by Nick Courage
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Nick Courage
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Michael Heath
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Courage, Nick, author.
Title: Storm blown / Nick Courage.
Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2019] | Summary: In San Juan, Puerto Rico, Alejandro worries about his great-uncle while helping guests at a resort, and in New Orleans, Emily worries about her sick brother, as a major hurricane rages, changing both their lives forever.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018885 | ISBN 978-0-525-64596-2 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-525-64599-3 (glb) | ISBN 978-0-525-64597-9 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Hurricanes—Fiction. | Refugees—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Puerto Rico—Fiction. | New Orleans (La.)—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C677 Sto 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780525645979
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Hatching
San Juan, Puerto Rico
New Orleans
New Orleans
San Juan, Puerto Rico
New Orleans
San Juan, Puerto Rico
P7 Beta, Gulf of Mexico
New Orleans
San Juan, Puerto Rico
New Orleans
Tropical Storm Valerie Atlantic Ocean
San Juan, Puerto Rico
New Orleans
National Climatic Research Center (NCRC) Washington, DC
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Part Two: Fledging
P7 Beta, Gulf of Mexico
San Juan, Puerto Rico
New Orleans
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Ncrc Washington, DC
New Orleans
Five Hundred Feet Above San Juan, Puerto Rico
Megastorm Valerie Atlantic Ocean
New Orleans
Part Three: Flying
Forty Feet Above San Juan, Puerto Rico
Venice, Louisiana
New Orleans
Forty Thousand Feet Above the North Atlantic Ocean
Highway 23 Port Sulphur, Louisiana
New Orleans
Ambergris Cay, Atlantic Ocean
New Orleans
Tent City New Orleans
Feather Island New Orleans
Ncrc Washington, DC
Audubon Park New Orleans
Tent City New Orleans
Megastorm Valerie New Orleans
Five Hundred Feet and Counting Above New Orleans
Ten Thousand Feet and Counting Above the Mississippi River
Oxford, Mississippi
Three Days Later Afterward
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For anyone who’s ever weathered a storm.
But for Rachel, especially.
During major storms, sea birds and waterfowl are most exposed….In a unique effect of cyclonic hurricanes, the eye of the storm with its fast-moving walls of intense wind can form a massive “bird cage” holding birds inside the eye until the storm dissipates.
—NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION, “SEVEN THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT HOW HURRICANES AFFECT WILDLIFE”
When the first glimpse of day appears, I make my way on deck, where I stand not unlike a newly hatched bird, tottering on feeble legs.
—JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, BIRDS OF AMERICA, VOLUME VII, “WILSON’S PETREL”
“Alejandro!” the old man shouted, his voice small in the rising wind. “Las sillas—the chairs, they’re blowing away!”
A turquoise lounger slid across the slick deck of the San Juan Pilastro Resort and Casino, its waterproof fabric stretched and filled like the sails of a ship. Alejandro ran after it, his skinny shoulders squared against the wind and rain as his padrino squinted at the approaching storm. Most of the guests had already evacuated, cutting their vacations short as weather advisories rolled in with the clouds. The few who had hoped for the best and ignored the warnings were holed up in their rooms, enjoying complimentary cocktails and wondering if it was too late to leave.
It was too late.
Just minutes before, Alejo and his mother’s uncle—Padrino Nando—had joined the hotel staff in the lobby for an emergency meeting. They’d stood near the doors with the other groundskeepers, not wanting to track mud onto the marble floors as the manager informed them that the bad weather they’d been having all week had been upgraded to a tropical storm.
Tropical Storm Valerie.
Nando had laughed and clapped his hands.
It was a name like one of their tourists, another Hawaiian-shirted guest with no real love for the island. But Valerie was nothing to laugh about—all flights out of Isla Verde were grounded until the storm blew over, and most of the birds were already gone. The loons, the geese, the herons, and even the gulls—they were smart like that. Except for a handful of purple-black cormorants that were fighting the wind for fun, the swirling gray skies were empty.
Padrino Nando smiled as Alejandro dragged the runaway lounger back to the others, tying them all down with a bright nylon rope. Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, not so very far from shore, winds were gusting over forty miles per hour. “Faster than traffic,” their manager had said. Sometime that night or the following morning, those winds and the rain would hit San Juan and the streets would flood and end the tourist season early.
Or everything would be fine.
It all depended on how angry the white peaks were, out in the surf.
