by Bobbie Pyron
She swallowed hard against the lump rising in her throat and headed for the back of the bus.
All day at school, she pondered the question of Nate’s change of luck.
She pondered as she halfheartedly worked trigonometry problems on the whiteboard. She pondered while she pretended to read The Tempest by Shakespeare. She pondered while she put carts of books in Dewey Decimal order in the Paradise Beach branch of the Franklin County Library. And she pondered as she helped her mother with the dinner dishes.
“You’re awful quiet tonight at dinner, sugar. Everything okay today at school?” Mrs. Beam asked.
“Yes ma’am,” Gen said.
Mrs. Beam regarded her daughter out of the corner of her eye. “Did Nate bring good luck to that baseball team?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? I haven’t seen or talked with him since then.”
“Hmmm …” Mrs. Beam said as she dried the vegetable bowl. “That doesn’t sound like Nate.”
“He’s been running around with his new friends, Ricky Sands and that bunch of philistines.”
Mrs. Beam’s eyes softened. She put her arm around Gen’s shoulders and gave her a little squeeze. “Be patient with him, honey. It’s such a new experience for someone like Nate to be popular, to be part of the in crowd.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, leaning just for a fraction of a second into her mother’s warm side.
“You know, Gen, it wouldn’t hurt for you to make some friends besides Nate. There must be some other boys or girls at school who —”
She pulled away from her mother and shook her head. It had always just been her and Nate, which was all she needed.
“I’m going over to the dunes to watch for turtles,” she said. “My charts indicate they should be here any day now.”
Mrs. Beam smiled. “Why don’t you take the girls with you? They’ve always wanted to go.”
“Not this time, Mama. I’d need to train them first. It’s not some game, you know.”
Mrs. Beam sighed a weary sigh. “Okay, but you have to take them next time. Take a flashlight and don’t be out too late.”
Gen followed the path through the pines. The red clay dirt gave way to sand, and the pines bowed to dollarweed, scrubby brush, and honeysuckle vines. She climbed up and over a dune and dropped down to the beach — her beach.
At least that’s the way she thought of it in her most private moments. Her heavy heart lifted and swelled like the tide and the moon. She closed her eyes and turned her most logical of minds over to the magic of the sea. She listened to the heave and sigh of the waves on the shore. She opened her nostrils wide and took in the perfume of salt and fish mixed together and served up on a warm, wet breeze. Sometimes, if she didn’t know better, she would almost swear she could hear mermaids singing beneath the waves. She could almost believe in the magic the twins believed in to explain the sparkling phosphorescence in the water.
Gen straightened her glasses. What would Albert Einstein think of her imagining ridiculous things like mermaids and magic?
She picked her way along the shore, careful not to get her shoes wet. She could just hear Nate saying, Come on, Gen, you got to take your shoes off and feel the sand and the Gulf! Nate was a fish of a boy, that was for sure. He’d swim anywhere — off Henderson Pier, off the docks, way the heck out in the bay, under the waves in the Gulf — any time he took a mind to. She, on the other hand, couldn’t swim a stroke.
She squared her shoulders and patrolled the shore for any infractions of the Turtle Rules. Save for one errant sand castle, folks were doing pretty well. She knocked the castle down and smoothed the sand.
As she proceeded along the beach, she watched for the telltale flipper tracks of turtles coming up to lay their eggs. “Hmm … not a single track.” She took a notebook out of one of many pockets in her overalls and read back through her notes. “By my calculations, they should be coming up on shore to lay their eggs about now.” Surely the turtles weren’t becoming as unreliable as humans, were they? Could they? She gazed up at the sliver, fingernail of a moon. “They should have come with the full moon last week,” she said, worrying an eyebrow.
Finally, at the far end of the beach, glowing white against the dark night stood the highest dune on Paradise Beach. How tall and unconquerable that dune had seemed to her and Nate when they first discovered it years ago. A towering mountain of a sand dune, a veritable Everest of sugar-white sand.
