The Edge of the Water

  Nera was a big deal to everyone. That was a given. But the why of her being a big deal was different, and Jenn figured that detail was worth exploring. She didn’t know why she was so big a deal to Langley other than the money she brought it. She also didn’t know why she was so big a deal to Eddie Beddoe aside from Eddie being a general nutcase. But she did know that the fire lit under Annie at this point had to do with the transmitter she claimed Nera was wearing, so she figured that was a good place to start. “She should have shed it,” had been Annie’s words.

  It didn’t take Jenn long to understand what this meant and why the presence of the transmitter was unusual. It took her a while of shifting among websites and following links, but she was able to work out a singular fact, one that she hadn’t known ever, despite living in proximity to sea mammals all of her life: Seals molted. They shed their skin every year. They came up with new skin to replace it, and bits of the old skin were a good source of DNA for scientists who wanted to study them.

  So far so good, Jenn thought. It came to her when she read that last point that Annie’s excitement could well have to do with just scoring a piece of Nera’s old skin and getting her DNA from that. Except that Annie had been lit up over the transmitter that Nera was wearing, so before she drew any conclusions from the shedding of skin, Jenn decided she should search out transmitters.

  She was interrupted by, “Come on, Tod. Stop acting like this, okay?” which came from across the library. She glanced over and saw that Extra Underpants Schuman was on his feet, slamming things into his backpack as the FatBroad tried to stop him.

  “I told you six times and I’m done telling you,” was Extra Underpants’s reply. “And if you ever stopped listening to that stupid music for three minutes, maybe you’d actually start hearing me, cow pattie.” He leaned forward and ripped the FatBroad’s earphone out of her ear. Jenn stifled a smile and thought, Go for it, dude, because she could never figure out why Fattie didn’t get busted daily for the iPod she used.

  “It’s not music,” the FatBroad said, “and will you please sit down so we can work this out?” She grabbed a couple of his books.

  He grabbed them back. “Nothing to work out. I’m outa here.”

  He was as good as his word. The volunteer parent said, “You two quiet down or I’m afraid I’ll have to—” and Extra Underpants interrupted with, “Ohhh, I’m so scared,” as he banged his way out.

  The FatBroad looked at Jenn and then away. If you only knew, was what Jenn thought. Fattie turned back. She said, “What?” to Jenn in that nasty kind of way that meant What are you looking at. Jenn said, “What what? I’m working here. You got a problem with that?” What a loser, she thought.

  The FatBroad put her arms on the table and her head on her arms. Things looking bad? Jenn thought. Ohhhh, so sorry.

  She saw Fattie fumble for the earphone and smash it back into her ear. Maybe, Jenn thought, she’d rupture her eardrum and not be able to have another scuba lesson.

  She went back to transmitters and did more surfing. She found a decent picture of Nera and she located the transmitter on her back. She compared the transmitter that Nera was wearing to the transmitters she found as part of her search. When she read the accompanying material, she understood why Annie was curious.

  Nera should have shed the transmitter when she shed her skin. The kind of transmitter she wore was old and it predated a new design that couldn’t be shed at all. The new design was sleek and small, looking nothing like the older one. That, Jenn decided, would have been how Annie knew the moment she saw it that something was wrong.

  The something wrong, or at least the something different, had to do with Nera. She didn’t shed her skin.

  Very interesting was Jenn’s conclusion. She only wished she knew what any of it meant. One thing she figured was that Annie Taylor wasn’t being entirely honest with her. If she’d found the black seal once on her own simply by following the seal spotters’ sightings, it stood to reason she could find her again. And if she was doing this finding at night so that no one could stop her, it didn’t look good.

  • • •

  JENN HAD A lot on her mind when she was heading out to the bus at the end of the day. Because of this, she didn’t see Squat sitting on a planter near the line of double doors to the school. She walked right by him, clued in to his presence only when he grabbed her by the back of the neck.

  She yelped and swung around, saying, “Hey! Get your filthy hands—” and stopping herself when she saw who it was. “The Squatman,” she said.

  “I thought I was Studboy.”

  “That’s only when you take off your clothes and display your manly pecs,” she told him. She enjoyed his blush. “Happening?” she asked, looking around to get a clue as to why he was there. “Waiting for that loser brother of yours?”

  “Who else?” he said. “He’s late, like always.” He looked as if he wanted to say more. Jenn cast a look at her bus and waited for him to go on. He didn’t.

  She said, “Anyway,” and tilted her head in the direction of the bus. “Got to . . .” She began to head toward it. He followed her. She thought that was a little bit odd. She said to him, “Something going on, Studboy?”

  He said, “That.”

  “What?”

  “The ‘Studboy’ thing.” When she stopped walking and looked at him with a frown, he said, “You never said. I know this is lame, but maybe . . . I figured you didn’t get it, so I asked. They checked and said no, you got it all right.”

  She said, “Got what? Who checked what? Why? Uh . . . Squat, the hell’re you talking about?”

  He shuffled his feet, totally out of character for him. He said, brushing his rusty hair off his face, “That flower.”

  She stared. Flower? He wanted to talk about a flower? Then she remembered. He’d sent her a carnation, which she’d thrown at Fattie in the commons on Carnation Day. Damn, she’d never thanked him for it. It cost him a buck and he could way afford it, but still. . . .

  She said, “Shoot. I forgot. Studboy, thanks. Very cool of you. Want some tongue?”

  He looked straight at her. “Well . . . Yeah, I wouldn’t mind. What about you?”

  His words caught Jenn completely off guard. When she was able to reply, she said the only thing she could, carrying on with the joke, “Can’t exactly take my clothes off here. It’d start a stampede of guys wanting my bod.” He said nothing in response to this, which prompted her to say, “Hey, you all right, Squat?”

  He said, “Yeah. Sure. But . . . Did you like it?”

  “What?”

  “That I sent you . . . You know. Come on, Jenn, you know what I mean.”

  “The flower? Oh hey, who wouldn’t like it? Flowers are cool. I never got one before.”

  “I would’ve sent more but I didn’t want you to . . . you know . . . think I was, like, a stalker or something.”

  She hooted at this. He looked offended. She said hastily, “I’d never think you were a stalker, Squat.”

  “Good,” he said. “’Cause . . .” He looked around, possibly checking for eavesdroppers, but who the hell knew. “Well, I wouldn’t want to you think . . . I mean I just wanted you to know. . . .”

  “Hey, we’ve been engaged since kindergarten, remember? You don’t need to remind me of anything,” she told him.

  He smiled that sweet Squat smile of his, the nicest boy in the whole ninth grade. Jenn thought about what a friend he was. She wished she’d sent him a carnation, too. She was about to tell him this when the family Range Rover roared to a stop next to the sidewalk where they were standing. Its passenger window lowered and Dylan leaned over and bellowed out of the window.

  “Will you quit hanging around that dyke? Man, there’s a name for idyats like you.”

  Squat swung around, and Jenn saw his fist clench. She said, “Save it, Squat.”

  “
I’m gonna make him stop.”

  “No need,” she said. “He doesn’t bother me.”

  “He bothers me,” Squat said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Jenn 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.