After all, they’d probably stayed up all night scared half to death they might get busted for murder.
However, Weedy’s face remained stony. If he was relieved Edgar was still alive, he sure didn’t show it. He showed no emotion other than smiling that bitter, sinister, angry smile.
“I must say,” sang Weedy as they approached, “I liked you much better dead, redneck.” He leaned back on the table and folded his hands behind his head. He squinted up at the bright sunshine of Mount Lanier. Then he looked down his nose at Edgar and Flounder.
“We’ve got something of yours,” explained Edgar.
“It’s your wallet,” added Flounder. “You want it back?”
Weedy’s evil smile dissipated. He shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly, as if he didn’t care about the wallet. “Whatever,” he said.
Flounder retrieved the leather wallet anyway and handed it to the bully who sat up and snatched it from his grasp.
“This wallet,” Weedy growled, “is worth more than your . . . everything.” Then he opened it and counted the money. As Edgar waited, he said, “It’s all there, Weedy. We don’t want your money, dumbass.”
Satisfied, Weedy stuffed the wallet into his back pocket and glared at Edgar.
“Here’s the deal,” Edgar continued, positive that he had Chris and his gang’s undivided attention. “We’ve got your cell phone now. Do you know what that means?” He let it sink in for a moment.
Weedy massaged his chin and shrugged.
“It means we have a lot of pictures of you committing various acts of vandalism around town, you catch my drift?”
A dark look emerged on Weedy’s face, and at that moment, when he knew that the ramifications had successfully sunk in to the bully’s thick skull, Edgar knew that things were going to be different. He knew they had all the power now, him and Flounder.
Weedy glared and fumed, but there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it now.
“And you guys,” said Edgar, pointing at the jocks sitting behind him. “You are all in the pictures, too.”
Immediately the jocks rose into hysterics, cursing Weedy and cursing amongst themselves, furious that they had been incriminated by Weedy’s recklessness.
“Don’t worry!” shouted Edgar, motioning for calm, as they all stopped and looked at him—their stupid faces contorted in anguish. “Don’t sweat this, because we—me and Flounder—we’re not going to tell on any of you, so long as you leave us alone. That’s all we want.” He paused for a moment and let it sink in. “For the next four years,” he added, “until graduation day, we demand to be left alone. And, after that, we will give back the phone. Is everyone agreed?”
Nobody said a word, they just looked at him and Flounder.
“I said,” he hissed, his angry eyes turning to slits, “are we agreed?” Slowly, in unison, they all began to nod like a bunch of powerless, pecking chickens. But Chris Weedy didn’t. His face remained hard as a stone.
“You’ll get your phone back at graduation,” Edgar growled at him, and then he and Flounder walked away.
“This isn’t over!” said Weedy from behind.
“Yeah, it is,” muttered Edgar, then stopped and turned. “By the way, I forgot to tell you. If I catch any of you going to my cabin in the woods, I will go straight to the cops with the pictures. Stay away from my cabin.”
And suddenly the jocks were protesting again, quietly this time, to Weedy, to each other, as they walked away. From the other side of the commons, Edgar turned and looked one last time at the snookered bully, who was still glaring at him, oblivious to his gang’s own disintegration.
“This isn’t over,” mouthed Chris Weedy.
But surely it was.
__________
Later on that day at lunch, Edgar and Flounder ate their food in absolute peace. It was incredible.
The jocks sat quietly across the courtyard and chewed on their food in a sort of moody surrender. Their expressions were painfully subdued as they ate and studied Edgar and Flounder, like a pack of bears who must, for some unnatural reason, allow a couple of helpless fish to swim by.
The following morning, Edgar and Flounder strolled up to the school without any yelling or insults raining down on them—no “Redneck,” or “Flounder, you stink!”
No one called them anything. Nobody threw any pinecones. Nobody did a single thing to them, which was wonderful. Things got so quiet at school the two boys almost began to forget that the bullies were even there. It was enough to make Edgar sleep well again, if he ever found time to sleep at all.
Sixteen
With the bullies fresh off their backs, Edgar felt like celebrating.
He shot Shay a text: Wanna go swimming tonight?
Across the classroom, Shay nodded and smiled.
That night they snuck out together and made for the other side of the world. Back on the island, they raced, laughing, down to the shore as the sun hung high and wonderful. They plunged breathlessly into the chilly water, where finally they surfaced and shrieked, convulsing with laughter.
“Whoa!” she exclaimed. “It’s way warmer than last time!”
“Yeah, you’re not lying,” Edgar nodded, who suddenly stilled. His smile fading, he cupped his hands over the surface of the water and peered through the window of his palms, squinting into the blue depths.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice suddenly worried.
“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s get those bags.”
So they swam to the shore and collected the backpacks they brought. Inside were two pairs of snorkels, two pairs of flippers, two collapsible prods, and two wadded-up burlap sacks.
