One Small Hop Read online

  For Graham and Karina, as always

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Seventh grade is a series of multiple-choice questions. I’m not just talking about quizzes or choices in the school cafeteria, which are more like choices between types of torture than types of food.

  I’m talking transportation. Do you: (A) walk, or (B) ride your bike? (Bike.)

  I’m talking ethics. Do you: (A) tell your middle school principal that her records are completely vulnerable, or (B) hack them? (Hack, though Davy is better at it than I am.)

  I’m also talking personal safety. Do you: (A) take Davy’s bet and wade along Blue Harbor’s toxic shoreline or (B) avoid it like the plague? (Take the bet. And I didn’t get the plague or even toe fungus. But I did get a weird respiratory thing that kept me out of school for two weeks. Davy blamed himself, for mentioning it.)

  Social situations require more letters of the alphabet.

  For instance, say it’s a Friday afternoon and you witness your so-called friends hanging out with your so-called enemy. Do you:

  (A) Pretend it doesn’t bug you that your friends are talking to Derek Ripley, a guy who’s hated you since second grade?

  (B) Keep walking and pretend you don’t see them?

  (C) Go right up to them and ask why they’re even hanging out with Derek Ripley when they know he still calls you Slime Boy?

  Strategically, B has worked for me the most often, so I stepped into the courtyard and stared up at the clouds, which were white and fluffy but still somehow ominous against the painted afternoon sky.

  This is not a metaphor: The sky was literally painted on the underside of the awning that covered every centimeter of the courtyard at Blue Harbor Middle School. The awning was supposed to protect us from what Principal Brown called “The Elements.” Basically, it meant that school authorities had decided the best way to preserve student health was to put up the equivalent of a giant umbrella.

  “Yo, Goldstein.” Derek noticed me first. His voice was tough and low, as if he was trying out for Detective No. 2 in the school play.

  I pretended I was shocked and surprised to see them all standing there. “Yo,” I said, even though I’m not the yo type.

  “Did you hear?” Derek said. “Varney found a lobster.”

  “So?” We were always finding lobsters, or pieces of them, along the banks of what we still called Blue Harbor. The original harbor was washed out before I was born, when the ocean swelled up and swallowed half our town—and every other town along the East Coast. It moved our shoreline to where Main Street used to be. We could see slabs of pavement below the surface when the sand shifted, which was pretty much all the time. There were still calm spots, but the waves mostly came at the shore like they were looking for a fight.

  Sometimes the waves brought shells with them, or lobster claws, always detached. I had a jar of them at home, dry and light as dust.

  “So?” Derek mimicked. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I knew.”

  “Oh, just tell him, Derek,” said Delphinium Perez, her face glowing, her mouth looking like it wanted to tell. Under normal circumstances, Delphinium would have told—she talked to me more than any other girl in Blue Harbor, including my own sister. But Derek was king of the moment. I walked toward him, a magnet compelled, and I understood why my two best friends had stopped to listen. I almost forgave them: Delphinium with her skinny arms and sneaky smile, and Davy Hudson, who memorized Latin phrase books and was shorter than everyone else because he’d skipped a grade. I could have skipped a grade, too, but my mother didn’t want me to be too far away from what she called my “socially correct peer group.” I pictured the seventh graders I knew. There wasn’t anything socially correct about a single one of us.

  “Just tell me, Derek,” I repeated. “What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s alive!” Davy crowed, forgetting all about Derek’s kingly status.

  “For real?”

  “For real, Slime Boy. It was moving its claws and everything. I’ll bet it weighed a pound and a half.”

  “Is that a lot?” asked Delphinium. She had been named, like her sisters, after New England’s recently extinct wildflowers. Indigo was the luckiest in her family; Lupine, which sounded like the scientific name for “port-a-potty,” came off the worst.

