“Sometimes people are weird about sex, that’s all,” Annie told her. “Her name’s Beth, by the way. She’s a pediatrician. We’ve been together since—”
“I’m ready,” Jenn said. She didn’t really need to hear about Annie, about Beth, about whatever. It gave her the creeps. She was here to dive.
Annie said, “Sure.” She slipped into the rest of her suit and padded out to the pool where Chad was setting up his gear. He gave her the once-over as he’d done before, and Jenn smiled inwardly with “If he only knew . . .” on her mind. Then, a second later, she was gut-punched when she saw who was about to dive into one of the swimming lanes set up in the pool.
It was SmartAss FatBroad Becca King. She made a neat dive, and she began to swim like someone with a lifetime of lessons behind her. Of course, Jenn thought, what else would she do?
Jenn wondered why the hell the FatBroad was at South Whidbey Fitness at five in the morning. Soon enough she learned the truth of the matter.
She’d put on a wet suit and a weight belt and was heaving her way into a tank when Becca King dripped her way over to them. She said to Chad, “Hope it was okay I warmed up,” and Chad said, “Better than okay. You two know each other?” and without waiting for an answer, “This is Becca King. She’s joining the class.”
“What?” Jenn said. “Wait a minute. Are we starting over?”
“Nope. Becca’s had a couple of private lessons. She’s all caught up. Fact is, she’s actually a little ahead.”
Oh right, Jenn thought. That would be just like her. Anything to make everyone else look bad. She glared at Becca who was watching her solemnly. “I’m sorta slow to catch on,” the other girl said, but Jenn believed that the way she believed in fairies.
Chad got them into the water after a review that seemed to last for hours. Each piece of equipment, its function, put it on, take it off, put it on again. Depth, air pressure, the bends, nitrogen narcosis, and on and on. He ended with, “When you have a problem, it’s going to happen in the water so it has to be solved in the water. That’s what we’re working on today.”
Turned out that “working on” solving problems in the water meant working—and diving—with a buddy. Jenn had a very bad feeling about where this was heading, and she wasn’t surprised when Chad said that she and Becca would be diving buddies. “Into the pool, you two,” he told them. “Becca, use the ladder and put your fins on in the water. Jenn, you’re jumping in equipped.”
“Hey! Why do I have to—”
“She already passed this part. She’s ahead of you, remember? Now get going. Just do what I do. Take a giant stride. Point is not to lose your mask.”
As Becca went down the ladder, Jenn watched Chad who, of course, made the whole thing look simple. Jenn followed him, trying to mimic his movements. She hit the water, lost her mask, got water up her nose, and nearly smacked her head on the side of the pool because of her fins. She shot to the surface, coughing and snorting. Becca had swum for her mask and was holding it out to her.
Jenn snatched it. “I can do this, okay?” and she threw in a couple of satisfactory thoughts about the FatBroad’s sexual extracurricular activities.
Becca looked at her directly, an unnerving look that made Jenn want to rip her nose off. She said, “What? What?” and then she lowered her voice to add, “What are you doing here anyway? What d’you think? Expecting Derric to show up or something?”
“I’m helping out a friend,” Becca said.
“You mean you have a friend?” was Jenn’s retort.
Becca flinched, which satisfied Jenn. Stay out of my life, bitch, was what she thought.
Becca said, “Takes one to know one, don’t you think?” and before Jenn could ask what the hell she was talking about, Becca said to Chad, “Okay, Teach, what’s next?”
TWENTY-ONE
Becca steeled herself for the arrival of Carnation Day at South Whidbey High School. She knew it was just the sort of event that generally turned out to be a feelings smasher, something akin to not receiving a Valentine in your elementary school classroom, only worse. But she discovered soon enough that several years ago the PTA had developed a solution to the Carnationless-in-Langley problem. Every kid who was destined not to have a flower ended up with one from the PTA.
