Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (15 page)

B
ecca steeled herself for the arrival of Carnation Day at South Whidbey High School. She knew it was just the sort of event that generally turned out to be a feelings smasher, something akin to not receiving a Valentine in your elementary school classroom, only worse. But she discovered soon enough that several years ago the PTA had developed a solution to the Carnationless-in-Langley problem. Every kid who was destined
not
to have a flower ended up with one from the PTA.

The flowers were distributed just before lunch, giving everyone time to read the messages attached to the carnations’ stems. As a result, the cheerleaders were walking around the commons with so many flowers that they looked like Olympic ice skaters post performance. So were the kids deemed popular. So were the athletes, as you would expect. Cries of Wow! Cool! Chill! No way! were everywhere as these kids dumped armfuls of flowers onto the tables and sat to read their messages. But along with those cries and the chatter and the laughter came the whispers, which Becca recognized as hot and intense. They filled the air with a non-noise noise that was generated by the kids who’d received only one flower and the other kids who
saw
them with only one flower.

He is
 . . .
she’s hurtin’
 . . .
try dropping fifty pounds, cow
 . . .
what a loser
 . . .
hate this hate this hate this
 . . .
stupid idiot anyway
 . . .
always this way
 . . .
he didn’t
 . . .
she did
 . . .
why doesn’t anyone
 . . . made a lot of claims about how people were feeling. To Becca, the whole thing seemed like an idea guaranteed to cement bad feelings everywhere.

She’d prepared herself for the single carnation way in advance of the day. Although she’d thought about sending herself two flowers so she wouldn’t look like such a loser, she’d decided she’d rather spend the money on something a little more important, like food. So she was surprised when she received three flowers.

She wasn’t sure how they’d managed it, but Diana Kinsale, Seth Darrow, and Debbie Grieder had all sent her carnations, with messages that were funny and fond. She smiled particularly over Seth’s—“You & Me, Sweatie, in it Togehter”—and especially at the Seth-like misspellings. She thought of what a real
friend
Seth was. If he’d still been a student at South Whidbey High School, she would have sent him six flowers, she decided.

So she was feeling far less horrible than she’d expected to feel because, of course, the one thing she knew was that she’d get no flowers from Derric. And she was relatively okay with this until Courtney Baker staggered into the room.

She had what looked like one hundred carnations in her arms. It was probably going to take her the entire lunch hour just to read the messages, Becca figured. She glanced around for Derric and assumed he’d be similarly burdened. But he wasn’t in sight.

A cheerleader heaped with carnations joined Courtney, giving the eye to her haul of flowers. Becca heard her say, “Wow. Guess I don’t need to ask how things’re going with
you
two, do I?” to which Courtney leaned over and said something to the cheerleader, who responded with, “Courtney! You didn’t! No way!”

Becca heard nothing more between the girls, for someone ran into the back of her chair with enough force to knock her into the table. A snarky voice said, “Oh, excuse me, fattie,” and Becca didn’t even need to raise her head to know Jenn McDaniels was passing behind her. Jenn added, “Wow. You have three friends?” in reference to Becca’s three carnations. Becca swiveled in her seat and saw Jenn had one. In spite of herself, she said, “Talking about friends, Jenn . . .” and nothing more.

Jenn threw her carnation into Becca’s lap. “Yeah right,” she snapped. “Talking about friends,” and she stalked off with
smart-ass . . . fat broad . . . so freaking ugly
following her, along with a few other words that always made whispers from Jenn McDaniels unmistakable in their origin.

Becca sighed, but at the same time she realized that Jenn’s whispers didn’t hurt her feelings as they had at first. She thought about this and wondered if it meant she was closer to what her grandmother had always told her about the real purpose behind hearing whispers:
The point is to use them to get inside someone’s skin and walk around for a bit in order to understand them better
had been her instructions. While Becca hadn’t understood at the time what her grandmother meant, she was getting the feeling that she might be closer to understanding that meaning now.

She opened the message on Jenn’s flower, ready to see something like “Your Friendly PTA” printed upon the unfurled slip of paper. What she saw instead was, “From your personal Studboy.” So she’d been wrong about Jenn McDaniels, she thought.

• • •

SHE WENT INTO
town after school, taking the island bus, which dropped her close to the Cliff Motel. It looked empty and sad at this time of year, and the absence of Debbie Grieder’s SUV told Becca she would have to wait to thank her older friend for her kindness and the message “DG and her munchkins think U R the best.” She went on to South Whidbey Commons. Seth, she figured, was probably there.

So were a lot of other people, as things turned out. She walked in and immediately saw Seth sitting at a table in the corner reading a book that turned out to be
Siddhartha.
He was moving his lips and squinting at the page, but what Becca wondered was how he could read at all. The noise level in the place was excruciating. She tried to drown it with static from the AUD box, but even that didn’t do much good. A crowd had gathered in the gallery room, but there were way too many people, and they spilled out into the coffee room as well.

She worked her way through them and joined Seth. He looked up from his book, his face brightening when he saw her.

She said, “Hey.”

He said, “Back atcha.”

“You sent me a flower. That was totally nice.”

“You know me. Nice is my middle name. When it isn’t Dumbnuts.”

“It’s never Dumbnuts.”

