Sam's Theory

by Sarah Mendivel

  A pit in my stomach turned as I waited for Mikayla’s reaction. To my surprise, she stood up in good spirits and announced her decision boldly. “Fine by me! I’m tired of y’alls boy energy anyway. Let’s go, Sam.”

  And with that, Mikayla grabbed a fishing line and began walking toward the canoe. Even though she didn’t make eye contact with me, it was the first time she had spoken to me directly in days. I hopped up and trailed behind her as the boys raced off to the opposite end of the lake.

  Feeling a renewed sense of hope in maybe connecting with her, I started a casual conversation. “So, did you fish at all growing up?”

  Without turning around, she threw the fishing line over her shoulder and continued to climb over logs of driftwood. “No, not really. But I’m sure you did, right?”

  I was confused by her reply, but tried to keep the chat going. “Not much, no. My uncle liked to fish, but we didn’t really see him much growing up so we didn’t get the chance to learn from him.”

  Her voice hovered on the wind that blew past us. “Mm hm. You probably come from some privileged kinda life where you were all hurt that you didn’t get somethin’ you wanted for Christmas or something and ended up running away, right?” she mocked.

  Instantly offended, I stopped in my tracks and held my ground. “What the hell do you know about my story?”

  “I’m just sayin’,” she continued sarcastically.

  Despite Theory’s reminders in my head about why Mikayla acted the way she did, I couldn’t contain my anger this time. “All right, that’s it. You wanna know what I got for Christmas one year?” I said, accepting her challenge and encroaching on her personal space. “I got this!”

  I grabbed her arm, spun her around to face me, and pulled down my shirt collar to reveal a long, skinny scar sprawling across the top of my collar bone. “Do you know what this is?”

  Mikayla’s face fell flat. Even though she didn’t answer, I kept going. “This was a present He gave me a few years ago. He didn’t wrap the cord in fancy paper before he beat me with it, of course, but it was still a nice surprise. Wanna know what else I got that day?”

  Mikayla stood still, almost looking afraid, but I kept firing. “I got to watch Him beat my mom so bad for trying to protect me that She decided to leave. Not only did She leave that morning after He hit her, but She took my little sister with Her. I wondered for years why She didn’t take me too, but apparently I was too damaged for Her to love me anymore. But Nova still had a chance. Nova was still good enough for my mom to take with Her.”

  My heart shattered as I admitted that out loud.

  “Nova? The girl Dodger keeps trying to find?” Mikayla offered calmly.

  “How the hell should I know what Dodger’s doing? Nova’s gone and I haven’t seen her in years. I don’t even know if she’s alive anymore,” I shoved past Mikayla and started walking angrily toward the water again.

  “Well, don’t you want to find her?” Mikayla called out behind me.

  I spun around again. “Do you seriously think I haven’t tried looking for her before?” My tolerance had thinned to nothing. “I swear you think you’re the only kid that’s ever been through a hard time. That just because your mom was too strung out to take care of you, you’re the only one who’s ever been lonely or seriously messed up. Well, guess what! You aren’t the only person out here who has a story. And it isn’t always someone else’s fault that you’re mad and alone. At some point you take ownership of the crap you’ve been through and move on. So suck it up and figure out how to be bigger than the people who made you feel so small!” I punctuated my rant with a yell and turned around to keep stomping toward the lake.

  It was quiet for a couple of minutes before Mikayla spoke again. “I didn’t know that stuff happened to you,” she said, trying to jumble past an apology.

  “Let’s just drop it,” I huffed.

  Mikayla began to pace me and grew bold again. “Okay then, since we’re changing subjects and all, you wanna talk about where you sneak off to every night?”

  A new flash of irritation spurred in me. “What, the. Ugh, nowhere, Mikayla.”

  “That’s not what it looks like when you skip out on us every other night and come wanderin’ back whenever the sun comes up!”

  I stopped in my tracks, raising my voice just loud enough so that the others couldn’t hear me. “And?! How does that concern you?”

  Mikayla matched my intensity and took a step toward me. “Because ‘we’re a team now.’ Ms. Sam. That’s what you said earlier, right? So why you got secrets and we can’t know about them? What makes you better than us?”

