Up for Air

by Laurie Morrison

  But nothing from Connor. And no group reply from Jeremy, either.

  “Wait, who are you texting?” Annabelle asked, but Jeremy didn’t answer. He bent down in front of her a little so she could climb on his back, and she got a flash of her dad, years ago, crouching down the same way and carrying her around piggyback or up on his shoulders whenever they were in a crowd and she got tired.

  “I think I can walk by myself,” she said, because the pain in her ankle was shrinking now. But her wrist was only getting worse.

  When they made it back to the edge of town, Jeremy stopped next to a bench in front of the first bed-and-breakfast and pulled out his phone again.

  “Seriously, who are you texting?” Annabelle asked. Jeremy frowned. “Your wrist is swollen already.”

  It had puffed up pretty badly, and the tender skin on the side of her thumb was turning blue.

  “Is Kayla coming back for us?” she asked, pointing at Jeremy’s phone. “Or . . . um. The rest of them?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “My mom is. She’ll meet us right here, and we can pick up our bikes on the way back.”

  Annabelle’s throat went dry. “What did you tell your mom?”

  “I told her where we are, so she can get us.”

  Annabelle let out a long, shaky breath. “Were you texting your mom this whole time?”

  “Uh-huh.” Jeremy’s fingertips brushed against his forehead, pushing aside the hair that wasn’t there anymore. Once he remembered, he ran his hand over the top of his head instead.

  “Where did you say we were? Back when you first texted?”

  “On Ashton, heading toward town. She said to text as soon as we were someplace safe to stop, and she’d come.”

  Jeremy looked at Annabelle, brown eyes wide and a little desperate. Her face must have told him he’d done something wrong, but despite all of those A-pluses, he didn’t seem to understand what.

  “How are we going to explain why we were on Ashton Street?” she asked.

  Even if there really wasn’t any surveillance footage, if their parents knew they’d been on a street they were supposed to stay away from and then word got out that someone had attempted to break into Dennis Martin’s property, it wouldn’t be hard to connect the dots.

  What if, thanks to her and Jeremy, the entire group got in trouble? Kayla and Connor and everyone?

  “You were hurt!” Jeremy protested. “You needed help, and I didn’t know what to do!”

  “So you texted your mom?” Annabelle was nearly shouting. She didn’t mean to shout, but her wrist was still throbbing, and when she checked her phone again, the text from Kayla was the only one there. Nothing from Connor, still.

  “Sorry for trying to help you,” Jeremy snapped. He moved to the far edge of the bench, as if he couldn’t handle being near her.

  This was Jeremy, who had collected quartz stones and examined seagull nests with her in sixth-grade science. Who kept on swimming the end of a lap of breast-stroke, over and over, just so she could practice her start. Whose eyes lit up when he talked about Bertha the white shark. He was her friend, and he had come back for her.

  She started to scooch over toward him, but then he added, “Sorry for being the only one who tried. Unlike Connor Madison, who just let you get hurt and then didn’t bother to check on you!”

  He spat out Connor’s name like it was a bad word, and every single muscle in her body tensed.

  “He didn’t know I was hurt! If you’d replied to Kayla instead of texting your mom, they all would have known and they could have come to find us! They’re probably looking for us right now!”

  An angry glare transformed Jeremy’s features. Annabelle’s mom always said what a sweet face Jeremy had, and Annabelle knew what she meant. There was something about how fast his smile came and how round and heavily lashed his eyes were—it was obvious from the first time you saw him that Jeremy was someone who’d never be cruel.

  But it was not a sweet face that looked at Annabelle right now.

  “Go ahead and text them, then,” Jeremy said. “Go find out for yourself how much Connor cares.”

  He let out a mean little laugh after he said it. The kind of laugh that said, “How stupid are you, Annabelle?” She’d heard it from other kids sometimes when a teacher called on her even though she didn’t want to be called on and she said something really, really wrong. But she’d never heard it from Jeremy before now.

  She blinked back the tears that pricked her eyes. “Fine. I will.”

