it, though, because he did the same thing when I fell down or got sad. But then he started doing it before I noticed I was feeling bad. And then there was the day that Otis pushed open the screen door, found my dad in the garage, and whined and nipped at him until my dad followed him back into the house and up the stairs to my room, where I was half-unconscious with a blood sugar level of forty-five and dropping.”
Quiet murmurs from the audience, who were no doubt picturing six-year-old me lying on my bedroom floor, clammy and pale.
I kept going. “Eloise worked with us for two full years to get Otis’s scent training solid, so that he would do it right every single time and even wake up from a dead sleep to alert us. My parents did most of the work, but I’m the one who still plays scent games with him to make sure his training stays fresh.”
I felt Otis tilt his nose up, and I smiled down at him. He wagged his tail like a windshield wiper on high. “That’s right, Otis—I’m talking about you.”
The audience awwww-ed. I looked out again. Anna was wiping away tears.
“You saw tonight the way Otis helps me and protects me. What you can’t see is that he understands diabetes better than anyone in this room, including me. Otis saves my life every day. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
I tried to picture it—life without Otis—but I couldn’t. There’s no version of Future Blue walking down the street, reading in bed, or doodling in English class without Otis.
The audience waited for me to finish my speech, but what more could I say?
“Um, thanks?”
I didn’t expect the tidal wave of applause. Usually when I finish my speech there’s some polite clapping, which I can barely hear because most people go back to eating and chatting by the time I’m halfway through speaking. But tonight, the sound filled the tent. I froze, not sure where to go or what I should do.
Luckily, Ed was ready with an exit line. He came back to the microphone. “Thanks, Blue. Now, folks, I hope you’ll all be as good a friend to Blue and kids like her as Otis is. But with your wallet, not your nose.”
People smiled and nodded, and more than a few of them reached for the donation envelopes on their tables.
Ed held up his hand. “I know everyone’s ready for dinner, but I have one more announcement to make.”
The murmuring died down.
“Some of you may know I have a new partner. A new partner in work and in life. Anna, would you please come up here?”
Anna made her way to the front of the room and stood on Ed’s other side. I looked over at Jules from my spotlight of awkwardness onstage. Her face was a total blank.
“Anna and I have decided to embark on a new journey together. An exciting journey that will bring the past into the present.”
Otis’s panting was now the only sound in the tent.
“Anna Bowdin, the beautiful, talented Anna Bowdin and I…”
Anna, gazing adoringly at Ed. Ed, gazing a
doringly at Anna. Jules, frozen.
“…are teaming up with Fitz Fitzgibbons and director Sonia Jacobs for their documentary about Fitz’s search for the Golden Lion payroll. Anna will narrate, and I’m coming on as producer. Best of all, folks, Fitz is giving the first hundred thousand dollars he finds to the Cure Juvenile Diabetes Foundation! Fitz—come on up!”
And that’s when the fireworks started. And the band launched into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“Isn’t this great?” Ed shouted.
Otis dove for cover between my legs, and I nearly fell on top of him. Half-blind in the stage lights, teetering over my dog, I squinted over the crowd, searching for Jules. All I saw was the back of her head as she ran from the tent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
True Fact: Up until the Middle Ages, people diagnosed diabetes by drinking pee to see if it tasted sweet. (TF supplied by Dr. Basch.)
“So your dad and Anna are on the Windfall right now?” I said.
Otis, Jules, and I were back on the water less than twelve hours after the CJDF fruit fail. So far we’d covered about three-quarters of the area near the sorrowful hound. We were running out of time and space.
“Yes. Thanks to my last name and my brilliant idea to threaten Fitz with a documentary, Fitz asked my father and his likely future daughter-wife to be part of the one that Fitz and Sonia Jacobs were already making. They’re all there together, as we speak, doing light studies and camera tests,” Jules said. “We’ll probably hear them on the spy-cam any second.”
As if on cue, Anna’s voice came through the speaker:
“Can we do something about this wind?”
Sonia: “Like what?”
Anna: “I don’t know. Block it? With a… thing?”
Jules yanked on the tow rope to the tube like she was an evil dentist going after a healthy molar. “I should have known he’d find a way to make the treasure hunt all about him,” she said. “I won’t let him. Not this time. We have to find the treasure first.”
Jules was all business since Ed’s big announcement. No more debates about wedges versus platforms or lectures about why the millions of bacteria that live in our guts will be the medicine of the future. Just bucket, bucket, bucket.
Which was fine with me. Every second that went by, somebody was getting closer to the treasure. And Jules was right: That somebody needed to be us.
The water today was calm and clear, and the bright sunshine meant we could see straight to the floor of the bay about twenty-five feet down. Perfect hunting conditions. We paddled from section to section, finding the usual rocks and seaweed.
Until I spotted the hunk.
“Jules.” I tried to keep my voice normal even though there were smoke detectors going off in my head.
“What?” she said, her voice muffled by her bucket.
“Look here and tell me what you see.” I moved over on the tube so she could take my spot.
Jules scooched over and put her bucket where mine had been. After a few seconds she said, “The seaweed?”
“No.” I stuck my arm in the water and pointed. “The hunk to the right of the seaweed. About two o’clock from the seaweed.”
Jules scooched a few more inches off the tube into the water. “I see the seaweed, and some sand, and—” She gasped.
The hunk stuck up half-buried in the sand, black, lumpy, about the length and shape of a quart-sized milk carton but skinnier. I’d been looking at lumps and bumps and hunks for weeks, and this one didn’t look like anything I’d seen.