The flowers were distributed just before lunch, giving everyone time to read the messages attached to the carnations’ stems. As a result, the cheerleaders were walking around the commons with so many flowers that they looked like Olympic ice skaters post performance. So were the kids deemed popular. So were the athletes, as you would expect. Cries of Wow! Cool! Chill! No way! were everywhere as these kids dumped armfuls of flowers onto the tables and sat to read their messages. But along with those cries and the chatter and the laughter came the whispers, which Becca recognized as hot and intense. They filled the air with a non-noise noise that was generated by the kids who’d received only one flower and the other kids who saw them with only one flower.
He is . . . she’s hurtin’ . . . try dropping fifty pounds, cow . . . what a loser . . . hate this hate this hate this . . . stupid idiot anyway . . . always this way . . . he didn’t . . . she did . . . why doesn’t anyone . . . made a lot of claims about how people were feeling. To Becca, the whole thing seemed like an idea guaranteed to cement bad feelings everywhere.
She’d prepared herself for the single carnation way in advance of the day. Although she’d thought about sending herself two flowers so she wouldn’t look like such a loser, she’d decided she’d rather spend the money on something a little more important, like food. So she was surprised when she received three flowers.
She wasn’t sure how they’d managed it, but Diana Kinsale, Seth Darrow, and Debbie Grieder had all sent her carnations, with messages that were funny and fond. She smiled particularly over Seth’s—“You & Me, Sweatie, in it Togehter”—and especially at the Seth-like misspellings. She thought of what a real friend Seth was. If he’d still been a student at South Whidbey High School, she would have sent him six flowers, she decided.
So she was feeling far less horrible than she’d expected to feel because, of course, the one thing she knew was that she’d get no flowers from Derric. And she was relatively okay with this until Courtney Baker staggered into the room.
She had what looked like one hundred carnations in her arms. It was probably going to take her the entire lunch hour just to read the messages, Becca figured. She glanced around for Derric and assumed he’d be similarly burdened. But he wasn’t in sight.
A cheerleader heaped with carnations joined Courtney, giving the eye to her haul of flowers. Becca heard her say, “Wow. Guess I don’t need to ask how things’re going with you two, do I?” to which Courtney leaned over and said something to the cheerleader, who responded with, “Courtney! You didn’t! No way!”
Becca heard nothing more between the girls, for someone ran into the back of her chair with enough force to knock her into the table. A snarky voice said, “Oh, excuse me, fattie,” and Becca didn’t even need to raise her head to know Jenn McDaniels was passing behind her. Jenn added, “Wow. You have three friends?” in reference to Becca’s three carnations. Becca swiveled in her seat and saw Jenn had one. In spite of herself, she said, “Talking about friends, Jenn . . .” and nothing more.
Jenn threw her carnation into Becca’s lap. “Yeah right,” she snapped. “Talking about friends,” and she stalked off with smart-ass . . . fat broad . . . so freaking ugly following her, along with a few other words that always made whispers from Jenn McDaniels unmistakable in their origin.
Becca sighed, but at the same time she realized that Jenn’s whispers didn’t hurt her feelings as they had at first. She thought about this and wondered if it meant she was closer to what her grandmother had always told her about the real purpose behind hearing whispers: The point is to use them to get inside someone’s skin and walk around for a bit in order to unders
tand them better had been her instructions. While Becca hadn’t understood at the time what her grandmother meant, she was getting the feeling that she might be closer to understanding that meaning now.
She opened the message on Jenn’s flower, ready to see something like “Your Friendly PTA” printed upon the unfurled slip of paper. What she saw instead was, “From your personal Studboy.” So she’d been wrong about Jenn McDaniels, she thought.
• • •
SHE WENT INTO town after school, taking the island bus, which dropped her close to the Cliff Motel. It looked empty and sad at this time of year, and the absence of Debbie Grieder’s SUV told Becca she would have to wait to thank her older friend for her kindness and the message “DG and her munchkins think U R the best.” She went on to South Whidbey Commons. Seth, she figured, was probably there.
