by Holly Green
“I owe you an apology, Sadie. A big one. I sulked over not finishing that race, and when I came out of it, when I realized what an ass I’d been, you could barely look at me. I’ve been mad at myself for the last year, but I’ve never blamed you.”
“What?” I ask. Because this doesn’t fit with anything that’s happened in the last year. “You’ve always blamed me. That’s why you said you didn’t want me in a boat with Tanner.”
Dad pulls back to look me in the face. Wrinkles crisscross his forehead. “When did I say that?”
“I was eavesdropping on you and Mom in the kitchen. You thought that I would ruin his chances of finishing, too.”
Dad turns back to the water and stays quiet for a minute. “That’s not what that conversation was about,” he finally says, and I wait until he decides to finish. “You know, your brother gets that competitive edge from me. He’s willing to sacrifice a lot for a win. Too much. I didn’t want him in a boat with you because he’d be like me. He wouldn’t listen to you. He’d put the finish above his partner. I just didn’t realize it would push you into a boat with John Cullen.”
“Call him Cully,” I say automatically as the shame of calling him John Cullen hits me again. Then I let Dad’s words seep into my brain. “I was that way with him at first. I was a jerk. Wouldn’t let him rest. Gave him hell every time he messed up. But he called me on it. He threatened to walk away, and I had to take a good look at myself. I didn’t like what I’d done very much.”
Dad gives a little half laugh. “Not the first time a Hink and Scofield were at each other’s throats during the race.”
“That year with you and Johnny—what happened?” I ask.
“Everything,” Dad says. “Nothing. We couldn’t agree on anything that race. If he wanted to portage, I thought we should stay on the river. And … he needed a break. He didn’t have the grit that year to paddle nonstop, and I wouldn’t let him. I let my ego come before our partnership. And … and I made a bad call. I got turned around and took us the wrong way on the bay. It could have been a lot worse than it was. We got in this big fight, waist-deep in the water. It turned into a shouting match, and he hit me in the jaw.”
“That sounds really familiar,” I say.
Dad’s head snaps around. He looks me in the eye. “Did Cully hit you?” His voice is steel.
“No!” I almost shout. I stare into his eyes. “Hear me when I say this. He’s nothing like Johnny. He’s not volatile.”
Dad’s face softens. His shoulders relax. “Yeah, I’ve kind of realized I’d figured that kid wrong.” He turns back to the bay. “Gonzo told me what happened with Tanner and Allie. Your brother’s a real piece of work sometimes. I hate to think he gets that from me, too.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “During the race that year, Johnny told me this crazy story about how you stood on his counter and dumped melted ice cream over his head. Told me your mom and I were too soft on you. That you were out of control. I couldn’t believe he’d lie to me like that about my own kid.”
Oh. I always thought since my parents never mentioned it, maybe Johnny didn’t tell. But I guess it was stupid to think that the ripples from that incident didn’t turn into waves. Huge waves.
“Dad.”
“Yeah?”
“I stood on Johnny Hink’s counter and poured ice cream on his head.”
Dad’s eyebrows shoot up. He rubs his stubble. “Well, then.”
My stomach sinks. But then Dad laughs. Deep laughter. Body curled, knee up, hand pressed against his mouth laughter. “I think I might owe that man an apology,” he finally says.
“I swear, Dad, I had to. You should have seen the way he was yelling at Cully. I didn’t know it would make you hate each other.”
“Don’t hold yourself responsible for something that happened between two grown men.”
I need to tell him.
“I’m not giving Cully up again.” I make my voice as hard as I can. “So don’t ask me to.”
“I didn’t ask you to give him up the first time.” Dad’s quiet for a minute. “But I see why you thought you had to. These are our mistakes you’ve been living with. I should have stepped in. Should have made things right with Johnny for your sake if nothing else. Or just adopted the kid so we could keep him around.”
The memory of kissing Cully explodes into my mind.
“You shouldn’t have adopted him.”
Dad twists around to where Cully is in the lawn chair.
“So it’s like that?” he asks.
I think back to the way his fingers touched my face when we were in the cut.
“I think so,” I say. “I hope so.”
He stares at me for a long moment, then shoots his eyes to Cully. “I guess I owe your mom twenty bucks.”
We both laugh.
He puts an arm around me and pulls me close. His chin rests on the top of my head.
“My point in all this, in bringing you over here,” Dad says, “is to say that I’m sorry and that I love you. You are so damn strong and so brave, and I couldn’t be more proud of you right now if you’d paddled that boat to the moon. And it’s not about finishing. It’s not that you came in sixth place, which is really something. It’s that you went out there and you put your whole self into it.”