  “I never said I’m better than any of you. Sometimes I can’t sleep and need to go for a walk,” I said, quickly trying to justify my absences.

  “In the guy dang forest by yourself? Mm mm. I’m not buying it,” she pushed while cocking her head to the side.

  “And what do the others say? Is this supposedly a problem for everyone else, too?” I said, pretending that I wasn’t worried that the others also suspected something

  Mikayla grew quiet and backed down a bit. “No. I haven’t told them.”

  Her answer surprised me. For as forceful and antagonistic as she had been, the concept of her holding onto a secret out of good faith was the last thing I expected to hear from her. I soothed my tone. “Why not?”

  She shifted her stance and relaxed her posture. “I got secrets too, you know. I’m just makin’ sure you aren’t goin’ around givin’ us away to the cops.”

  I looked at her with a renewed sincerity. “Mikayla, you have to know I would never do that. I have my own beef with those guys,” I let out a sigh and decided to give in a bit. “Listen, it’s nothing. When I first ran away from rez, I found this place in the woods a few miles from here and ended up getting comfortable there. It’s like the closest thing I’ve had to home since…well, since ever.”

  Mikayla fidgeted and pursed her lips. “Mm hm. A’ight.”

  Sensing a truce, I shuffled my feet a bit, then handed her the oar. “Dude, I’m over this conversation. Are you coming or not?”

  Mikayla swiped the paddle out of my hand and shrugged her shoulders casually. “Whatever, I’m driving. Like I even know howda fish.”

  We bounced down the slant of the water bank toward the canoe and awkwardly inspected it for critters. Mikayla leaned into the canoe, sassily swiping for bugs and warned. “I’m not goin’ if there’s a raccoon in here.” She sat back up and stared at me, waiting for a reaction. I tried to hold a serious expression, but a smile poked through the cloud of resentment. We both laughed.

  “Me neither,” I said, feeling the tension start to dissolve.

  “A’ight then. Let’s go show these boys what’s up.” Mikayla tossed the oar into the canoe and began to shove our feeble vessel into the water to catch dinner. I skipped behind her, pants rolled up, waiting for the canoe to float far enough into the water to jump in it.

  “Oh my gaaaaawd, how long is this supposed to take?” crowed Mikayla. She plopped onto the bottom of the canoe frustrated.

  I couldn’t blame her. We had been sitting the middle of the lake for nearly two hours without a single bite. We had just heard the boys cheer and laugh over three caught fish already. The sun continued to beat down on us, taunting our efforts at being able to tolerate one another in such a small space. I took off my hoodie as Mikayla slung a leg over the side of the canoe and let her foot get wet. Sitting hunched over on the other side of the canoe, I began to concentrate on the dried peas and carrots we had used from our noodle cups as bait. The water was crystal clear beneath the bait, held into place by an ashy river rock bottom.

  “Maybe they’re using some kind of secret bait or something they didn’t tell us about,” Mikayla postulated out loud.

  “Pssh, probably,” I huffed, inclined to believe her at this point.

  Splash!

  Suddenly, from the nose of the canoe, flipped a saffron tail. Mikayla snapped into a s
itting position. “Did we catch something?”

  Just as excited to finally see something, I scurried to the edge of the boat. “No, but I saw a tail!”

  Mikayla browsed the surface of the lake. “Well, we’ll take a tail then! No one said we had to bring back a whole fish!”

  I smiled, enjoying Mikayla’s humor in the rare instances she chose to use it.

  Flick, splash!

  “I heard it again!” yelled Mikayla.

  “Me too! Do you see it?” I said, shuffling past her to check the water on the other side of the boat. Moments later, the handle of our makeshift fishing pole bobbed and tipped into the bottom of the canoe. Mikayla and I looked at one another, then both bolted toward the pole, simultaneously grabbing it. Our hands fumbled over one another’s trying to share what little space the stick of the handle provided.

  “Check the other end!” Mikayla blurted.

  “Okay!” I chirped without a second thought. Sure enough, a gorgeous, heavy bodied fish had nibbled up the freeze dried pea and sat dangling from the tip of our line. It tugged its fiery orange and green body side-to-side, trying to escape. “Oh wow, I think it’s a sockeye salmon!”

