One Small Hop Read online

  “Now what?” asked Davy.

  “Now we go see Leroy,” I said.

  “The Lobster Killer?” Derek said. “Nice company.”

  “It’s a condolence call,” I said.

  “Maybe for you. I’m out of here.”

  Good, I thought. I didn’t make a move toward the house until Derek disappeared, down the air-conditioned bike path this time, and riding slower.

  “I suppose Leroy has suffered a loss,” Davy said. He made his face funereal, which wasn’t so different from his usual expression. I led the way with Davy and Delph behind me, points on a triangle. Leroy opened the door before we reached his front steps.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I was watching you. Wasn’t sure you’d knock.”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “You might not want to be seen talking to me after what happened.” Leroy’s eyes searched ours. He didn’t mention that we’d never been seen talking to him before this happened, either. It was a big school and we only knew each other vaguely.

  “Oh, come on,” Delphinium told him in her I’m-going-into-foreign-relations-someday voice. “Give yourself a break. It wasn’t your fault.”

  I gave her the side-eye. “Whose fault was it, then?”

  “It was … circumstances.”

  “You don’t have to be nice about it. I know I killed it,” Leroy said. His hair fell over his eyes.

  “It still would have died if you’d left it where it was,” Delphinium said. “They always do. It could have happened to anyone.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened to Ahab,” Leroy said.

  True, I probably could have kept that lobster alive for longer. I’d been studying habitats and life cycles—marine and otherwise—for as long as I could remember. And while I didn’t have much of a lab, I had a couple of aquariums outfitted with aeration systems. I had more than a bucket. Still, Delph was right: The lobster probably wouldn’t have lasted long anyway.

  Leroy waited for me to pass judgment.

  “Well,” I said finally. “It’s not like you meant to kill it.” A court wouldn’t have convicted him of lobster murder, just involuntary lobster slaughter.

  Leroy gave me an almost smile.

  “So where did you find him?” I asked. “What were you going to do with him, once you got him home? Why would you let someone like Derek Ripley know you had him?”

  “And how’d you get out of school so early?” added Davy. He was a rule follower in real life; it was just online that he broke them. Still, he liked to know how other people broke rules, in case he ever needed to do the same.

  “Who are you? The EPF?” Leroy said. “I answered all those questions already.”

  “Not honestly,” I said.

  Now Leroy grinned with his whole mouth. I could see a slight gap between his front teeth.

  “So what’d you tell them?” I asked.

  “That I was walking along the shoreline and I saw something moving.”

  “What really happened?”

  “I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

  “We won’t tell,” I said.

  “Why do you want to know?” Leroy tapped his hands on his legs, but the beat wasn’t random, it was organized, like a drum solo.

  I wanted to know for the same reason the government wanted to know. Because this was life. Something was out there, something that wasn’t floating belly up. And, okay, maybe it was dead now. But maybe there was another one that wasn’t. Maybe we could find it and revive it, unlike the EPF, which couldn’t keep a cockroach alive. Or wouldn’t.

  “Scientific curiosity?” I said.

  Leroy thought for a minute. “I kind of wanted to tell somebody anyway. That’s why I spilled it to Derek. Mistake Number One.”

  “Number Two.”

  “Hey, now,” said Leroy.

  I changed the subject. “So you didn’t find it along the shore?”

  “Nope.”

  “You didn’t go in, did you?” Delphinium took a step back, as if she thought toxins would start oozing out of Leroy’s skin.

  “I took a boat,” Leroy said.

  I looked around the bare yard. “You don’t own a boat.” No one did; there was no point.

  “I built one, for history class. A dugout canoe, like the Indigenous Americans. It didn’t have to be life-size, but I thought if it was, Duckworth might give me extra credit.”

  Duckworth, I thought. Well, that explained a lot.

  “I just wanted to see if it would float,” he said.

  “And it did?”

