Up for Air

by Laurie Morrison

  Bertha was a great white shark who’d been spotted off the shore of the island last summer, and Jeremy watched her movements on a shark-tracking app. She was a juvenile—so young that her jaw wasn’t strong enough to eat seals or sea lions yet, and she couldn’t travel too far from the coast of Long Island, where her home was.

  “You think she’s going to come back to the island?” Annabelle asked.

  In front of them, the summer dad’s tires swerved as he hit a patch of sand.

  “She might turn back like she did in January,” Jeremy said. “Or go in toward the Cape like in March. But maybe.”

  He’d learned so much about Bertha because the shark spotting had messed up his dad’s summer business last year. Most of Mr. Green’s construction projects happened in the off-season, and then he took snorkelers and scuba divers out on his boat in the summer. After Bertha, most people had been too scared to go on boat trips, so Jeremy had started doing research to prove that sharks were almost never a threat to humans.

  And Annabelle had gotten swept up in his interest. It was fun to see the world through Jeremy’s eyes—as a place where you could spot a problem and feel so certain you could fix it. And there was something that fascinated her about Bertha, this creature who was so big and terrifying and yet still barely old enough to go out and explore by herself. She imagined Bertha’s shark parents reminding her to be safe before they let her go out to swim around on her own, and then worrying while she was away.

  “How big do you think she is now?” Annabelle asked.

  They were out of their neighborhood now, reaching the marshy wildlife preserve. Seagulls squawked overhead, and a dragonfly hovered at the edge of the path.

  Jeremy shook his head. “No way to know for sure unless another shark tagger finds her. Maybe nine feet?”

  Up ahead, the summer dad pulled off to the side to check the bike path map, and Jeremy and Annabelle rode past, up to the mostly hidden entrance for Bluff Point.

  They locked their bikes at the rack in front of the dunes, where Mia’s pink cruiser was waiting. As they walked onto the beach, Annabelle kicked off her flipflops, letting her feet sink into the soft sand. The waves were bigger than usual, leaving hissing white foam after they’d broken, and the seals were out, some resting on the rocks and others bobbing up and down in the water. She took in a big, salty gulp of ocean air.

  Mia wore a bright blue bikini and lay facedown on her towel, kicking her already tan legs up and down as she read something on her phone. Annabelle had the kind of fair skin that either burned or did nothing, and Jeremy did, too. But Mia could spend five minutes out in the sun and boom: Her olive skin was golden-tan. “One good thing about Greek genes,” she’d told Annabelle once.

  She popped up and ran over to Annabelle and Jeremy, spraying sand with every step. She looked like the old Mia right now, with her dark eyes all lit up. The Mia from sixth grade and even the first half of seventh, who made Annabelle a card on National Best Friend Day and painted Annabelle’s nails team colors before all their big meets last summer.

  But when she opened her mouth, it was second-half-of-seventh-grade Mia all the way.

  “I did it! Nothing below an A-minus except art, which my parents couldn’t care less about!”

  The words pushed all the soothing, salty-fresh air out of Annabelle’s lungs, but she told herself to be happy for her friend.

  “My dad’s taking me anywhere I want in August to celebrate!” Mia said. “I think I’m going to pick L.A.”

  Her family was one of the few year-round island families with enough money to afford the full Gray Island tuition and plan a trip across the country in honor of a report card. They lived up the coast from Annabelle and Jeremy, in a neighborhood full of vacation homes. They used to be summer people who lived in Boston the rest of the year, but they’d moved here full-time right around the same time Annabelle had. Mia’s dad’s company had moved their office, so he was going to work from home anyway, and her mom, who had grown up in California, missed being near the ocean all the time.

  “Congrats,” Jeremy said. “That’s awesome.”

  Then he snuck a wrinkly-foreheaded look over at Annabelle, and her heart cannonballed to the bottom of her stomach.

  Jeremy knew. It didn’t matter how hard she had tried to hide it. Jeremy knew how stupid she was, and he felt sorry for her.

