by Beth Kephart
Copyright © 2016 by Beth Kephart.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Kephart, Beth, author.
This is the story of you / Beth Kephart.
pages cm
Summary: Seventeen-year-old Mira lives in a small island beach town off the coast of New Jersey year-round, and when a devastating superstorm strikes she will face the storm’s wrath and the destruction it leaves behind alone.
ISBN 978-1-4521-4284-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4521-4652-2 (ebook)
1. Hurricanes—New Jersey—Juvenile fiction. 2. Islands—New Jersey—
Juvenile fiction. 3. Survival—Juvenile fiction. 4. New Jersey—Juvenile fiction.
[1. Hurricanes—Fiction. 2. Islands—Fiction. 3. Survival—Fiction. 4. New
Jersey—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K438Th 2016
813.54—dc232015003765
Design by Jennifer Tolo Pierce.
Typeset in ITC Giovanni.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.
New York: Henry Holt, 2014.
Savadove Larry and Margaret Thomas Buchholz. Great Storms
of the Jersey Shore. New Jersey: Down the Shore Publishing, 1997.
Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1916.
“Pelorus Jack.” Lyrics by P. Cole, music by H. Rivers.
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For my father, brother, and sister,
and in loving memory of my mother,
my grandmother, and Uncle Danny.
Once the beach was ours.
Blue, for example.
Like the color the sun makes the sea. Like the beach bucket he wore as a hat, king of the tidal parade. Like the word I and the hour of nobody awake but me. I thought blue was mine, and that we were each ourselves, and that some things could not be stolen. I thought the waves would rise up, toss down, rinse clean, and that I would still be standing here, solid.
I was wrong about everything.
In the beginning it was just the beginning. The storm had no name. It was far away and nothing big, mere vapors and degrees. It was the middle-ish of September. Empty tables in restaurants, naked spaces in parking lots, cool stairs in the lighthouse shaft, no line for donuts, deer in the dune grass, padlocks and chains at the Mini Amuse, the Ferris wheel chairs tipping and dipping.
The beach belonged to Old Carmen and the campfire nobody stopped her from lighting—four logs and a flame and the sea. The beach belonged to the retrievers and the one collie and the mutts who limped behind, yapping like they thought they could someday take the lead. You could watch the sky, and it was yours. You could stand on the south end of the barrier beach and see Atlantic City blinking on and off like a video game. You could ride your wheels home, and the splat splat on the wide asphalt was your sweet siren song.
Everything calm. Nothing headed toward crumble.
September, like I said. Middle-ish. Skies so sweet and so Berry Blast Blue that Eva and Deni and I and the rest of us at Alabaster were taking most of our classes outside, our Skechers untied and our bodies SPF’d cloud high.
Science was bird-watching in the dunes. English was Trap the Metaphors. History was lessons on Pompeii under the shade of the schoolyard tree. Math was Algebra 2 taught at the picnic tables whose splintery legs were screwed in tight to the concrete pad in the school’s backyard, the school that looked like a bank because once it was a bank, the big, round, metal eye of its abandoned vault still in the basement.
Our liberty projects were our Project Flows—our four-year independent studies. Water: that was the category. Subtopic: anything we chose. Monsters of the Sea. Vanishing Cities. Shore Up. Glaciers on the Run. The Murder of Mangroves. We chose our topics. We wrote our books. We understood that on graduation day we would leave those books behind.
Let the process define you.
Our principal, Mr. Friedley, was mayor material, this guy with fresh ideas who believed in straying from the path. We learn wherever we open our eyes. That was his motto. Know the possibilities. He said that, too. Don’t give up on the future. Give everything you have. Know who you are. Go forth and conquer. We were six miles long by one-half mile at Haven. We’d conquered the place infinities ago.
We were The Isolates. We were one bridge and a few good rules away from normal. We were casual bohemians, expert scavengers, cool. Woo-hooo, we said, when the last Vacationeers drove off, over the bridge, Labor Day Monday. Rumble rumble. See you next May. And then out we’d come with our Modes, which were yard-sale vintage, to take back what was ours.
