Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (20 page)

J
enn tried to pick up a few details from Annie Taylor about seals, skin shedding, and transmitters, but it seemed to her that Annie was being cagey with what she was willing to reveal. So Jenn watched her comings and goings from Possession Point more closely to try to get
something
out of what the marine biologist was up to, and she also tried to overhear the murmured conversation Annie had with Chad Pederson at the last scuba lesson in the fitness center’s pool. She picked up a few indications that they were doing some kind of search for Eddie Beddoe’s boat, but she got nowhere further than that. And getting nowhere further irritated the living heck out of her.

She
almost
asked the SmartAss FatBroad to help her with the Nera project, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Fattie was proving as irritatingly competent at scuba as she was at everything else, and the fact that Jenn
still
tended to panic when Chad engineered something to go wrong underwater put the FatBroad on a whole different plane of skill than she was. She hated that. Indeed, she could hardly wait for their presentations in Western Civ to roll around so that she would finally have the infinite pleasure of seeing the FatBroad fall on her face.

For Jenn, though, it was A+ all the way. Indeed her final rehearsal with Squat not only ensured this, but also gave her the route she was looking for to find the answers she wanted on the subject of Nera, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of Squat earlier.

She and he were meeting, as before, in the boys’ hangout upstairs at Squat’s house. There, with the dismal weather of late March doing its usual thing of battering the windows and the roof with torrents of rain, they had huddled for an hour shoulder to shoulder on a sofa with Squat’s laptop on the coffee table in front of them. He’d scored Cokes for them both along with a bag of Cheetos. They’d finished scarfing these and otherwise going over their material when Jenn brought up Nera and the transmitter she wore.

Despite how he felt about the lunacy of the seal spotters in general and their emergency meetings in particular, Squat was no intellectual slouch. So he was intrigued the moment Jenn told him about the transmitter that Nera should have shed. No shedding of transmitter, no shedding of skin, was how Jenn put it. What did the Squatman think about that?

He was quiet for a moment as he thought it all over. Then he went for the laptop and began to type. Project one was the transmitter, according to him. Who put it on her in the first place and why? Then project two was the shedding of skin. What kind of seal was she, really, and maybe she was a kind of seal that didn’t molt.

“Like a mutant or something?” was Jenn’s question. Mutation had, after all, been one of Annie Taylor’s points from the first.

“Maybe.” He paused in what he was doing and peered at her. “But why’s all this such a deal to you?”

Because it’s a deal to Annie Taylor, was what came into Jenn’s mind. She didn’t say this, though, because she wasn’t yet certain of what she meant. She said, “The whole seal spotters thing . . . Ivar Thorndyke . . . That whacked-out Eddie Beddoe . . . I dunno. It just got me interested.”

They did a little searching round the Internet, but to Jenn’s disappointment, Squat’s conclusion was exactly the same as Annie’s. There were plenty of pictures of Nera but no clear and close pictures of the transmitter she wore. They needed that—a decent picture, Squat said—if they were to work out why she was wearing it.

Jenn groused, “I got no clue how we’re going to come up with the picture. It’s not like she’s gonna swim by and pose while I happen to be standing on the dock with a camera.”

He said, “I c’n do some searching and some talking to people, if you want. I bet bucks there’s someone at U-Dub who c’n explain the transmitter thing, like why she’s got it on in the first place.” He paused and looked ceilingward, roughing up his thatch of ginger-colored hair as he thought. “And far as the shedding goes,” he said slowly, “you know, there’s people at the Seattle Aquarium. I bet they’ll talk to us. We c’n say it’s for school.”

She felt her face light up as she said, “You’d do that for me?”

He said with a shrug, “Sure. Why not?”

She threw her arms around him. “Studboy, you are the very best,” she declared. “I think I have to kiss you for this one.”

“With tongues?” he asked her.

“With tongues,” she said.

