The Truth According to Blue

by Eve Yohalem

  “I get why you hate this,” I said.

  “I don’t hate it,” Dad said. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. Or be disappointed like I was disappointed.”

  “But I’m not the same as you,” I said, searching for the words that would make him understand. “I loved going out on the boat with Pop Pop. I still love it.”

  Maybe, though, the reason that I could love being with Pop Pop on the boat was because I had a dad who built me miniature igloos out of cheese cubes when I was little and who always came to my school plays and bowling tournaments.

  Dad’s face softened. He didn’t look like he might cry anymore. “I know you love it, Belly, and it makes me happy that you got all the best parts of Pop Pop. He had a lot of good parts.”

  My stomach twisted like a clove hitch knot. “I wish he’d given you all his best parts too.”

  “I got plenty.” Dad rubbed Otis’s head. “Don’t worry about me.”

  The clove hitch loosened a little. Maybe Dad would listen now if I tried to explain to him why the hunt was so important to me.

  “Dad? There’s, um, something else,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  I folded my hands on top of the table to keep my fingers from tapping. “When Pop Pop died I promised I’d find the treasure for him. If I stop now, it means I broke my promise. I have to keep looking.”

  “Blue—” Dad warned.

  “Plus,” I said, in my most logical, reasonable, how-could-anyone-possibly-object voice, “if I don’t finish the search, I’m definitely going to be disappointed, and you said you didn’t want me to be disappointed.”

  Dad didn’t say anything. Which meant he was thinking. Which meant there was hope.

  I kept going. “Fitz, on the other hand, might be very un-disappointed when he’s the one who finds the treasure that your father spent his whole life looking for.”

  “Fitz.” Dad said “Fitz” like most people say “sewer rat.”

  “Fitz,” I agreed.

  Dad shook his head. “Even if I said yes, there’s the cease and desist letter.”

  “Are you sure there’s nothing we can do about that? Maybe we can fight it or get a permit or something.”

  “I doubt it, Belly,” Dad said. “Fitz is lawyered up.”

  “So let’s get our own lawyer. Please, Dad. Can’t you at least ask someone?”

  He thought it over. “I guess I can ask Marisol.” Dad’s friend Marisol is a lawyer in town who also happens to have been his high school girlfriend, which should be awkward but somehow isn’t.

  “Thank you.”

  “And while I do that, you clean the basement.”

  Dad stuck out a fist. I bumped it.

  “Deal,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  True Fact: Everybody needs extra help sometimes.

  The next morning I woke up just as the sky was turning from pink to blue. Otis had claimed my pillow. I stroked the bridge of his nose with my thumb while he slept.

  “You were really tired last night, weren’t you?” I whispered.

  My blood sugar had been low when I tested in the middle of the night, but Otis, who was still totally exhausted after our scuba misadventure, had missed it. He didn’t wake up to alert me, he slept through my alarm, and he even stayed asleep while I ate a pack of Skittles.

  Otis can’t always take care of me.

  But if I was going to manage my diabetes, if I was going to catch as many highs and lows as possible, I needed Otis to back me up.

  And Otis needed a CGM to back him up.

  But I’d known that for a while, hadn’t I? I just hadn’t wanted it to be true. I wanted—I still want—Otis and me to be everything for each other forever. Even though it’s impossible.

  Otis opened his eyes and nuzzled my hand, calm and peaceful. So I knew, even before I tested, that my blood sugar was normal. I didn’t need to worry, because right now, and hopefully for a long time to come, Otis was taking care of me.

  After I got dressed, Otis and I walked Dad to his truck. Dad slid behind the wheel but left the door open.

  “Now listen.” He held up his phone. “You’re still grounded. I’ll be checking your phone finder app all day. If I see you’re not home, the deal is off.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “And the deal is that you’ll clean the basement today, and I’ll talk to Marisol.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “And no Jules. I’m calling Ed with an update.”

  “Will Ed even care?”

  Dad gave me a Mom-look.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Can I at least talk to Jules?”

