It was late that night by the time we all met on the beach. French fries for dinner had become a frequent, if unhealthy, habit. But I couldn’t stomach the hotdogs that everyone else had grabbed. Any meat besides fish turned my stomach, lately. I plucked another French fry from the paper carton, wondering if the fuel of elite athletes could ever consist of protein shakes, fried potatoes, and gummie candy. I just hoped for a chance to find out.
Celeste had run the dolphin rescue truck to three different locations up and down the coast, all day. Hundreds of dolphins had beached, dying by the dozens, and no one had any idea why. I could feel her weariness in my bones, but felt grateful she hung out to talk. In spite of her exhaustion, Celeste had patience for our questions, perhaps because she felt frustrated, too.
“They certainly could swim up on the sand and get stuck there if their directional instincts are messed up. It’s definitely one current theory to explain the beachings. It’s also possible that most of them die in the ocean, and only half find their way out to shore. We just don’t see the other half, so we don’t have as much data,” explained Celeste. I could literally see her wracking her brain for the answers.
“I’m sorry,” I said, passing her an open bag of candy. She took a few and smiled gratefully.
“Could sonar do that to humans?” Blake asked.
“It usually doesn’t,” Celeste continued. “But it does affect dolphins to some extent, even though I’m not sure it’s to blame for any of the recent breachings or deaths.”
“I remember reading that,” Blake said, nodding. ”Dolphins can use their echolocation to see through things; like an x-ray. Don’t they call it bio-sonar?”
“Yes,” Celeste said, shaking her curls from her eyes.
“So you agree that sonar could be harmful to dolphins?” I asked.
“It does interfere with the way dolphins process information about the world,” Celeste admitted.
“How?” Blake asked.
“We’re still not sure exactly. One popular supposition is that the sonar crowds the signals that they use to maneuver through the water and stay safe. With the extra noise, they can’t accurately interpret their surroundings or warnings from their pod.”
“What’s the other one?” I asked. Celeste gave me a blank look. “You said one supposition.” “I assume that means there’s at least one more?”
“Well, yes, some scientists believe that the sonar blasts can have a damaging effect on the dolphin’s equivalent of an ear drum, mess up their depth perception, and can cause them to stay underwater for so long that they essentially drown themselves.”
“But, you don’t think there’s any way that that is what’s happening here?”
“Billy looked, extensively, for information on ear damage when you guys first brought this up, but he found nothing. It was a good idea, guys, really, but it just doesn’t translate to humans. We don’t have bio-sonar; so the man-made sonar doesn’t affect us in the same way.”
“How can something be so damaging to the dolphins that's already part of their nature?” Blake asked.
“It’s like the oil spill,” I broke in.
Blake’s curiosity turned me on, his questions exposing the intelligence that he often kept in the background. He did well in school, but showing it off wasn’t his thing. Kaleb had been the more intellectual one. But, like many siblings, especially twins, Blake had chosen other areas to excel in and different ways to get attention. His questions and ideas through this whole process had been incredibly insightful, especially today.
“You're right—the oil is natural: it’s found in the ocean and on the beach,” Celeste said, “but when there is a spill, like Deepwater Horizon, that’s man messing with nature; it ruins the balance of things.”
“To say nothing of all the crap they put in after the oil spill,” Blake said. “Couldn’t that be causing all this?”
“Anything’s possible, guys, but nothing that’s been found, so far indicates, that Shay or Darwen’s conditions are being caused by that. I think more people would be susceptible if it were caused by chemicals, or from an oil spill. That, at least, is something that could affect humans. The sonar, really, isn’t.”
I’d been quiet for the most recent exchange; something was running around in my head, but to put words to it would make me seem even more nuts that I already did.
“About that—do the dolphins use sonar to talk?” I asked.
“Sort of. It’s part of a bigger system; their clicks and whistles are more like talking, the way you and I do, but it’s thought that they use their bio-sonar to communicate silently by sending images directly to each other’s melons—you know, that big round spot on their heads.”
“How do you know that?” Blake asked.
“We have extensive studies on sonar, on dolphins working together, and how it works,” Celeste said.
“So, if people could do the same thing; wouldn’t that be sonar?” I asked her.
“Like ESP? Or telepathy? Maybe,” she said. “It does exist in nature, but still, sonar and people? I don’t know of a link.”
“What does all this have to do with Shay?” Mica asked, with a scowl.