They had joined hands and dug their shoes and (Nate’s) bare toes into the deep, cool sand, clambering up three steps, sliding back one, up three, down one, until they’d finally reached the top. They had stood atop the tallest dune on Paradise Beach taking in the vast wonder of the placid bay on one side and the restless Gulf of Mexico on the other, cradling their spit of land. It had forever after been their dune.
Gen scrambled up the dune and plopped down on the wind-scraped top. “I’m here,” she said to no one in particular.
The only answer came from the wind rattling the sea oats and the shhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh of the waves upon the shore.
“Dang,” she whispered. She felt a burn and a hot tickle in the back of her throat. “I will not cry,” she declared through clenched teeth. “I won’t.”
She took a deep breath and began to sing. Now truth be told, Genesis Magnolia Beam could not carry a tune in a bucket. Even the good folks in her daddy’s church choir politely discouraged her from joining their ranks. But out here on the dune, she and Nate sang. They sang church songs, popular songs from the radio, silly made-up songs. They sang loud above the wind and waves, they sang soft to the stars as they came out one by one. Nate even claimed the singing helped the turtles.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and began to sing:
“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine …”
Her rusty bucket voice trailed off. Singing alone just wasn’t the same.
She let out a sigh as watery and long as the turtles’ journey to lay their eggs in the white sand. She dropped her head to her knees and sniffled. What had happened to through thick and through thin?
As the moon made its way across the sky and the turtles made their journey toward Paradise Beach, Gen cried.
Later that week, Gen saw Chum Bailey sitting at a table in the school library, looking sad and forlorn as could be.
She didn’t know much about the boy, just what she’d heard from Nate and what she’d observed: that he was picked on at least as much as she. She had some idea how he’d come by his nickname, Chum.
Gen sat across from the big boy and said, “Why so glum, Charles?”
Chum sighed. “Things ain’t right, Genesis.”
“Aren’t,” Gen corrected. “And explain, please.”
Chum looked up from his hands and studied the girl. He had never actually talked with Genesis Beam. He had never dared to; she was too smart for the likes of him. Folks in town talked about how odd she was, so different from everyone else in Paradise Beach. Chum had always admired how clean and pressed her jeans were and how she stood up to people like Ricky Sands, but he’d never figured she’d talk to him.
“What’s not right, Charles?” Gen asked again.
“Ever since my daddy got that money for winning the shrimp boat race, the other shrimpers are being mean to him,” Chum said. “They say he didn’t win the money fair and square.”
Gen frowned. “How was his winning not fair?”
“Because Nate was on board. And seeing as how Nate has superpowers from the lightning and all, some are saying Daddy didn’t deserve to win. No one wants to be friends with him anymore.” The big boy hung his head. “I know how that feels, and it feels terrible, Genesis.”
Gen studied the boy for a long moment. She had never noticed how kind his face was. In truth, she had never noticed him at all.
Maybe, she thought, her mother had been right about needing friends other than Nate.
“Could you help me loo
k for turtle nests after school today?” she asked.
Chum looked up. “I thought Nate helped you with that.”
She sighed. “He used to, until he got so busy with other friends. It works better — the counting and watching, I mean — with two people.”
“I don’t think I’m as smart as Nate. I might be more of a bother than a help,” he said, poking at the dirt beneath his fingernails with a paper clip. “Anyways, that’s what my mama says.”
“I beg to differ,” Gen said.
Every day after school, Chum Bailey and Genesis Beam rode the bus back to Gen’s house. They ate the snack prepared by Mrs. Beam and told her about their day at school, which was a study in contrasts.
Since Chum had started going to the beach with her, they had found turtle tracks, but no nests. Not a single one.
But they didn’t give up.
“Hey, Gen,” he called, waving something in the air. “Lookit what I found!” Chum trotted from the pile of seaweed and driftwood he’d been pawing through and over to Gen. He held both hands out for her to see.
She gasped. “A flip-flop and a camera. Those have to be Nathaniel’s!” And indeed they were. The flip-flop was a bit worse for wear, and the camera would most likely never work again. Still, Gen knew what they meant to Nate.