  Dad thought it over. “Yes, but only on the phone. Not in person.”

  A small victory, but still a victory. I hid a smile.

  “Otis!” Dad called.

  Otis stood up on his hind legs with his paws on Dad’s thigh in the front seat. It was only because Otis was huge that he could reach.

  “Take care of Blue.”

  Otis woofed.

  Otis and I were good. Obedient. The minute Dad left, we headed straight down to the basement.

  I pulled the string on the overhead light.

  Shih tzu.

  See, the thing is, lots of people have messy basements. And usually, the longer you’ve lived someplace, the messier your basement is. Well, my family has lived in this house for two hundred years. That’s two hundred years of ancient clothes, books nobody will ever read again, broken baby furniture, weird posters my parents hung on their walls in college, my great-grandfather’s pinch pots, a framed embroidered Lord’s Prayer, cracked litter boxes, fire pokers, a headless dressmaker’s dummy, an old-timey bicycle with a missing seat, record albums, dented hamster cages, mystery boxes, mystery crates, and a butter churn. And that was just what I could see in front of me.

  No wonder Dad is two psychological wrong turns away from being a hoarder. It’s in his genes.

  I took a picture with my phone and sent it to Jules. A minute later she texted back: Impressive

  Jules: Did you know that people’s ears and noses grow their whole lives?

  Me: Really???

  Jules: Yup. Just saw it on the Science Channel

  I looked down at Otis, who was sniffing a wicker basket filled with homemade rag dolls with black cross-stitches for eyes.

  “No eating the zombies.”

  Otis gave me his Who, me? look and lay down. We both knew this was going to be a long day.

  “We need a plan,” I said. The basement has three main rooms, plus the creepy cobwebby crawl space from the original house in the 1600s, where no one ever goes. “We’ll start with the room we’re in now.”

  I could see that Dad had already cleared one corner. His mistake, I decided, was bringing all the stuff to get rid of upstairs into the main part of the house, where it could live forever in the hall like some kind of modern-art sculpture.

  “We’ll open the cellar doors and bring everything outside—because, let’s face it, everything here is garbage nobody would want, right? That way, Dad will only have until the next time it rains to haul it all to the dump. Sound good?”

  Otis woofed, and I gave him a head hug. I picked up the basket of rag dolls.

  “Let’s get these out of here before they suck out our souls.”

  It’s amazing how many armloads you can carry out of a basement and when you come back it still looks like you haven’t started. Piece by piece, I lugged stuff up and out to the grass by the side of the house. Then I’d go back to Otis and the room would still look like a jungle. Was new stuff growing where the old stuff had been?

  It was sweaty, dusty work, but the hardest part was not getting sucked into a time warp whenever I came across a family heirloom. Because mixed in with the junk were some pretty intriguing finds.

  Like the zombie dolls. I pictured some long-ago great-grandmother of mine in a flowered cotton dress and a white apron, maybe a bonnet, maybe some bloomers—all excited becau
se she’d been begging her mother for a doll forever and when she turned six her mom made her one for every birthday she’d ever had. But maybe that was all wrong. Maybe that great-something-grandmother made those dolls herself when she was my age. Maybe she wanted to sell them to buy, oh, I don’t know, penny candy or chewing tobacco. Or maybe Mom got them at a flea market and meant to use them for scarecrows, and I was getting sappy for nothing.

  It’s weird growing up as part of a family who’ve lived in the same place for centuries. The libraries are full of local history books that mention our ancestors, and the towns are full of streets with our last name. Broen Lane is just down the road from my house. Sometimes I’ll pull over my bike and wonder about my great-great-great-great-uncle Herman Broen, who used to live there, and whether people would knock on his door in the middle of the night for emergency doses of the medicines he concocted at his pharmacy on Main Street. Had any of his five kids looked like me?

  And had any of them died before they were three years old from a mysterious sugar sickness?

  When I came back from dumping a bag of rusty pie plates and cookie cutters, Otis wasn’t in his spot anymore.

