Nim at Sea
Authors: Wendy Orr
Contents
For Paula, who believed in Nim
L
ONG AGO
, when Nim was a baby, she’d had both a mother and a dad. Then one day, her mother had decided to investigate the contents of a blue whale’s stomach. It was an interesting experiment that no one had done for thousands of years, and Nim’s dad, Jack, said that it would have been all right, it should have been safe—but the Troppo Tourists came to make a film of it, shouting and racing their huge pink-and-purple boat around Nim’s mother and the whale. The whale panicked and dived so deep that no one ever knew where or when he came back up again.
Nim’s mother never came back up at all.
So Jack packed his baby onto his boat and sailed round and round the world—and finally, when the baby had grown into a very little girl, he found the perfect island where he could do his science and Nim could grow, wild and free like the animals they lived with.
The island has white-shell beaches, pale gold sand, and tumbled black rocks. It has a fiery mountain with green rainforest on the high slopes and grasslands at the bottom. There is a pool of fresh water to drink, a waterfall to slide down, and the hut that Jack built in a hidden hollow where the grasslands meet the beach. And around it, there’s a maze of reef guarding the island from everything but the smallest boats, so Jack knows the Troppo Tourists or anyone else can never find their island.
But one day, Jack and his boat got lost in a storm—and Nim was left alone on the island, until her e-mail friend Alex Rover, the most famous and cowardly adventure writer in the whole world, crossed the sea to rescue her. And then Nim’s most secret wish came true: Jack came floating back—and Alex stayed.
I
N A PALM TREE
, on an island, in the middle of the wide blue sea, is a girl.
Nim’s hair is wild, her eyes are bright, and around her neck she wears three cords. One is for a spyglass, one is for a whorly, whistling shell, and the other holds a fat red pocketknife in a sheath.
With the spyglass at her eye, Nim watched the little red seaplane depart. It sailed out through the reef to the deeper dark ocean, bumping across the waves till it was tossed into the bright blue sky. Then it rose so high and so far it was nothing but a speck, and floated out of sight.
“Alex is gone,” Nim told Fred.
Fred stared at the coconuts clustered on the trunk.
Fred is an iguana, spiky as a dragon, with a cheerful snub nose. He was sitting on Nim’s shoulder, and he cared more about coconuts than he did about saying goodbye. (Marine iguanas don’t eat coconut, but no one has ever told Fred.)
As Nim threw three ripe coconuts
thump!
into the sand, she remembered Alex saying, “I never knew anything could taste better than coffee!” the first time Nim opened a coconut for her.
Nim looked down at her father, sitting like a stone on Selkie’s Rock. Jack’s head was bowed and his shoulders slumped. Nim had never seen him look so sad.
And suddenly she knew she’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.
The mistake began when she answered Alex’s very first e-mail, back when she’d thought that the famous Alex Rover was a man and a brave adventurer like the hero in the books “he” wrote. That led to Alex’s ending up on the island—and when she did, Jack and Nim wanted her never to leave. Sometimes it felt good to be three instead of two.
But other times Nim wanted Jack just for herself, the way it used to be. Or she wanted Alex just for herself, because Alex was
her
friend before she was Jack’s. Sometimes, when Alex and Jack told Nim to go to sleep while they talked late into the night, Nim felt left out and lonely.
Then, earlier this morning, the little red seaplane had arrived, bringing all the things that Alex had asked her editor back in the city to send. It was the first time a plane had ever landed on Nim’s island. Nim could tell that Jack was worried that the pilot would notice how beautiful the island was and would want to come back again and again.
Whenever Jack was worried, Nim was too. And when Nim was worried, so were her friends Selkie and Fred. (Selkie is a sea lion who sometimes forgets that Nim is a girl and not a little sea lion pup to be looked after and
whuffle
d over.) They both stuck close to Nim every time she walked back and forth between the plane and the hut.
“I’ve never seen animals do that before!” exclaimed the pilot.
Nim didn’t know what to say, partly because she didn’t know exactly what he hadn’t seen before, and partly because she’d never spoken to any person besides Jack and Alex. She grabbed a crate and opened it up. Inside there were books! Thin books and fat, short books and tall, history and science books, mysteries, adventures, and more and more and more! Nim started to look through one when—
“Come on, Nim!” said Alex. “There’ll be time to read when everything’s off the plane.”
The pilot pulled out two big solar panels. “Great!” Jack exclaimed, because he wanted them for the new room he planned to add to the hut—one created especially for Alex to write her books in. Jack balanced the panels on his head and walked very slowly and carefully up toward the hut.
“Who’s going to take this one?” the pilot asked, pointing to a crate.
Nim stepped forward eagerly. But just as she was about to reach for the crate, the pilot handed it to Alex. First Alex stumbled, then she tripped, then
crash!
the crate fell with a tinkle of broken glass.
