Chapter Thirty
I sat in Lake’s boat again, wrapped in a blanket to keep away the early morning chill as the sun broke through purple clouds above us. Dylan sat silent next to me while Lake steered us toward the first of his buoys in the sound. Sailor wasn’t with us this time, apparently angry at me now because Miss Gale had spent time with me the night before to teach me the finfolk song. But I was too preoccupied with Mrs. Canavan’s reaction to worry much about Sailor’s current opinion of me.
I had laid awake in my bed all night, reliving the sound of glass shattering and then raining down on my head. Mrs. Canavan frightened me and the fact that she could feel so strongly about me frightened me even more.
Lake slowed the boat to a stop and let down the anchor. Once he dove into the water to retrieve his crab pots, Dylan let his hand brush against mine. He smiled at me, though his eyes looked apprehensive.
“You’ve been pretty quiet lately,” he said. “Anything wrong?”
I blinked at him and it occurred to me that I’d never had the talk I meant to have with him. He hadn’t tried to kiss me in the past week, but he had to have noticed the way I recoiled slightly at his touch. I’d meant to talk to him before now. It wasn’t fair to let him go on thinking something had really happened between us.
I opened my mouth, trying to find the right words to say, but a metal box flew into the boat, startling me when it narrowly missed my nose.
Lake resurfaced, pulling himself halfway out of the water and over the side of the boat. He looked furious.
“Look at that!” he roared, pointing at the pot in the boat.
I looked at the twisted wire box that lay empty, dripping water at my feet. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but Dylan gasped and knelt down to get a better look.
“What happened?” he asked. He picked up the box, turning it over to examine it closely. “It’s been cut.”
He pulled at the wires, revealing the gaping holes in the pot that should have held the crabs in.
“All of my pots have been cut,” Lake growled. I looked away when he pulled himself back into the boat and redressed. He stood in only his khakis, glaring down at the ruined crab pot. “Every single one! Empty and cut.”
Dylan blinked up at him. “How?”
“I don’t know,” Lake said. “I can guess, but I have no proof.” His eyes scanned the water in the distance.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, pulling the blanket tighter around myself. The morning was cold and windy and the boat bounced on the choppy water.
Lake’s shoulders sagged. “There’s nothing I can do, except repair my pots.”
“You’re not even going to track down who did this and do something about it?” I asked.
Lake turned away and reached into the water to grab his buoys. The muscles in his arms were tight and rigid as he pulled up the remaining pots. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t blame someone for something I didn’t see happening.”
There wasn’t a question of who had done this. Making finfolk miserable seemed to be a Connors family trait. Lake was right, but that didn’t mean that I had to like his decision.
“Aren’t you tired of being treated like this?” I asked. “You let people like Mr. Connors walk all over you and you don’t do a thing about it. You know who sabotaged your pots. Go sabotage his!”
“We finfolk have had to fight long and hard against the beliefs people have about us,” Lake said. “If I sabotage his pots, I’m proving that I’m no better than what the books say.”
“It’s not fair,” I said. “We shouldn’t have to just take this and do nothing about it.”
“Committing a crime against someone else doesn’t make things right,” Lake told me. “This isn’t your fight, Mara. Let me deal with it in my own way.”
It seemed to me that Lake hadn’t been dealing with it, and that was entirely the problem.
* * *
All day I felt as if I was suffocating. My body ached for the ocean and I gulped bottles of salty water, feeling as if I would die without it. I had no focus at all on my classes that day.
In gym class, Elizabeth sent a hard volleyball hit toward my head, narrowly missing my ear when I shook myself from the daze I was in and ducked at the last minute.
My pride was too wounded from his mother’s attack to acknowledge Josh in the halls whenever we passed. We acted as if we were the strangers we appeared to be. As far as the rest of the population of Swans Landing knew, Josh and I had never spoken more than a handful of words to each other. They didn’t know the afternoons we’d spent telling our deepest secrets at Pirate’s Cove. They didn’t know how he had held me in his arms and sung to me so that I could see my mother dancing through his room.
They didn’t know that I loved him.
The realization had filled me with a stronger fear than I’d ever felt before. I’d had boyfriends before, back before my life turned upside down, but I’d never loved anyone the way I did Josh. I’d never felt as whole and understood and accepted for exactly who I was as I did in his presence.
But I avoided Pirate’s Cove that day. Every time I closed my eyes, I could hear Mrs. Canavan’s insults ringing through my head. I could see the fear in Josh’s eyes and his voice telling me to go.
It wasn’t fair to make him choose. It would only destroy him. It was my choice and I couldn’t stay in Swans Landing—even if that meant letting him go.
After school, I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to go to Pirate’s Cove either. I didn’t want to be anywhere that I might have to talk, so I went back to the place where I’d hunted for seashells with Dylan near the northern end of the island.
Waves crashed against the broken edges of the old wooden pier. I walked between the barnacle-encrusted pilings with my boots dangling from my fingers as the water lapped at my feet. A group of seagulls followed behind me, most likely hoping that I might have some food to share.