  “It weighs more than a softball,” I said. Despite her skinny arms, Delph pitched for the school softball team. Davy liked to calculate her ERA, which was currently at 1.89. “More like three softballs. That’d be the equivalent of 680 grams.”

  “I know what a pound and a half is, thank you,” said Delphinium, who was also good at math. I kept trying to get her (and everyone else) to use the metric system, like every other country in the world. No luck. “I meant: Is that a lot for a lobster?”

  “Anything’s a lot for a lobster, if it’s alive.” I looked at Derek. “You’re sure Leroy wasn’t joking? He wasn’t just wiggling it around?”

  “I saw it myself,” Derek said. “I held it. Almost got pinched, too. Had to get all the details for my dad.”

  Derek’s father worked for the EPF, which officially stood for Environmental Police Force. Unofficially, it stood for Police Farce. And sometimes Police Farts. They were a government agency, sort of new and already corrupt, set up to satisfy a group of scientists who were still worried about climate change.

  I suppose I should be glad that the government had finally acknowledged that the climate was changing, and had been, faster than anybody had imagined. When my dad was my age, the government said it was all a lie. Which may be one reason that he could never get used to the new restrictions, which, okay, were probably created so the EPF could give out fines. Those were used to give bonuses to the EPF workers so they could take their families on nice vacations. They didn’t seem to be using the money to fund research or do anything that would make the environment better.

  Along with issuing fines, the EPF had a game division, which transported “fragile species,” a designation that made it sound like it was the animals’ fault they were dying, to the Center for Species Rehabilitation in New Arcadia. Our science class was supposed to take a virtual field trip there. Mr. Kletter, our science teacher, had already suggested that we “manage our expectations.”

  “Does Leroy still have it?” I gave up trying to hide my excitement.

  “Doubt it,” Derek said. “I told my dad as soon as I put the thing back in the bucket. He’s probably bringing Varney to headquarters right now. The Blue Harbor EPF has the most efficient—”

  I was already halfway to my bike. “Come on!” I was addressing my actual friends, but Derek went for his bicycle, too. I pulled my One out of my pocket, mounted it on my handlebars, and said Leroy Varney’s name. A projection beamed back at me, mapping my way to his house. Left on Rockaway, right on Gull, that was the shortest route. It took us away from the town’s air-conditioned bike path, but I didn’t care.

&nbs
p; “No fair, Ahab.” Davy pedaled hard behind me. His hair was cut short and close, in a fade, but that didn’t stop the sweat from dripping down his neck. “Ever hear of breathing?”

  I pedaled harder and held straight for two more blocks until Beacon, my own sweat coating my chest like oil. Heat rose from the pavement and blurred the horizon. Every now and then, we passed a yard that looked lush and green, as if it had come out of a catalog, which it probably had. The other yards were ashy brown. Spring in Maine. What a joke.

  I’d heard my mother wax poetic about the springs of her childhood, where people hunted for snowdrops or the first purple crocus. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and anosmic to think that this—the code reds and an ocean that the media had nicknamed the New Dead Sea—was the way the world was supposed to be. But that’s the world I pedaled through to get to Leroy’s.

  Leroy Varney’s house was painted green and took up most of a scrubby lot on Beacon Street. Even if I hadn’t had the address, it was easy to tell which house was his: There were two EPF scooters parked out front.

  The door opened and Officer Ripley and his partner came out, carrying a metal tank between them. Leroy was nowhere in sight.

  “That’s my dad,” Derek said. I was glad he was out of breath, too.

  It was easy to tell Officer Ripley and Derek were related. They had the same squarish head; the same blue eyes, closeset, like the eyes of a (now-extinct) possum; and the same short brown hair. Officer Ripley had a small dent in his chin, which made him look more like a movie cop than a real one.

  “D,” Officer Ripley said. “Don’t you know better than to bring an audience when we’re conducting official police business?” He laughed to show he was joking and nodded at his partner. Together, they set the tank on the ground near their feet. I felt sorry for the lobster, trapped in the dark.