So were a lot of other people, as things turned out. She walked in and immediately saw Seth sitting at a table in the corner reading a book that turned out to be Siddhartha. He was moving his lips and squinting at the page, but what Becca wondered was how he could read at all. The noise level in the place was excruciating. She tried to drown it with static from the AUD box, but even that didn’t do much good. A crowd had gathered in the gallery room, but there were way too many people, and they spilled out into the coffee room as well.
She worked her way through them and joined Seth. He looked up from his book, his face brightening when he saw her.
She said, “Hey.”
He said, “Back atcha.”
“You sent me a flower. That was totally nice.”
“You know me. Nice is my middle name. When it isn’t Dumbnuts.”
“It’s never Dumbnuts.”
“Oh con-trair,” he countered. “It’s Dumbnuts once a week, at least. Twice if my luck’s bad. Anyways, I’m a say-it-with-flowers dude and you’re a getting-a-flower babe. That being the case, I sent you a flower.” He set his book down on the table, spine up. He removed his black fedora and messed with his ponytail. “But this doesn’t mean we’re hooked up, okay?” he said. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Just didn’t want you to face the one-carnation curse.”
“I got three,” she told him.
“Damn. I shoulda saved my buck.”
She said, “And Jenn McDaniels threw hers at me.”
“Ooooh. She got just one? That’s nasty. But not surprising.”
“It wasn’t from the PTA,” Becca told him. “It was from Studboy. That’s what it said.”
“Then she probably sent it to herself,” Seth told her. “Cuz that’s one bull ain’t no cowpoke gonna want to ride.”
Becca frowned. “You don’t mean . . .”
“I do mean. That plus all her personal crap . . . ? Keep about fifty yards between yourself and that one.”
Becca began to respond, but angry shouting interrupted her. It came from the gallery and the ongoing meeting. A man was yelling, “Why don’t you people get a life, for God’s sake? You act like that animal’s here to save this dump of a town.” At this, outraged retorts came from all directions.
Seth said, “Weirdness prevails as usual,” and Becca turned in her chair to see what was happening.
Becca recognized a man on his feet. Eddie Beddoe, she thought, the guy with the rifle on the beach at Sandy Point. Someone was yelling at him, “Shut up and sit down!” while someone else shouted, “When was the last time you did anything positive for Langley, Eddie?” Then another voice said, “Let’s get ourselves calmed down, folks,” and this was a voice that Becca knew. Ivar Thorndyke was in the meeting. She turned back to Seth and asked, “What’s going on?”
“Seal spotters called an emergency meeting.”
“The black seal again?”
“Oh yeah. If the seal spotters have a confab, there’s only ever one reason.”
Becca thought about this and about being on the boat when Ivar confronted Annie Taylor and Chad Pederson. She said, “Seth, d’you know much about that seal?”
“All’s I know is she’s a seal and she’s black,” he said. “She shows up once a year and gets a big hallelujah from the town.”
Becca looked back at the meeting, where it seemed as if a little pushing and shoving was going on. She said to Seth, “I think it’s more than that.”
“How so?”
“She’s wearing a transmitter.”
“Who?”
“The seal.”
“Like what? She’s a mechanical seal?” He laughed. “Not hardly, Beck. She’s always looked pretty real to me. Or d’you mean she’s communicating with someone? Hey, maybe she’s an alien life-form. Get too close and she’ll put babies down your throat and they’ll blast out of your stomach when they get their teeth.”
“Very funny,” Becca said. “But I’m telling you, I was there when Annie Taylor saw her and when she saw that there was a transmitter on her. . . . It was a huge thing, Seth. There’s something going on.”
She eased her way to the edge of the meeting, to the point where she could see into the gallery. Ivar was at the front of the crowd, which spread out before him like a human fan. Eddie Beddoe had elbowed his way forward, and he was in the act of confronting Ivar. The size of the room—which was small—made him look massive. The veins in his temples were so filled with blood that they looked like worms crawling across his skin.
