by Eve Yohalem
“Right, Blue,” she said.
“Then I’m staying.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest so no one would see my hands shake. “I want to be here when Fitz Fitzgibbons finds our family’s inheritance right where I showed him to look.”
“I’m staying too,” Jules said. She put on her sunglasses, the ones that hid half her face.
Otis sat on my feet.
And that settled it.
Officer Dalvito accompanied Fitz back to the Windfall—Fitz’s “Talk to my lawyer!” loud and clear even without his bullhorn—and Mom, Dad, and Ed joined Jules, Otis, and me on our boat (Anna went home to take an oatmeal bath). A few minutes later, Officer Dalvito left on the Coast Guard boat, the Windfall moved their search area to ours, and we moved about ten yards out of their way.
It was pretty crowded on the Mako. Jules and I sat side by side in the well with Otis stretched across our laps. Mom and Dad shared the seat at the wheel, and Ed perched on the side of the boat. Nora’s letters crinkled in my pockets. She was here too.
Jules and I had been wrong. It didn’t take one minute or five minutes for Fitz to find the wreck. It took twelve.
When Fitz’s divers sent up the first video image, he and the rest of the crew whooped and high-fived and slapped one another on the backs with joy.
Jules pressed her hands over her ears. I hung my head between my knees and stared at the deck.
“Right under your shot buoy,” Mom said.
“Blue put all the clues together.” I could hear pride in Dad’s voice. “Three centuries of Broens couldn’t figure it out, but Blue’s the one who found it.”
I looked up. “And Jules,” I said.
“And Jules,” Dad agreed.
“But now Fitz will get all the glory,” Jules said, burying her hands in Otis’s ruff.
“Not if I can help it,” Ed said, coming over to rub Jules’s back. “You two did the work that matters, and I’m going to make sure everyone knows.”
Maybe that should have made us feel better, but it didn’t. My tears weren’t the only ones dotting Otis’s fur.
I didn’t deserve Dad’s pride in me. I’d found the treasure for Fitz Fitzgibbons. Not for Pop Pop. Not for Dad. For Fitz.
Sorry and angry twisted into a fiery ball that smoldered in my stomach. Any second now, Fitz was going to find three million florins of gold, silver, and copper.
Hours crawled by while divers dug out the wreck. Every so often we’d hear Fitz announce another find: “A cup!” “Look at that—a hammer!” And once, “Is that a barrel? Bring it up. Let’s see what’s inside!”
On the Mako, nobody smiled and everybody spoke in near-whispers. It was like being at a funeral reception. Which made sense because it was sort of true—something had died, even if that something was a dream.
Sometime around midday, Ed called one of his assistants and asked them to motor over with lunch. I gave my roast beef sandwich to Otis.
“How about we head back?” Mom suggested again. “You don’t have to keep watching this torture.”
I looked at Jules. The sun was beating down on us, and our backs were stiff and sore from sitting on the deck for hours. But we didn’t even have to say a word to know we agreed.
“We’re staying,” we said together.
More hours passed, and more finds emerged from the wreck. But the Windfall got quieter as the sun headed toward the horizon, and eventually the cheering stopped.
Silence.
And then a scream: “WHAT???”
Jules rose up onto her knees. “What’s going on?”
Mom, who’d been watching the Windfall, lowered the binoculars and smiled. “I don’t know for sure, but I believe the Golden Lion payroll is officially not at the bottom of Gardiner’s Bay.”
We all gaped at her.
“Ha!” Ed snorted.
“What’s so funny?” Dad asked.
“Oh, nothing much,” Ed said. “I just happen to know how many—many—millions of dollars Fitz spent on his search, that’s all.”
Everybody was on their feet now, talking, laughing, shaking their heads. Everybody except me and Jules.
Otis snuggled into our laps, and I stroked his shiny black head, listening to the small quiet voice inside me grow louder.
Still out there.
Still out there.
Still out there.
Still out there.
CHAPTER FORTY
True Fact: “Treasure” can mean a lot of different things.
Back home that night I found Dad in the basement, rummaging through a big pile of family castoffs.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Sure, Belly. Just looking for something.”
He set aside a bag of Christmas tinsel and dragged away a pair of rusty andirons before pulling out an old cardboard cigar box with ROSE-O-CUBA printed in red ink on the top.
Dad blew off some of the dust. “This is where I kept all my really important stuff when I was growing up. There’s something I want to show you.” He opened the lid and sifted through the contents. “Here.”
He handed me a long brown rock.
I examined it. “What’s this?” I asked.
“Treasure,” he said with a half smile. “I found it one day on the boat with Pop Pop when I was a kid. There we were, facedown in shallow water, looking through our view buckets, and all of a sudden I saw something sparkle. It was the sun bouncing off the mica, but we didn’t know that until later.”
I turned the rock over, shifting it this way and that, trying to catch the light.
“Take my word for it,” Dad said. “On a sunny day, you’d swear it was pure gold. And the shape—”
Shiny and flat. “Like a bar,” I said.
“So you get why Pop Pop and I were pretty excited. He’d been hunting for gold his whole life, so it was a big deal that he let me be the one to swim down for it. As soon as I grabbed it, I knew.”
