Half a Chance

by Cynthia Lord

  Dad fidgeted with his camera, and I knew he was fretting that the light was going fast. “That’s wonderful. Lucy, maybe you can take some photos of the loons to show me when I get home?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If they let me get close enough.”

  “Be here at ten o’clock,” Grandma Lilah said to me. “That’s when we do Loon Patrol.”

  I drew in a sharp breath. Did she think I was asking to go with them? “Oh, I didn’t mean —”

  “Can you swim?” she asked. “You don’t usually have to, but if the kayak tips over, it’s good to know how.”

  If the kayak tips over? “I’ve never been kayaking.”

  “It’s much easier than canoeing,” Dad said. “But Mom’s driving me to the airport around ten. You’d miss coming with us.”

  I opened my mouth, but I felt both ways. I wanted to spend as much time with Dad as I could. But he’s always full of details for his trip right before he leaves on a long photography assignment. And airport good-byes are the saddest, emptiest good-byes when you’re the one staying behind. I hate that moment when Dad walks off to security and then looks back and gives one last wave. Though he tries to hide it, I can tell he’s excited to be heading off somewhere new. I don’t say it, but I always wonder, What if he doesn’t come back? What if this time he’s unlucky and gets some weird flu or is bitten by some poisonous animal, and that excited, happy-to-be-leaving wave is the last thing I see?

  But if I said no to our new neighbors again, they might stop asking me. Dad was going to Arizona, and I had to make it work here.

  I threw Dad an apologetic glance. “Would it really be okay if I don’t come to the airport?”

  He frowned a little, but nodded. Turning to Grandma Lilah, he said, “You’ll watch out for Lucy if we let her stay behind?”

  “Of course!” she said, smiling.

  The light in the sky had turned to white — a colder light now. As Dad and I walked home toward our cottage, I hoped I hadn’t hurt his feelings.

  “I got some nice shots,” he said. “Nothing great, but they’re okay. Are you hungry? I’ll see if I can figure out the stove and make us some breakfast before I have to get packing.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to go today,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Dad replied. “But you can text me and call me.”

  “Don’t worry, I will!” I’d been begging for my own phone ever since some other kids at school started getting them. Mom and Dad’s answer was always no, until a few weeks ago when it turned to yes. I think maybe the phone was an apology present for moving again.

  “Texting will be easier than calling,” Dad said. “There’s the time difference between New Hampshire and Arizona, and sometimes I’ll be too busy to answer a phone.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Our footsteps crunched the little beach rocks, sounding extra loud in the quiet around us.

  “You know it’s hard for me to go, right?” Dad asked. “But it’s my job and it’s important. It’s only for a while, and then I’ll be home for a much longer stretch.”

  As much as I hated for him to go, I did understand. When I’m thinking about how to frame a shot and when to click, there’s nothing else. It fills me up in a good way. And Dad doesn’t just take pictures, he tells stories with his photos: a tiny animal that’s almost extinct, people who don’t get along with each other, or harsh remote places that most people would never get to see if he didn’t show them.

  Still, I wish he could do that important, make-a-difference thing at home. Most times when one of the magazines he works for sends him on a trip, he’s only gone for a week or so. But every now and then, it’s for many weeks. This time was one of the longest — almost two months. And he was leaving us behind to do all the work of moving. “It’s just how it all worked out this time,” he said, but I couldn’t help thinking it had worked out better for him than for us.

  “Look,” Dad said. “There’s a loon flying. It must be the mate, called home by the one we’ve been hearing.”

  The bird flying over the lake was big, but not soaring gracefully like an eagle or a hawk. He was beating his wings fast, like it was a struggle to stay in the air. He landed with a long splashdown on the water.

  “Good morning!” I heard behind me.

  I looked back to Grandma Lilah standing alone on her dock, but she wasn’t talking to us. She was looking out at the lake, calling to the loons.