Eva’s Mode was a 36-inch Sims Taperkick that she’d decoupaged-out with Betty Boop; that skateboard could fly—Eva’s three braids going up and down on her back, each like a stick on a marching band drum. Deni had a Gem Electric golf cart, circa 1999—a cute little two-seater that she’d painted gold as the eye of a tiger. Gem was a gift from Deni’s uncle. She drove it everywhere, slipping her aviators to the top of her head, where they remained, like a helmet. Deni even swam with those glasses on. She wore them in the rain. She walked around with two pools of reflected sky on her head.
My Mode was a pair of old-time roller skates whose clanking key I wore at my neck like a charm. It was the prettiest jewel you’d ever seen, that key. It left a bruise on my chest from all the thonking, a proud purple thing.
I’m medium everything—blond, built, smart. But with that key and those strap-them-on adjustables I was such pure speed that Eva would say, every fifth or seventh day, that I should pack for the Olympics already.
Yeah, right, is what I said. Yeah, right. I’m not going anywhere. Because I had my business in Haven. I had responsibilities. I had my mom, first of all—long story. And I had a brother, Jasper Lee, who needed me. Seven years younger and perfect, except for one thing: The kid was born with no iduronate-2-sulfatase enzyme, which means he couldn’t recycle mucopolysaccharides, which is another way of explaining this lysosomal disease called Hunter syndrome, which is why his face is shaped the way it is, and why he has trouble walking, and why he is losing his hearing and his seeing and I can’t help it if you’ve never heard of it before, because there are only maybe two thousand people with Hunter in the whole wide world. My prime business in Haven concerned my brother, Jasper Lee, who was Home of the Brave to me, whose disease I knew all the long words to, because knowing the names of things is one small defense against the sad facts of reality.
Mid-September, like I said. Outdoor classes, mostly. Old Carmen watching the flickering sea, the moon in the water, the flames around her campfire logs—all sizzly. Old Carmen, a Haven legend: Someone should have done their Project Flow on her. Sitting like a sea lion on her patch of sand, the long line of her fishing pole tossed to the waves, a bucket at her side to help with the catch. Some people said Old Carmen was an heiress. Some people said she was outer space and alien. Some people said she was old. Vacation season, she disappeared. Labor Day through Memorial Day, she was present. Always the same age, the same clothes, the same fishing line, the same bucket. Old Carmen was Old Carmen. We just let her be.
I lived in a seaside cottage. I lived in the attic room on the topmost floor, my own private deck looking out toward the shore, a sliding door between me and
the weather. This is how I’d copped a front-row Old Carmen seat and how I was first to see the dawn exploding and how I was the one for whom the dolphins came, slicing their fins through the waves, those dolphins like excellent friends, scientific name: Delphinus delphis. I was the first to see the bubble edge of the surf, where the baby clams and blue crabs and foraminifera (ten thousand kinds of foraminifera) sucked back into their hiding after the waves had knocked them through.
Monsters of the Sea. That was my Project Flow. That was me. I was on a first-name basis with the strange and lovely things. Kingdom through phylum through family, genus, species. I was the taxonomy queen.
I had the attic, which was two stories high, and the sliding doors that opened onto the crooked deck, and the deck itself. That deck was like a continental shelf. It stood on four pole legs, tossing a shadow across the yard below, a place we called the Zone. Every part and parcel of the attic and the deck had belonged, once, to my aunt. The tartan blanket, the drainpipe jeans, the penny loafers, the Marilyn Monroe tees, the faux tuxedo jacket, the curio cabinets, and the curiosities—all hers, once, just as the cottage, once, had belonged to my aunt, until she left it to my mother. “Over to you, Mickey,” my aunt had said, according to legend, but I never knew for sure. I was in utero at the time.
Mickey inherited the cottage. I inherited the view, which is to say the sea and the sky, and the day I’m talking about had been spectacular, the air that kind of blue that snaps a shine into the sea and makes every speck of sand look like combusted mirror dust. Jasper Lee had set his alarm for a 7 a.m. he’d never honor. Mickey had been awake before that. I’d been up since five, watching the toss of the sea.