She took the camera from Chum and wiped away the wet sand. Maybe if she took it back to Nate, he would be her friend again and everything would be the way it was before. They would ride the bus together, monitor the turtles, and sit on their dune underneath the stars. Maybe with Chum too.
“Let’s go find him,” she said, grinning up at Chum.
“Do you know where he is?” he asked.
She nodded. “Where he always is.” Slipping the camera and flip-flop into her beach bag, Gen trotted inland toward Billy Bowlegs Park.
She couldn’t wait to see the look on Nate’s face when he saw that she — not Ricky Sands or Connor or Buddy — she would reunite his missing shoes.
“Hey, who’s that waving like a maniac over there?” Ricky Sands squinted across the baseball field, where a large someone waved from behind the chain-link fence.
The boys warming up for their after-school game stopped and looked toward the fence.
“Is that your big brother, Ricky?” Buddy asked.
Ricky shook his head. “Heck, I can’t tell who it is.”
Then a small someone stepped out from behind the big someone. It cupped its hands around its mouth. “Nathaniel! Nathaniel Harlow!” it called out.
Everyone looked at Nate. “Who’s that?” Connor asked.
He shook his head and shrugged. “How should I know?” But he did. He’d know that voice anywhere. What the heck was Gen doing here? He tried his level best to shrink into his clothes so she wouldn’t see him and would go away.
The two figures came trotting across the field, out into the sunlight, for God and all the boys to see.
“Oh. My. Heck,” Ricky guffawed.
Buddy and Connor gaped and grinned. “I can’t believe it. The two weirdest kids in the whole school.”
“Hey, Nate,” Chum said. “We been looking all over for you. It sure is lucky we looked here.”
Nate purely did not feel lucky.
Ricky slapped Nate on the back. “Did you hear that, Sparky? They’ve been looking all over for you. You’re the lucky one, as usual.”
Gen studied the expression on Nate’s face. She was not the best at reading people, she knew, but she had the distinct impression he was not happy to see them. That would all change, though, when she showed him the shoe and camera.
She elbowed Chum out of the way and smiled at Nate. “I brought you something.”
The boys hooted and hollered. “Ooo, Sparky, your girlfriend brought you something!” Ricky made smoochie noises.
Nate’s face burned with humiliation.
Gen ignored the boys. She pulled a bag from behind her back and handed it to Nate.
“Open it,” she said. Both she and Chum were grinning, Nate decided, like a couple of idiots.
The boys crowded around him. “Oh, I can’t wait to see what Sparky’s girlfriend brought him, can you?” Connor said in a high, girly voice.
Nate glared at Gen and Chum. Why did they have to show up here and ruin everything?
“Come on and see what it is,” Chum implored.
“Yeah,” Ricky said. “Let’s see.” He grabbed the bag from Nate and pulled out the battered flip-flop.
Nate gasped. His shoe!
Gen grinned. The look on his face was exactly what she’d expected. “We found your camera too. It’s in the bag,” she said.
Connor grabbed the camera out of the bag and held it up for all to see. Water streamed from the case. Buddy grabbed the camera and doubled over with laughter. “What a great gift. A broken camera!”
Part of Nate wanted to grab the flip-flop from Ricky and the camera from Buddy and dance with joy; another part, though, wanted Gen and Chum and the shoe and camera to just disappear. Now.
Gen tried to grab the camera from Buddy. “That’s Nathaniel’s, not yours. Give it back to him!” Buddy shoved her away, knocking her to the ground.
“Hey!” Chum cried. “Leave her alone!” He pulled Gen to her feet. She looked from Buddy to Nate. Surely he would stand up for her like he always had before. He would tell those boys a thing or two.
Gen picked up the flip-flop and camera from the weeds. Someone must have stepped on it in the scuffle, because the case was cracked.
“Here,” she said, handing it to Nate with a shaking hand.