  “I was seeing if you followed up on my tip,” Derek said.

  Officer Ripley beamed. “Going to join the EPF in no time, this one,” he said. “If you’re not careful, CJ, he’s going to take over as my partner. You remember my son, Derek?”

  “Of course.” His partner’s blond hair was pulled back so tightly that her forehead could have ripped apart at any moment. Like Officer Ripley, she wore a green uniform with a badge. Her name tag said SILVA.

  Officer Ripley nodded at his son. “These your friends?”

  Derek paused a beat too long. “They’re from school,” he said finally.

  “Well, go on. Make your introductions.”

  Derek fused our names together so they sounded like one big, long one: Ahabgoldsteindavidhudsondelphiniumperez.

  “Goldstein.” Officer Ripley checked out my curly hair and black-framed glasses. “Your father’s Ted Goldstein?”

  Unlike Davy, I’d just had a growth spurt, so I was about the same height as my dad. I was also fifty kilograms lighter. Sometimes it was hard to tell we were related. “Yes,” I said.

  “Him I know. Your usage alarm’s gone off about twenty times in the last three weeks; are you aware of that?”

  “Not exactly.” I shifted my weight—fifty-four kilograms—from one foot to the other. The thing was, those were almost the same words I used when I talked to my father, except I started the sentence with “Dad.”

  Dad, you’re not supposed to throw that away.

  Dad, we’ve used up our meat allowance.

  Dad, the alarm’s going off again.

  DAD!

  Of course our alarm was going off. My dad overused water, power, and everything else you could possibly overuse. I knew it every time the shower cut off before my allotted two minutes were up. I knew it because of the stack of green tickets—paper, because the EPF was either stupid or ironic—stacked on top of his desk. I’d heard that alarm, with its police-siren wail so that the whole neighborhood knew exactly who was sucking up too much energy and who was throwing super-juice pouches into the garbage instead of the recycling shoot.

  “He still have that behemoth in your garage?” Officer Ripley went on.

  “Yes,” I said. “But he doesn’t drive it. I swear.”

  The behemoth was my dad’s Suburban Utility Vehicle, or SUV, and it sat inside what would have been the world’s greatest lab space. Instead, the garage was taken up by a vehicle my dad referred to as Helluva Car, which he was only allowed to drive in the Fourth of July parade. Aside from the obvious shortage of gasoline, the SUV—or Soov, as Davy called it—violated something like fifty thousand emissions regulations.

  “They don’t make them like this anymore,” my dad had said more than once, thumping the hood with his fist.

  “I could do a lot with this garage,” I said. I pictured the shelf with microscope slides and test tubes instead of his emergency cans of gasoline.

  “Like what?”

  “Inventions. Experiments.” With so much room, anything seemed possible, like making a discovery big enough to get me into Darwin’s Disciples. It sounded like a gang, and it was, in a way: a gang of scientists. A secret society. People didn’t talk about the Disciples openly, but I knew enough to know that I wanted to be one. If I got in, I’d receive an invitation on a green card with gold lettering. I’d be one of the youngest to make it, and if I did make it, my future would be wide open.

  “You can do experiments in your room,” my dad said.

  “Not with wildlife or chemicals.” My mom had rules about what I could bring inside the house. Things with Heartbeats were at the top of her ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN list, just under Things that Exploded.

  “The garage is mine,” my dad said. “You wait. These regulations aren’t going to stick. Someday I’ll be able to drive this baby wherever I want.”

  My dad was convinced his time would come again. Either we’d go back to a government that didn’t believe the world was dying or we’d get a bunch of scientists who’d fix it. Maybe they’d invent a space vacuum to hoover up the greenhouse gases or come up with some sort of industrial wet vac to suck up toxic algae blooms. Someone, a Disciple probably, would fill the earth with oil again, inject it like Botox and coat it with moisturizer.

