Saltwater Secrets Read online

  “I think it is.”

  He stretches his neck right and left until he gets it to crack. “How so?”

  “If things had gone the way I’d wanted them to, we would’ve been busy with bonfires and lifeguards.” I add, “The disconnect between Josie and me… it’s the reason this all started. The sitch on the pier was something we were both interested in. We were both excited about it. And we needed that.”

  “Understood. But let’s get back to the facts that put someone into the hospital.” He looks at his watch. “Stella, we don’t have a lot of time, so please stick to the facts.”

  “Okay, but can I officially state something important for the record?”

  “You can, but understand that this isn’t official.”

  “Gotcha.” Then, as calmly and maturely as I can, I say, “It was all my idea. Everything. Josie didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Three Stella

  Boardwalk

  June 18 (Continued)

  Josie and I set out for our ritual: water ice and then the fun house, which is the building right next door to Water Ice World. Between the two buildings is a wooden ramp that goes from Thirty-Fourth Street to the beach.

  On the way, Josie filled me in on life down under: “I’m super busy with my school’s marine conservation society. I’m running for prez in the fall, so excited about that.” Josie also does this Aussie thing where she shortens words as much as they can possibly be. “Sea turtles are espesh a big issue.”

  “President sounds like a big deal. Good luck. Maybe I can work on some posters for you. My digital design has gotten pretty good.”

  “That’d be great, Stell. Thanks.”

  “How’s your mom?” I asked.

  “Mum is Mum.”

  Talk about a non-answer. I wondered what was up with that; instead of asking, I said, “Sea turtles are the cutest. Good thing they have your help.”

  She nodded. “How’s Greg?”

  I corrected her. “Gregory.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s good. Nice. The apartment feels different with him in it. It’s like there’s always a guest around. My mom and I never just lie around in jammies anymore, you know?” I asked. “But sometimes it’s good, like when he makes pancakes or drives me places.”

  “Change is hard, at least for me. Maybe he won’t feel like a guest after a while.” That was easy for her to say. Her mom, Kate, got remarried when Josie was a baby, so she’s only known life with her stepdad in the house. Plus he’s a surfer, which is very cool.

  “Maybe,” I said. What I didn’t say out loud was that I liked it better when it was just me and Mom. And I felt guilty that I felt that way, because why shouldn’t she be able to get remarried? I was just about to change the convo and ask Josie if she had a boyfriend, and maybe tell her about Pete, when the sight of Water Ice World made us freeze.

  It was gone.

  In its place was something called the Smoothie Factory. And the place was jam-packed.

  “What the heck?” I said. The Smoothie Factory buzzed with people, music, bright lights, and color. If I hadn’t seen the name, I might’ve guessed it was a dance club with an eighties neon theme.

  “It’s like the end of an era,” Josie added.

  Just then we heard a familiar “HELL-o!” And there was Alayna Appleton, an inch from our faces.

  Alayna, aka the Amazing Apple, was a thirteen-year-old magician. Her MO was to troll the boardwalk and beach, sharing card tricks and pulling arcade tokens out of people’s ears, noses, and butts. She was popular among vacationers, especially kids, and she’d cornered the babysitting market. She had one trick that she reserved specifically for me, Josie, and our other shore friend, Dario. Most magicians pride themselves on their ability to disappear, but the Amazing Apple wasn’t like most magicians.

  She was a master at appearing. That is, she would materialize inside one of our personal-space bubbles with no warning. It was cute when we were kids, but now it was just creepy. Neither of us liked it, but Alayna was like a song you can’t get out of your head—it drives you crazy and it’s annoying, but you find yourself singing along, because you also kind of like it at the same time you’re wishing it would go away.

  Josie jumped. “Alayna, you scared the pants off me.”

  “I’m going by ‘Apple’ this year. You know, nearly in high school and all. Time for a whole new brand.” She smiled big. “Look. Got my braces off.”

  Even Alayna was evolving for high school. “Great seeing you, Alayna—I mean, Amazing—I mean, Apple—but we’re totally late.” I nudged Josie to walk away.