  He nodded, the smile finally reaching his eyes. “I took her out during study hall. It’s not like anything else was going on. I usually skip sixth period.”

  “That was very brave,” Delphinium said. “Going out on the water alone.” Leroy must have recognized the admiration in her voice, because he stood straighter until she added, “Stupid, but brave.”

  “And nobody saw you?” Davy was still looking for professional insight.

  “She’s small,” Leroy said. “And she doesn’t exactly look like a boat—more like a go-kart with missing wheels.”

  “Weren’t you afraid that you’d fall in?” Delphinium asked, that tone still there.

  “Nah, she’s steady.”

  “So where’d you find the lobster?” I was torn between getting every detail and skipping to the one I really cared about.

  “In the harbor,” Leroy said. “Ish.”

  “We deduced that,” I said. “Where exactly?”

  “You mean latitude and longitude? Heck if I know.”

  I looked at Delphinium to see how she felt about her hero now, but her face hadn’t changed.

  “I could show you,” Leroy said.

  “In the water?” Davy said. I could feel his “no way” about to crash down like a wave. This was not his favorite kind of risk, especially since the time I’d gotten sick. He’d try pretty much anything in the digital world. He was more careful in the real one.

  “You could?” I asked.

  “If I wanted to,” said Leroy.

  “What would make you want to?”

  He cocked his head to the side a little. “Respect.”

  Leroy was still on the top step, so I was looking up at him. That seemed a little like respect. I shut up and waited for him to speak again. That seemed like respect, too.

  “Look, I never expected to find anything out there, and when I saw it—” He stopped and I thought about what it must have been like, to see something moving and real. “I thought I was saving it.”

  “Why didn’t you call someone who could have helped?” Davy said.

  “Like who?” Leroy said. “The EPF?”

  “Us.”

  “No offense,” Leroy said. “You weren’t the first people I thought of. I took it back to school, and I guess I thought I might find somebody there. I ran into Derek. I knew it was over when he called his dad. Because if anyone was going to save a lobster, it was never gonna be the EPF. Right?”

  “A hundred percent,” I said.

  “I guess that’ll do,” Leroy said. “For now.”

  I’d ridden in a canoe before. There was a fleet of them at the Mirage, a domed, man-made “lake” over on Route 22. But that canoe was nothing like the one Leroy had hidden in a pile of scrubby brush along a calm stretch of shoreline.

  “I call her the Swan,” Leroy said. “I was gonna name her after a duck, only Duckworth would have thought I was being a suck-up.”

  I was impressed he knew what a swan was, since that had also been declared a fragile species. Maybe there were still some out there, but I’d never seen one in real life. Ducks had not been declared a fragile species, but I’d never seen one of them in real life, either.

  “It’s a tree,” said Davy, who usually spent so much time inside I was surprised he recognized one.

  “A dugout,” said Leroy. “What do you think Indigenous Americans dug out? High-grade aluminum?”

  The bark had
been peeled off the bottom, which was the side facing us, but you could still see the knobs where the branches used to be. It looked like it weighed a ton.

  Leroy grabbed hold of it and I helped him flip it over. Now it looked more boatlike at least. He’d carved out the middle and left the sides thin, and there were two raised humps that he’d sanded into benches. I ran my hand along one of them. Smooth.

  “What’d you carve it out with?” I asked him.

  “I used an ax for part. And burned some of it. I was trying to be authentic. But I lasered part of it, too.”

  Delphinium reached out and touched the canoe. “What kind of tree was it?”

  “Spruce,” Leroy and I said at the same time. I was surprised he knew.

  “It was already on the ground. I didn’t chop it down,” Leroy said. “Lightning hit it, maybe. Or it just … died.”

  “You’re sure it’s seaworthy?” I asked.

  “It held me,” he said. “Look: You want to see where I found the lobster, I’ll take you. But you’ve got to stop questioning my handiwork.”

  I touched the canoe again and rocked it back and forth. It was lighter than I thought it would be. Mrs. Duckworth should have given him an A.