  First, she texted Kayla, who wrote right back to say she was so sorry Annabelle had fallen and then called Jeremy. He took a few steps away to take the call, and all Annabelle could hear were his whispered promises that he wouldn’t say anything to his mom that would get Kayla in trouble.

  Annabelle stared at the display on her phone, but it only showed the time and the old background picture of her and Mia blowing kisses at the camera.

  Connor would have no idea she was hurt unless she told him. He might assume she and Jeremy had decided they’d rather hang out, just the two of them. He might think she like-liked Jeremy. She had to text him, she realized.

  I’m a little banged up but OK, she wrote.

  She dug her fingernails into the raw skin of her left palm again and bit back a scream. Ruby was probably with Connor right now, cozying up to him and trying to make him forget Annabelle’s black bathing suit and how easy she was to lift high in the air.

  Are you guys OK? she added.

  And then, so he knew and didn’t have to wonder, I’m getting a ride home.

  And finally, Sorry for not catching up.

  Then Mrs. Green’s car pulled up. When she saw Annabelle, she said, “Oh, sweetie,” and made Jeremy help Annabelle into the back seat and then load her bike onto the rack when they stopped to get it.

  As they drove back to their neighborhood, Mrs. Green kept glancing over at Jeremy and then checking on Annabelle in the rearview mirror, and Annabelle kept staring at her phone, waiting for a text that never came.

  Chapter 20

  At home, Mom and Mitch popped up from the living room couch as soon as they saw Annabelle.

  “Oh, honey, what happened?” Mom said.

  “I . . . I fell,” Annabelle said, blinking back tears and cradling her hand.

  “On your bike?” Mom asked. “Where? Why didn’t you call? How did you get home?”

  “Mrs. Green brought me,” Annabelle said. “It wasn’t on my bike. I fell in town.”

  Dennis Martin’s house was in town, technically. She didn’t want to lie, because then everything would be even worse if Mrs. Green told Mom and Mitch where she and Jeremy had been. But she was hoping Mom and Mitch would assume she’d tripped on a loose cobblestone near the Creamery or something.

  Mom took out the rubbing alcohol and Neosporin for the scrapes on Annabelle’s knee, arm, and hands, and Mitch wrapped an ice pack around her wrist.

  “Maybe it won’t be quite so bad in the morning,” Mom said.

  Maybe.

  Maybe after Annabelle had iced her wrist and elevated it on a pillow all night, it would go back to its usual size. It’d be a little sore, but she could deal with soreness. Ever since she’d started swimming seriously, at least one part of her body had been sore at all times.

  And maybe Connor would text her back any minute. Or call, even.

  But he didn’t.

  The next morning, she didn’t have a single new text or call. Her wrist and thumb were even bigger, and the tender skin was pink and purple, like the ugliest sunset imaginable. She couldn’t rotate her hand at all. She could barely even flex her fingers.

  When she came down the stairs, she expected Mitch and Mom to scramble up to help her again—to make a fuss asking what they could get her to eat and holding out ice packs and ibuprofen.

  But neither of them budged from their places at the kitchen table. Slowly and almost in unison, their heads turned toward her, and the expressions on their faces matched. If
she were a word person like Jeremy, she’d know how to describe the way they looked at her. It was something worse than disappointed. Something bigger than mad.

  Could there have been surveillance footage after all? Could somebody from the security company have called somehow? Or the police, even?

  “I can explain.” She scrambled for a story, but how could she possibly explain what she was doing attempting to climb the fence outside some famous person’s yard? She could claim that Jordan had left something important there when he was mowing the lawn? His wallet, maybe. Or his phone. No, an inhaler. She’d been helping, because he needed it right away.

  “We heard from Mrs. Green this morning,” Mom said. Annabelle lowered herself into a chair. Not the police, at least, but not good.

  “She couldn’t get the whole story out of Jeremy,” Mom started. “But he said something about you getting hurt because of something you were doing with a high school boy who just left you after you fell?”