  “Guess what?” Apple stopped us.

  Neither of us asked what.

  “Turns out I’m lactose intolerant.” She made an exaggerated pout. “Gives me gas.”

  Was she really telling us about her gas?

  “Bummer,” Josie said.

  “Guess what else?” Apple asked.

  We still didn’t ask what, but she said, “This winter I apprenticed with the enchantress of Estonia. So, that’s kind of a big deal. She’s expert in the act of exorcism and elemental recomposition. Together we scaled the cliffs of Saaremaa Island and called upon necromancing quadrilaterals and—”

  “Uh, sounds great.” I cut her off. “Sorry. But we’re late, remember?”

  We’d managed to get a few feet away when Josie turned and called back to her, “See ya.” But Apple was gone.

  “Maybe the quadrilateral enchanters taught her how to disappear,” I said.

  “You have to admit,” Josie said, “she truly is amazing.”

  Josie was right, but I’d outgrown magic tricks.

  Josie returned to our previous problem and asked, “What if Kevin’s Fun House closed too? You know what that would mean? Oh no, Stell, what if…”

  It sounded like Josie was panicking about the fun house, but she was actually concerned about what we’d hidden there. Well, not there. But under there. If Kevin’s Fun House closed, we’d lose our supercool way to access our hiding spot.

  To calm her I said, “There’s no way,” but she was already racing down the little stretch of boardwalk between the Smoothie Factory and Kevin’s Fun House. It was under this part of the boardwalk that was important to us.

  “Slow down,” I called to Josie. Man, she’d gotten faster, or I’d gotten slower. Probably some of each.

  She slowed and noticed I was out of breath from sprinting only a few yards. “I guess you didn’t have a great track season this year?”

  “Nah. I quit.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It would’ve totally eaten into my social life,” I said.

  Josie said, “I thought Pete was your whole social life.”

  I said, “I branched out this year. I actually had a lot of sleepovers with my friends, and then I was too tired to go to practice because we’d stay up all night. And… I had a lot of studying to do.” I didn’t want to tell her that I’d been asked to leave the track team. Well, okay, so more told than asked, but she didn’t need to know that. “I guess you had a good season?”

  “Really good. I’m sorry to hear you gave it up. You loved it.”

  I shrugged. “It was time for other stuff. It’s fine.”

  Kevin’s Fun House was there, same as always, except it didn’t look the same. It looked a little tired. The paint on the slide was fading in the middle, and the v in Kevin’s name had come loose and hung to the side, like <.

  “Ready to give it a checkout?” Josie asked

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  Josie gave me one of the VIP wristbands that Dad’d bought for us so we could skip the line. I noticed that we were the tallest of the kids waiting. We headed in, stopped at the hall of mirrors, many of which were cloudy and cracked, and looked at ourselves. I’d seen these reflections a hundred times before, so it wasn’t that funny to me anymore. Then we wiggled through the foam pillars; most had chunks missing, and their previously bright colors h
ad dulled. Lastly, we scaled the rope bridge, which I could now get over with one step. Unfortunately, I tripped on that one step because my sandal got caught.

  Josie arrived at the barrel first.

  “I win,” she crowed.

  “It wasn’t a race.”

  “It’s always a race,” Josie said. “Every single time we come here, we’ve raced to this exact barrel.”

  I didn’t respond. She was right, of course, but I didn’t feel like racing, and I didn’t want to argue about it. Instead, I looked around. “All clear.”

  Josie stomped and popped up the chunk of loose floorboards. “What will we do if Kevin ever decides to fix this?” Josie asked, and before I could answer, she disappeared through the hole.

  I jumped next, pulling our trapdoor shut behind us.

  Four Stella

  Under the Boardwalk

  June 18 (Continued)

  We dropped about five feet to the sand below, plopping onto our butts. Sand wiggled up inside my shorts into places where I would’ve preferred not to have sand.