Jules took her head out of her bucket to face me. “Can we get down there?”
“It might be too deep,” I said.
“Let’s try anyway,” she said. “Now. Like, right now.”
“My thinking exactly,” I said.
But distance wasn’t the only problem. Because the water was deep, there’d be a lot of pressure as we swam closer to the bottom, holding our breath. The thing is, pressure is really bad for diabetic people’s eyes, which tend to do things like hemorrhage. Not blood-spurting-out-of-your-face hemorrhage, but little-burst-capillaries hemorrhage, the kind that over time, if you have enough of them, can make you blind. So when Jules asked, “Want me to try first?” I gritted my teeth and said yes even though I was dying to shout, No way!
Jules took off her shorts and T-shirt and tossed them into the well in the middle of the tube. She had on a plain blue one-piece underneath. Very swim team. Not very Jules. She slid off the tube and treaded water.
“Let’s not get overexcited. It’s probably nothing,” she called.
“Probably,” I agreed. “But worth checking out.”
“Definitely,” she said, and dove down.
Otis stuck his head under the boat rail and stared at the spot where she’d been. Or possibly at the jellyfish, which there were kind of a lot of.
I watched Jules through the view bucket. She was a good swimmer. She went straight for the hunk, but before she even got close, she turned around and came back.
“I ran out of air,” she said, breathing hard.
“How was the pressure?” I asked.
“I thought my ears were going to explode, but whatever. I’m going again.”
Jules tried again. And again. She treaded water next to the tube after the third time, catching her breath.
“It’s too far down to swim,” I said, my brain scrambling for a backup plan.
“Yeah. Sorry. I—oh, shih tzu!” Jules yelled. “Oh! Ow! Jellyfish! Get me out of here!”
Otis barked. I slithered half off the tube and reached. “Grab my arms!”
Jules grabbed and I pulled.
“Oof!” she groaned.
I gave one last heave and Jules rolled all the way onto the tube, clutching her leg, which had a big red sting mark on it.
“Oh, wow, it hurts. It hurts!”
I yanked the rope to bring the tube to the Mako. Jules crawled on and curled into a ball. Otis hovered over her.
“Do something!” she begged.
I climbed on after her and got a small plastic spice bottle out of the gear bag.
Jules eyed me suspiciously from her fetal position on the deck of the boat. “What’s that?”
“Meat tenderizer,” I said, holding up the bottle. “It takes away jellyfish pain.”
“Are you sure that’s okay for my skin?” Jules frowned. “I don’t want to get a rash.”
“Well, the other thing that works on jellyfish stings is pee,” I said. “Do you want me to pee on you?”
“Ew, no.”
I kneeled next to her and sprinkled some of the white powder on her leg. Otis tried to lick it off but I distracted him with a bone. After that Jules seemed like she was feeling a little better. At least she wasn’t whimpering anymore.
“Would you really pee on me if you had no meat tenderizer?” she asked seriously.
“I guess,” I said. “If you needed me to.”
Jules teared up.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “Does it hurt?”
She sniffed. “I don’t have a single friend back home who would do that for me.”
The jellyfish sting seemed to have affected Jules’s brain even more than her leg.
“Well, obviously you need to get some new friends,” I said.
We laughed, and I helped her sit up.
“Could you tell what the hunk was?” I asked.
“No,” Jules said, fanning the sting with her hand. “But it definitely doesn’t look like something we’ve seen before. The size, the shape, those lumps all over it that make it look like it’s been corroding for a really long time. Maybe we can find a way to bring it up instead of going down to get it. Do you have some kind of scooper thing?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to move it without knowing what it is. What if it breaks apart?”
“So what are we going to do?” Jules said.
Simple. There was only one thing to do.
“Do you know how to scuba?”
<
br /> Jules gave me her Duh look. “Please. I’ve been going to Maui every year since I was five.”
She was definitely feeling better.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
True Fact: Taking a dive can be a leap of faith.
The problem was, we couldn’t tell anyone we wanted to scuba. Nobody—not my parents, not even Ed—would let two middle school kids go off and dive on their own, not to mention go down without a buddy. Which was why Jules told Ed she was sleeping at my house and why we were loading gear into the Mako at midnight.
At least we had Otis with us. Not that he could scuba or drive the boat, but he had an air of authority. Otis didn’t understand the words “sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night while Mom and Dad are sleeping,” but he knew something was up. I could tell by his ears, which were especially tall and pointy.
“This is my first night dive,” Jules said, clicking the waterproof flashlight on and off over and over again. “It’s going to be really cool.” Click, click, click, click.
“Shhhh,” I hissed. “Do you want people to hear us?”
We used oars to paddle away from my house and then motored out to the hunk site without talking so we wouldn’t add to the engine noise. Plus, I wasn’t sure I could talk without my head erupting.
The thing is, people with diabetes have to be really careful about scuba diving. It’s not just the pressure, which isn’t too bad if you know how to breathe right and you don’t go too deep. It’s that spending time underwater can give you low blood sugar. Sometimes super-low blood sugar, which can make you go into a coma.
Sometimes people don’t wake up from comas.
Dr. Basch says it’s okay for me to dive, but there are a lot of extra rules I have to follow. Like I have to test my blood sugar an hour, a half hour, and ten minutes before a dive, and then every hour after a dive for twelve hours. I can’t dive deeper than fifty feet. And I can’t dive if I’ve had a recent “major blood sugar episode” without checking with Dr. Basch first.
The hunk was only twenty-five feet down, but getting up to 490 is definitely a “major blood sugar episode.”