Wild Horse Spring (5 page)

“A man o’ war, right?” I said.

“Yeah. Don’t touch it. It can still sting for up to a week after it’s dead.”

“A week?” Stephanie said. “That’s amazing.”

“It’s not just one creature; it’s actually a colony made
of four different kinds of polyps that all need each other. See the four different kinds?” He pointed to one after another.

“How do you know all that?” Stephanie asked.

“I’ve studied a bunch of animals. My mother is a botanist. She’s here doing research on the maritime forest.” He stood and took a look at Stephanie, then turned to me. I studied my toes, hoping my blush didn’t show. His gaze was so direct. “You staying in the gray house?”

“Yeah, we are,” Stephanie said. “You’re in the yellow one? With the ATV?”

“Yeah, but the ATV isn’t ours. It belongs to the owner of the house. He lets us use it.”

“Do you run cross country?” Stephanie asked. “My stepsister, Diana, runs cross country for our school. She said you’re pretty fast.”

It amazed me the way Stephanie was able to strike up a conversation. Me, I couldn’t say a thing to him.

“Yeah.” The boy nodded, then looked over at me. “What distance are you running?”

I managed to mumble, “3K.”

“So you’re in eighth grade?”

I nodded. For some reason, I couldn’t seem to find my tongue.

“I’m in tenth grade, running for my high school, so I’m running the 5K.”

“How old are you?” Stephanie asked.

“Sixteen. I got my license two months ago.” He smiled, flashing white teeth.

“Do you live in North Carolina?” Stephanie asked.

“Yeah. Raleigh. What about you?”

“We’re from Charlotte,” Stephanie said. “Are you going back to the house?”

“Yeah.”

“So are we,” she said.

We all started walking back together.

“So, you’re into science?” Stephanie asked. “What did you do for your eighth grade science project?”

I was impressed. How did she know how to ask questions like this?

“Bioluminescence,” he said.

“What’s that?” Stephanie asked.

He tossed a shell into the ocean. “Well, it’s light that’s produced by living things. Like lightning bugs. I did my project on organisms in the ocean.”

“Oh. How do they do it, anyway?”

“Well, when some organisms are under stress—like being thrown around in the waves—they put off light. I’m hoping maybe I’ll see it while I’m here.”

“Cool,” Stephanie said.

“How exactly do they put off light?” I finally got up the nerve to ask a question.

He waved his arm, as if to dismiss the question. “It’s probably too complicated for you to understand.”

I felt heat rising to my face. “That’s an arrogant thing to say! How do you know we won’t understand?”

“Well, maybe it would just take too long to explain,” Stephanie said quickly, obviously trying to smooth things over. That’s what she always does. Tries to smooth things over.

“I have time,” I said, stopping on the beach and glaring at him. “Tell me. How exactly do animals put off light?”

He looked a little surprised, then stopped and said, in a kind of sarcastic voice, “The enzyme luciferase creates a chemical reaction that changes luciferin plus oxygen to oxyluciferin plus light. Got it?”

I walked as fast as I could ahead of them. What a jerk! The sun had dropped lower in the sky, the tide had come in, and the beach had shrunk and narrowed since we left the cottage. I started up the walkway to our house.

“Maybe we’ll see you tomorrow,” Stephanie said, apparently not realizing that I personally didn’t care if I ever saw him again.

“That would be excellent.”

“Oh … my name is Stephanie, and that’s Diana. What’s your name?”

“Cody.”

“Well, maybe we’ll see you tomorrow, Cody,” Stephanie said.

“Okay, maybe.”

I glanced back in time to watch him saunter away with a small salute.

I kept going up the walkway and didn’t say a word.

Stephanie followed me in silence. Finally I stopped and turned around. She looked at me with raised eyebrows.

“He’s not going to see
me
tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t believe you kept being nice to him. He said we wouldn’t understand! Like we’re stupid or something.”

I planned to never speak to him again.

“I
think Cody just thought that we wouldn’t know the scientific terms,” I told Diana as we climbed onto the back porch. “I don’t hold it against him. I thought he was cute. ”

Diana stopped and looked at me with her hands on her hips. “He talked to us like we were idiots,” she said.

“He was just passionate about what he likes. I don’t know why you’re mad at him.”