I know him too well to believe that. “Come on, Dad. You can’t pretend you aren’t proud that I came in sixth. I know how much that means to you.”
“Of course I’m proud of how well you did. But I’m proud of how you did it. You put your partner above the finish. You realized that to get there, you two had to take care of each other. And when a jackass like Johnny Hink got in trouble, you went out there and helped him. It’s better than he would have done for you.”
He looks out at the water, where Johnny’s boat approaches the finish.
“That’s why I decided not to race this year,” he continues. “I took a good look at how I’d treated you, and I didn’t much like it. Didn’t like myself very much, either.” He turns his head away from me, wipes his eyes, and sniffles. “I really hope you can forgive me.” His voice breaks as he says it.
I wipe my eyes with my wrinkled hands and lean into my dad. “Of course I can.”
He pulls me into a hug. We stay there, with his arm around my shoulder, and watch as Johnny’s boat reaches shore. As Johnny skips the photos, leaving his wounded partner behind, and walks straight for Cully. He wakes his son.
Dad starts to stand, but I put a hand on his arm. Everything in me says to go over there. To grab what’s left of my milkshake and pour it on Johnny’s head. But I can still hear Cully’s words in my ears.
I don’t need you to do that for me anymore.
Instead, I watch as Cully stands, rubs his eyes, and leads his dad away from the pavilion.
I watch heated words fly between them.
And then I watch Cully walk away.
“We’re not done here, John Cullen,” Johnny calls after him.
“Yeah. We are,” Cully says. “We’re really done.”
He walks to me and Dad, holds out a hand, and says, “Let’s go clean up.”
Erica drives us the four blocks to the motel that leaves rooms unlocked for racers to shower.
“Want me to wait?” she asks.
Cully shakes his head. “We’ll call you if we need you.”
We leave our shoes outside the door of the room—an Odyssey tradition to show someone is showering in there—and walk inside.
It’s an old place, built at least fifty years ago, and probably not updated much since then.
I let my bag fall on the carpet with a whup.
“Do you want the first shower?” Cully asks.
I shake my head. “Take it.”
He goes into the bathroom and the door clicks shut. I can hear the water running inside, and a minute later the door cracks. “Can you bring my bag in here and give me my dopp kit?”
He’s already in the shower when I carry in his backpack and
dig around until I find a toiletry bag I can only assume is a dopp kit. Steam rises above the closed curtain and billows out when I slide the bag in to him.
Then I lie down on the cold floor of the bathroom, not caring about germs or dirt or other people’s hair, and I close my eyes.
“What was your dad saying?” I ask.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says.
He’s in there. Showering. Naked. A flimsy shower curtain away. But it feels like a million miles.
“It matters to me,” I say.
A quiet minute passes.
“He’s mad that we brought him his boat. Mad that I walked away at the Wooden Bridge. Embarrassed. Says I disrespected him in front of a crowd of people,” Cully says. “Like he didn’t do the same thing to me.”
“What are you going to do now? Texas State?” I can’t deny that part of me wants Cully to go to school fifteen minutes down the road. We could see each other every day.
“I’ll stay at Gonzo’s until he cools off. Defer my admission. Get a job. Apply for loans and grants. It’s not like I’ll be the first kid to figure out how to pay for school on my own. Maybe I can go to RISD in the spring. Or in a year.”
I don’t know which part of this makes me love him the most, only that I love him all 265 miles down the river and all the way back. All the way to Rhode Island or anywhere else he lands, whether I get to love him as a friend or I have the chance to love him as something more.
I run my tongue over the inside of my teeth. I also know that after two and a half days on the river, my mouth is foul.
Suddenly, I’m up and I’m flossing and brushing my teeth, and my legs and my arms and my entire body are made of rubber, and I don’t know if it’s from extreme exhaustion or from Cully. I’m waiting in the room while he finishes up, because it’s too hard waiting in there with him on the other side of the shower curtain. He comes out fresh and clean, and then I’m in the bathroom peeing on an actual toilet. I sit in the shower because I’m too wobbly to stand, but I’m using soap and shampoo and watching the dirt run off my body and down the drain in a brown stream. Then I’m clean, in a black cotton dress, walking out of the bathroom.
Cully is on one side of the bed with his eyes closed. Asleep, he looks so peaceful it’s impossible to tell he spent the last two and a half days paddling. I see so clearly how he is still the boy I’ve known my whole life, just older. It seems so ridiculous now that I ever could have hated him.