He went for it, and she found that, while it was more or less pleasant to have a kiss from Squat last longer than their previous quick kisses had lasted, she didn’t care a whole lot for the open mouth part of it. So she broke off first. She gave him a hug and said, “Squatboy, Squatboy, you’re the best,” in a friendly way, for lack of anything else to say. But then he started another kiss. And then, with a shock, she felt him go for her breast.

“Hey!” She jumped to her feet.

He said, “What?” and he sounded startled.

“What d’you mean ‘what?’” she demanded.

“Didn’t you like it?”

“Squat! What the
hell 
. . . ?”

“
What
the hell?” He was blushing furiously, but for the first time, Jenn wasn’t sure what his blushing meant. It couldn’t be the shyness she always associated with him. Going for a boob wasn’t
exactly
shy.

She said, “I mean . . . hell . . . damn it . . . Squat, come on . . . I mean, you can’t just . . .” She blew out a breath, walked to the window where the rain was beating, walked back to the sofa and looked down at him. Hand on her hip, she said, “What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing. Geez, Jenn. You acted like . . .” He fiddled with the laptop, bringing up the Internet.

“Like what?” she asked him.

“Forget it,” he said. “I just thought you wanted it.”

“
It
?
What? Your hand on my boob? Your tongue in my mouth? What?”

“Yuck. Stop being gross. And I said forget it.”

“We’re friends and I won’t. What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Obviously. Nothing’s going on.” And that was all that Squat would say.

• • •

THE PRESENTATIONS IN
their Western Civ class began the next day. The loathsome Mr. Keith placed a large cardboard box on his desk to collect the written part of their reports, and once class began he produced a grab bag from which he drew the first slip of paper identifying the student-partners who were to present the oral part to the rest of the class.

There was the usual stirring, whispering, tittering, and murmuring, to which Mr. Keith said, also as usual, “Settle down, people. You knew this day was coming. Everyone is supposed to be prepared.” He made a big ceremony about unfolding the paper on which the unlucky first presenters’ names were written. He looked up and announced, “King and Schuman,” and Jenn did what she could to stifle a smirk. This, she thought, was going to be entertaining. She wondered how far things would get before Extra Underpants illustrated once again why he was called Extra Underpants.

In front of her, she saw the FatBroad get to her feet. She eased her earphone out of her ear as someone from the back of the room murmured, “Go for it, Extra Undies. Show us what you’ve got.”

Fattie glanced down at her partner, who not only had not gotten to his feet but was also clinging to his desk, as if finger peeling were going to be the only route to get him out of it. He looked up at SmartAss, and his face broadcasted terror. Jenn heard Fattie say, “Let’s do this, okay?” in an encouraging voice spoken to someone who looked like a deer three seconds before the semi hits it.

Tod Schuman’s whisper filtered back to Jenn. “I didn’t do it,” he said.

“What?” The FatBroad’s face was a picture. Clearly, she didn’t have Clue One what Extra Underpants Schuman was trying to tell her.

“My part of the oral,” he said. “I mean, I did it but I didn’t. I can’t. I never . . . I’m going to . . . You gotta . . .”

“Mr. Schuman!” Mr. Keith’s voice boomed from the back of the classroom. “Are we prepared? Because if we’re not—”

“No, no, he’s ready,” Fattie said. “We’re ready.” And then in a low voice to Tod, “Come
on
.”

“You don’t
get
it.” His voice was a frantic whisper.

“Pssss, psss, psss,
pisssssss
,” someone tried to clue her in.

At this, Tod Schuman put his head on his desk. And the FatBroad seemed to figure it all out. The air went out of her. The spirit went out of her. Her shoulders sank. Tra la la, Jenn thought.

“Mr. Schuman,” Mr. Keith said. Tod did nothing. Mr. Keith roared, “Mr. Schuman! Either get to the front of the room with Ms. King, or take your F.”

Tod Schuman didn’t move an inch.