  “Well then sock-it-to-me and let’s reel this thing in!” Mikayla touted happily. Together we began to wrestle with the twine fishing line, being certain not to tip ourselves over the side of the canoe in excitement.

  “Oh, I see it,” Mikayla announced as the emerald nose of the fish began to lift out of the water. “We definitely got this sucker. But dang, is it heavy!”

  As the head of the salmon surfaced, I leaned over the side of the canoe to try and grab its body. Brushing my fingers against the scaly surface of the fish’s tail, I noticed another rusty orange flash of fins swim past us. “I think there are two fish!”

  “Well, we gotta hurry and get it, then! The boys have three, I think,” Mikayla said, gritting her teeth with determination. After several slippery minutes of an epic fresh water battle, we managed to reel our prized fish into the bottom of the canoe.

  It smacked into the belly of the boat, protesting furiously with Olympic-sized flops. The sun sparkled over the ember curves of our fresh catch and I stood in admiration of how much fight a single fish had given two sizable teenagers. The fish plopped and splashed in its own puddle as Mikayla caught sight of another. “Sam, right there! I saw the other one, maybe even bigger than this one,” she said, quickly baiting a new dried veggie onto the hook of the fishing pole.

  Eager to catch another, I looked over the side of the canoe. “Oh, I see it!”

  Mikayla grew suspicious. “Mmm, I don’t think so. It’s on my side.”

  “What do you mean? I just saw it right here,” I said, confused about what she was looking at.

  “Um, it’s right here,” she said shortly. Puzzled, I shifted my weight to the side of her canoe.

  Sure enough, there was a sockeye gliding past her end of the boat. “Oh, jeez! So maybe there are three of them, then.”

  “Um, Sam, I think there might be more than three,” said Mikayla, her tone changing to that of concern. I looked at her and followed her arm to the point of her index finger to see what she was looking at. Several feet away, deep within the translucent waters of the lake we sat floating in, was an entire swath of sockeye salmon migrating toward our canoe. I tried counting them, but quickly realized after I reached “eleven” that we might be in over our heads.

  A massive mango-colored school of fish began to swell the waters around our canoe. The calm, comfortable lake water that had once been porcelain blue was now saturated in a moving mass of orange and olive tones. Dozens of fish swam in unison, filling the lake floor with strength and verve.

  As the hoard of fish grew, they began to turn toward the opposite side of our canoe. Dozens circled, inspiring dozens more to join them. Mikayla and I gripped the edge of the canoe as it slowly began to shift in the direction of the fish below us. She looked at me speechless, sharing my shock.

  My eyes widened and I knelt in awe of the parade of paddlers. They continued to swim forcefully and eventually our canoe sat swirling in place on the surface of the lake. Mikayla and I spun slowly, watching the fins of fish break through the water and into the air. The sun seemed to be swimming between them, creating a dance of shadows that was memorizing to watch. Maybe I should have been afraid, but was too stricken by wonder to manage.

  Splat, splat, splat!

  Suddenly a handful of fish began to leap out of the water and hurdle over their comrades. Sharp noses rose and dove, playing leap frog in the water.

  “What are they doing?” Mikayla asked, clearly still as stunned as I was.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, watching the fish frolic and hop, higher and higher.

  Plosh! Within the spark of a moment leapt a massive salmon far above the rest. It rose, seemingly in slow motion, over both of our heads, dragging with it a glitter of droplets. It jumped with such magnitude that it caused an eclipse of the sun and was still suspended in time when the droplets splashed across our faces. I blinked, trying to avoid getting lake water in my eye. By the time I opened my eyes again, the fish was gone.

  The canoe was still swirling in place when Mikayla picked up my hoodie and started zipping it up. Panicking over my comfort item being messed with, I interrupted her. “What are you doing?”

  “Trust me, Sam. I got this,” she said assertively. Mikayla wasn’t exactly the first person I would have trusted with my hoodie, but the spinning of our canoe by a hefty school of enchanted salmon called for different rules, I guess. She tied the sleeves and hood together, creating a makeshift catchall. Before I could protest, Mikayla plunged the cotton net into the water and scooped up two fish.

