Winter's Tide Page 12

  Meanwhile, I watched Diana and Jeremy together. He walked beside her, talking and waving his hands. Was she blind? Couldn’t she see that he liked her?

  I ran to catch up and caught the tail end of their conversation.

  “So there was this young stallion, and I named him Firecracker,” Diana was saying. “And I watched him get into a fight with the stallion that was the leader of his herd. Firecracker got thrown out of the herd.”

  “Oh, that must have been amazing,” Jeremy said.

  “Their fight was terrible to watch. Firecracker was standing off by himself, and every time he tried to walk closer, the black stallion charged him. And they’d rear up on their hind legs, and they were trying to pummel each other with their front hooves and bite each other’s necks. And horses have to have the herd to survive. But by the end of our week there, Firecracker had found a friend. He’d found his own herd. It really gave me hope.”

  “Same way with the whales,” Jeremy said. The wind blew his longish red bangs into his eyes, and he impatiently swiped them away. “They have to have their pod too. You know, pilot whales often follow one older female. Sometimes, if there’s something wrong with the leader, she might strand herself, and then all the whales in the pod will follow her. So that’s why whole groups of pilot whales sometimes strand themselves. And then, you know, it’s such a tragedy, because they all die, but only one was sick.”

  Could two people be a better match? Listen to them talking about the lives of animals.

  “I heard that sometimes sonar can cause whales to strand themselves,” Diana said. “Is that true?” While she asked him this, she tiptoed to within a few feet of one of the horses that was grazing and kneeled to take a close-up picture of the horse’s face and neck.

  “I think the whales use echolocation to call to each other and, like, give each other directions. Some people say the sonar can mess them up. I heard about cases where entire pods of thirty whales have stranded themselves in shallow bays after the Navy did sonar testing.”

  “No kidding!” Diana said. She pointed at the horses that were grazing. “Look, see? The pinto is the stallion. All the other horses here are mares. And even though he’s in the back of the herd, he’s telling the mares which way to go. He directs them with his head.”

  Jeremy and I watched as the stallion did as Diana described, lowering his head and slowly herding the mares along. Though the horses did not seem afraid of us, the stallion was slowly moving them away. Diana and Jeremy followed at a distance, still talking about animals. We came to the end of the pasture and started climbing a small dune. Just past the dune the horses began to melt into a grove of gnarled and twisted trees with shiny green leaves. The wind whistled through the gray, crooked branches.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Jeremy said. “Right out there is where they found the Queen Anne’s Revenge.” He pointed toward the ocean side of the island. “Right off the tip of this island.”

  “Blackbeard’s ship, right?” Diana said.

  “Yeah.” Then Jeremy asked, “So since you love animals so much, are you planning to be a veterinarian or something?” Jeremy asked.

  Diana blushed. “Stephanie and I helped a veterinarian do surgery once on a wolf-dog. That was really cool, wasn’t it, Steph?”

  I had been terrified. “Sure,” I said.

  “The vet said the animals of the world could use more people like me,” Diana said. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

  “You should do it,” Jeremy said. “But keep an eye on your grades. I’ve heard it’s hard to get into vet school.”

  Diana opened her mouth to say something, glanced at me, and then didn’t say anything. I knew exactly what she was thinking about. Being suspended. And she didn’t want Jeremy to know. Well, I wasn’t going to tell him if she wasn’t.

  I looked at the time on my phone again. “Hey, Diana, we have to go!”

  “No, we don’t. If they have to wait a few minutes, it’s not the end of the world.”

  “Jeremy, how long does it take to get back to Beaufort from here?” I asked.

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  “See, we better go. It will take time to tie up the boat and walk back to the parking lot. We’re supposed to meet them in thirty minutes.”

  “Just a few more minutes!” Diana kept walking after the horses. I could feel myself starting to become upset. At the same time, I hardly knew Jeremy, and I didn’t want to get in a fight with Diana in front of him.

  “They’ll get worried about us.”