  “Otis?”

  A small woof from the next room. Otis had decided to explore.

  “No eating anything!”

  I wiped my face with the bottom of my T-shirt and surveyed my progress. The pile outside was growing. Dad had warned me he might not be able to reach Marisol right away, so I tried not to check my phone too often. I also tried not to think about Fitz or the ballast pile or things like What if Marisol is on a bucket-list trip to Tasmania for six months and can’t help us?

  “Otis?”

  Woof.

  “Just checking.”

  Old stereo equipment. Mom’s wedding dress packed in tissue paper in a foil-wrapped box (which I didn’t throw away). A red wagon. I burrowed all the way to the corner of the room. Some kind of medieval torture instrument or possibly a pair of stirrups. An antique cabinet that was too pretty to trash and too heavy to lift anyway.

  Hooooooooowl!

  I dropped a box of broken power tools. “Otis?”

  Squeals and thrashes came from somewhere deep in the basement.

  “Otis! What’s wrong? I’m coming!”

  I barreled through the clutter, shoving junk out of my way, following the sound of Otis running—or chasing something?—from one room to another and knocking stuff over like he didn’t care what he crashed into.

  “Otis, stay!”

  But Otis didn’t stay. Not until he got to the last room in the basement. The crashing stopped, but I could still hear whimpers, which I followed to the farthest far end of the room.

  “Otis?”

  Whimper.

  The room was dark, with not even a cellar window to let in a trickle of light. I waved my arms around, looking for the string I knew was nearby, afraid of what I would find when I switched on the light.

  What if it’s a squirrel?

  Or a raccoon?

  Or a rabid raccoon?

  Didn’t matter. Whatever was in there, Otis needed me. I used the flashlight on my phone to find the string. Pulled—

  Nothing. No wild animals. Not even Otis. Just heavy panting.

  “Oh no, you’re not…”

  But he was.

  Hiding inside the creepy cobwebby crawl space, the only part left of the house that used to be here 350 years ago. Possibly with the carcass of a diseased rodent.

  I took a deep breath, ducked down, and shined the flashlight into the space.

  “Oh, Otis.”

  Otis’s fur was covered with mousetraps. The glue kind that my mom leaves all over the basement baited with peanut butter. Which Otis loves. I held back the hysterical laughter that was threatening to burst out, because friends don’t laugh at friends in their hour of need. Judging by the placement of the traps—stuck to his chest, his back paw, the tip of his tail, and dangling from his snout—Otis must have tried licking some peanut butter and then freaked out when the trap stuck to his face, running and jumping in circles, stepping on more traps, freaking out more, until he fled to the smallest, darkest corner he could find. Even if I hadn’t been fluent in Otis-ese, I would have known he was thinking that this was the most miserable, humiliating day of his entire life.

  “Come on. We’ll go upstairs and I’ll fix you up.”

  Otis shrank back. He cowered.

  “Come, Otis,” I tried again.

  He lowered his head and turned his back to me, revealing a trap stuck to his rump that I hadn’t noticed before.

  I sighed. And then I got down and crawled into the crawl space with my dog. It was empty except for us and three and a half centuries of dust. The crawl space was about as wide as a small walk-in closet, with ceilings high enough for sitting but too low for standing. Unlike the rest of the basement, which had cement floors and brick walls, the whole crawl space was paneled with smooth wood and strips of black metal, even the floor and ceiling.

  I wedged myself next to Otis and laid my head on a trap-free section of his back. Ignoring the lumpy chunk of metal poking my butt, I petted the top of his head and told him he would be okay. Nobody but us had to know about this terrible, embarrassing thing that had happened to him. I would get all the traps off and it wouldn’t even hurt. Promise. There would be treats. Many treats. And a super-long belly rub and a new antler to chew.

  Gradually, I coaxed Otis out, persuaded him to come upstairs, and made good on all my promises, including peanut butter sandwiches—creamy for me, double extra crunchy for him.