Out on the beach, the news was playing on Old Carmen’s radio. The line off her pole glistened like a strand of dental floss. There was a mutt up to its belly fur in a slow wave, and the sea was behaving itself. There are 140 million square miles of ocean in this world. The oceans are mountains and craters and hot vents and tectonics and all uncountable creatures. That morning, I was pondering a time when there was no sea at all, billions of years before now. I was imagining the earth all hot and blustery, all feisty and flames, working like heck to cool itself down, but mostly spewing its hotness like a cauldron. The sea covers seventy-one percent of our planet, but it wasn’t here at the planet’s start. The sea fell from the skies—any Alabasteran writing any Project Flow will tell you that. The sea arrived (most of the sea, that’s how they teach it here) when the iced comets cometh, when the asteroids tore through the skies and shattered. The sea around us fell down upon us. It took billions more years before we showed up ourselves.
The sea comes and the sea goes.
At school it was fourteen of us in the Class of O’Sixteen—give or take, less is more. Maybe where you’re from they need three buildings skirted out with parking lots (students to the right, teachers in the shade) to accommodate the up-and-coming citizens of the world. Not in Haven.
First of all, we had our Modes, or else we walked. Second of all, the old bank they’d converted into our school fit us just fine. Into its basement (south to the vault’s gloomy north), they’d carved a cafeteria that equaled Gym that equaled Arts and Music that equaled Study Hall or, also, Assembly Hall. On the three upper floors, in tall, pilaster-peeling spaces, they’d arranged four classrooms per. First grade through fourth: Level 1. Fifth grade through eighth: Level 2. Ninth grade through twelfth: Level 3. Sometimes we could hear the kids on Level 1 singing their Duck, Duck, Goose. Sometimes, from Level 2, the reverbing of Of Mice and Men. Sometimes Mr. Friedley would stand at the bottom of the spiraling central steps with the hole up through the middle and roar: Go forth and conquer. History was ceaseless in the repetition of itself. We lived with a severe case of déjà vu.
Except: On this particular day, when the weather was so revved full of allure that classes migrated to the exterior world, there was the dawn of something new. It was homeroom, just after the bell. We had already pledged our allegiance.
“Class,” Ms. Novotny said, a new guy standing by the door. “This is Shift.”
The guy turned his head inside his hoodie. He crammed his fists inside the pockets of his green-and-purple madras shorts. He slapped the heel of one flip-flop, then slapped slapped slapped toward the single extra chair, sat his long self down, hood still up, eyes averted. He was a transfer from someplace, but nobody knew where. He’d come by way of the bridge, unless he’d come by way of boat; there was no big reveal. He had a slim spiral-bound notebook in his hand and a uni-ball Roller clipped to the peak of his hood, and maybe Shift was his first name, or Shift was a trick name, and maybe he wouldn’t be staying for good, but I felt sure of this: We’d never seen him before.
“Hey, Shift.”
“Hey, yeah.”
“Cool.”
Eva’s eyes like anime.
Deni with a calculating stare.
Me pondering the one word, Shift. Class? Order? Family? Species?
First period was birds by the dunes. It was Ms. Isabel already down in the lobby, her long cotton coat hanging past her anklebones, the lavender sleeves rolled to her elbows, a fat dahlia stuck in the current of her auburn dreads. Ms. Isabel was a big believer in songbirds. She said tanageroriolevireothrustwarbleryellowrumpnorthernwaterthrush like it was all one word. She hauled her science books around in a saggy roller cart, tucked the cassette deck into her purse, sank extra batteries into her pocket wells. “Listen,” she’d say. “Identify.” Making as if birdsong was Spanish, the only second language actually offered at Alabaster.
I was good, far more than medium good, at naming all those birds.
Birds were Ms. Isabel’s dinosaurs, her dreams, her proof that it was our privilege to save what could still be saved of our world. “Every feather counts,” she’d say. “Every song.” Ms. Isabel taught activism by way of appreciation. Respect. Preserve. Study the signs.