I felt free out here with the water. I breathed in deep, filling my lungs with salty air. Leaning my head back, I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feel of the wind whipping my hair against my face and the spray of the ocean on my skin.
When I opened my eyes, the face peering back at me over the edge of the pier made me jump.
“Sorry,” a small voice called down to me. “I didn’t mean to spy on you.”
I recognized Claire’s white-blonde hair and huge glasses. She sat on the pier, her legs dangling over the side and her hair getting tangled in the wind. “How did you get up there?” I asked.
She pointed back toward where the pier met the land at an old, boarded up fishing shop almost hidden by overgrown, leafless brush. “There’s a way onto the pier from there,” she said. “If you climb over the gate.”
I eyed the broken end of the pier a few hundred yards out. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”
She shrugged. “I don’t ever go down to the broken part. It’s still mostly sturdy this far inland.”
I watched her for a moment, then asked, “Why are you talking to me?”
Her face flushed red. “Sorry. I’ll leave you alone if you want.”
I shook my head. “That’s not what I meant. Every time I’ve tried to talk to you before, you always run away. Why are you talking to me now?”
Claire picked at the edge of the wooden railing where she’d propped her arms. “I don’t know. You seem...sad. I thought maybe you could use someone to talk to.”
She said it so simply, as if all my problems could be easily solved by talking with someone. But I had a world of problems that couldn’t be chased away just like that.
“Do you mind if I come up?” I asked.
Claire shook her head and I stuffed my feet back into my shoes. I followed the pilings up the beach toward the old shop. The windows had long ago been busted out and the CLOSED sign on the front door looked as if it had survived several hurricanes. A collection of empty beer bottles lay next to the side of the building, collecting rainwater and algae. The gate blocking the entrance to the pier wasn’t very high and I climbed over it easily, dropping down to the other side.
The pier groaned and creaked against the force of the water below. Claire sat far enough away from the broken end that it didn’t appear we were in any immediate danger for now.
I sat down next to her, letting my own legs dangle over the side too. “Do you come here a lot?”
“Only when I feel like I’m drowning at school,” she said.
I raised one eyebrow, studying her closely. “You’re not...?”
“Finfolk?” She smiled a little, but shook her head. “No, I’m just a normal, boring human.”
I laughed bitterly. “I’d love to be normal and boring for once.”
“I’d love to not be so invisible for once,” Claire said in a small voice.
Along the horizon, a boat slid its way across the water, leaving for other parts of the world. A boat would be the only way for people like Claire to escape the suffocation of this island and the people on it. I could swim away at any time I wanted, but Claire was stuck here with Elizabeth and Jackie and those other kids that were just like them.
“I meant what I said before,” I told her. “You don’t have to let Elizabeth push you around.”
Claire gave me a half-hearted smile. “You haven’t been here long enough to really know Elizabeth yet, have you? Once she decides she doesn’t like you, there’s no changing her mind. She makes it her mission to make you as miserable as possible.”
“What did you ever do to get on Elizabeth’s bad side?” I asked.
Claire shrugged. “Her daddy used to work for mine. Then my daddy fired hers.”
“And she blames you for that?” I asked.
“It was a hard time for her family. It took several years before her daddy’s crab business started making a profit. Elizabeth had to do without a lot of things during that time. I guess she’s still a little bitter about it.”
“And now my dad is running hers out of business,” I said. “So she blames me.”
Claire nodded. “One thing you don’t do is mess with the source of Elizabeth’s clothing fund,” she said with a grin.
I laughed and leaned back on my elbows on the gently swaying pier. “You know, Claire, you’re not so bad, once you actually talk to people.”
She examined me for a moment through the tangle of hair in her face. “So can you really change?” she asked. “Like the others?”
I nodded. “I didn’t know until a few days ago, but yes, I’m finfolk too.”
“No one at school really knew for sure,” she told me. “But the fact that you’re half-finfolk was enough for them.”
“Enough for them to hate me?” I asked.
Claire looked out at the water, watching birds circle over the ocean. “Around here, our lives revolve around the water, even for those of us who aren’t finfolk. And it hasn’t been easy. My daddy used to run a big fishing business, back when I was a kid, and he sold his fish all over the coast. From Maryland to Florida, people knew his name and his fish.”
“He doesn’t do that anymore?” I asked.
“The fish aren’t like they used to be,” Claire explained. “The catches are smaller and a lot of people don’t buy fish from us anymore. They can get it cheaper from other countries. That’s why my daddy had to lay off almost all of his workers and sell all but two of his boats. By next year, he’ll probably be down to just one.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
Claire shrugged. “It’s the way of life here. Businesses close, people leave, hurricanes tear down things. But we find a way to survive somehow. We always do.”
A chill raced its way up my spine. “Why don’t you just leave? Go some place where your parents can find better work.”
She gave me a confused look. “Why should we leave? This is where we belong.”
Her words caused an ache deep inside me. I envied her certainty about where she belonged. I wished that I could find that one place where I fit in and couldn’t imagine anywhere being anywhere else.
But right now, I felt as broken as the pier we sat on, torn between the water that tried to claim it and the sand that fought to hold it in place.