  We went back to the basement, and Otis stayed by my side while I lugged. The pile outside grew and grew, but I hardly noticed and didn’t care. Desperate for news, I kept checking the time, checking my texts, checking for missed calls from Dad, for low battery, bad Wi-Fi, a freak tornado. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Until, finally, at precisely 5:40 PM, which was an hour earlier than my parents’ usual get-home time, I heard two trucks pull into the driveway.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  True Fact: Play by the rules. Obey the law. Do what you’re told. Ask permission first. Let’s just say there are exceptions to everything.

  Otis and I raced upstairs to the front hall. “What did Marisol say?”

  Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at Dad.

  “Let’s talk in the living room,” Dad said.

  The ballast was on the hall table, where I’d left it that morning. Dad picked it up, and we went into the living room, where no one ever goes except maybe once a year when my parents have a party. We sat around the coffee table, Mom and me on the couch, Dad in a chair next to me, and Otis in front of the fireplace. For a second, I was four years old again, next to Pop Pop in this exact spot when he first showed me the family bible all those years ago.

  Dad weighed the ballast in his hand and sucked in a deep, long breath.

  My whole future was in that breath.

  He exhaled. “I told Mom already and we decided to give you the news together. It’s a no go, Belly.”

  “What!”

  “We’re sorry, Blue,” Mom said.

  “Are you sure?” My brain was spinning in my skull like one of those toy tops you pull with a string.

  “A hundred percent,” Dad said.

  No. No. Not okay. NO. “What exactly did Marisol say? Did you ask her about special permission for students? Or people whose families have lived here for hundreds of years? Or—”

  “I asked her all those things,” Dad said. “And more. The bottom line is that Fitz has a legal right to search those waters and we don’t. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

  “But that’s not fair!” I stood up. I needed space to move, air to breathe. “Pop Pop worked so hard! And our family brought that payroll here in the first place! Why should Fitz—”

  “Life isn’t fair,” Dad interrupted. “Never has been, never will be. It’s a game with rules that people like us are supposed to follow. And then
there are people like Fitz, who get to break those rules. And take extra turns. And maybe they get to play by a few extra rules that the rest of us don’t even know about.” Dad thwacked the ballast down on the table. “You need to accept that or else you’re going to be walking around ticked off at the world for the rest of your life.”

  My eyes burned and the living room turned to melted wax. “You think I don’t know life isn’t fair? Me? The only kid in Sag Harbor Middle School who sticks herself with needles every day?”

  Everyone went quiet. Suddenly, the air was full of all the stuff we never say out loud. It felt almost too heavy to breathe. So we didn’t. Not even Otis.

  Finally, Mom got up and gently pulled me back to the couch. “Enough about what’s fair. We need to get to the bottom of all this, once and for all. What are you still holding back?”

  I ground the heels of my hands into my eye sockets to keep the tears from leaking out. And then I told them all the really bad parts that I’d been hiding from them. Because what did it matter anymore? When I said we’d gone to the Ruins, Mom’s eyes got really big and Dad’s got really small. But when I told them about entering the Windfall and installing the spy-cam, my parents imploded. As in, instead of yelling and screaming, they got very very quiet.

  “Do you realize what you did on the Windfall was a felony?” Mom said.

  “Um, what’s a felony?”

  “A serious crime,” Dad said.

  “Then yes.”

  “And a bomb on the Ruins could have exploded?” Dad’s face was so red I worried his head might explode.

  “But it didn’t!”

  “That’s not the point,” Mom said, her voice rising. “Blue, the things you’ve done—insane, dangerous, illegal things, including lying to us and keeping the whole thing secret and putting Otis in danger—why? What’s going on with you? That’s what I can’t figure out. Why would you do all this?”

  “I told you!” I shouted. Otis whined. I lowered my voice. “I did it for Pop Pop.”

  “Pop Pop wouldn’t have wanted you to take all these risks. You know that,” Dad said. “There has to be something else you’re not telling us.”