“You knew it was just a rock?” I said.
Dad shook his head. “The opposite. I knew we’d finally struck gold. I could see it all playing out in my head, like one of those movie montages: Pop Pop and me salvaging the ship with all its cargo still on board, the newspaper headlines: ‘Local Father and Son Find Haul of the Century!’ I swam back to the boat one-handed, holding the rock over my head, screaming, ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!’ at the top of my lungs. Pop Pop leaned over the side, and I know it sounds sappy, but his eyes shined brighter than gold ever could. He took the treasure from me so I could climb aboard.” Dad stopped and pursed his lips.
“What happened next?” I asked.
He sighed. “By the time I got my legs over, I could read it in his face. Our gold bar was just a rock.”
“Oh wow,” I said. “You must have been really upset.” Poor Dad. To think he’d found the treasure and all that must have meant—fame, fortune, finally being able to spend time with his father on dry land—and then to find out it was just a rock.
“I should have been upset, but I wasn’t. Before I could get out a word, Pop Pop held it up and said, ‘They don’t call it fool’s gold for nothing,’ and we cracked up laughing. After that, we sat in the well, taking turns catching the light with our fool’s gold, talking about all the things we’d do when we found the real thing.”
Dad took the rock back from me and turned it over in his hand. “I haven’t thought about that day in a long time. It was a good day. Maybe our best day.”
“Dad?” I said quietly.
“Yeah, Belly?”
“How disappointed are you that we didn’t find the treasure today?”
“Not very. I’m very un-disappointed that Fitz didn’t find the treasure.” He smiled down at me and sighed. “I’m so proud of you, Belly, that I can’t feel disappointed about anything. Pop Pop would be proud of you too.”
Dad said “Pop Pop” and “treasure” like nothing weighed those words down anymore, like saying them made him happy.
“There’s a full moon tonight,”
I said. “Do you think there’s enough light outside to make the rock sparkle?”
“We can try,” Dad said.
We went upstairs and out to the back deck. The moon hung huge and heavy in the sky. Dad held up the rock, tilted it this way and that, and we waited for an explosion of glitter.
“You see anything?” Dad asked.
I leaned my head on his shoulder and he wrapped an arm around me. “Nope,” I said.
“Me neither,” Dad said.
Which was fine with both of us.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
True Fact: Different can be okay. Sometimes it can even be good.
A few days later, Jules and Otis waited outside the dressing room at the surf shop while I tried on bathing suits.
“How was dinner with your dad last night?” I asked through the curtain.
“Good,” Jules said. “We went to the seafood place on the water down the road from you, and he didn’t sign a single autograph the entire time.”
Whoa.
“Was Anna there?” I wriggled a red suit up my legs. Too small.
“They broke up. She told my dad she was ‘sick of all the drama.’”
I could hear the air quotes Jules put around that last part. “Anna actually said that?” I picked up another suit option off the floor.
“Yup. The drama queen herself.” Jules paused. “Blue? He said he was sorry. He said he never should have tried to take over the hunt, and that he knows he can be a total jerk sometimes.”
Wow. I struggled to find the right words. “That’s—”
“A miracle. I know,” Jules said.
I opened the curtain. Jules took in my blue-and-silver-striped bikini, the insulin pump clipped to the waistband, the infusion set with its dangly tube like a small jellyfish on one side of my belly button… and the brand-new continuous glucose monitor sensor like a translucent sand dollar on the other side.
Jules whistled. “Like a cyborg Lara Croft.”
“Just letting my diabetes flag fly,” I said.
She held up her hands like a picture frame and eyed my devices. “We can bling them with rhinestones if you want.”
I swatted her hands. “One step at a time, Jules.”
I paid for my new suit, and we headed over to the Long Wharf for ice cream. It took a while because a few people stopped us and asked about the wreck and how we found it and whether we had any idea where the treasure was (for the record, no).
The best part? Not one single person said the words “diabetes” or “Ed Buttersby.”
Jules ordered a large waffle cone bowl of salted caramel and chocolate peanut butter with whipped cream and hot fudge. Which was most definitely not fat-free. Otis and I shared some of the sugar-free nut clusters Mrs. Alvarado makes for us.
Jules gave a piece of her bowl to Otis. “I talked to my mom last night. She got a new job.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” I said. “It means she’s feeling better?”
“She’s definitely feeling better.” Jules licked fudge off her thumb.
“So what’s the job?” I asked, taking another bite of nut cluster.
“She’s an animator on a new movie about a princess with huge, crazy red hair,” Jules said. “My mom’s doing the hair.”
“That’s a thing? Your whole job can be to just draw hair?”
“It’s totally a thing. Anyway, my mom was saying all this stuff about my dad. About how no relationship is perfect. And about how there are always compromises and disappointments, and when there’s more of the bad stuff than the good stuff, it’s better to end it.”
I rubbed Otis’s head. “So she’s not sad about your dad anymore?”
“I guess not as much. But I don’t know because then she started going on and on about how she’s been going on dates, and I had to tell her to stop because, you know, ew.”
“Totally,” I agreed.