  That phrase got stuck inside Annabelle’s head and bounced around there. Just left you. Just left you. Just left you.

  “I . . . We were all hanging out together,” Annabelle said. “Me and Jeremy and . . .” She wasn’t going to be the one to tell on Kayla if Jeremy hadn’t. “And a bunch of other people. And they . . . It was nobody’s fault. I fell and we got separated and they didn’t realize I was hurt.”

  That wasn’t quite right anymore, though. They did know, after she’d texted Connor. Or he did, anyway. But he probably thought it wasn’t that bad, since she hadn’t made a big thing about it. Maybe she should have made it sound more serious?

  “We trusted you, Annabelle,” Mom said. “I was afraid swimming with high school kids would be too much for you to handle.”

  “It isn’t!” Annabelle insisted.

  “Was it that Madison kid?” Mitch asked. “Connor? I don’t like the kind of attention he gives you. I’ve seen him talking to you way too much when I pick you up from practice.”

  For a split second, that thrilled Annabelle—the idea that Connor’s attention was so obvious that even Mitch had noticed.

  But then Mitch got up from his seat and paced around the kitchen. His whole face was red. His neck, too. He was wearing a light green shirt, and his face and neck clashed with it.

  “He’s not . . . It’s not . . .” Annabelle started.

  “No high school boy should be paying that kind of attention to you,” Mitch boomed, and Annabelle jumped. She’d heard him yell at his own daughters before but never at her. “You’re a kid.”

  And now that phrase joined in with the other one, bouncing around inside her skull and jarring her every time they collided.

  You’re a kid. You’re a kid. Just left you. You’re a kid.

  “You lied to us about who you were with last night,” Mom said. “You knew the deal, Annabelle. No more high school team now. When you’re all healed up, you can go back and swim with the middle school.”

  “What?” Annabelle squeaked, but Mom held up one hand.

  “You had one strike left after missing tutoring. This was a big strike, Annabelle. We trusted you.”

  Annabelle looked at Mitch, sure he’d fight for her. He might be mad, but he knew how important it was for her to stay on the team. She was sure he’d remind Mom that a person was supposed to get three strikes, that’s how strikes worked—but he only shook his head.

  “I’ll call Colette this afternoon,” Mom said. “She’ll understand that this won’t work out. That you’re just not ready.”

  It was the meanest thing Mom could have said.

  Because yes—when Annabelle had found out she’d disqualified the relay team, when Connor had commented on her personalized towel, and when Ruby had taken out her e-cigarette—in those moments, Annabelle hadn’t felt like she belonged on the high school team. But then there were other moments—when Connor flicked her ponytail and lifted her up over his head, when Elisa and Kayla talked to her like she was one of them, when Coach Colette acted like she was capable of something special—in those moments, she felt like she counted.

  Swimming with the high school team, helping them win the league, even, and spending time with Connor and Kayla and Elisa—she was way more ready for those things than she was for anything else people expected her to do. She had a much better chance of doing that stuff well than of passing eighth-grade history.

  Mitch took her to Urgent Care to get her wrist checked, and the doctor who took X-rays and examined her said things could be worse. She had a fracture in the lower part of her right thumb and a badly sprained right wrist. She was lucky that she was left-handed, and she didn’t need an actual cast—only a splint that had to stay on all the time except when she was in the shower. She had to wear it for a month, and pretty soon she could start doing physical therapy.

  “How long do you think it’ll be before she can swim again?” Mitch asked.

  “Light swimming should be okay in a few weeks,” the doctor said.

  But “light swimming” wasn’t going to do Annabelle any good. Not while the rest of the team was getting to the peak of training, before they’d taper to get ready for the biggest races of the season.

  Mitch didn’t clarify what he was really asking, though. He probably figured there was no point, when Mom was calling Coach Colette to pull Annabelle from the high school team, anyway.

  And on the drive home, he turned the radio up loud so they wouldn’t have to talk.