“She passed out underwater,” I said out loud. “Instant coma, remember? And, she was breathing. She didn’t swim in the wrong direction and just not come up for air.” I creased my brow in thought. “But, if the sonar can hurt dolphins, maybe it can do the same thing to humans, even if it’s not in exactly the same way.” I was grasping at straws, but it felt important to continue pulling.
“They’ve been using sonar around here for years,” Mica said, pacing. “Something would have happened before now.”
“But this was a significant enough test to warrant a warning to the fisherman. It’s got to be something different,” argued Blake. “What if it’s like really loud music or something, which can hurt your ears; like that crazy broken squeal a speaker makes when it gets feedback? Last time that happened, I had a headache for days.”
“There are different levels of sound waves,” Celeste said in agreement, “and we have found some dolphins with burst ear drums. But, I agree with Mica. Even if this was causing the problems for the dolphins, which has never been proven exactly, it doesn’t relate to humans.”
“But we have strange ears!” I said. Mica rolled his eyes at me. I’d obsessed over this detail when it was just Shay. Billy had investigated as he’d promised, and had found some internal bleeding, but it had obviously not killed her like the dolphins. So, that knowledge hadn’t helped explain the coma. Now that they had Darwen to compare it to, I hoped they might look into it again. It just felt significant to me, but I had no idea why.
“It would just sound loud to us, Cami,” Billy explained, kindly. “We don’t use echolocation, or hear the same frequencies that dolphins do. I can look into sonar testing on humans to see if there is any proof that it affects the body. Maybe it can cause damage in some other way, but I’ve never come across that info before,” he said, smiling gently. “If we find where it affects the brain, perhaps we can find a way to repair the damage. It’s a long shot, but I’m willing to look into anything that seems like a realistic possibility. In any event, I arranged for a new MRI machine. It should be here in a few days.”
Well, that made me feel a little better. The first one had broken when they’d tried to examine Shay, but Alysha had said her parents didn’t push through for a new one because, they thought Shay would just wake up. I nodded, satisfied that there was forward motion of some kind.
Mica and Blake and I sat on the beach sharing French fries and soda, again, for dinner. We were making a habit of this far too much since Alysha had signed on to work at the snack bar. She was lonely with Shayla in the hospital and her parents there so much. Doc’s son Helix was the manager there, and he seemed to let her get away with murder. She took multiple dinner breaks and always brought tons of snacks.
It was hardly the chow of champions, but we were fighting to fit in as much training time as possible and needed the quickest fix of calories to refuel. I had doubled up my training schedule, adding two surf sessions to the two hours of swimming I generally did, since I had missed so much time already.
Mica was an amazing surfer. He was almost better on the board than he was with swimming in the waves, and I think he loved it more. I actually preferred swimming. Surfing was fun, but I wouldn’t have done it competitively if it wasn’t an event in the Carnival.
“I totally don’t get my parents at the moment,” Alysha huffed. “It’s like they’ve been replaced with robots, programmed to repeat Doc’s nonsense over and over again.”
“The way they act like he’s God makes me sick,” Mica said.
“Yeah, well you wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Doc,” Blake said. “So, maybe he knows what he’s talking about a little bit?”
“Maybe about making babies,” Mica retorted, “but how could he know about this thing when it’s never happened before?”
“They won’t even say that it’s a thing,” she said. “ ‘It’s an accident. A coincidence. No further questions, please,’ ” she continued, doing an uncanny imitation of Doc’s gravelly voice and Mainlander accent.
“My mom just thinks they’re in shock,” I said.
“I think they’re the ones who need a shock!” she retorted, getting more upset by the minute. “They just sit around praying, begging the gods for Shay to wake up. I highly doubt that’s what your mom would do if it were one of you in that bed.”
“I definitely think she’d be more aggressive, considering we get blood drawn every time we get the flu,” Mica agreed. “At the very least, she’d insist on blood tests and CAT scans up the wazoo. Speaking of, I didn’t tell her about the blood Billy drew from us on the day of the race. Did you?”
“No. If she knew that we didn’t get the test results yet, she’d never let us in the water,” I said, then I dropped out, not needing to say more when Mica could see an old childhood memory flashing in my head and he showed me his version of the same event.
It must have been clear that we were speaking silently, because Blake called us out on it. “Care to share with the class, kids?” The harsh angle of his raised eyebrow made it impossible to take his joke at face value.
He knew we were clicking to each other, and one look at Lysh’s face told me she did too. Blake seemed annoyed, but it set Alysha crying and I felt awful for reminding her about what she was no longer able to do with Shay.