“My dad showed me how to do this at the Florida Keys one time,” she explained. “It’s kind of freaky at first, but you’ll get the hang of it. Just keep your fingers away from the pincers.”
Hopping back into the surf, she led him down to the reef below, kicking deep into the clear blue water. Once down, she approached a hiding hole in some coral and began to pry a red crustacean from its bunker. As the lobster scooted backward into her burlap sack, she turned and gave Edgar a wild thumb’s up, her eyes sparkling with excitement inside her mask.
He took another quick glance around. The truth was, the night before, while fishing, he’d seen something absolutely terrible on the island’s shore: the unmistakable sight of a shark’s fin breaking the surface.
Still no sharks, he thought. Thank God.
After several trips back and forth to the surface, with two bags overflowing with ruby red pincers, Edgar and Shay finally made for shore.
“We’re rich!” she exclaimed, ripping off her mask, holding up her fat sack. Kicking in the ocean, she marveled at the catch. “I must have ten lobsters in here, easy!”
__________
That night, with the lobsters bagged and stored in the cabin freezer, they walked to her house, strolling slowly, giggling in the waning moonlight.
“What are you going to do with your profits?” he asked.
“Buy a new Bass Pro Shops lunchbox,” she giggled. “And give it to you.”
There, at the base of the sycamore tree, just below her bedroom, Shay kissed him. It was nearly dawn and their faces were as red as the lobsters they’d caught.
“Goodnight,” she whispered, kissing him again, her hands still wrapped behind his neck, drunken with fatigue. She closed her eyes and pressed a third warm and wonderful kiss onto his lips, and he drank in her lips, utterly overcome with passion.
He wished it would never end.
Afterward, she climbed up the tree and lingered for a moment, then waved to him and slipped inside.
He turned and, with a delirious smile, made for home.
__________
At five-fifteen in the morning, he arrived at his driveway. No suspicious activity seemed t
o be occurring, luckily. No lights were on, and nobody seemed to be up. He seemed to be safe.
With a sigh of relief, he made his way to the bedroom window, then wearily lifted the glass.
“What are you doing?”
Edgar froze. The voice had come from inside his room.
His knees nearly buckled from the shock.
He was busted.
“What?” he asked into the darkness, frozen halfway inside his window.
“I asked you, what are you doing, Edgar? Where have you been?” It was the angry, incredibly wounded voice of his mother.
“I,” he began, sitting frozen on the wooden windowsill, utterly paralyzed with fear, unable to breathe, his sweaty heart thundering in his shirt. “I was out for a bit,” he admitted.
He climbed inside and there, in the corner of his room, sat Mrs. Dewitt on his chest of drawers. How long she’d been there, he had no idea. Currently she was holding a balled-up tissue in a clenched-up fist, that was obviously used for wiping away worried tears. Immediately he knew without question: he was in big, big trouble.
“Mom,” he began. “I . . .”
“No!” she interrupted, closing her weepy eyes. “I do not want to hear any more of your lies, Edgar.” She lifted a trembling hand and massaged her forehead, then opened her eyes and glared again. “All you do is lie nowadays, over and over again.”
“What?” he croaked, his throat suddenly dry. “What do you mean, ‘lie?’”
She laughed angrily. “Edgar, come on! Your father and I—we are not stupid. You’ve been lying to us for weeks!”
“No I haven’t!”
“Speaking of your father,” she said, talking over him, “he came to say goodbye to you in the middle of the night, but unfortunately you couldn’t find it in your busy schedule to be at home in the middle of the night—so he said to tell you that you’ve really let him down, and when he gets back home, you are in serious, serious trouble.”
Edgar had a front row seat to the collapse of his entire operation. Piece by agonizing piece it was falling away, every bit as terrible as he thought it might be when he considered it all those times when falling through the Earth, wondering what might happen if his parents ever found him gone in the middle of the night.
“Dad came to say goodbye?” Edgar muttered. “Where did he go?”
She blew her nose on the ratty tissue and balled it up again. “He left for Yakima two hours ago.”
“ . . .Why?”
“To fight a fire.”
“But Dad’s not a fireman.”
“You know he volunteered. He told you last week. Or were you not listening? Anyway, stop trying to change the subject, Edgar,” she said grimly.
He ran a nervous hand through his hair and nodded.
“So now,” she continued, “you were saying? About sneaking out to God knows where?”
“I—” he began, defensively, but she held up a hand and cut him off again.
“You know, I can just feel another lie coming,” she said disgustedly, shaking her head. “I just don’t think I want to hear it.”
“OK,” he said. “OK, Mom. So we went catfishing last night.”
“Catfishing?” she chuckled. “And where exactly did this catfishing occur?”
He gulped audibly and tried to keep his cool. “Out at the Coulee Dam. I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t let me go, since it was a school night.”
She glared at him, searching his face. “Coulee?” she said. “How did you get all the way out to Coulee?”