“Are you aware that this is a joint grade for you and Ms. King?” Mr. Keith demanded.

Tod Schuman nodded. The FatBroad cast a glance at Mr. Keith, the plea on her face so easy to read that even Jenn squirmed in her seat. But Mr. Keith’s face was completely implacable, so Fattie dragged her butt to the front of the room. There, two music stands had been set up as lecterns, and she took her place at one of them. At the other music stand, no one stood. Certainly not Extra Underpants Schuman, whose lifelong disgrace would have been on full frontal display had he left his seat and stood before his classmates.

• • •

IT WAS PRETTY
excruciating, even for Jenn, who completely couldn’t stand Becca King. She almost even felt sorry for her, but she got over it quickly because her name and Squat’s name got drawn from Mr. Keith’s bag of tricks next. They sailed through their presentation smartly, as every person in the class had known they would, with visuals and a PowerPoint presentation that practically left Mr. Keith weeping for joy. The contrast between Presentation Number One and Presentation Number Two was thus immutably set down in the annals of Western Civ, and the only thing that would have put the icing on the FatBroad’s cake of despair, Jenn figured, would have been Derric Mathieson and EmilyJoy Hall being called upon next. But that didn’t happen. Three other sets of partners presented, and while neither of them came close to what Squat and Jenn had done, both of them managed to make Becca’s miserable job of covering for Tod Schuman look like the performance of a whining worm.

When the bell rang, everyone vacated the premises pronto. Jenn was about to do the same when she saw the SmartAss approach Tod Schuman. She was fingering her earphone nervously, and it was pretty clear she wanted to say something. This, Jenn thought, was too good to miss. She accidentally on purpose dropped her notebook, which cooperatively sprang open and dumped papers on the floor. She took her time about gathering them up.

Fattie said to Extra Underpants, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I blew it,” the
pss, pss, pisssing
having apparently done the trick. “I just wish. . . .” She sighed and her spine seemed to shrink. Yeah, Jenn thought,
bet
you wish he’d told you about his problem. As if that would happen in a million years. How would it have run? “I pee my pants when I get scared, and my mom won’t let me wear Depends.” Yeah, right.

He raised his head. “You wrecked everything,” he snarled at her. “You total loser. If you hadn’t argued with every single thing I wanted to do for this project . . . If you hadn’t acted like you’re the smartest person on earth . . . If you’d listened to me for exactly one second instead of preaching and telling me that everything I was coming up with was lousy . . .”

“That’s not fair,” the SmartAss whispered. “That’s not what happened.”

“Like hell,” he said.

D
erric told himself that what goes around, comes around, and that after dumping his letters to his sister upon him, Becca King deserved to face
some
sort of consequences. But he still felt bad about what had happened to her in their Western Civ class because he’d known, along with everyone else, why Tod Schuman would never stand in front of the class and give a report.

When he saw Becca at her locker after school, glumly pulling out books and stowing them into her backpack, Derric went up to her. He hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words to her in weeks, so he wasn’t surprised to see her give a little start when he said her name. She removed from her ear the earphone she wore to block out secondary noises and to help with her hearing. He figured this meant she didn’t much want to talk to him, but that was okay, since he didn’t expect their conversation to be very long.

He said, “Hey. I’m sorry about what happened with Schuman.”

She said, “Oh. Well. I should’ve figured it out.”

He wondered what she meant, since it wasn’t as if she could have expected Tod Schuman to confide in her about his pants-wetting problem. So he said, “It’s not like you had any way of knowing. The rest of us . . . ? We’ve been with him since grade school, so we would’ve expected what happened to happen.”

“I get that,” she said. “But the thing is, people always give you clues about themselves, don’t they? I mean, if you pay attention, the truth is always there right from the start. How they’ll react to things, what they’re really like underneath, that sort of thing.”

He shot her a look. Was she talking about him? About him and Courtney and sex with Courtney? She might as well have been.