  As Dad packed and Mom unpacked in the living room, I checked the clock every few minutes so I wouldn’t miss ten o’clock, when I’d promised Grandma Lilah I’d be ready for kayaking and Loon Patrol (whatever that was).

  Why did I agree to try something new with people I didn’t know? What if I fell in the lake?

  “I can’t take any more to Arizona than I have to.” Dad looked around the living room at the piles of equipment and clothes. “Some of these planes are so small, the pilots even wanted to know how much I weigh.”

  “But they’re safe?” Mom asked, pulling books from one of our moving boxes.

  “Don’t worry,” Dad said. “These pilots have been flying these routes forever. I’ll call when I get there — as long as I can get cell phone reception.”

  “Call me, too,” I said. “Remember, I have my own phone now.”

  “Okay.” Dad picked up a paper from his pile. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about this. Lucy, would you do me a favor? A bunch of portfolios will be coming in the mail from my editor sometime in August. Would you keep an eye out for them? It’ll be a big package. Just put it somewhere that I can find it when I get home, okay?”

  “All right,” I said. “What kind of portfolios?”

  “It’s for a contest I’m judging. I told Marjorie I wouldn’t have time, but she insisted. So I have to judge them as soon as I get home.”

  “Can I see?” I reached for the paper.

  Why didn’t he tell me about this?

  As I folded the list small to fit in my shorts pocket with my camera, Ansel got up from his snoozing spot near the window and flopped down at my feet. He kept lying down and getting up and moving to a new spot — like he had to try them all to see which ones felt right.

  “Hey, Ansel,” I said. “Get the leash?”

  Ansel’s head snapped up. Leash is one of Ansel’s tail-wagging words (treat, car, and bacon are others). It stung that Dad hadn’t told me about the contest, and I didn’t want to sit there and watch him pack.

  When Ansel gets excited, he can’t pick between running and jumping, so he does both. He ran-jumped around the room, messing up one of Dad’s piles on his way.

  I waited until we were outside and away from the living room windows before I looped Ansel’s leash around my wrist and unfolded the contest paper.

  Maybe Dad thought I wouldn’t be interested? Or maybe he worried people would say I had an unfair advantage because he was the judge? But the uneasy feeling in my stomach was afraid it wasn’t for either of those reasons. Maybe Dad hadn’t told me because he thought I had no chance of winning.

  As Ansel sniffed a clump of birch trees beside the driveway, I looked through the contest words. Some would be difficult, and others were full of possibilities. “Lines” could be people waiting for concert tickets, ripples moving outward in water, rows of bricks on a building, tree trunks.

  I glanced up into the birch trees. The mix of light and shadows on the leaves created changing shapes and different greens. Leaves are brighter when they’re lit from above. And the blue sky gave some nice contrast.

  I turned the camera portrait-style. This photo was all about soaring height. I took baby steps until all the white birch trunks worked together in the frame, thick at the bottom, thinner as they climbed, ending in a burst of leaves, like fireworks exploding. Beautiful, strong lines.

  As I clicked the shot, Ansel started wagging all over. When he makes a friend, he makes it hard.

  “Hey, Lucy!” Nate said, coming across his yard like we’d been neighbors forever. “What a
re you doing?” He reached out to pat Ansel.

  I glanced at the paper in my hand. “Oh. I just found out about a photography contest. It’s like a scavenger hunt — except instead of collecting things, you take photos. I was playing around with one of the words.” I flipped on my camera’s screen and showed Nate my shot of the birch trees. “This is ‘Lines.’”

  “Wow, that’s good! It looks like it could be a postcard,” Nate said. “What do you get if you win?”

  I hadn’t even checked, so I scanned the rules at the bottom of the page. “First place gets five hundred dollars and all the winner’s photos are published in the magazine. They also pick three runners-up, who each get two hundred fifty dollars and one photo published, and then there are some honorable mentions who just get their names printed.”

  Nate looked at the list with me. “This looks fun! ‘At the shore’ would be easy. You could just take a picture of the lake.”