“Mom went psycho on this nurse until they called security,” Mica said, filling everyone in.
“We were like nine, and someone failed to call her with some routine test results,” I explained. “She got out of control—and fast.”
“Even though our mom almost got arrested, the nurse got canned when Doc came back,” Mica added. “I was so embarrassed.”
“Really?” I asked. I never knew this, and was shocked that his emotional reaction that day was so different from my own. “I was pretty psyched to see her fighting—instead of worrying, for once.”
“Well, maybe we should tell her about the blood test,” Blake suggested. “Let’s get her psycho in a way that helps out Shay and Darwen.”
“Yeah, but we need to figure out what we can tell her that gets her to help, without worrying her so much that she puts Mica and me on lockdown,” I said, grabbing Blake’s forearm for just a second. My need to touch him—anywhere—grew like a thirst every time we were together.
I kept it brief, because more than two seconds would get me all distracted. Our constant tiny touches were completely necessary, yet totally unfulfilling. It was like a dehydrated person chomping ice when, really, only a gallon of water would do.
Blake’s arm muscles twitched as I pulled away, chasing the spark we made together until the next moment when his knee found mine. This was as much as we could do right now.
Alysha and Mica noticed, but we all worked to stay focused on the topic at hand. Around us, the beach buzzed with day-trippers totally oblivious to the recent tragedies.
A lanky runner came over the sand at top speed. His legs moved in that circular run that is only possible on the forgiving surface of the beach. He fell twenty feet from us, face first into the sand. I jumped up to help, realizing, as we got closer that it was Helix, Doc’s son. He’d never seemed to like any of us very much, though it seemed he had softened to Alysha since she’d started working for him at the snack bar.
“I’m fine,” Helix muttered into the sand, his pale face reddening the moment he realized he knew us. Helix was two years older than us and in college on the Mainland. It took a very long moment more until he caught his breath enough to sit up and then tried to stand. As soon as he could, he tried to get away from us, but he could barely stand up and almost fell back on the sand. Blake caught him before he fell over.
“Come sit on my board and we’ll get you set,” Blake said, helping Helix hop over to sit down while I dunked a towel in the ocean to wrap around his ankle.
“It’s just twisted,” Helix said, sitting down with a sand-covered scowl. His hard mask softened minutely when he looked up to see Alysha. He gave her a nod.
“Man, people are getting busted up left and right around here,” Mica said, tossing a surf sack. These were small cornstarch packets we used to get the sticky sand off of our skin. Helix caught the small square in a puff of white and started dusting the cornstarch over his face and arms. Like magic, the dark granules came off, but his sour look did not.
“Does that help?” I asked, avoiding Helix’s unhappy face to wrap the wet towel around his ankle. If indeed it were only twisted, the salt water would quickly draw out the pain. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a similar fix for his emotional discomfort. He was anti-social on a good day, which this so obviously was not.
“There’s something very special in Pinhold saltwater,” Blake joked, trying to make Helix more comfortable. I loved that he tried, even though Helix didn’t seem to appreciate it.
“Oh my god! That’s why they were blood testing you, right?” Alysha asked.
Mica and I looked at each other, unsure about continuing our discussion in front of Helix. He’d been quite the tattletale in our younger years. Whenever we were forced to play together, he’d tattle on us to our parents for every little thing and we spent the whole time in trouble. Mom claimed that as an only child, he couldn’t be expected to know how to work things out for himself the way that we did and begged for our sympathy on his visits.
He was always the odd man out. Even though I felt bad about it, we’d stopped hanging out as soon as we became responsible for making our own plans. It was just no fun to get in trouble all the time.
Alysha clearly felt no such concern for his trustworthiness, continuing on as if we’d never been interrupted.
“I’ve been trying to figure out why I didn’t get tested that day, too. I thought they were just being lax. But now I get it: I didn’t get tested, because I didn’t get wet.”
Helix listened to Alysha, and his face showed some sympathy, which took the edge off of things just a little bit.
“So, they must have been thinking, at least initially, that this wasn’t a total coincidence,” Blake mused. “Maybe we’ll know more when the tests come back.”
“Nothing unusual showed up,” Helix said. “In your blood or in the water.”
“So, why didn’t they just tell us that?” Mica asked, conspiracy theories bouncing in his brain as he waxed his board, rubbing out his frustrations.
“My dad’s not one for sharing ‘unnecessary’ information, in case you haven’t noticed,” Helix said, shrugging.