She blinked at him. The color on her cheeks deepened, the way it does when someone suddenly realizes there’s more than one interpretation to what they’ve said. She quickly went on with, “Sometimes I don’t like to wait to see how things’re going to work out. I want to
make
them work out the way I want. That’s what was going on with Tod. He was pushing to get his way. So I pushed back.”

It came to him that this was exactly what had happened with his letters to Rejoice, too. Becca had decided that throwing those letters in his face at the clinic was going to change something, was going to make him do something because
she’d
decided it was time for him to do it. Not because he was ready, not because he wanted to, but because of herself. He felt his heart hardening a little at the thought when she said suddenly, “You know, I’m sorry about that day in the clinic, Derric. About what I did with those letters? I’m really sorry. It was way wrong of me. I was pushing you. Just like with Tod. I get that now.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Whatever. I guess.” But he found he couldn’t look at her then because the anger of that moment came back to him. So he said, “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you. Sorry about Tod.”

She said, “Thanks. And good luck with yours, okay? Good luck.”

He thought, My what?

She clarified quickly. “Your presentation in Western Civ,” she said.

• • •

IT WASN’T A
satisfactory conversation, but he didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on it. Soon enough he was back at home, standing in the driveway with his mom and wondering why the heck she wanted to tie a blindfold around his eyes. She said she had a surprise for him. It was a cheer-you-up, she told him, and he knew she meant that, after what had happened with Courtney, he needed something to make things a little better in his world. He didn’t exactly think a mom surprise was going to do that, but he played along.

She led him into the house and he could tell they were heading toward his bedroom. She stood him in the doorway and whipped off the blindfold. “Ta dah!” she cried. “How d’you like it, sweetie?”

He stared at what lay before him. Since he’d left for school that morning, she’d completely redecorated his room. He had no clue how she’d managed it other than bringing in a whole team, but in the hours he’d been gone, she’d had the room painted, had new carpet installed, had new window coverings hung, and had new furniture put in place of the old. It was amazing. It was sensational. It was masculine and right in every way. Except one.

“What happened to the beanbag chair?” he asked her quickly.

She said, “Beanbag chair? That’s all you have to say?”

“Where’s the beanbag, Mom?”

“Don’t you like your room?”

“Did you throw it away?” He heard his voice growing louder and he tried and failed to bring it back under control. “Mom, did you throw it away? Where’s the rest of the stuff? What did you do with it?”

“Good Cheer came for all the furniture. They sent a truck this morning.”

“Where?” His voice became quite hoarse.

“What d’you mean? Here.”

“You
know
what I mean!” he cried. “Where did they take it? I want that chair!”

Derric saw his mother’s face alter. No wonder. He was out in left field. She said, “Derric, that beanbag chair was old when Dave Junior was your age. He had it because it belonged to his mother. She nursed him in it, for heaven’s sake. It was covered with duct tape and bleeding beans or whatever they are, and anyway, you can’t possibly think that—”

“Where does Good Cheer take furniture?” he demanded.

“Sweetie, I don’t know.”

“Well, you need to find out.
Now
.”

“You’re not being reasonable,” Rhonda Mathieson said. If she was sounding miffed, who could really blame her? “I’ve got to put dinner on. Plus that chair was a piece of junk. I don’t know if they even kept it for resale because the way they looked at it. . . . You could tell they were doing me a favor just carting it off the property. Derric, don’t you like your room?”

“I want it back,” he answered stubbornly. “I want that beanbag chair back.”

His mother was silent. In this silence he saw that she was trying to sort out the feelings beneath his words. She said, “D’you want to tell me what this is about?”

Derric searched for something that wasn’t the truth but at least could stand in place of the truth. He said, “It had history, Mom. I gave it more history. That means something to me because in Kampala . . . You
know
how it was. . . . Just my clothes, that’s it.”