  He’d been so proud and happy so, so recently, when Colette had asked Annabelle to swim up with the high school team. But now that was over. There were no upcoming meets for them to strategize about. There was no point in breaking down some element of her stroke.

  Without swimming, everything between the two of them was even more broken than her messed-up hand. Without swimming, she and Mitch didn’t have anything to say to each other at all.

  But just when the tears had pooled in Annabelle’s eyes, her phone chirped, and there it was: what she’d been waiting and waiting for. A message from Connor. Finally.

  Even though Mitch was focused on the road, she shielded her phone the way kids shielded their test papers at school.

  Sorry for not texting before, he wrote. And sorry we couldn’t find you.

  Couldn’t find her. So he must have tried!

  Battery was dying and everything was chaos!

  And then he wrote, See you at practice Monday?

  With a smiley face. Like he was hoping he would.

  Annabelle didn’t tell him about being off the team for good, but when she wrote back about her wrist and thumb, he sent back a string of sad emojis.

  She looked at them for the whole rest of the drive home, letting those tiny yellow faces parade through her mind and block out the memory of Jeremy’s angry face from the night before and Mom’s and Mitch’s worse-than-angry ones from this morning.

  Chapter 21

  Annabelle was in so much trouble that she was barely allowed to leave the house. There was no way she would have been able to go see the seals at Bluff Point on Sunday with Jeremy even if he’d still wanted to, which she was sure he didn’t. But at least Mom said she could take her summer reading book and walk down to the little residents-only beach at the end of the unpaved side road that split off from their street. The place where she, Mom, and Mitch sometimes went to watch the sunset and Mitch took out his little boat for a sail.

  “I’ll come check on you in a little bit!” Mom said, because she was keeping tabs on Annabelle’s every move.

  The side road wasn’t paved, but the sand was packed down hard from cars driving over it. As Annabelle reached the dunes, it turned as soft and fine as the powdered sugar Mitch used to dust the tops of waffles when he made them for breakfast on the weekends.

  The morning sun baked the metal and black fabric of her wrist brace, so she plopped down in the sand a few feet away from the dunes, slid off the brace, and let her swollen hand rest on the warm pillow the sand made.

 
; The little beach was a protected bay, which meant the water was always calm. Tiny ripples wrinkled the glassy surface and lapped against the shore, and long piles of dried brown seaweed stretched across the sand. The Bennetts from next door were out playing. Mrs. Bennett stood at the edge of the water, watching little Kelsey squeal and splash as she ran a few steps out and then back. But Mr. Bennett was out pretty far. Julia, Kelsey’s older sister, was holding onto a kickboard and kicking her way to him over the tiny ripple-waves.

  “Almost here!” he called. “You can do it!”

  Annabelle’s legs itched to jump into the water and show Julia how to make her kicks more efficient—by slowing them down and letting her feet sink deeper instead of skimming the surface and sending up so much splash.

  Annabelle didn’t usually swim for real in the ocean—she mostly just waded out to the sandbar here or rode in the waves at Bluff Point and saved her real strokes for the pool.

  But today, if her wrist and thumb didn’t ache, she would have loved to wade out to the sandbar and then keep on swimming as far as she could go. All the way out past the protected cove, toward the rocky open ocean.

  And as she sat there looking out at the water, she remembered something she hadn’t thought of in ages. From back before Mom had met Mitch, before Annabelle had even heard of Gray Island. Back when she, Mom, and Dad had gone down to the Jersey Shore for a week one summer.

  They’d gone to the beach early in the morning, before it got crowded. The water had been calm, and she and Dad had kicked their way out to a buoy. Annabelle had been propped up on a boogie board while her dad had crawled along, never putting his face in the water, so she’d never feel alone.

  “It’s too far,” she’d protested. “I can barely even see it.”

  “You’re doing great,” Dad had said. “But if you get tired, we’ll turn around. Any time. Just say the word.”

  Her legs did get tired, but not until they were so close to the buoy that she could see the black stripes on top. She couldn’t turn around now, when they’d gotten this close, but the farther she kept going, the farther she’d have to kick her way back.