  “Shall I get in first?” Delphinium asked.

  “You can’t go,” Leroy said.

  “Why not?” Delph looked ready for a fight.

  “The Swan can’t hold four people,” Leroy said.

  “I thought you said this thing was sturdy,” Davy told him.

  “It’s a two-person dugout. Two benches. Two people.”

  “I’m underweight,” I said, holding out my arms to prove it.

  “I’m short,” Davy added.

  “Any volunteers to stay behind?” I asked.

  Delph did not volunteer. Davy looked like he might, but his hand didn’t go up. And it was Leroy’s boat.

  “Look, the four of us probably add up to two slightly overweight grown humans,” I said. “It could be a test for your dugout. A buoyancy trial.”

  “This is at your own risk, understand?” Leroy said. “Anything happens, it’s not my fault. It’s not the Swan’s fault, either.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “It’s a great day for sailing,” Delphinium said. I didn’t point out that there wasn’t a sail.

  We hid our backpacks in the brush and lugged the canoe toward the water. Delph kept her softball mitt with her. It was kind of like a talisman, I guess.

  “We split the weight,” Leroy said, easing the canoe forward. “You and I each take an end. Davy and Delphinium get in the middle.”

  He grabbed the paddles and handed one to me. “I should make you sign something. So you don’t sue.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Swear?”

  “Swear.”

  I crawled in first, and Leroy shoved the canoe so that my end was in the water. I dug the paddle down to the rock and sand, to hold us steady. Delphinium crawled in, keeping her hands as far from the water as possible. The boat rocked. It rocked again as Davy crawled in. Then Leroy shoved us off, the muscles on his arms bulging a little as he held tight to the sides of the canoe. He lifted his legs and swung his body over the stern, like a gymnast, avoiding the water. Then he used his paddle to propel us deeper in. We drifted until Leroy looked at me like I had the intellect of a fungus.

  “What are you waiting for?” he said. “If you want to get anywhere, you’ve got to row.”

  We angled right through murky water.

  “See that island?”

  I followed the invisible line that extended from Leroy’s finger to a small mound in the distance. I could see some trees sticking out. It looked like one of the old harbor islands; there was nothing special about it, other than the fact that it was still there. The other islands, the ones that hadn’t been washed away, barely poked out of the water. They looked like burial mounds.

  “That’s too far,” Davy said. He believed in low expectations.

  “Leroy made it out there by himself, right?” I said, wondering how he’d done it.

  Leroy flexed a muscle, a joke. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that he actually had a muscle to flex.

  “You can’t have made it there and back during study hall,” I said.

  “I might have skipped science,” Leroy said. “And all-over fitness.”

  That was the one class we had together; it was so big you didn’t notice if anyone was missing. The teachers never called roll.

  Delphinium started chanting. “Stroke, chugga chugga. Stroke, chugga chugga. Stroke, chugga chugga,” and Leroy and I worked the paddles through the water, trying to match her rhythm.

  I looked for signs of an algae bloom—there was a new one off the coast, the biggest yet—but it was leagues offshore, and we were only meters. There was lots of gunk down there, which made it hard to see the bottom. The island didn’t seem to be getting any closer. How had Leroy gone that distance alone in half a tree? That took guts.

  We kept rowing. My shoulders ached, but I kept my mouth shut.

  After a while, Leroy handed off his oar to Delph. I gave mine to Davy, who wrenched it through the water. “Ex nihilo nihil fit,” he said. “Nothing comes from nothing.” He rowed some more.

  Then Leroy and I took over again. Sweat dripped down my face. Delph divided her hair into three chunks and braided it down her back. She didn’t have a band to hold it in place, though, so the hair parts stayed separate at the bottom, like tentacles.

  The island still seemed far away. I looked back at the shore to see if anyone was watching us, but as usual, no one had ventured near the water. It was still pretty beautiful to look at, but it also smelled like the corpses of a thousand sea creatures, sort of salty and rotten.

