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.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Derric 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. Whatever, 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. Forget 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.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The first dive in relatively open water was the next day, and Becca got herself to the marina in Langley on her bike. She wasn’t feeling up to the dive. She certainly had no enthusiasm for it. The whole Derric situation sat on her shoulders like a concrete cape. She wondered how much worse her life could get.
When she saw Jenn McDaniels, she had her answer. Jenn’s smirking “Hey, Beck-kuh” told her that the other girl was still deeply enjoying the mess that had been her presentation with Tod Schuman.
Whatever, Becca thought with resignation. Jenn McDaniels wouldn’t be satisfied until Becca King was out of her life. Doubtless, she’d try to drown her right there in Langley Marina if only she could.
Jenn was suited up already. Chad Pederson was checking the tanks. Annie Taylor was up on the wharf using binoculars to search the surface of the water.
“Anything?” Chad called up to her as Becca joined Jenn by the pile of equipment.
“Nope,” was Annie’s reply.
To Becca’s question of what she was looking for, Chad told her that someone had rung the bell. She knew what this meant. There was a signal bell in a small bluff-top park on First Street in the village. It was rung when someone sighted a gray whale out in the passage.
Jenn groused, “That’s all we need. Diving and having a whale show up.”
Becca thought it sounded sort of cool, but wisely she kept this thought to herself.
The air among them was filled with whispers. For once it was easy to attach them to the thinkers. Jenn’s had gone from FatBroad not so SmartAss now to get it over with to get back to soccer or I’m finished while Chad’s dealt with the nice shape of Annie’s butt and like doggies but I guess, which didn’t exactly make a lot of sense. Meantime, Annie might have been looking for a whale but what she was thinking about was Nera. The break I need suggested that she was going to be relentless till she got what she wanted, whatever that was.
Because of the weather and the water temperature, they were using dry suits for the dive. When they were suited up, they moved toward the water in a line of three, with Chad in the middle, saying to them, “We’re only going down ten feet the first time. We’ll stay near the dock. Take it slow and see how it feels.”
The water was clear, like glass, beyond the marina’s protective bulkhead, and near the marina the bottom was sand and mud and stone. Within ten yards of shore, they were able to sink beneath the surface and put on their fins. While they were doing this, the first fish appeared. Seeing them, Becca smiled around her regulator. She enjoyed the sensation of the water around her. Being underwater was the only place where she had something other than the AUD box to prevent her hearing the whispers of others.
Chad led them along the pilings of the pier, where sea stars clung and barnacles formed lumpy masses. He began to go deeper until they were perhaps ten feet from the surface. It was, to Becca, a magical world.
Things changed quickly, though. A whip of water churned past them, like a strong current that none of them had been expecting. Becca turned to register two things at once: a coal black seal and its lightning fast approach. The animal was heading straight for Jenn.
In a flash, Jenn thrashed her way to the surface. Just as quickly, Chad Pederson followed. Becca turned this way and that to see where the seal had gone, but there was nothing till the water pulsed once again and the seal was there. She swam around Becca. Once, twice, a third time. Then she shot into the open water of Saratoga Passage. But before she did this, she looked directly into Becca’s face. What felt like an electrical shock passed thr
ough Becca. It seemed to travel from the seal to her.
Becca surfaced. The scene above was modified chaos. Chad was yelling at Jenn, Jenn was yelling at Chad, Annie Taylor was yelling at them both from up on the wharf.
“—crazy? It was just a seal!” from Chad.
“All right! All right! I freaked out! She came out of nowhere,” from Jenn.
“Jenn, was that Nera? Is Nera here?” from Annie.
“Hey, thanks, Annie,” Jenn scoffed. “I’m just fine. Really.”
Their whispers bombarded the air as well as their words. All she cares about . . . got to get my hands on . . . that’s the way . . . I’m out of here . . . five minutes is all . . . never should have started . . . It was like at a tennis match, Becca thought, with three players firing balls at each other simultaneously.
Chad was arguing, “Look, you can’t do that, okay? And no way am I certifying you if you can’t show me you won’t panic at the first sign of life underwater.”
“Like I care?” Jenn cried and headed for shore. “Like you care? Like anyone cares?”
Annie said, “Come on, Jenn. Don’t be like this.”
“This whole thing is stupid. You’re stupid. He’s stupid. The seal is stupid.”
No way no way constituted her whispers. She added to them, “You want a dive partner, Annie? Take the FatBroad with you.”
“What? Who’re you talking about?” Chad said.
“Me,” Becca said. “She’s talking about me.”
They were silent at that. They made their way to the shore. Jenn took off for the restrooms and the showers. Becca stayed where she was. She was slow about struggling to remove her tank and the rest of her equipment. She wasn’t in a hurry to join Jenn in the restroom, so instead she went to a spigot and washed off her fins, her hood, and her gloves. Because of this, she was near enough to pick up on the conversation Annie Taylor had with Chad Pederson when the marine biologist came down off the wharf.