  Now Diana wasn’t even talking to me. She was just walking, ignoring me. My heart beat harder, and I felt out of breath. I could feel the blood pounding behind my eyes as I got madder and madder. Diana was always doing whatever she wanted and not paying attention to other people.

  I was tired of her pushing me around.

  “Diana!” I yelled, so loud that it hurt my throat, so loud that the horses started to run, crashing through the undergrowth around the trees. The pounding of their hooves gradually died away. A few branches swayed gently from their passing.

  Diana threw her hands in the air in disgust. “I can’t believe you did that! You scared them!”

  “We have to go!” I yelled. “Why are you like this? Grammy is waiting in the hospital for us to come visit her. She’s been waiting there all day!”

  “I don’t care!” Diana flung back over her shoulder.

  Anger flashed through me. She never cares! She never cares about anyone! I ran after her, shouting. “Once I told Colleen that you cared more about animals than you did about people, and it’s true!” I drew a deep breath into my lungs, feeling the burn of the cold air. And it came out. “That’s why people call you ‘annn-i-mal,’ Diana!”

  Diana stopped and turned and stared at me. “What?”

  There was a sudden silence, during which the constant roar of the surf on the other side of the island seemed to swell to a crescendo inside my head. I realized that I had just told Diana the secret that I had been keeping all of this time. That I was the one who had started people calling her “animal.” That it was my fault that she had endured this name-calling for over a year.

  Her mouth hung open, but she seemed unable to speak. She just stared at me in shock. I stared back at her, my heart beating in my throat.

  Jeremy looked from one of us to the other, then jammed his hands into his pockets and focused on the ground, scuffing the sand beneath his feet. “I guess we better go,” he said finally.

  In silence, we trudged back toward the meadow. Diana stayed as far away from me as she could. She and Jeremy didn’t talk anymore. The wind blew and the waves pounded on the beach-side of the island with an endlessness that made me want to put my hands over my ears.

  Why had I told her? Why hadn’t I told her before? Would she ever understand that I hadn’t done it on purpose?

  15

  DIANA

  I walked along the sand blindly. There was a buzzing in my head, and I couldn’t get my thoughts straight. I tried to remember what Dr. Shrink had told me about taking deep breaths and the Moronic Mood-O-Meter, but I felt so confused I couldn’t focus on a number. How could Stephanie have done that to me? I just felt totally, totally betrayed.

  The winter wind was freezing on my face and ears. I jammed my cold hands into my coat pockets. I hadn’t even said good-bye to the horses.

  All those people calling me names for over a year, and it was because of Stephanie? Stephanie started it? Stephanie, who, after all these months, I had finally started to trust? Stephanie, who I thought cared about me?

  I felt numb.

  I stumbled through the meadow and onto the sand, confused. I couldn’t even look at her. I sneaked a glance at Jeremy. What must he think?

  But he was standing beside the water with his hands hanging limply at his sides. He turned to me with a look of anguish on his face.

  And then I looked out at the water and saw it. The tide had come in. Our boat was floating away.
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  It was about twenty yards out, bobbing up and down on the water. It seemed to be slipping farther away with every second.

  “I forgot to drop anchor,” Jeremy said.

  Of course Stephanie freaked out. She gasped, tightly wrapping her arms around her body. “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do?”

  With a groaning growl of fury, Jeremy picked up a shell, and threw it at the boat. It flew over and disappeared into the water.

  Then we all three stood in silence, staring at the bobbing boat. Seconds ticked by at a crawl. My thoughts raced.

  “We have to do something quick!” I said. “One of us has to swim in after it!”

  Stephanie looked at Jeremy with terror on her face. He drew a deep breath, took off his coat, threw it on the sand, and ran splashing into the surf, yelling at the shock of the cold water.

  He waded as deep as he could, then started to swim. I ran over and picked up his coat, shouting encouragement at him. “Go, Jeremy! You can do it!”

  He looked small as he stroked his way toward the boat, his reddish curls turning dark and wet. As he got closer the bow raised up and crashed down, and he dodged away, angling toward the back. Then he disappeared behind the boat. For long seconds I held my breath, waiting for him to reappear.