At this, Rhonda’s hand climbed to her throat. She said, “Oh, Derric, I should have asked you first. I didn’t think. Just that the room redone might cheer you up after . . . well, after Courtney and everything. I’m so sorry, sweetie. Let me phone them right now.”

He’d lied to her and he felt wretched about that. But there was no real help for the matter. He didn’t see an alternative to lying. For if that beanbag was gone, so was his only link to his sister.

• • •

IT DIDN’T TAKE
long to find out the worst. The beanbag chair was history. They’d given it one look at the Good Cheer intake center and they’d tossed it into the nearest Dumpster. At three-fifteen, the Dumpster had been picked up, its contents hurled into a garbage truck. From there, who knew where it had ended up aside from beneath five or six tons of trash and rubble at a dump site somewhere.

Over dinner, his mother apologized endlessly. His insides felt hollow, though, and Derric couldn’t take in the apology. He couldn’t tell her exactly what she’d done, either. With his letters to his sister gone, his experience of growing up in this foreign culture of America was gone as well, and so was Rejoice. She seemed lost forever.

It was clear that his mom knew he was upset. She just didn’t know how much and she didn’t know why. She couldn’t tell that within him now there was so much anger that he wanted to take one of his father’s rifles, walk up and down Goss Lake Road, and shoot out the windows of all their neighbors’ houses, just to feel that he was
doing
something. But he was condemned to being the grateful orphan who’d been rescued from Africa, so he did nothing but excuse himself from the dinner table as soon as he could and shut himself in his bedroom where he could try to think.

At nine o’clock, he found the thin volume that was the Whidbey Island telephone directory. He flipped it open and began to search. It was the only thing he could think of to do. And he
had
to do something or he would blow.

He made two calls. The first directed him to the second: Seth Darrow’s father giving him the cell phone number of his son. Derric dialed that number, and when Seth answered the call with “Talk to me,” he asked for Becca.

“I figured you know where she is,” he said. “I need to talk to her.” Derric tried not to sound bitter about Seth being the one to know where Becca was at all times while he was kept in the dark. “It’s for your
protection
, it’s for your own good,” she’d told him. Right, Becca, just like everything else.

Seth muffled the phone. A moment later, Becca’s voice came over the line. She said, “Derric?” and she sounded confused, a little surprised. What
ever
, he thought.

“Just wanted you to know how it all worked out,” he told her.

A pause as she dwelt on this, then, “Oh no. Did something happen to EmilyJoy Hall?”

God, she
actually
thought he was calling about his Western Civ presentation! Was she stupid, or something? Did she really think that was important to him?

He said, “I’m talking about the pushing thing, Becca, how you like to push once you decide you know what’s best for people.”

She said in a lower voice, “What happened?”

“The letters are gone. That’s what happened. They were hidden—”

“Back in the woods?”

“No, not back in the woods. They were here in my room and now they’re gone and I figured you might like to be in the picture.”

“Oh my God. Someone
found
them?”

“That’d be way too easy. No, they got carted off to Good Cheer inside of a crappy beanbag chair that my mom decided to replace.”

“We can get them back,” she said quickly. “Seth and I can go—”

Her mentioning of Seth made him want to throw the new lamp on his new bedside table at the new mirror on the newly painted wall. He said, “Forget it. Okay. For
get
it. The chair got carted away and then tossed with the trash and wherever the hell it is now, I do
not
know. But it’s with the rest of the trash from all of Whidbey Island, so it looks like you’ve made everyone’s day. Not only Tod’s but mine. Congratulations, Becca.”

She let the Tod remark pass and instead said, “So we’ll look—”

We.
It was always
we.
He said, “Forget it, Becca. I said forget it and I meant forget it. I just wanted you to know how great things work out when you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. Enjoy whatever you and Darrow are up to. You deserve to have some fun after today.”

And then he ended the call. He heard her cry out his name before he cut her off, and he expected to feel better, but he did not. What he felt was utter desolation, cut adrift from everyone and everything he valued.