“Oh,
no
!” Alex wailed. “What have I done?”
“Jack’s test tubes!” Nim shouted. “You should have let me take it!”
“I was trying to help!”
“But I didn’t need help! You just got in the way!”
“I’m always in the way these days!” Alex snapped. “Maybe you and Jack would be better off without me.”
“I think we would!” Nim shouted, and stomped off without waiting for an answer.
She’s right!
Alex thought.
Nim and Jack lived here perfectly happily all those years without anyone else—they don’t really need me. Nim’s been cross with me a lot lately and I’ve never seen Jack be so worried. I think…I think I’m changing their lives too much. What if they’ve secretly been wanting their old lives back—and just haven’t wanted to say so?
Alex understood about being afraid to say so. Before she came to the island, she was so afraid of saying anything to anyone that she hardly ever left her apartment. She was a famous person, but only through her books. Her life had totally changed since she flew across the world to find Nim.
“Last one!” The pilot handed her a large envelope. “And now, time for me to go.”
Alex opened it. She pulled out the letter and stared at it without reading.
“Wait! Can I…can I go with you?”
“Sure!” said the pilot. “But don’t you need to pack?”
Alex knew that if she saw Jack or Nim she would never be able to leave, even if it was the right thing to do. “No,” she said, “I’m ready to go.”
Alex Rover climbed into the little red seaplane. And was gone.
Hours later, Nim scrambled down from the coconut palm and buried her face in Selkie’s warm neck, because the sea lion loved her no matter how bad Nim was—and the feeling in Nim’s stomach told her this was the very worst thing she’d ever done.
Jack loved her too, but Nim didn’t know if he still would when he realized it was Nim who had chased Alex away.
“Meet me at the Emergency Cave,” she told Selkie, because suddenly the sun and sea were shining much too bright. Only the deepest, darkest cave could match the way she felt inside.
Selkie gave a disapproving sort of
hrumph
and lolloped down to the sea. Nim and Fred headed inland, toward the bottom of Fire Mountain, past the Hissing Stones, and across the Black Rocks.
Scrambling up the boulders was good because it was such hard work Nim couldn’t think about anything else. But when she got to the cave, she remembered: Alex telling her stories when they were trying to sleep on the hard cave floor, Alex watching the sunrise on the very first morning, Alex crying when Nim skinned her knee.
Nim crawled into the deepest corner of the cave to be as sad and alone as she could possibly be. She hiccuped and coughed and cried and blew her nose, then dropped her hanky.
It was when she was feeling around in the dark for her soggy hanky that she found the map.
Alex had drawn the map when she told one of her stories. It showed an island that was part of a city with even bigger parts next to it. It was as different from Nim’s island as anywhere could possibly be.
It was the place where Alex’s books were published, in a tall, shining building whose top floors were up above the clouds. It was where Alex’s editor worked—the one who’d sent the supply plane.
Nim stuffed the map into her deepest pocket and started crying all over again. She cried so hard that Selkie pulled herself all the way up from the sea to the cave to comfort her. But when Nim wouldn’t stop crying, no matter how much Selkie
whuffle
d and
snuffle
d, Selkie went just outside the cave entrance so that she could do tricks to make her friend smile. She balanced a rock on her nose, then threw it up in the air and off the cliff. She sat up high on her tail and flapped her flippers as if she were trying to fly. She did a handstand on her front flippers. She went through all her tricks over and over and barked at Nim in between to make her stop crying.
Finally Selkie showed Nim her best trick ever—a handstand right on the edge of the rocks, then a flip into a perfect dive all the way down to the water.
It was a long way down, and it was a very good trick—but Nim wouldn’t come out to see.
And so Nim also didn’t see the giant cruise ship that had come around the point and anchored not far from the cliffs.
She didn’t see the inflatable motorboat with people snorkeling around it, or the second motorboat chugging quietly out from the other side of the ship. She didn’t see the man watching the sea lion do her tricks lift his rifle and shoot Selkie with a tranquilizer dart. She didn’t see him instruct his crew to heave Selkie into his boat and speed away with her to their ship.
But Fred did.
Fred
had
been watching Selkie and hoping she’d do his favorite flipping-a-coconut-high-off-the-cliffs-
smash
!-onto-the-rocks trick. When she did the handstand-dive, he ran to the edge of the cliff to see if she’d smashed a coconut on her way down.
What he saw made Fred forget all about coconuts.
First he scrambled down, then he scrambled back up. Then he rushed into the cave and head-butted Nim’s leg. When she still didn’t pay attention, he climbed onto her shoulder and sneezed his cool saltwater spray in her face.
“Yuck, Fred!” said Nim. But when Fred scurried to the edge of the cliff, Nim followed.
The boat was chugging back to the ship. Through her spyglass Nim could see Selkie at the bottom of the boat.