  “Where is he?” Stephanie asked. I didn’t answer.

  At last I saw his head pop up over the stern, and he pulled himself, dripping, over the edge and dropped into the boat. I could only imagine how freezing he must be. He stumbled to the steering wheel and struggled with the key. It seemed to be taking him forever to start the boat. Then I realized he was shivering so violently he was having a hard time getting the key into the ignition.

  “I’m sh-shaking too hard,” he yelled. And then he threw a rope toward us. I ran in ankle deep and grabbed it. “Pull me in,” he yelled.

  I pulled as hard as I could, running up the beach, until the boat sluggishly moved into shallower water the way it had been before.

  “Get in!” he called. The boat was still in a few inches of water.

  I waded in, gritting my teeth against the shock of the cold water. I threw Jeremy’s coat onto the boat and then clambered and shimmied onboard. Jeremy was shaking really hard, breathing through his teeth, and when I realized he was shaking too hard to put his coat on, I put it on for him.

  While I was catching my breath, I could see Stephanie stop a moment to consider whether to get her new Christmas boots wet. She sat down on the sand and pulled them off. Disgusted, I ignored her when she tried to hand her boots up to me. She threw them in, and one of them landed in the bottom of the boat; the other landed on the seat.

  With a rush of anger, I picked up both of them and threw them into the water.

  “Oh no!” she cried. “Diana!” A look of horror crossed her face, and she raced after the boots into chest-deep water. She screamed when she felt how cold it was.

  “What did you do that for?” Jeremy shouted at me. His hands and face were both bright red from the cold water.

  “I’m paying her back!” I said. I caught his eye, and he looked quickly away from me with an expression of anger and disapproval. My heart thudded. Just minutes ago he had looked at me completely differently.

  Stephanie had gotten the boots now and was half-wading, half-swimming back toward the boat. Jeremy reached over the side to grab the boots from her, tossed them on the floor of the boat, and then leaned over to grab Stephanie’s red hands and pull her on board. She tumbled, with a wash of freezing water, onto the floor of the boat

  “Are you okay?” he asked, touching her shoulder gently with a shaking hand.

  She was gasping with the cold. “I’m-m-m freezing,” she chattered. Stephanie picked up the boots and tried to pour the water out of them.

  Jeremy gave me a dirty look. “Why did you ruin her boots?”

  “She ruined a year of my life! It’s not even a fair trade!” I yelled.

  He shook his head, and then started looking through the storage compartments under the seats. Among a collection of lumpy life jackets, he found two old towels and a blanket. He wrapped one of the towels and the blanket around Stephanie and wrapped the remaining towel around himself.

  Stephanie sat on the floor, crying. And shivering so hard.

  I didn’t care! She deserved it. She’d started everything. Just like I always thought, she was my enemy.

  As I walked past Jeremy, intending to sit in the front, I saw that he was shivering to the point that he couldn’t get his hands to stay on the steering wheel, and, like Stephanie, he was gasping with the cold.

  “Di-Diana,” he said. “D-drive.”

  Me? I didn’t know how to drive a boat. I didn’t know how to get back to the dock. But I looked at the way Jeremy was shaking, and I knew I had to do something. He handed me the keys and pointed to the ignition. He pointed at a T-shaped handle that was beside the wheel and described the way I had to move that handle forward to get the boat into gear and then get it moving forward. I took the wheel, and he pointed a shaking finger toward the mainland, just to the left of the island he had called Carrot Island, and I steered that way.

  He sat in the passenger seat with the towel wrapped tightly around him, gritting his chattering teeth. His hair was slicked against his head and his lips were blue. I was the only one who was dry, the only one who wasn’t freezing. And, of course, Stephanie was only wet because of me. It was my fault.

  Nobody talked on the way back. Thank goodness it was winter, and there were no other boats out here. I don’t know what I would have done if a bunch of other boats came flying at me. My heart was in my throat, beating so hard I was sure it showed through my skin. I steered the boat where Jeremy pointed, careful not to go very fast. Stephanie huddled in the floor of the boat, still gasping from the cold.