He was saying, “You listen to me, all of you. That blasted seal don’t belong here. You know that, Thorndyke, better ’n anyone. And the sooner the rest of you idiots get that into your thick skulls, the better off all of us’re going to be.”
More shouts ensued. Becca scanned the crowd. She was surprised to see that Jenn McDaniels was there, sitting next to Annie Taylor. On Annie’s other side sat Chad Pederson, and he and Annie were in the middle of some kind of intense conversation. For her part, Jenn was slouched in her seat, watching Ivar and Eddie suspiciously.
Eddie Beddoe was going on, developing a real head of steam on the topic of the coal black seal. “That animal’s been nothing but trouble since the day she showed up. She’s already way too easy around people. She’s at the point of attacking some kid on the beach. And then where’s the lot of you going to be? She’s probably already carrying a disease ’cause why else would she be so close to shore.”
Voices rose higher. People jumped to their feet. Ivar did what he could to settle them down. It look to Becca like pandemonium, but it was a pandemonium that Eddie was clearly enjoying.
He went on with, “Fish and Wildlife need to be told. They need to get her out of here before she passes on whatever the hell she’s got and our fishing and crabbing is ruined. You understand?”
At that, Annie Taylor jumped up. She shouted, “Listen to me! That seal is perfectly healthy. I’ve seen her up close. So has Chad”—here she put her hand on the young man’s shoulder—“and so has Mr. Thorndyke for that matter.”
Voices rose in horror at this information.
“You got close?”
“What the hell’s going on?”
“You some kind of hypocrite, Thorndyke?”
“Yeah, you ask him that!” Eddie Beddoe crowed. “You ask him what he wants with that seal!”
More shouting, more roaring, more swearing ensued. So much tension developed that Becca could feel it. It impeded her breathing and got in the way of her ability to think. She needed to get out of the place, so she fumbled through the crowd and got to the door, and once outside, she took gulps of cold air.
Darkness had fallen, and the shadows around her spelled a warning of danger. Someone in Langley needed to heed it, Becca thought, before it was far too late.
PART FIVE
Goss Lake
TWENTY-TWO
Derric had known he’d blown it when the carnations were distributed. Courtney had sent him thirty-seven. He had sent her two.
&nb
sp; He wanted to use The Guy excuse, that explanation for every romantic misstep any man might make. It was, “Hey, I’m a guy,” and it was intended to convey that, as a male of the species, he would never really know the right thing to do in a situation involving the heart.
Problem was . . . he had known what the right thing to do was. He was her boyfriend and the whole world knew it. So why hadn’t he made a big deal with the flowers?
Someone sure had. Or a lot of someones. Because when he saw her coming out of the commons at the end of lunch, Courtney was carrying what looked like two hundred flowers. She was also looking sad and confused. No doubt, he thought. “Love from Derric” on two measly flowers didn’t go far to match the thirty-seven separate messages that she’d sent to him.
He knew what she would think: His failure in the flower department was directly related to their argument after he’d left the prayer circle. Well, it was and wasn’t at the same time. Something was going on with him. He just didn’t know what it was.
It didn’t help matters that Becca King had been standing there when he burst out of that stupid classroom. She’d seen something bad was happening between him and Courtney and, for reasons he didn’t want to consider, that made everything so much worse. The only saving grace about it all was that Becca had rushed off. She hadn’t heard him and Courtney go at it, so at least he’d prevented her from feeling smug.
It had been a wrecked few minutes, though. The worst part of them was that nothing he said could make Courtney see she’d totally betrayed him with her supposed “prayer” about them.
She’d cried out, “Derric! Where’re you going? What’s wrong?”
He’d hissed back at her, “What’s wrong? That’s our private business. That’s what’s wrong. What’re you doing talking about us like that in the middle of a bunch of kids?”
She said, “It’s not like everyone doesn’t know we’re hooking up.”
He wanted to kick a hole in the wall. “So what? Dude, I do not believe you.”