“Oh yes, Sparky,” Buddy said, sneering. “Take your camera and shoe and go play with your girlfriend and the big dummy.”
Gen felt Chum take a step back. She waited for Nate to tell the boys they could all go take a flying leap to the moon.
Instead, he pushed the flip-flop and waterlogged camera away, none too gently. They fell to the ground. “What do I want with just one flip-flop and a broken camera?” he said.
Gen’s plucked-over eyebrows bunched up in confusion. “But now you can bring the shoes back together, like you always wanted.”
Buddy and Connor about fell to the ground laughing. Ricky frowned.
Nate felt words building up inside him like molten lava in a volcano. He knew they were terrible words, hurtful words, mean words, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“You are so weird, Gen. You’re as weird as your name.”
Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. “I don’t get it….”
“You never do,” he said.
Gen pulled frantically at her eyebrows. She felt a huge burning knot rising up from her stomach all the way to her eyes. “What is wrong with you?” she whispered.
Nate grabbed his baseball glove. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You’re the weirdo.”
And before he could see the expression on her face, he turned his back on her. “Come on,” he said to the boys. “Let’s go play ball. I’m feeling lucky.”
Gen watched Nate strut across the weedy field. Her legs shook. Her hands shook. Her insides shook.
Chum patted her on the shoulder. “I’m sorry he said those things to you. I’m used to it, but …”
Gen tried to say something, something logical that would explain Nate’s behavior. No words came. All she could feel was a deep, deep hurt like she’d never felt before. All she could hear were his words cutting into her like a knife: You’re the weirdo.
She pulled away from Chum and ran faster than she ever had, away from Nate and the terrible, awful words.
The smartest girl in Franklin County (and maybe all of Florida) sat atop the roof of The Church of the One True Redeemer and Everlasting Light, arms hugging her knees to her chest and eyes dripping with tears.
When her mama told her for the third time to come down for supper, she said, “I can’t, Mama. I have to think.”
When her little brothers tried to clamber out onto the roof to join her, she said, “Go
back in. I need to think.”
When her little sisters poked their heads out the window and asked, “Are you crying?” Gen shouted, “Go away, I’m thinking.”
And later, her daddy, who was purely terrified of heights, scooted oh-so-carefully out onto the roof, touched her face, and said, “Daughter, would you like me to sit here with you?”
She sniffled and shook her head. “Thanks, though, Daddy.”
Reverend Beam scooted oh-so-carefully back across the roof and through the window. “Don’t stay out there much longer, honey,” he said. “You’re worrying your mama.”
Gen hugged her knees closer and let her gaze drop to her homemade weather station. She’d won the second grade science fair with this project. Her father said it was a heck of a lot more reliable than that weatherman on the TV who didn’t know a barometer from an anemometer.
Measuring air pressure and wind speed made sense to Gen. Everyone said the weather was a fickle thing, but she always said, “There’s nothing fickle about it; you just have to know how to measure it. It’s science, not a ‘thing.’ ”
What didn’t make sense to the smartest girl in Franklin County (and probably all of Florida) was Nate. Nate and his hurtful words. He’d always stood up for her, and she for him. Her mother said they were like peanut butter and jelly; Nate’s grandpa said they were like a rod and reel. They fit, like a turtle and its shell. They were better together. Who wanted just a plain ol’ peanut butter sandwich? And how would a rod work without a reel? It wasn’t logical.
But as illogical as it seemed, something in Nate had changed with the lightning strike. Even she had to admit it. He had, in fact, for whatever reason, become very lucky. Everything he wanted, he got. Everything he touched turned to gold, so to speak.
Gen shook her head and wiped her sleeve across her drippy nose. Even if that were true, why would it have to change being best friends? From the first time she’d spotted that small boy, shoulders hunched against the stares and taunts of the kids on the school bus, she’d understood him. She’d glared at the same kids who wouldn’t sit with her on the bus because she was “weird” and gone straight to the back and sat down next to him. They’d sat together every day (880 days, she quickly calculated) since.