  We bumped over the waves as we headed back to shore, and I thought back to that summer of the wolves when I talked Stephanie into letting the wolves go. When my friend Russell, who loved the wolves, found out that I’d let them go, his attitude toward me was forever changed. He no longer considered me a friend, and he hadn’t forgiven me.

  It looked like Jeremy, who had liked me before, didn’t consider me a friend any more either. Well, I didn’t care!

  But I did.

  I glanced back at him, then at Stephanie, who was huddled on the floor of the boat, still crying. And at that moment I knew, in my core, the truth: Whatever Stephanie had said about me, she hadn’t said it to hurt me. She hadn’t done anything on purpose. That wasn’t something she would ever do. I knew, because I knew her. She was the girl who had struggled with her fears to help me free the wolves. She was the girl who had convinced me to forgive Cody for hitting the horse at the Outer Banks. She was the girl who had believed, on the cruise, that Manuel was a good person, even though he had been persuaded to smuggle an iguana. She always believed the best about everyone.

  “W-we’re going to be late,” Stephanie said through chattering teeth. “W-we need to tell Daddy and Lynn.” She had her phone out but she’d gotten it wet when she went in the water. I realized I would have to make the call. And we were going to get in a ton of trouble.

  But I had to concentrate on driving right now. I was headed toward the coast of Beaufort, with Carrot Island on my right-hand side and the Duke Marine Lab on my left. Waves lapped at the sides of a big research boat docked at Pivers Island at the Marine Lab.

  “S-stay away from the research boat,” Jeremy said.

  I adjusted the wheel to move our boat farther away from the boat’s bow as we drove by. I had figured out that I could move the T-handle toward me to slow the boat, and since we were approaching land, I did that.

  With seagulls soaring above us, we slid by the houses along the Beaufort waterfront now, the sound of the water slapping against the shore. There, at last, was the dock.

  “S-slow way down so you’re hardly moving,” Jeremy said. “Put the handle back into neutral. Just pull up alongside the dock. M-my dad c
an put it in the slip later.”

  I did as he said.

  “C-cut the engine by turning the key, then grab that boat cleat and wrap the rope around it,” he said. “But l-leave some p-play in the rope.” He stood up to try to show me but was still shaking too ferociously to actually do it.

  I turned the key to cut the engine, but of course the boat kept moving forward, so I raced to the side of the boat, leaned out, and grabbed the boat cleat as we slid by. The rear of the boat swung out and went all the way around until we were facing the other way, but I managed to hang onto the cleat. Then I threaded the rope from the bow through and around the cleat the way I’d seen Jeremy do it at Cape Lookout.

  He had managed to grab another cleat, but his hands were shaking too much to get the rope in the stern over it, so I did it for him.

  He nodded when I finished. “Okay.”

  I jumped out of the boat and held out my hand and pulled both Jeremy and Stephanie up onto the dock. Stephanie clutched the wet boots to her chest and wouldn’t look at me. They were both still shivering so much I knew something was seriously wrong.

  I took out the phone Dad had given me and pulled up Mom’s number.

  16

  STEPHANIE

  Daddy screeched up to the entrance of the emergency room. Lynn jumped out of the car, leaving the door hanging open, and ran inside.

  Diana had called Lynn after she’d pulled the boat up to the dock, and five minutes later Lynn and Daddy were there to pick us up. I kept trying to tell Daddy we were sorry, but I was having trouble concentrating on anything.

  I was still unable to get control over my shaking. My fingers had been bright red before, but now they were blue.

  A few minutes later, Jeremy and I were inside the emergency room, both on gurneys, wrapped in layers upon layers of warm white blankets. Fast-moving people in colorful scrubs had gotten us out of our wet clothes, wrapped us up in the blankets, stuck needles in our arms, and started IVs.

  “It’s saline solution,” Lynn said, patting my arm. “It will warm you up.”

  I vaguely understood that Jeremy was in the cubicle next to me, a curtain drawn between us. Jeremy’s parents rushed in, and between my confusion and drowsiness, I caught bits and pieces of the conversation they had with Daddy and Lynn.