  At last I felt my paddle hit bottom again.

  “We’re here,” Davy announced.

  Leroy passed his own paddle up to Delph, who was near me at the front.

  “You have to push down,” he said. “The paddle’s an arm. The canoe’s the body. Use the arm to drag the body forward.”

  It was an interesting way to explain it. The two of us pressed and pulled, so the canoe’s nose inched toward dry land. Leroy scooted over us and jumped out, yanking us farther up the beach. Then we all got out and helped.

  “Land ho, I guess,” Delphinium said.

  “That’s what you say when you see land,” I told her. “There’s probably something else you say when you hit it.”

  “Welcome,” Leroy said, pounding out a drumroll on his thigh, “to my island.”

  The island couldn’t have been much bigger than the field where Delph played softball. But it rose in a nice arc and there was a clump of trees in the middle, blocking the view of the other side; it felt bigger because we couldn’t see it all.

  We looked back at the shore of Blue Harbor. The sound of the highway was muffled by the surf. A lone seagull, which was not on the fragile species list because of its adaptability to eating garbage, flew overhead and cried.

  “This way,” Leroy said. He could have just pointed, but I let him lead us to where a stream of water rushed downhill to meet the surrounding sea.

  I squatted down. “Is that fresh water?”

  “I think so,” Leroy said. “I haven’t tasted it.”

  “There must be a spring somewhere in the middle. But how is that even possible? The water table—”

  “See there, where they intersect?” Leroy said. “That’s where I found the lobster.”

  “Biosphere.” I occasionally used failed experiments as swear words, even though in science, failure can be a good thing; it’s what leads to a breakthrough.

  “Huh?” said Leroy.

  “It’s his idea of a swear,” explained Davy.

  “I told you, enough with the—”

  “I’m talking about me,” I said. “We should have stopped at my house to get an aquarium. And a pump. We’ve got nothing. Not even a bucket.”

  “Observe first. Act later
,” Delph said. She was quoting someone—maybe herself, since she was one of those people who could come up with a rule to justify whatever situation we were in. But I didn’t want to act later. Later always meant “too late.”

  The water churned as the stream tumbled toward the ocean and the ocean pushed it back. The rocks and pebbles jumped. We stared at the spot Leroy had pointed to as if it were lit up by a cosmic spotlight, as if just talking about it would conjure the lobster back from the dead. Even without the lobster, though, there was something sort of special about that spot, about the whole island. Over the sound of the water, I heard birds—and not just sobbing seagulls, either. I saw an actual fern. If there was any place around Blue Harbor that could support life—the kind that wasn’t genetically engineered in a lab or a petri dish—this could be it. It even smelled different: fresher, somehow, without the stink of decay that air fresheners could never actually freshen.

  “Look,” Delph whispered, pointing. “That shadow moved. Did you see it?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But it feels like … it feels like something’s here.”

  “Very scientific, Ahab,” Leroy said, squatting down to wait. I squatted, too.

  If you had to guess the first person to call me Ahab instead of Jonathan, which is my given name, who would you pick?

  (A) Mr. D’Angelo, my fourth-grade science teacher;

  (B) Juliette, my older sister, with whom I had a textbook sibling relationship, entitling me to a lifetime supply of teasing;

  (C) Derek Ripley, my sworn enemy; or

  (D) Ted Goldstein, my dad.

  The answer, surprisingly, is D. My dad says he started calling me Ahab, after the captain of the whaling ship in Moby Dick, because as a two-year-old, I showed “a startling single-mindedness” in the way I approached everything, from eating my breakfast cereal to learning the names of algae and other eukaryotic organisms. When I was older, I told him that single-mindedness in a variety of subjects wasn’t single-mindedness; it was broad-mindedness. But the name stuck. Actually, I kind of liked it, especially when you compared it to names like Slime Boy.