  She was already sure Mia had figured it out, since Mia peeked at her papers and lingered in the doorway when teachers talked to her after class. But Jeremy never peeked or eavesdropped. He was in a different section for history, so he hadn’t heard Mr. Derrickson say, “I can’t teach you if you don’t even try” loud enough for everybody to hear as he handed back a mostly blank quiz. And he was always busy with mathletes or sitting with his guy friends when she went to Ms. Ames’s office or met her tutor at lunch.

  “Um, yeah. That’s really great!” Annabelle managed. “Good job!”

  She walked over to Mia’s towel and sat next to it without bothering to spread out her own. Jeremy plopped down on her other side, and then Mia lowered herself back down, too. A little ways away, a lifeguard blew his whistle and motioned for two kids who’d gone out too far to come back in.

  “How’d you guys do?” Mia asked. “You met Mr. Derrickson like a zillion times for history help, right, Annabelle? Did you do well?”

  Annabelle focused on the seals that bobbed up and down in the water, out past where the lifeguards let swimmers go, waiting for their turn to sunbathe on the rocks.

  “Um, yeah,” she said. “I studied a lot. My grade was . . . eh.”

  She shrugged to show it didn’t really matter and buried her toes in the sand.

  “Aww, Annabelle.” Mia put her arm around Annabelle’s shoulders, and Annabelle squirmed away to pick up a rock. Pink quartz, it looked like.

  “Mr. Derrickson’s the worst,” Mia said. “He seriously wants people to fail. He’s, like, a Satanist who takes pleasure in making people suffer.”

  “You mean a sadist?” Jeremy asked.

  Mia reached over Annabelle to flick him in the ear. She never really minded when Jeremy corrected her, though. She was confident enough in her own intelligence that it didn’t shake her when she got a word wrong.

  “The point is, he’s a miserable person. And not a fair teacher. That short-answer section was ridiculous—we barely ever talked about any of that.”

  Mia talked faster and lower than she used to. In the spring, she’d joined the lacrosse team and become friends with all the prettiest, loudest eighth graders. She sounded just like them now, and she said everything like it was a fact, even when it wasn’t.

  “It was a really hard final,” Jeremy agreed.

  But it hadn’t been too hard for Jeremy or Mia. Only for Annabelle.

  Annabelle wiped the sand off the pink quartz rock and ran her fingers over its rounded end. Pink quartz, white quartz, and salt-and-pepper granite—those were the most common kinds of rocks on the island, because they could handle getting pounded by the waves. She’d learned that her first year at the Academy, in sixth-grade science.

  When they did their unit on the island habitat, she’d had questions about everything: why there were so many of those three kinds of rocks, why the ocean looked blue in the morning and greenish by afternoon, why all of the beaches were bordered with dunes.

  And her teacher, Mrs. Mattson, would tell her, “What a terrific question!” And Jeremy would say, “I’ve never stopped to think about that!” And for as long as she was in science class, she almost felt smart.

  Mia took the rock to examine it, and then dropped it back in Annabelle’s palm. “Hey, what are you guys doing tomorrow? Wanna play mini golf?”

  “Okay, yeah,” Annabelle said, willing her voice to sound happy.

  Mini golf with Mia was the best because Mia came up with silly challenges, like making everybody crouch down and hit the ball pool-cue style, with the skinny end of their clubs. And this was what Annabelle had wanted a
ll spring. No lacrosse girls for Mia to sit with at lunch while she had to meet her tutor. No video-game-obsessed guys from Jeremy’s advanced math class to invite him back to their dorm rooms to beat the next level of something or other. All the boarding kids had gone back to Boston and Connecticut and New Hampshire and New York, and now she and Mia and Jeremy could go back to being Annabelle, Mia, and Jeremy again, like last summer.

  Annabelle had friends at school, too, but she wasn’t around that much since she spent so much time studying and swimming. They were always nice to her when she was there, but she never got the impression that they missed her all that much when she wasn’t.

  She slid off her tank top, and Mia glanced at her black suit—the same one she’d been wearing the other day when Connor Madison had stared—and then looked away fast.