“Well, my friend Flounder has a car.”
He anguished as she thoughtfully scooped up an old picture from the top of the chest of drawers. She gently caressed Edgar’s photographed face—a photo she’d always liked from back in little league, but one he always hated since it embarrassed him how chubby he’d been as a kid, from baby fat, and how he looked like a beaver with his two huge, buck teeth.
“You know,” she said softly, smudging a speck of dust from his photographed face, probably wishing she still had him—the young Edgar—instead of the grown-up Edgar she seemed so disgusted with who stood before her. “You remember the science fair project you mentioned a few weeks back? You remember how you sat at the table and destroyed your childhood globe? Well, I know they didn’t assign you that project on the first week of school.”
Edgar dropped his head and stared at his sandaled feet.
“Even then I knew you were lying, Edgar.”
She placed the picture back on the chest of drawers and looked up at him, gazing at him. “The way I could tell, Edgar, was that I knew it in your voice. You were lying. You’ve never been a good liar, son, which is a good thing, but tonight with all this ‘catfishing’ business, I just know I’ve caught you in a bigger lie—I’ve caught you doing something worse—but you just continue to dig a hole for yourself.”
She shook her head and shrugged. “I just don’t think I even know you anymore.”
She rose from the chest of drawers and walked across the room to him, glaring down.
“Cross country tryouts?” she muttered at him. “Running into the house at five in the morning with no shoes on? What a fool you have made of me! Of us!” That stung Edgar deeply.
“Where are all your progress reports, Edgar?” she probed, lifting her palms to her hips, making his already petrified heart skip another beat. “I guess you’ll tell me they haven’t been sent home yet, huh? Or what, they don’t do progress reports in Washington? Which lie do you have ready for me this time?”
Breathlessly attempting to maintain his composure, he looked her in the eye and said, “Mom, we haven’t gotten any progress reports. Not yet.”
“Oh, is that right? Are you sure?” she asked, a bitter, angry smile emerging on her face. “Wow. You must think I’m really dumb, Edgar.”
The jig was up. She was onto him and would never let up now. Edgar was screwed. He was also suddenly so very tired, and so overwhelmed by the horrible confrontation that he just wished he could go to sleep—to lie down and sleep the sleep of a clean conscience again, to start over again. Nothing was worth this terrible moment of seeing his own mother fall apart like this. Edgar knew he had ruptured something between them, and that their relationship had been shaken to the point that he didn’t even know if it could be made whole again. She was looking at him differently now, standing in the oncoming dawn of his room, a woman who, until now, had always been just as much a friend to him as a mother. He thought about her guiding him by the neck through town, leading him to the ice cream parlor.
But now, he could tell in her eyes: their friendship was jeopardized. She was in survival mode now. He had hurt her very deeply.
None of this was worth the island or the hole through the Earth or the fishing business or the money or the freedom.
None of it was worth a dang thing to him. He just wanted his Mom to trust him again, but the way she was looking at him now, it might not ever happen again.
“Please,” she asked, “just tell me the truth, Edgar, and I promise things will get better for you. That’s how the truth works. It heals. It’s like medicine.”
Which sounded good. But for some weird, inexplicable reason, when Edgar opened his mouth to tell the truth, terribly, inconceivably, the lies continued to come.
“We went catfishing,” he said with finality, his shoulders slumping from the confrontation. “Over at the Coulee Dam, like I said.”
He couldn’t stop thinking about Shay and the times they’d had together, swimming and laughing and catching lobster and how they’d kissed freefalling through the Earth, and commiserated in the middle of the night walking home. How could he possibly give that up? He gazed at the floor in misery unable to bring himself to look at his mother. “I’m very sorry I snuck out,” he added. “I will never do it again.”
�
�Oh, finally,” she said. “That’s the truest statement you’ve made yet: you certainly are not going to sneak out again.” Freshly enraged at his unwillingness to come clean, Milly Dewitt leaned down to him. “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?” she asked threateningly.
“No!” he said, a fresh sheen of sweat breaking out upon his forehead. Something was wrong. Things were getting worse. She knew something, but what?
“This is your last chance, Edgar,” she said, her voice fraught with danger.
“I’m super positive,” he nodded, his voice rising an octave. “Just that stuff about going catfishing, that’s all. Nothing else has been going on.”
She nodded grimly, then brushed past him and walked to the corner of his room, where she bent to the floor and to the baseboards.
Then, terribly, unbearably, she began to wiggle the same exact baseboard that he used to hide all his money!
“Whoa, Mom!” he shouted, lifting his hands in surrender. “Please! What are you doing!”
“What’s the matter, Edgar?” she asked loudly, turning to glare at him. “Nothing’s ‘going on,’ remember?”
“Yeah, but, Mom!” he cried, yet she ignored him, yanking away at the baseboard.
The Secret Island of Edgar Dewitt Page 13