Lynn poked her head out the back door. “Hi, girls.
We’re going to eat outside on the porch. Could you set the table, please?”

I set the wooden table out there, quickly placing the forks on top of the napkins so they wouldn’t blow away. Diana, as usual, didn’t help.
Maybe if they see how helpful I am, they’ll want me to live with them
. Daddy brought the speakers outside so we could listen to music, and he let me put on Taylor Swift. I loved her album
Fearless
because she sang about being afraid too. She said being “fearless” means having the courage to live your life in spite of the fear.

I wished I wasn’t afraid of so many things. Horses. Terrible loud fights like the ones Mama and Daddy used to have. The fights that Mama and Barry had now about Matt.

We sat out on the porch, peeling and eating shrimp that Lynn and Daddy picked up from a roadside stand, and listening to the music and the ocean, with the seagulls circling above us.

“Look at the pelicans,” Lynn said, pointing up. Seven of the big, dark birds flew over us in a stately fashion, in a perfectly straight line, their wings frozen in position. They looked almost like ships flying through the air. Then, one after the other, like dominoes, they each flapped their wings three times.

Diana was quiet and sulking at dinner. Last summer,
when we were at the ranch, the way Diana acted really upset me, but I was learning to stop letting it bother me.

“We met the boy that’s staying in the yellow house,” I said to Daddy and Lynn. “He’s sixteen and runs cross country, like Diana.”

“You girls didn’t waste any time getting to know someone!” Lynn exclaimed. “What’s this boy like?”

“I didn’t like him!” Diana said, tossing a shrimp shell onto her plate. “He said that Stephanie and I are too stupid to understand bioluminescence.”

“That’s not really what he said,” I argued.

“Where’s he from?” Daddy asked.

“Raleigh,” I said.

“Well, I’m glad you girls met a friend,” Lynn said.

“He acted like he thought he was better than us!” Diana said.

“He may have said that as a defense mechanism,” Lynn said, “just to boost his confidence while talking to new people. You yourself sometimes say things you don’t mean when you’re feeling insecure, right?”

Diana focused on shelling a shrimp and didn’t answer.

After dinner we put on sweatshirts and took flashlights and walked on the beach. Now that the sun had gone down, the sand felt cool. Daddy put his arm
around my shoulder and aimed the flashlight beam on sand crabs that frantically scuttled sideways to escape our feet. Lynn tried to take Diana’s hand, but she pulled her hand away and walked alone a little distance away from us. Then Lynn came and walked with Daddy’s other arm around her. So it was me and Daddy and Lynn together, and Diana all by herself. Well, it was Diana’s choice. What’s her deal?

When we got back to the house, Lynn pulled a worn box off the bookshelf. “Hey, look! They have a Pictionary game! Let’s play. Steph, want to be my partner? You and me against Diana and Norm.” She put the box on the kitchen table and started taking out the playing pieces and cards.

“Okay!” I helped Lynn place the pencils and notepads around the table. I don’t want to lie: I’m good at drawing clues, and my team wins a lot. I love board games.

“Lynn, my wonderful bride, why in the world don’t you want me on your team?” Daddy said. He wrapped his arms around her as she opened the board.

“Because nobody can even tell what your drawings are, my sweet love,” Lynn said, laughing.

“Hey, I’m what you call a minimalist,” Daddy protested. “It’s my style.”

“It’s what I call a hopeless scribble!” I said, laughing.

“Enough of that!” Daddy said, chuckling. “We’ll take them on, won’t we, Diana?”

“I don’t want to play,” Diana said, starting up the stairs.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Lynn said.

“We’ll all play,” Norm said. “We can do this, Diana, no problem. With your outstanding drawings and my excellent guessing. ”

“I. Don’t. Want. To.” She went upstairs and shut the bedroom door.

You can’t play Pictionary with three. Was Daddy going to make her play? Were we going to have a huge fight? Was she mad because Lynn had asked me to be on her team? I couldn’t believe Diana was going to ruin this.

I stopped what I was doing, holding my breath.

Lynn looked at Daddy, raised her eyebrows, and started putting the pieces back in the box. Daddy looked upstairs at the closed door and then seemed to make a decision.