“Alejo!” Nando shouted. “Look!”
The palm trees lining the Pilastro’s white sand beach bent toward the resort, their leafy crowns catching the wind. Beyond them, the cormorants took turns dive-bombing the roiling white waves. With the sky so gray and the sea so gray and the rain running down their faces, it was hard to tell what was earth and what was air.
Nando squeezed Alejo’s shoulder with one wrinkled hand as they watched the cormorants fish, shading his eyes with the other to better see their long necks piercing the surf like arrows from the heavens. No matter what happened, the storm would be gone in a few days—spinning up to Bermuda or threading its way into the Gulf of Mexico, toward the oil rigs and refineries off the muddy coasts of Louisiana and Texas.
<
br /> Padrino Nando didn’t care where the storm went, only that the cormorants were full and happy.
As long as there were birds in the waves, San Juan would be fine.
By the time Sam Gribley developed a taste for frog soup, Emily had finally settled into her book. It hadn’t been easy. Sam’s story was written so long ago that Emily was borrowing her mom’s childhood copy of My Side of the Mountain. They’d both had it assigned for summer reading, twenty years apart, and the pages were brittle and yellow. Emily traced her finger over an ancient crease, her vision blurring at the edges as she folded and unfolded the same corner her mother had dog-eared when she was a kid. She tried not to think about Elliot and the surgery, and her dad working on the oil rig while her mom worried herself sick…but it was all too much.
She couldn’t concentrate.
The words just wouldn’t stick in her head.
It didn’t help that their apartment was so small.
Between the low groan of Elliot’s humidifier and the cable news blasting from the living room, she’d had to stop three times and start from the beginning. The thought of starting all over again was too much for Emily to bear, so she chewed her lip and turned the page. Sam—the main character—had run away from home and was camping in a hollowed-out tree…but Emily had to admit that he was doing okay for himself.
Maybe even better than she was.
Emily had been living on fast food for the past month, and her mouth watered as she reread the recipe for Sam’s favorite meal: acorn flour, water-lily buds, and wild onions served in a polished turtle-shell bowl. If you left out the frog legs, it’d be perfect…but even without them, there was no way she could get any of that stuff at their grocery store. The Winn-Dixie they went to on Saturday mornings had flickering fluorescent lights and a security guard who was always sipping from a quart of pink, flavored milk.
It wasn’t a farmer’s market, that was for sure.
Emily’s mom cursed at the news while Emily daydreamed about handpicked mussels sizzling over an open fire and the crunch of fresh green vegetables. Soon they’d start shopping at the fancy stores again, the ones they’d gone to before Elliot got sick.
The ones where happy people got their groceries.
Those stores had everything.
For the fourth time that morning, Emily closed her book, holding her place with a finger. It was too hard to stay focused while she was blinking back tears. “I’m fine,” she whispered, but the tremble in her voice gave her away. Even though everyone said Elliot was going to be fine, Emily felt sad—and the apartment was dark and cold, which made her sadness feel more real.
For the past week, the curtains had been pulled tight to keep out the dust, for Elliot. Before he came home from the hospital, Emily and her mother had scrubbed the apartment on their hands and knees until everything smelled like lemon and bleach, and then the real cleaners had come. Another mother and daughter team. They’d turned the radio up so loud it drowned out the television and they’d sung along to songs Emily recognized from the aisles at the grocery store.
It had felt good to have them in the apartment, laughing and singing in the warm, late afternoon light.
It felt like a new start.
Emily’s mom had smiled then, and Emily had smiled, too.
Before the cleaners, the entire summer had felt wrong.
As soon as school had let out, most of Emily’s friends had gone straight into summer camp. The others had left on long road trips to ramshackle cabins and rented beach houses in Pensacola, like her friend Katie. One girl was going to Mexico to see the pyramids. Emily knew because they’d all had to write essays about their summer plans and read them out loud to the class. Emily had written about visiting her aunt Lillian in Florida. She was proud of her essay. Aunt Lillian had promised to take her to a clear-water swimming hole where you had to keep an eye out for alligators. Everyone thought that was a lie, but it wasn’t.
Except that she never got to go to Florida after all.
Emily frowned.