“Everything’s necessary until Shay wakes up,” Alysha said, looking at Helix like he had the answers to everything she needed to know in the world.
Helix blushed. “I can help you out. I can’t exactly give the test results to you, but I can file transfer them to Billy. What time does he get home tonight?” Helix asked.
Blake answered and we made a plan to meet up online later. To make the transfer work, Billy had to be at home and ready to download some files from Doc’s computer so we made a plan to reconvene at Billy and Blake’s house after dark.
“Maybe he didn’t call you because, he just didn’t find anything,” Billy hypothesized, ready to minimize the open window on his home computer after Helix had texted us that it was ready.
Helix would make the test results available to Billy by simply switching the access settings on Doc’s home computer. It seemed strange, him helping us like this, but Billy had learned from working in Doc’s office that father and son were at odds, at the moment. And, in any event, looking at the files this way wouldn’t leave any kind of trail, because Billy was often in the general system.
Billy and Blake’s basement was always a favorite study spot, for school or any of the tests we needed coming up through the Junior Guard. It provided comfort, even now as we struggled to make connections between what Helix was giving us and what Billy was seeing at the hospital. The cool blue tones that decorated the walls and furniture did nothing to calm my racing heart. For once, at least lately, the extra beats per minute were not because of Blake. Even though only our own test results were up on the screen, and even though Billy technically had a right to examine the files as a resident, what we were doing felt a little shady.
“Maybe he didn’t want anyone to know he did all these tests, because the results didn’t come back with anything relevant,” said Celeste, following on Billy’s theory. We had brought her up to speed on everything when she’d joined us after work. Alysha had gone on to the hospital, so it was just the five of us there.
“Do ours match Shay’s?” Mica asked, like a dog with a bone. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—let go of the idea that something more was going on here.
“I’ll look, but only if you three go sit on the couch. I can’t have you over my shoulder on this one,” Billy said, pointing to the comfy white cushions that completed the nautical theme and had stayed miraculously pristine over ten years in a house with boys.
He opened all the test results and started comparing ours to Shay's, jotting a couple notes on a legal pad, while I tried to keep from fidgeting right off the couch.
Calm Down. We’re just checking our own files, Mica said quietly in my head, sending me calming imagery that did absolutely nothing to assuage my guilt.
What about Shay’s? And Darwen’s? I clicked back.
Doc knows something about this that he’s not saying. We have to find out somehow, he answered back, directly into my brain.
I sensed that he was right. I didn’t know why I felt that way, without any real proof. If I stopped arguing, maybe Billy could come up with something to make it true. Still, my worried instincts weren’t enough to justify snooping in medical records. That went beyond wrong, and somewhere into illegal.
While Mica’s thoughts got me even more agitated, Blake’s actions had me distracted. The small circles he made on my lower back quieted my external jitters, but further accelerated my racing pulse.
With an eye roll and a smile, Mica popped off the couch and grabbed a beanbag starfish from a “moment” Blake’s mom had set up. It was one of many around their house; objects combined with color and picture to draw your eyes around the room. Knowing she had three boys, Blake’s mom had gone out of her way to put touchable items in with the fragile ones. She figured if she gave her boys an obvious grab, they’d leave the delicates alone. So far, it had worked.
Mica beaned the bag to Blake who caught it one handed and sent it back. They exchanged it almost ten times before Billy stopped writing. Celeste was looking over Billy’s shoulder at the pad.
“Nothing, right?” he said to her.
“Nothing new, chemically. Some elevated nitrous and a lot of extra particles of ceridium—all of that is consistent with their tests from the past year or so. But why on earth have Cami and Mica had so many tests?” she asked, grabbing the notes from Billy’s hand.
“Don’t you know we’re precious?” Mica sneered.
“That’s what our mom used to say when we cried about the needle pricks,” I explained.
“Okay, yes, we can all agree you’re special, but there are almost one hundred records of tests from just the two of you,” Celeste responded. “The same seems to be true for the other sets of twins, too.”
“You know about the years of infertility?” Billy asked.
Celeste nodded.
“Your mom told me,” she said to him. “And we have some research on it at the center.”
“Why would you have information on that in a lab about the ocean?” Blake asked.
“It coincided with a time of very low dolphin births.”
We knew the numbers of dolphins in the water had diminished, which was one of the reasons The Guard voted to lease land to the center. But, I had never considered parallels in the timeline before.
“Do they know why?” I asked.
“BPA in the water,” she said. “That’s the theory, anyway. It was never proven one way or the other because the research money got spent on fertility studies instead.”