  I looked over at the lake: sun reflecting off the waves, the mountains rising above the trees on the far side, and a sailboat in the middle. It was pretty, but ordinary. “It’s a good idea, but I bet lots of kids’ photos would look exactly like this. If I were really doing the contest, I’d want mine to be different, so it would stand out.”

  As soon as I said it, I worried I might’ve hurt Nate’s feelings and wished I could take the words back.

  But he grinned. “There’s a dead fish down on the beach. That’d be different. And it’s at the shore!”

  I smiled with relief. “That’d be too different!”

  “Can I help you look for something?” he offered. “I can’t go home yet. One of my little cousins ate the other one’s Popsicle. Now they’re both crying. I came outside to escape.”

  I’d never had a boy as a good friend before. And I’d never had a friend who liked taking photos with me, either. “Sure,” I said.

  But as we headed for the lake, Ansel had other ideas. “He doesn’t like water,” I told Nate. Ansel licked my hand as I knotted his leash around a little tree growing at the start of the sand. “Okay, you win. You can stay here, but no barking, okay?”

  At the shore, I crouched to examine the sand. From a distance, sand seems like one big thing, but up close, it’s a million tiny ones. A carpet of baby rocks.

  But the problem with sand is that it makes a better background than a subject for a photo. So I looked for something small to place on the sand. All I found were a few little sticks of driftwood, some pinecones, a dirty snarl of rope from someone’s boat, and a cigarette butt.

  “Nothing seems special enough,” I said.

  “How about a different word, then?” Nate said. “If you skipped a rock on the water, that could be ‘skip.’ It’d be a cool action shot.”

  “It’d be hard to skip a rock and hold the camera still enough to take the photo,” I said. But really, I didn’t know how to skip a rock, even though I’d tried tons of times before.

  “I’ll do it.” Nate kicked off his sneakers. “We need some good flat rocks — the flatter, the better.”

  Underwater looked bumpy, and some of the rocks had a greenish slimy haze on them. So I kept my flip-flops on and stepped in. My bright pink nail polish and blue flip-flops stood out brilliantly against the green and tan and gray of the lake bottom. My teeth clenched with the cold, but the water felt soft around my ankles.

  Nate’s first rock sliced into a wave without bouncing once. “I have to throw them out farther,” he said.

  Holding tight to my camera with one hand, I reached down through the water with my other to help him find rocks. A wave splashed little pinpricks of cold drops up my bare arm. The first rock I chose looked flat from above, but when I pried it from the sand, the other side was rounded like the bottom of a bowl. I dropped it back. The next rock was flat and smooth.

  Nate waited for me to get the camera ready before he threw. Six skips!

  I could hardly click fast enough to keep up. “Wow! How’d you get so many?”

  “The trick is to get low,” Nate said. “If you throw higher, it doesn’t work as well. And then put some spin on it — more spin, more skips.” He picked up another rock. “You put one finger on top like this. Then twist the rock as you throw. I’ll hold your camera, if you want to try.”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said quickly. “I’ll take the photos.”

  I changed my setting to “burst” so my camera would take a whole series of shots with each click. Nate threw again. Just before I saw the rock in the frame, I pushed the button. Nate’s next rock skipped five times and I got off a burst of shots.

  “So where did you live before here?” he asked.

  “Massachusetts, right near Boston,” I said. “This is a big change.”

  “A good change? Or a bad change?”

  I thought about it. “Both. Even though this town seems really small, I don’t know where anything is yet. But there are some good things, too.”

  “Like what?”

  I shrugged. “The lake is nice. I have a bigger room and it’s on the corner of our house, so I get two windows instead of only one. I love animals, so I’m excited there are more of those here.”

  “I saw a moose last summer. He was over in the pond near the dump,” Nate said.

  “That’s cool!” I said. “I didn’t know there was a pond.”

  The water had been biting-cold, but I was surprised how fast I’d gotten used to it. Or maybe I was just numb now.