When I first met Jules, the bad stuff about her definitely seemed to outweigh the good stuff. But then I found out that she was smart and brave and loyal and fun, even if she does think that Prada is just a regular brand like the Gap.
Even diabetes isn’t all bad. After all, if I didn’t have diabetes, I wouldn’t have met Jules.
I got out a bottle from my backpack. “Drink, Magoats?” I tipped the bottle and poured a stream of water into his mouth.
“You share that with him, don’t you?” Jules said. “I mean, right now he’s licking the top, and later, when you get thirsty, you’re going to put your mouth right where he had his dog-germy tongue.”
“Yup,” I said, with zero shame whatsoever.
“That’s—”
“What?” I said, trying not to smile.
Jules didn’t answer. Instead, she held out her hand for the bottle, raised it to her mouth, and drank every drop that was left.
“I read recently that dog mouths have less germs than people mouths,” she said.
“True Fact,” I said. I already had that one in my journal.
Jules gave me back the bottle. “Listen. I want you to know it’s totally okay if you keep looking for the treasure without me when I go back to California.”
“Not a chance,” I said, without thinking it over for even a second. Because I didn’t need to.
“I mean it,” Jules said.
I counted on my fingers: “One: I’m too busy with my science project. Two: I don’t even know where to look. And three: Even if I did know where to look and had tons of free time, no way would I look without you.”
“Fine.” Now Jules was trying not to smile. “But you can change your mind anytime you want.”
“Besides,” I said, “the important thing is that we found the wreck. Right?”
“Right,” Jules said. “Absolutely. Finding the wreck is the important thing.”
We looked out at the harbor in silence. At the houses along the coast, the gulls swooping over the water, the waves flowing through the channel.
“Do you really believe that?” I asked, staring straight ahead.
“Nope,” Jules said.
I sighed. “Me neither.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
True Fact: Before there was Otis, there was Nora.
Dear Nora,
I hope you’re “on a ten” while the crew practices a scene shift or focuses the lights or whatever else it is that crew people do that I haven’t been able to find on the Internet, because this is going to be one looooong letter.
There’s so much that’s been going on—huge, major things involving crimes (mine), evilness (not mine), and acts of bravery (mine again).
Before I get into any of that, though, I need you to know that I’m looking at a cloud right now, and it looks like a dragon cresting a tidal wave. I wonder, can you see it from where you are too?
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
True Fact: Sometimes the tiniest, no-big-deal of a thing can turn out to be humongous.
July was almost over, which meant Jules had to go back to California so she could be with her mom for August. Also, I really did have to get started on my science project. I’d thought that maybe I could get away with not doing it after everything that had happened, but Mom said I thought wrong.
On Jules’s last night, we had a sleepover at my house.
“Look at it this way,” I said while we cooked chicken on the grill for dinner. “At least the ladies from the Historical Society are happy.”
The wreck didn’t have the Golden Lion payroll on it, but it did have a lot of cool artifacts that they were going to put on display. Ed said Jules could fly in for the opening of the exhibition next winter, so at least we’d get to see each other again soon. I kept trying to imagine Jules and Nora in the same room. It’s possible their combined energy would set off some kind of nuclear reaction.
We played scent games with Otis and didn’t talk about the treasure. We watched a documentary about exploding stars and didn’t talk about the treasure. We helped Mom make flower arrangements and didn�
�t talk about the treasure.
And then we went up to my room and talked about the treasure nonstop until we fell asleep.
I woke up at three thirty out of habit. Now that I had Otis and a CGM, I didn’t have to test in the middle of the night anymore. My blood sugar was a steady 115. All good.
In the short time I’d been wearing the CGM, I’d learned that Otis often alerts at least twenty minutes before the CGM. And Otis will alert when I’m in the shower or swimming, where I can’t see the CGM meter app on my phone. And sometimes the CGM will report a false low if I smoosh it while I sleep, but Otis reports just fine no matter how much I smoosh him, asleep or awake.
True Fact: Otis is way better than a CGM and always will be. And even when he can’t be my service dog anymore, he will still be my favorite person in the world.
The iPad glowed from the floor next to my bed. I hung my head over the side.
“How come you’re still awake?” I asked Jules.
“Because it’s a thousand degrees in here and there’s a thousand-pound fur rug on me.”
My air conditioner had broken again.
“What are you looking at?”
“I found cool stuff,” Jules said. “Come see.”
I took my pillow and lay down next to her and Otis on the floor. Jules swiped the screen and tilted it in my direction.
“These are all pictures from a museum in Amsterdam. Check out this woman and her husband. They were painted in 1656, the same time period as your ancestors.”
They wore big white stiff collars that looked like stacks of coffee filters and dark, heavy clothes. “They look so hot and itchy,” I said. “No wonder Abraham and Petra came here.”
Jules swiped to the next picture. It showed a whole bunch of ships in a harbor. Big waves and clouds of smoke—a sea battle. In the center, the sun cast light on the biggest ship, her sails heavy-bellied with wind, her flag—blue, white, and orange stripes—flying. Her transom painted gold and carved with a gold—
I grabbed the iPad and sat up. “Is that…?” I said.