And even if I’m wrong, even if he doesn’t feel the same way about me that I do about him, I have to ask. I lie down on my side, face-to-face with him, and press my foot into his. His brown eyes drift open. I touch his face and his cheek is smooth.
“Can I kiss you?” he whispers.
Everything inside me glows.
I cock an eyebrow at him. “Goulash.”
His soft laugh is everything.
His chest is warm underneath my hand. His fingers are in my hair and his lips are soft against mine. We stay like that, kissing, our feet tangled together, until someone knocks on the door and asks what’s taking so long.
We climb off the bed onto wobbly legs. I catch his hand as we walk out the door into the bright June sun. All the blistered and raw parts of my hand press into his.
And I don’t let go.
Anyone familiar with the Texas Water Safari will recognize it as the inspiration for the Texas River Odyssey. My dad paddled the Safari as a teenager, back in 1964, after reading the 1963 Life magazine article about it. I grew up thinking of it as that crazy canoe race my dad did. In 2012, the race came back into my life when my husband paddled it with three friends. I followed along, spectating at water stops and checkpoints. Long before his team ever made it to the finish line, the beginnings of Sadie’s story were already forming in my head.
The Water Safari community is made up of a generous group of people who have the absolute best stories. Nothing I could dream up could compare with what they have experienced. I encourage anyone interested in learning more about the Safari to visit texaswatersafari.org.
Although the Odyssey has its origins in the Safari, all the characters and events in the story are completely fictional.
The people who made this book happen could fill a whole fleet of canoes.
Thank you to my agent, Michael Bourret, for your keen insight, for loving this story, and for finding a home for it. Thank you to my editor, Maya Marlette, for all your brilliant edits, for your support, and for writing the best emails. I couldn’t have landed in a better boat. You are both first in class, every time.
Thank you to the whole team at Scholastic including Melissa Schirmer, Keirsten Geise, David Levithan, Mallory Kass, Jessica White, Elizabeth Tiffany, Aimee Friedman, Shannon Pender, Josh Berlowitz, Janell Harris, Taylan Salvati, and our sensitivity reader, Joseph Chavez.
Big thanks to Bethany Hegedus, my first mentor, who changed my writing completely. To early readers Salima Alikahn, Shelli Cornelison, Vanessa Lee, Laurie Morrison, and Laura Sibson. Thank you to beta readers Kate Branden, Elizabeth Hayt, Brynn Speer, Sarah Pitre, Heather Curry, and Melanie Jacobson. Special thanks to Salima and to Stephanie Kotara, who have cheered me on for over a decade now. And to Emma Kress for navigating these new waters with me.
Thank you to my advisors at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. To Tom Birdseye, who helped me get Sadie and Cully to the finish line that first semester. To Margaret Bechard, who helped me see my new beginning. To Jane Kurtz, who helped me write from inside my character’s skin. To Tim Wynne-Jones, for loving this story from the start. And to David Gill, for helping me get Sadie and Cully to the finish line the second time and for so often seeing my story more clearly than I could see it myself.
Thank you to my Tropebusters and to the Writers of the Lost Arc. I couldn’t have found better families at VCFA.
I owe a huge thanks to the people who shared their canoeing knowledge and their racing stories with me. To Holly Orr of Paddle with Style, who is a skilled canoeing teacher and was so patient when I made every mistake you can make in a boat. Thank you to Chris Kelter, for being my racing partner and an all-around great friend. Thank you to Tom and Paula Goynes for sharing Safari stories over pie. And thanks to John Dunn, for always being willing to tell me about your racing days and for inventing the Cussing Lamp.
Mom, Dad, Kelly, thank you for raising me to love books and for always keeping me well supplied.
To my kids, I am so lucky to be your mother. Thank you for always being excited about me becoming a “book writer,” and for the happy dance when I got the good news. You are more incredible than I could have dreamed, just as you are.
To Woody, who does hard things, thank you for everything, always.
Holly Green has never paddled in a 265-mile canoe race, but she has paddled a sixteen-mile race, and that feels like a reasonable length. She is a former potter turned tech trainer turned writer who loves traveling, hiking, and swimming. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in central Texas with her family.
Copyright © 2021 by Holly Green
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First edition, July 2021
Jacket Illustration © 2021 Mike Health | Magnus
Jacket design by Keirsten Geise
e-ISBN 978-1-338-72664-0
All rights reserved under International a
nd Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.