  “I can help you find where things are,” Nate said. “I’ve been coming here with my family ever since I was born. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No, it’s just me and my parents and Ansel.” I glanced at Nate to see if he were hoping there was someone else he could be friends with, instead of me. But he didn’t look disappointed.

  Turning sideways, Nate tossed off a rock. “We have a houseful this summer: my grandmother, my parents, my older sister, Emily. She’s fifteen. And my aunt Pat is here with Morgan and Mason, her two little kids. I like Morgan and Mason in small doses, but all summer is a big dose.”

  “Wow. That’s a lot of people.”

  “It’s too many people!”

  I clicked as the next rock crashed into the water. “Sorry, that one stunk,” Nate said.

  I probably had a few good shots already, but I didn’t want it to be over. We hunted rocks and Nate threw them, one after the other, until Ansel was asleep under the little tree and someone called, “Nate! Loon Patrol!”

  “Do you think you got a good enough ‘skip’?” he asked.

  “I won’t know until I look through them,” I said. “But thanks! I have to bring Ansel back inside and say good-bye to my dad. Then I’ll be ready for Loon Patrol.”

  “You’re coming with us?” Nate asked, surprised.

  My smile fell. “Grandma Lilah invited me. But I don’t have to —”

  “No, that’s great!” Nate said quickly. “It’s usually just Emily and me.”

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t even know what to do on a loon patrol. And I’ve never kayaked before. I thought Grandma Lilah would show me.”

  He grinned. “Don’t worry. It’s easy. There’s a group called the Loon Preservation Committee that keeps track of how the loons are doing in New Hampshire. So if you live on a lake, you can volunteer and tell them about your loons: how many you have and if they lay eggs and if they hatch — stuff like that. Grandma Lilah’s been our lake’s loon person ever since I was little. She’s the one who started calling it Loon Patrol. But she can’t get out on the lake anymore, so my family takes turns doing it for her. There’s a form to fill out, but Emily and I will do that. You can just come with us. Do you need a life vest and stuff?”

  “I need everything,” I said.

  “No problem. We have extra. I’ll get you a life vest and a paddle and meet you on our dock.”

  My wet flip-flops squished over all those little beach rocks as I walked up to untangle Ansel’s leash from the tree where I’d looped
it and then from every bush that he’d wrapped himself around.

  Climbing our porch steps, I turned on my camera’s screen to see my “Skip” shots. Some were so bad that I deleted them immediately, but I had two really good ones. The first wasn’t a great photograph, but it had Nate in it. And he looked great.

  And the other was a rock caught in midair, water rising in an elegant crystal crown behind it.

  A perfect skip.

  Wading out to the pink kayak bobbing in the knee-high water next to the dock, I didn’t think this looked easy at all.

  “Maybe the loons have a baby now,” Grandma Lilah said from the dock. “There was an egg!”

  “There are two eggs this year,” Emily said. “Last year the loons only laid one, but this year they have two.” She smiled and I noticed a space between her front teeth, smaller than Nate’s but there just the same.

  I was glad for that little gap, because when I first saw her, I wasn’t sure if Emily would be nice. She had dark blond hair, parted on the side, and looked like the kind of cool, older girl who is good at every sport and doesn’t have to try hard to be pretty. Those girls don’t usually talk to me — unless they have to.

  But Emily had said, “Great!” when Nate told her I was coming, like she really meant it. And when Nate asked if we should invite Megan, Emily said, “Not today. There are only three kayaks and Lucy’s our new neighbor. I want to get to know her, too,” and I liked her even more.

  “The loons have two eggs!” Grandma Lilah said. “How wonderful! Did you write that down?”

  “Yes.” Nate tipped the clipboard to show me the Volunteer Casual Site Survey Form. “We fill this out every time we check on the loons. The Loon Preservation Committee wants to know the weather and if the water was choppy or calm. Then we write down how many loons we saw and what they were doing.”

  “Every day,” Grandma Lilah said. “We must check on them every day.”

  “Pretty much,” Emily whispered to me.

  “Write down the time you start,” Grandma Lilah said.