On the day that Shift showed up, Ms. Isabel was waiting on us in the lobby for the after-homeroom bell, waiting and not looking up through the aperture in the spiraling stair, not watching us single-file out of homeroom and down the Level 3 hall and toward the marble stairs worn to a thin shine by so much climbing. The jingle bells around Becca’s ankle went first. Marco and Mario—tallest and shortest, Filipino and Italian—went next, then Dascher with her brand-new anchor tattoo, then Deby, Becca’s skinny twin. Then Taneisha with her platform wedges and her arm full of bracelets that jingled louder than Becca’s bells. Then Chang with a fluorescent disc in her backpack’s pocket—Chang, captain of Alabaster’s most award-winning sport, which was Ultimate Frisbee, which only I sucked at. Then Ginger, first in the class, her headband worn like a crown over her broom of curls, Queen of Alabaster, that was Ginger. Then the others, and after that it was Deni and me, side by side, those aviators on her head, her brother’s army jacket tied by the arms around her waist. Deni kept twisting on the steps, looking back, hunting out Eva, who was in back of the pack, Shift beside her, neither of them talking, at least according to Deni, who was doing all the spying.
Into the sun we went, our ragtag O’Sixteen fourteen plus one.
The sky so blue. There was an American kestrel overhead. There was a trio of finches on the telephone line, already losing their luster, and right around Oyster Way, where we turned, we spied a lesser yellowleg, its wings brown and spotted like Bambi.
“Early proof of the start of migration season,” Ms. Isabel said, parts of her words rippled back by the breeze. Early proof of migration starting too soon.
We all stopped. We duly noted. I glanced east, over one shoulder, past Chang and Taneisha, past Dascher and Becca, and there was Eva, her smile megawatt. Next I saw why: Shift. Hood up, madras shorts, and Eva’s power binoculars pressed to his eyes. Those were Barbie-pink binoculars—pinker than Pepto. They were an Eva find at the St. Mark’s White Elephant Sale; I had been there, and so had Deni, when Eva had negotiated. Eva
took that pink prize wherever she went—to the beach, to the birds, to the lighthouse—and now, for that moment, she had given it up; she had placed it in the hands of Shift, a guy nobody knew.
“What’s that about?” Deni said, because she’d turned, too.
“Guess she thinks he could use a little help with the birds.”
“Eva, the naïve.”
“Eva, the generous.”
Eva, who saw things nobody could see, who chose Vanishing Cities as her Project Flow. All the hotels, the streets, the kitchen chairs, the bedrooms that lived invisibly—that had been swept away by winds or cracked by earthquakes or gobbled down. To Eva every inch of before was romantic history. Everything was submerged or on the verge of going under. Atlantis, for example, which Plato said was swallowed by the sea. Port Royal, Jamaica, which fell, in 1692, into its harbor after an earthquake rattled it around. Fifteen thousand people, Eva says. A city bigger than Boston. Gone. Disappeared. Just like Edingsville Beach, South Carolina, two centuries later—high rent and hoi polloi, a “playground for rich planters” (she read, from some book) that went down on both knees to a sweep of hurricanes. Shishmaref is disappearing, Eva would say, pointing to a place just below the Arctic Circle on a map. Venice will soon be gone. The Maldives. She’d lean close. She’d whisper the names. She’d sit back and close her eyes, and we’d watch the trance that she’d become, that she was. She was pretty on the outside. She was even prettier inside. She kept time and all its layers whole in the channels of her mind.
But back to Deni, who was giving me one of her stares beneath her spectacular eyebrows.
I stared back, shrugged, understood. Worrying was Deni’s Job Number One. She’d lost the big things in life. A brother first (Afghanistan) and then a father (hole in the heart). The news that had changed Deni’s life and consequently had changed Deni had arrived in suits seven months apart, a knock on the door—the army people, the police—and who could blame her for the thoughts she had, the days she didn’t trust, the plans she was forever putting into place, the precautions she took. Shore Up. That was Deni’s Project Flow. Dams, dikes, levees, green-blue corridors, sea gates, surge control, blue dunes, oyster reefs, wrap the city of Manhattan up in plastic, float Venice on buoys.