“Do they have a deck of cards in that drawer? You can play hearts with three,” he said. “Stephanie, we’ll have to teach Lynn to play.”

If he was upset, he was doing a good job not showing it. Lynn found some cards, and we sat at the table.

“The object of the game is to have the lowest score,”
said Daddy, fanning out the cards so Lynn could see. “Each heart you take counts one point against you. And there are two special cards—the queen of spades and the jack of diamonds. The jack is good—ten points subtracted from your score. The queen is bad—thirteen points added to your score.”

“So you want the jack, but you don’t want the queen, right?” Lynn asked.

“Correct,” Daddy said. “Ready?”

We started playing, and at first we were quiet, with Daddy and me instructing Lynn on strategies of the game. Then Daddy dumped the queen of spades on one of Lynn’s tricks, and she said, “Oh, Norm, how can you do such a terrible thing to me?”

Daddy laughed and said, “Every man for himself,” the way he does when we play games.

During the next game, Lynn slapped the queen on Daddy.

“Take that!” she said.

“You sure caught on quick!” Daddy said, pretending to be hurt.

“So sorry!” Lynn said.

And pretty soon we were shrieking with laughter, yelling, and pounding the table. We forgot all about Diana. At one point, while we were playing, I looked up and saw her sitting on the stairs, watching us. The
moment I saw her, she got up and disappeared into her room.

I normally like sleeping late, but the next morning, bright April sun spilled into my bedroom and woke me early. I opened my eyes, listening to the
shhh-shhh
sound of the surf. I stretched, feeling deliciously relaxed.

I lay there for a few minutes, listening. We were going to be here for a whole week, waking up and hearing this every single morning. And we were going to be walking on the beach, letting the sand sift through our toes every day.

When Mama and Daddy were still married, here at this beach was one place they always seemed happy. Mama used to sit on the back deck putting polish on her toes, listening to her music, and drinking Diet Coke. She sat on the beach and rubbed oil on herself and focused on her tan. Daddy used to play with me and toss me into the surf, or let me bury him in the sand. Sometimes he’d fish, and mostly he didn’t catch anything, but once in a while he’d catch a small, bony flounder or cod.

This week would be different. Lynn wore 50 SPF sunscreen. She brought a broad, blue and white
umbrella, a fat nonfiction book about sea turtles, and a pair of binoculars so she could look for dolphins. She and Daddy made a lot of plans for this week. I think one day, maybe even today, they were going to go play golf together. They had planned for another day of sightseeing. I was sure Diana would try to find the horses, and there was bound to be a lot of drama, because wherever Diana is, there’s drama.

I knew I had to leave memories behind. And it was okay. Mama and Daddy didn’t get along at home, and we were only at the beach for one week a year. You couldn’t have a life when you only got along for one week a year. But still I thought about it, about the three of us together. The music playing, the smell of the ocean, Mama’s nail polish, and Daddy’s grilling.

I knew that there were a lot of kids just like me, adjusting to living in two places, and it was practically normal, the new normal, really. And it was fine; I was fine. Most of the time I felt lucky to have two families.

I’d met Colleen at school this year, who lived with her dad and stepmom. Her mom had been killed in a car crash when she was really little. Colleen told me she didn’t love her stepmom at first. In fact, she hated her. I told her it had been easy for me to love Lynn but not Diana.

On the back porch, I leaned over the railing, and the sun warmed my hair. The light reflected off the sand and the water in the most wonderful golden way. Today it was already warmer than yesterday. And there were already about five people out on the beach. Cody’s yellow house looked quiet, with the red ATV parked in the driveway.

I peeked into Diana’s room and breathed a sigh of relief. She was still there, asleep. The striped comforter had slid onto the floor. Either she hadn’t snuck out, or she was already back.

Thirty minutes later, I was standing by the sliding door in my bikini, with my beach bag over my shoulder, ready to go out onto the beach, and Diana was shoveling Cheerios into her mouth.

“Norm and I are going to play golf today,” Lynn said as she finished loading the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. “We’ll be gone for about five hours, and we’re trusting you girls to show that you’re mature enough to stay on your own for a while. Can you do that?”

Diana nodded enthusiastically, still shoveling. None of us had said a word about her not playing games with us last night. We acted like nothing had happened.