  Back in the spring, Mia’s mom had taken the two of them shopping in Boston, and they’d tried on the same striped shirt. On Mia, it had looked like a regular T-shirt. But when Annabelle had stepped out of the dressing room, Mia’s mom had said, “Va-va-voom! Honey, I don’t think you can wear that shirt to school!” Mia had rolled her eyes and told her mom to stop making a big deal out of nothing. But she’d frowned at her own reflection in a way that told Annabelle she didn’t really think it was nothing. Now she was frowning down at her bikini top the same way.

  Annabelle was about to ask if anyone wanted to go in the water when Mia said, “Hey, so what’s the deal with genius camp, Jer?”

  Jeremy’s cheeks filled in with pink and he tried to brush away the hair that used to fall to his eyebrows before he’d gotten it cut. “I guess it’s happening.”

  “Genius camp?” Annabelle repeated.

  Jeremy reached behind her to flick Mia, but Mia pulled away so he only flicked air.

  “That’s not what it’s called. It’s an enrichment thing at a college in Boston for a few weeks. It starts next month. Samir’s going, too.”

  Samir was Jeremy’s closest guy friend at the Academy, and he lived in Massachusetts when he wasn’t at school.

  “It’s kind of expensive, so I wasn’t sure if I could go, but there was this scholarship thing, so . . .”

  He trailed off, and Annabelle squeezed the pink quartz rock, hoping that would balance out the way her throat squeezed up and made it hard to breathe.

  What about us? she wanted to say. What about coming to Bluff Point every week and sharing a large cup at the Creamery—half peanut butter cup and half double-chocolate chunk—and going back to the Cape Cod shark museum like last summer to find out more about Bertha?

  But what came out was “What . . . what about summer swim team?”

  Jeremy let out a little laugh as he ran his fingers over the top of his short hair. “I think the team will manage without me.”

  “Maybe,” Mia said in her loud new lacrosse-girl voice. “But who will judge our amazing pool handstand competitions and order too many fries at the snack bar so we can steal the extras?”

  “Those aren’t extras!” Jeremy protested.

  Annabelle made herself laugh along with them, but the sound came out shrill, like the bark of those bobbing seals who wanted their turn on the rocks.

  Jeremy stood and brushed the sand off his legs, careful to step far enough away that it didn’t hit Annabelle and Mia. “Wanna swim?”

  Mia flopped back on her towel and picked up her phone. “You guys go. I need to text Reagan back.”

  Reagan was one of Mia’s lacrosse friends who had just finished eighth grade. She was the loudest girl on the whole team, and she cursed and made fun of people in a way that she pretended was silly but always felt mean. Annabelle hadn’t been that sorry to see her go back to Connecticut.

  “She’s super bored at home,” Mia said. “I’m telling her she should visit so we can give her the true Gray Island experience!”

  The true Gray Island experience. Like Mia had given Annabelle after they met at an Academy welcome event before sixth grade. Since Mia had come to Gray Island every summer for years, she’d already known that you could watch movies on the beach on Thursday nights in August, and that the Creamery’s cookies were half price after five, and that the burger shack by the lighthouse had the best fish and chips and the best sunset views. She’d made it seem like having Annabelle with her made all of her favorite summer things even more fun. But maybe now, having Annabelle with her wasn’t enough anymore.

  Annabelle squeezed the pink quartz rock again—harder this time—before she buried it in the sand. Jeremy held a hand out to help her up, but she didn’t take it. She pushed herself off the ground, shed her shorts, and bolted for the ocean, fighting the pull of the sand with every step.

  Jeremy had almost caught up by the time the sand turned cool and mushy at the edge of the water, but she didn’t stop. He liked to ease in a little at a time, and she liked to get in fast. She kept running, splashing cold, salty water up her arms and legs. Then she saw a big wave coming right at her, so she dove under and stayed there, beneath the surface, until it crested and rolled in to shore.

  That was the thing about the ocean, even when it was rough: Even the most powerful waves passed if you stayed under for long enough, and Annabelle could hold her breath for ages thanks to swimming.

  When she finally came up for air, she tried to imagine herself diving beneath everything she couldn’t face thinking about—those Cs on her report card, the look on her mom’s face, Jeremy leaving in July, and Mia still choosing Reagan over her when Reagan wasn’t even here. It didn’t really work, though.