“That was right around the beginning of Plastic Isle,” Billy said, nodding. “I never thought about that before.”
“At the time, no one knew that BPA could interrupt gene development and fertility. All that research came later. But, we do know that in the eighties, the Plastic Isle grew big enough that it started to influence ocean currents, sending streams of water towards the Island.
“But if the pollution reached us, wouldn’t it have reached the Mainland, too?” Blake asked.
“It has, it’s just happened much more slowly,” said Celeste. “It may be that you are in a more direct stream of the pollution, because the currents around the Island that bring the big waves also bring other things. Additionally, you all practically live in the water and eat fish almost exclusively for protein. Just like dolphins.”
“Just us and the dolphins?” joked Mica. “Maybe we do share DNA.”
“Well, we all share DNA,” Celeste said, taking Mica’s joke seriously. “I mean, scientifically speaking. They’re at the top of the food chain, have brains even bigger than ours, and they process toxins in a similar way,” she said.
“Yes,” Billy continued, “and I can tell you from time on the Mainland that the same conditions are being seen by the medical community there. But, it definitely seems to happen faster and more dramatically to the population here.”
“So, it’s almost like we’re a stepping stone between the dolphins and the rest of the world?” Blake asked, making sense of it all before I had made that connection.
“But what does that have to do with all the tests?” I asked, eager to focus back on the medical records while we still had access to them. We couldn’t know how long Helix would feel like helping.
Billy shrugged, but Celeste brushed a rusty curl behind her ear and looked thoughtful. “It’s possible that they know this, and are making sure you’re all in the clear for some of the pollutants and conditions we’re seeing in the dolphin population.”
“Isn’t that a little creepy? Doing tests on people because of what’s happening with animals?” Mica asked.
I shook my head, disagreeing with my twin. “Whatever happens to the dolphins will happen to us.” It was one of the tenants we learned about the ocean and the signs regarding the balance of the Pinhold pin.
“That’s just Junior Guard mumbo jumbo,” Mica argued.
“I’m afraid not. Just with those dolphin deaths yesterday, we lost a couple of degrees on the Pin,” Billy said.
I gasped because, although I knew it had tilted, I didn’t actually think it was tied to the dolphins.
“Look, you guys need to understand. The things you can’t see, are often just as real as the things you can,” Billy explained.
Celeste shrugged. “I can’t know why they’ve done all these tests for so many years, but I can tell you for a fact that dolphins are a sentinel species. We watch them very carefully, because, eventually, what happens to them will happen to us.”
After scouring the medical records, Mica, Billy, and Celeste left Blake and me for some much-appreciated alone time. It was funny how much I craved that all of the sudden, when before, I’d avoided being alone with him because of that strange undercurrent that had fluttered between us…which I always thought was Kaleb.
For a blissful hour, we snuggled on the couch and watched reruns while I attempted to forget everything but that moment. Laid out against him on the nubby white fabric, I could finally give in to my need to touch him for longer than five seconds at a time.
Every time I tried to talk about something other than the angst on screen, Blake silenced me with a kiss. The couch was just barely big enough for us both, but his strong grip kept me squashed against him in all the very best places. The hard muscle in his arms surrounded me as I snuggled into his side and relished the constant contact I’d craved.
One of my newly-discovered favorite spots to explore was the bare skin on his head that matched my own. In the past few days, a tiny bit of stubble had grown in on our matching wings, so light that you could barely see it. I couldn’t stop running my fingers over it, going against the way the hair grew so the little bits of rough pushed against my fingers.
I kept my cheek right under the crook of his neck and took him in with all five senses. Long golden blond eyelashes framed amazingly mismatched eyes. Sunscreen and cornstarch, the smells of our childhood, mixed with the spicier scents of sea grass and salt water that had me drooling until I got brave enough to take a taste. I pressed a kiss to the skin under his ear, which caused him to squirm against me in the most delicious way. It was clearly a hot spot for him, and I couldn’t resist doing it again, and again.
We moved to get closer together every way that we could; his legs and hips and chest moved against me until we built a rhythm. It made me think about the way his body moved in the water the other day, which made me heat up from the inside, out. A deep blush rose on my skin, and I felt grateful that he couldn’t read my mind. Although, with the way my body responded, he really didn’t need to. He cupped my face with strong, square hands and brought our lips together.
Everything burst in waves of color and sound simultaneously. It pulsed like lightning behind my eyes, reverberating over and over again, so brightly that it felt like I could see the same image inside Blake’s head, too.