  Then Ted Goldstein would pull his Soov out of the garage and drive it more than once a year. He’d eat twenty-dollar burgers and take showers that steamed up the bathroom. I wasn’t sure what was so great about being able to write your name on a fogged-up bathroom mirror, but it would be nice to be in a world where you could ride your bike in the street without the hot wind coming at you like a blast of bad breath.

  Officer Ripley was still talking. I pushed my glasses against my nose and waited for the end of the lecture. I hoped he’d mistake my silence for respect. “—everyone’s responsibility,” he said finally. “Maybe you can talk some sense into him.”

  “I can try,” I said. I had tried. “Officer Ripley? May we see the lobster, sir?” His jaw unlocked. I’d been right to add the “sir.”

  “I don’t see why not,” he began, but his partner interrupted.

  “We have to get back, Rip.” She reached down to pick up the tank again, but Officer Ripley put his foot on it to stop her.

  “For educational purposes, CJ,” he said, stooping down. “For the kids.”

  We crowded around the tank, even Derek, who had already seen the thing. I held my breath as Officer Ripley lifted the lid.

  The lobster was bigger than anything I’d seen washed up on the shores of Blue Harbor. His neck, if lobsters had necks, was spotted, his claws parted, his fanlike tail curled under. He sat stock-still, like he was waiting for something. Then I noticed his antennae. Instead of standing rigid and alert, like in pictures, they were wilted. That meant he was:

  (A) sleeping,

  (B) scared,

  (C) sick, or

  (D) dead.

  Please be B, I thought. Or A. B or A.

  There was a pump in the tank, but it wasn’t making any bubbles.

  “Some monster,” I said. “I thought he almost pinched you, Derek.”

  “He did. He was snapping
like he wanted a piece of me.” Derek reached out and pinched me on the arm. “Like this.” He looked at his dad. “What happened to it?”

  “Hard to keep a creature like this alive without the proper transportation device,” Officer Ripley said. “Delicate boogers. No constitution. It was a miracle the Varney kid found it alive in the first place. You hope for the best, expect the worst.”

  “So he’s dead?” I asked.

  “Course he’s dead. Your friend didn’t know how to properly maintain it. Carried it home in a bucket. May as well have been a coffin.”

  “Rip, we really have to—” Officer Silva began.

  “Hold on, just hold on. This is a teaching moment. Kids, what do you do if you’re walking by the edge of the harbor and you happen to spot something like our lobster friend, still kicking? Anyone?”

  “We call a certified member of the EPF!” Derek recited.

  “Do you touch it?” Officer Silva asked, getting in the spirit of things.

  “No,” Derek said.

  “Do you put it in a stinking bucket?” Officer Ripley asked.

  I hadn’t taken my eyes off the dead lobster, but I noticed the effort it took for Officer Ripley to use a sanitized word like stinking, when a thousand other words must have been going through his head.

  “No, sir!” Derek barked, right on cue. “Pursuant to environmental code RE 248: When a fragile or near-fragile species is spotted in the wild, do not touch said species without consulting a fully trained EPF specialist.”

  “And do you go into the water?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I didn’t hear the rest of you. I said: ‘Do you go into the water?’ ”

  Derek crossed his arms like his father and waited.

  “No, sir,” Davy piped up.

  “Miss?”

  “No,” Delphinium answered.

  I didn’t take my eyes away from the dead lobster as I chose my words. “You don’t go into the water.”

  I said it so slowly that Officer Ripley must have wondered if my brain was getting enough oxygen. But when I looked up, he smiled and punched his partner in the shoulder. “See what I mean?” he said. “Teaching moment.” He put the lid back in place and strapped the tank on the back of his scooter. To Derek he said, “See you at home, D.” Then he pressed his thumb against the ignition disk, gunned his motor once for effect—a weak effect, given that the environmentally sound DM-400 made about as much noise as a coughing mosquito—and drove away with Officer Silva.