So far, she had spent most of her summer curled up on two hard plastic chairs in the hospital waiting room listening to her mom whisper-shout at the insurance companies, Aunt Lillian, Emily’s dad, and whoever else Emily’s mom could get on the phone. Emily’s friends texted her inside jokes and photos of themselves buried in sand. Emily always responded, but her heart wasn’t in it. Most of them didn’t know about Elliot, and she didn’t know how to tell them.
While Emily’s mom watched the never-ending news in their dark and disinfected apartment, Emily listened to children playing in their shared backyard. The world was full of people who didn’t know what they were going through.
Normal people.
Her tears were slow and hot, and she bravely sniffed them back as her book slipped loudly to the floor.
“Emily!” her mom shouted from the living room.
Emily waited for footsteps—but none came. Her mother was planted firmly on the couch, watching the weekend weather forecast. As usual. Emily closed her eyes and pictured her staring, moonfaced, at the glowing blue screen.
“Em, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Emily shouted, forcing herself to smile so she might actually sound fine. She rubbed the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and kept the smile plastered to her face.
There was no way they could have known that everything would be even harder when Elliot came home. He had always been thin, but he was so much thinner when he was released from the hospital. His dirty blond hair looked brown and his lips were cracked. The nurses had joked that he got a little dinged up in the shop and Emily’s mom had laughed gratefully, like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard…but when they got Elliot back into his bedroom, she was so scared he would get sick again that Emily wasn’t even allowed to see him, even though her hands still smelled like lemons.
Even though Elliot had been her best friend since the day she was born.
Emily picked her mother’s book up from the floor, smoothing the pages where they had crumpled. “I’m going outside,” she said to no one in particular. She slipped her phone into her pocket and walked to Elliot’s room. The doorknob felt cold in her hand. Refreshing. She half turned it, then stopped. If there had been a sliver of light, she would have gone in, but the crack beneath the door was dark, as usual, and there wasn’t any point in getting their mom worked up. The floorboards creaked as she tiptoed away, so loudly that she almost didn’t hear her brother calling her name from the shadows.
Elliot rubbed the sleep from his eyes as his sister ducked into his bedroom. It hurt to sit up, but he sat up anyway. The stitches crisscrossing his stomach felt tight—so tight that he was worried they might pop—but Elliot clenched his teeth and tried to ignore the pain as a stack of comic books slipped and fluttered from his mattress onto the floor. His mom had arranged them next to him while he slept, hoping he’d wake up well enough to read.
But he was always so groggy.
It was the medicine.
The pain pills made it so he couldn’t stay up for more than a few hours at a time. And even when he wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t quite awake. It felt like he was floating underwater. Like the voices on the street outside his window were from another world, a hundred miles away.
Elliot sighed as his sister tiptoed through the darkness.
In school, he was always getting in trouble for not sitting still. If his homeroom teacher could see him now, he thought, she wouldn’t believe her eyes. It had been over a week since he’d worn shoes—and it was getting harder to remember a time when he could jump around “creating an environment of total chaos, to the detriment of his teachers and classmates.”
That was what his last progress report had said.
He’d never forget his mother reading that line out loud at the dining room table—so shocked
and exasperated—while Emily laughed into her peas and their dad tried to hide a smile behind a forkful of mashed potatoes.
These days, Elliot wasn’t even sure where his shoes were.
“Hey,” he said. “Emily?”
His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. It was a waste of a summer vacation: lying in bed, alone, in the dark. He was so sick of it he could scream. Instead, he tried to arrange a smile on his face for his little sister, like nothing was wrong.
Like he was fine.
It wasn’t so hard to do, even with the stitches pulling on his side.
There was something about the way Emily was sneaking toward his bed, like a ninja, that made the corners of his mouth twitch upward. He would have laughed, but even in the low light of his bedroom he could see that her cheeks were wet with tears. “What’s wrong?” he whispered, but Emily put a finger to her lips and held it there for a long moment, waiting for the creak of a floorboard to recede.
“Mom won’t let me in here,” she finally said, when she was sure that their mother wasn’t coming. Her voice was so soft that Elliot had to strain to hear her over the sound of the television in the living room, and she kept looking over her shoulder in terror, like she might dive under his bed any second.
Elliot felt his smile widen.
It wasn’t funny—not “ha ha” funny—but Emily looked so serious that Elliot couldn’t help it. The stitches stretched and pulled as he started to laugh, and the pain was immediate—a flash of red that took his breath away as he fell back down onto his pillow. Emily stared at him from the shadows, her eyes wide as Elliot clutched his side.