  “Whoa, no way! Great job,” I yelled, half surprised that I was encouraging her to use my hoodie as a fish net.

  “Come on, Sam! Let’s get ‘em,” Mikayla shouted over the splashes of salmon activity below us.

  “Okay!” I shouted back, wiping the incoming shower of drops from my face. I hurled both my hands into the water and bear hugged a fish back into the canoe. Surprised by how smoothly that had gone I lunged back into the water for more.

  Splish! Tuck! Swoosh! Mikayla and I took turns laughing and grunting over the side of the canoe as more fish catapulted into the boat on their own.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Mikayla said, shaking the excess water from her hair.

  “No kidding! There must be hundreds around us,” I said, working hard to grip another sockeye.

  “Sam, look!” Mikayla yelled, pointing to the floor of the canoe. I stopped fishing and saw that we had been so busy catching salmon that we had failed to notice the entire bottom of our canoe was now filled with fish. Astonished, I looked over the prismatic flounder of flurry, wondering how we could possibly eat all of these on our own.

  Mikayla began to laugh and wiggle her knees. “I can’t even move my feet! We’re buried in fish!” I laughed, studying the relaxed composure of my co-captain. For the first time ever, she looked genuinely happy.

  Filled with immense gratitude, I smiled. “I guess someone’s lookin’ out for us.”

  Quicker than I could finish my sentence, the crowd of salmon beneath us had dispersed to another part of the lake, leaving the water crystal clear again.

  When we arrived to the beach closest to our camp, the boys were waiting for us. Rishawn skipped into the water, his jaw dropping. “Oh my gawd! How in the world did you catch all these fish?! You must’ve caught the whole lake!”

  Mikayla laughed and showed Rishawn the hoodie net she had fashioned. I hopped out of the canoe and saw Dodger standing over us, holding three fish of his own. His face had melted into awe. “How did you….what did you…”

  Smiling at the sweetness of his surprise, I lightly elbowed him. “Looks like we might’ve won the bet.”

  He looked at me, shaking his head in defeat. “Oh man, you guys totally killed it.” He lifted his trio of fish, sarcas
tically suspended it over the canoe and dropped it into our pile of achievement.

  We all laughed, thankful for the feast that awaited us. Dragging the heavy canoe onto land, we created a bucket brigade to release the boat of fish. The pile of salmon sat glistening in the last of the day’s sun as the four of us interlocked arms with each other. For the first time ever, we felt like a family.

  We decided to have a “Warrior’s Dinner” to celebrate that night. After the fish was split into piles and prepped, we foraged into the woods to collect plants suitable for evening wear. We spent hours collecting trinkets of nature, working diligently to craft them into our own fashion statements.

  Mikayla stitched together a necklace made of ferns and pocket-sized pinecones, wearing them like pearls. Rishawn skipped around the canoe, dangling sleeves of leaves and wildflower blossoms. I wove together a headband of feathers and pine needles, taking pride in how sweet it made my hair smell. Dodger sported a royal crown of driftwood, shells, and tall grasses. We mixed face paint out of the lake’s clay and nearby blackberries, taking care to apply perfectly geometric shapes onto one another’s faces.

  When the light of the campfire grew larger than the sunset, we sat down for dinner together. As we feasted on salmon, Rishawn laughed about our adventures of the day and passed out more food. We ate through a fiesta of crackers, honeysuckle, fish, mountain berries, and trail mix.

  Echoes of laughter bounced off the mountain tops that hid Lake Isabel from the world. We told our favorite jokes, made up silly stories, and added logs to the fire to keep it alive. We talked for so long that eventually we got hungry again and helped ourselves to seconds of fish. It wasn’t until I saw a shooting star streak across the sky that I realized how late it had gotten, and how comfortable I had grown with the idea of these kids maybe becoming my family.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The night fell into a hush, save the lapping of the lake over its smattering of stones. Walking past the last of the fire, I could see the silhouettes of Dodger and Rishawn sleeping soundly next to one another in their tent. I smiled, loving how close they had gotten recently.