  We studied our hideaway. I was always struck by its stuffiness. When stuffy and beach mix, it smells like dead fish. Yuck. It was shady, except for where sunlight snuck through the cracks between the boards above. In some of those sandy patches, tufts of beach grass grew. Overhead we could hear all sorts of boardwalk activity: people laughing, biking, and skateboarding, even though they’re not supposed to.

  I had great memories of being down here. One time there was a huge storm, and we curled up and told each other scary stories and watched lightning bolts spike at the ocean, until we heard Dad frantically calling our names from the beach. He was so relieved when he found us that he forgot he was mad at us.

  “It looks different,” Josie said.

  There used to be a latticed fence on the ocean side that went from the boardwalk to the sand, hiding us from beachgoers. We could see through the crisscrosses. The fence had been replaced with a sliding door that hung from rails, the kind you’d see on a barn.

  “What’s with that?” Josie pointed to a deep groove in the sand. It started at the new sliding door and crossed the sand alley under the boardwalk between Kevin’s Fun House and what was now the Smoothie Factory. The groove went toward the opening to Thirty-Fourth Street.

  I said, “It looks like a bigger version of the kind of groove that kids dig in the sand as a river.” Those never really work, because the water soaks into the sand before it reaches its intended place—probably a castle moat. But there were no castles down here.

  Josie said, “And check out all the footies.” Josie meant footprints. “People have been hanging out down here. And I don’t see our marker.”

  I brushed the sand around in the spot where I remembered the rock being, then dug with my hands. “No rocks. No box,” I said. “It’s gone.”

  “Gone? Gone!” Josie cried. “First Water Ice World, now this?” She frantically dug deeper. When she didn’t find anything, she sat in the sand. “Those memories are just gone!” She looked at me. “Why aren’t you upset? You should be upset about this, Stella!”

  “I am,” I said. “But I mean, maybe it’s a sign.”

  “What kind of a sign would take away our treasures?’ ”

  “A sign that we should make new memories. You know, have a different kind of summer. We could do that.”

  “I thought you loved it the way it was! What’s wrong with the way it’s always been, Stella?” Josie yelled. Her ice-blue eyes weren’t far from tears.

  I said, “We could make a new box. Maybe hide it someplace where the sand doesn’t go up our butts, and we don’t hit our heads when we stand up all the way.” There was about five feet between the sand and the boardwalk. Last year we started having to hunch over when we walked down here. “Or maybe we don’t have to hide it? We could keep it at Dad’s.”

  “I don’t like that idea at all, and, Stella, that box was very special to me.”

  “It was to me, too,” I said, and I meant it, but I mean, it was a box. “Just because the box is gone doesn’t mean those things didn’t happen.”

  Something else caught Josie’s eye. “Oh great. That’s changed too.” She pointed to the door that had led to the Water Ice World basement. It was now painted lime green and had a shiny new lock. “We can’t get back up top the way we used to.” Yasmina, the owner of Water Ice World, hadn’t minded that we’d cut through her store. In fact, she’d liked that we were so comfortable with the place that we’d let ourselves in. She’d said we were practically family. “Now I hate that smoothie place even more.”

  We checked out our options: Once the trapdoor to the fun house was closed, it couldn’t be opened from down here. So I went to the sliding door and pulled on it to try to access the beach, but it, too, was locked.

  Our last resort was to walk through the sandy alley between the Smoothie Factory and Kevin’s Fun House toward Thirty-Fourth Street, which wasn’t really a big deal. It was just a longish walk to the pavement, then down the street a bit to the ramp that led back to the boardwalk; that’s the way we went.

  Coincidentally, it was the same direction the groove went—from the beach to Thirty-Fourth Street.

  What was with that groove?

  Five Stella

  Police Station

  June 25 (Continued)

  “So the missing box…,” Santoro says at the same time as he thumbs something on his phone.

  “That darn box. I wanted to be excited to go find it, and I wanted to be more upset that it was gone, but the truth is, it didn’t bother me that much. I mean, it did a little, but not as much as it upset Josie. I tried to act upset. I wanted to be upset, because if I wasn’t, Josie would be upset, and I didn’t want that.”