“Oh con-trair,” he countered. “It’s Dumbnuts once a week, at least. Twice if my luck’s bad. Anyways, I’m a say-it-with-flowers dude and you’re a getting-a-flower babe. That being the case, I sent you a flower.” He set his book down on the table, spine up. He removed his black fedora and messed with his ponytail. “But this doesn’t mean we’re hooked up, okay?” he said. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Just didn’t want you to face the one-carnation curse.”

“I got three,” she told him.

“Damn. I shoulda saved my buck.”

She said, “And Jenn McDaniels threw hers at me.”

“Ooooh. She got just one? That’s nasty. But not surprising.”

“It wasn’t from the PTA,” Becca told him. “It was from Studboy. That’s what it said.”

“Then she probably sent it to herself,” Seth told her. “Cuz that’s one bull ain’t no cowpoke gonna want to ride.”

Becca frowned. “You don’t mean . . .”

“I do mean. That plus all her personal crap . . . ? Keep about fifty yards between yourself and that one.”

Becca began to respond, but angry shouting interrupted her. It came from the gallery and the ongoing meeting. A man was yelling, “Why don’t you people get a life, for God’s sake? You act like that animal’s here to save this dump of a town.” At this, outraged retorts came from all directions.

Seth said, “Weirdness prevails as usual,” and Becca turned in her chair to see what was happening.

Becca recognized a man on his feet. Eddie Beddoe, she thought, the guy with the rifle on the beach at Sandy Point. Someone was yelling at him, “Shut up and sit down!” while someone else shouted, “When was the last time you did anything positive for Langley, Eddie?” Then another voice said, “Let’s get ourselves calmed down, folks,” and this was a voice that Becca knew. Ivar Thorndyke was in the meeting. She turned back to Seth and asked, “What’s going on?”

“Seal spotters called an emergency meeting.”

“The black seal again?”

“Oh yeah. If the seal spotters have a confab, there’s only ever one reason.”

Becca thought about this and about being on the boat when Ivar confronted Annie Taylor and Chad Pederson. She said, “Seth, d’you know much about that seal?”

“All’s I know is she’s a seal and she’s black,” he said. “She shows up once a year and gets a big hallelujah from the town.”

Becca looked back at the meeting, where it seemed as if a little pushing and shoving was going on. She said to Seth, “I think it’s more than that.”

“How so?”

“She’s wearing a transmitter.”

“Who?”

“The seal.”

“Like what? She’s a
mechanical
seal?” He laughed. “Not hardly, Beck. She’s always looked pretty real to me. Or d’you mean she’s communicating with someone? Hey, maybe she’s an alien life-form. Get too close and she’ll put babies down your throat and they’ll blast out of your stomach when they get their teeth.”

“Very funny,” Becca said. “But I’m telling you, I was there when Annie Taylor saw her and
when
she saw that there was a transmitter on her. . . . It was a huge thing, Seth. There’s something going on.”

She eased her way to the edge of the meeting, to the point where she could see into the gallery. Ivar was at the front of the crowd, which spread out before him like a human fan. Eddie Beddoe had elbowed his way forward, and he was in the act of confronting Ivar. The size of the room—which was small—made him look massive. The veins in his temples were so filled with blood that they looked like worms crawling across his skin.

He was saying, “You listen to me, all of you. That blasted seal don’t belong here. You know that, Thorndyke, better ’n anyone. And the sooner the rest of you idiots get that into your thick skulls, the better off all of us’re going to be.”

More shouts ensued. Becca scanned the crowd. She was surprised to see that Jenn McDaniels was there, sitting next to Annie Taylor. On Annie’s other side sat Chad Pederson, and he and Annie were in the middle of some kind of intense conversation. For her part, Jenn was slouched in her seat, watching Ivar and Eddie suspiciously.

Eddie Beddoe was going on, developing a real head of steam on the topic of the coal black seal. “That animal’s been nothing but trouble since the day she showed up. She’s already way too easy around people. She’s at the point of attacking some kid on the beach. And
then
where’s the lot of you going to be? She’s probably already carrying a disease ’cause why else would she be so close to shore.”

Voices rose higher. People jumped to their feet. Ivar did what he could to settle them down. It look to Becca like pandemonium, but it was a pandemonium that Eddie was clearly enjoying.

He went on with, “Fish and Wildlife need to be told. They need to get her out of here before she passes on whatever the hell she’s got and our fishing and crabbing is ruined. You understand?”

At that, Annie Taylor jumped up. She shouted, “Listen to me! That seal is perfectly healthy. I’ve seen her up close. So has Chad”—here she put her hand on the young man’s shoulder—“and so has Mr. Thorndyke for that matter.”

Voices rose in horror at this information.

“You got close?”

“What the hell’s going on?”

“You some kind of hypocrite, Thorndyke?”

“Yeah, you ask him that!” Eddie Beddoe crowed. “You ask him what he wants with that seal!”

More shouting, more roaring, more swearing ensued. So much tension developed that Becca could feel it. It impeded her breathing and got in the way of her ability to think. She needed to get
out
of the place, so she fumbled through the crowd and got to the door, and once outside, she took gulps of cold air.

Darkness had fallen, and the shadows around her spelled a warning of danger. Someone in Langley needed to heed it, Becca thought, before it was far too late.

Goss Lake