  Chapter 4

  When Annabelle and Jeremy got dropped off at the pool the next day, the older team’s practice was ending and Mia was already there, standing with a bunch of other girls from the middle school team. She was telling a story in her loud, low voice that made everyone look over to see what she was saying.

  Annabelle wasn’t sure how she did it. Mia was always in the middle of things at school, too, even though she missed everything at night and some things on the weekends, when she was at home instead of in the dorms. And lately, swim team was the same way.

  Most of the other kids on the North Shore Sands summer team went to the public school, and they were always talking about stuff that happened at school and making jokes about Academy kids, with their expensive clothes and hyphenated last names and the way they took up the whole sidewalk when they went into town. But whenever they did that, Mia would say something funny or give someone a compliment and boom: The Academy jokes would stop, and everybody would circle around her.

  Annabelle was still watching Mia as she started for the locker room, and she almost walked right into the strong, tan chest of a guy wearing only a navy-blue racing suit. She stopped short, stumbling, and then two hands reached out to steady her.

  Connor Madison. His fingers sizzled against her bare shoulders.

  “I’m—I’m sorry,” Annabelle stuttered, but Connor grinned at her.

  “Not a problem, Hummingbird. I like it when people almost run into me. Keeps me on my toes.”

  Most people had stopped using her old nickname by last summer, once she’d hit a growth spurt that had left her towering over half the boys. But Annabelle liked that Connor still called her that. It felt special, coming from him.

  “Oh, um, okay,” she said, even though he was obviously kidding.

  But she couldn’t focus on how silly she sounded because Connor’s hands were so warm on her shoulders, and his blond hair had brighter blond streaks in the front from the sun like she always wished her own dirty-blond hair would get, and his eyes were so, so green. Almost as bright as her mom’s birthstone, peridot. Which Mom thought was “garish,” but what did Mom know.

  The tips of Connor’s ears were sunburned, and the skin at the tops were peeling a tiny bit. Annabelle wanted to touch them, even though the idea of touching dead skin should be disgusting. Mia’s cousin, who’d never stopped texting with her boyfriend when she’d visited last summer, had told Mia and Annabelle that
when you really, really like somebody, that changes how you see them, like how 3-D glasses change the way you see a movie. That’s probably the kind of thing she was talking about—not being grossed out by somebody’s dead ear skin.

  Annabelle glanced back over at Mia, but Mia was still completely absorbed in whatever she was saying. When she’d texted Mia about what Connor had said to Jordan the other day after she’d gotten out of the pool, Mia had only texted back an open-mouth cat emoji. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a Whoa, that’s amazing! Maybe Connor’s into you! excited cat or a sort-of-surprised but not super-impressed one or what.

  “I hear you’re ready to crush all those under-fourteen records this summer, huh?” Connor asked, and Annabelle’s heart sped up.

  He had? Had he actually participated in a conversation about Annabelle and her swimming?

  “I’m gonna try,” she said, and that made him laugh for some reason. She liked the sound so much, she wanted to make him laugh again. “I think your old under-fourteen boys’ backstroke one’s safe for another summer, though.”

  “Whew,” he said, pretending to wipe sweat off his forehead. “You’re not gonna try to take down all the guys’ ones, too?”

  “Madison!” somebody called, and he turned his head to reply.

  It didn’t feel like their conversation had officially ended, but Annabelle wasn’t sure if she should leave or wait around or what.

  Before she could decide, Elisa Price came out of the girls’ locker room with Jeremy’s older sister, Kayla.

  “It’s my favorite under-fourteen swimmer!” Elisa said.

  “Mine too, but don’t tell Jer,” Kayla joked.

  Annabelle giggled but wasn’t quite sure what to say. She always used to know what to say around Kayla, even though Kayla was older. When Annabelle, Mia, and Jeremy had started sixth grade, Kayla had been in ninth, and she’d been full of advice about which teachers were strict and which weekend events were worth going back to campus for. And she’d always acted like she really liked Annabelle and Mia.