  Santoro sighs. “I was going to ask if you knew what happened to it.”

  “No. It’s just gone. I guess stolen or somehow washed out to sea.”

  “And this magic girl…” He flips to a new page.

  “Alayna. The Amazing Apple,” I say.

  “Right. You said she had a knack for simply appearing without warning?”

  “That’s right. Right into your personal space. And she’d talk real close to your face. Like this.” I lift myself from my chair and position my nose an inch from his and tilt my head ever so slightly. He has deep creases in the corners of his eyes and between them, like his brows spend a lot of time in a furrowed position. Probably he squints at clues and suspects.

  “Close talker. I got it,” he says. “You can sit back down, Stella.”

  I add, “And you can always smell the last thing she’d eaten.” I sit. “Usually a tuna sandwich. Who eats tuna at the beach?”

  “How did she stealthily appear like that?”

  “Magic, I guess.” I shrug. “She says she’s studied all over the world, but I don’t buy it. She always tells us about the exotic places she’s gone and the techniques she’s learned from practicing wizards. I’m waiting for the day that she brings up Dumbledore. Then I’ll know she’s full of it.”

  He doesn’t smile at that. What kind of a guy doesn’t smile at a spontaneous Dumbledore reference? How does my dad spend all day on a boat with this guy? He’s as personable as a doorknob.

  I get on with the story in the hopes that our time together can come to a quick end. But then again, what if Santoro ends up being the only thing that stands between me and handcuffs?

  Six Stella

  Boardwalk

  June 18 (Continued)

  Once we were back on the boardwalk, I faced into the wind, let it blow my hair out of my sweaty face, and I tied my hair into a knot on the top of my head. Josie didn’t get as hot as I did, and her blond hair wasn’t quite long enough to top-knot.

  “Where to now?” Josie asked.

  I looked at everyone slurping from lime-green cups. “I wanna check out those smoothies.”

  “You can’t be serious?” Josie asked. “You’re gonna buy something from that factory? They’re, like,
the enemy.”

  “You’re being a little extra, Jo. It’s just a smoothie. It isn’t going to hurt anything.”

  “I’ll wait in line with you, but I’m not having any.” She added, “I’m officially boycotting.”

  The line was out the door. As we waited, I studied the place through the window. The walls were painted bright lime green, and metal baskets of fresh fruit hung from chains. Employees in white lab coats put peeled and cut chunks of fruit into clear tubes that led to blenders. Customers put their lime-green cups under the spigots coming from the blenders. They filled their cups with blended, drinkable fruit and stirred them with long, orange spoons. There was a self-serve bar where people could scoop on healthy toppings like granola and diced figs.

  “It’s so ug,” Josie said, meaning “ugly,” but I thought the colors and white coats really brightened the place.

  We still hadn’t made it inside when three familiar faces came out. Two out of the three held branded lime-green cups.

  “G’day,” Josie greeted them.

  “Welcome to the shore,” TJ said, holding my eyes for a hot sec longer than Josie’s. We could file TJ under things that had definitely changed. He was about a foot taller than last year, and his voice was deeper.

  “It’s about time,” Tucker said.

  “Where ya been?” Timmy asked.

  TJ, Tucker, and Timmy—or the Three Ts, as we called them—were the same age as us, thirteen. They were a trio of best summer friends who lived in different towns during the year, but were glued at the hip at the shore. This year they wore matching red T-shirts that said GUARD on the back, although they weren’t full lifeguards yet; they were in training. The real lifeguards wore white shirts with red letters.

  You’d think that, being called the Three Ts and wearing matching shirts, they might be triplets, but they were far from clones. Three different backgrounds, three different personalities, yet still best friends—at least for the summer.

  “Hey there,” I said, mostly to TJ, whose dark curly hair was already sun-pecked with highlights. “We just got here. After this we were heading to the lifeguard shack to see what’s going on tonight.”