Avalon High Part 13

Alex Haley, who wrote the book Roots, must have lived in Annapolis, because the whole dock was devoted to him. There was a big statue of him, with these smaller statues of kids lying around on the ground beneath him, like he was reading them a story. Will was leaning against one of these kid statues, waiting for me.

The minute I saw him, my heart did that somersaulting thing inside my chest. That's because, for a second, I thought he was there alone...that, by some miracle, it would be just the two of us out on his boat. But then I saw Jennifer's golden head bob up. She and Lance and Marco were waiting in a rubber dinghy in the water just below the dock, the dinghy that would take us out to Will's boat, anch.o.r.ed a short distance offsh.o.r.e. My heart, instead of doing more gymnastics, fell.

It fell more when my parents decided to actually get out of the car and go over and chat with Will, whom I guess they considered their big friend now, since they'd let Will chow down on all of our pad thai and wear my brother's bathing suit, and all.

"Hey," my dad said, leaning an elbow on Alex Haley's shoulder. "Nice day for a sail."

"Yes, sir," Will said, straightening up and smiling at us. He had on a pair of Ray-Bans to keep out the glare of the sun. The warm breeze tugged at his dark, curly hair and the open collar of his blue shirt. To me, he said, "Glad you could make it."

But before I had a chance to reply, my mom started asking Will all these worried questions, like how long he'd been sailing, and whether or not he had enough life preservers...that kind of thing. You know, the kinds of things you always wished your mom would ask the guy you have a major crush on when he's invited you to go sailing with him.

Not.

Will's answers must have satisfied my mom, since she finally grinned at me and said, "Well, have a nice time, Ellie." And my dad went, "See you later, kiddo." Then the two of them climbed back into the car and went to have brunch at Chick & Ruth's Delly.

I looked at Will and said, "Sorry."

"No problem," Will said, with a grin. "They care about you, is all. It's cute."

"Please just shoot me now," I begged him, and he laughed.

"Can we go?" Jennifer called from the dinghy. "We're losing prime tanning time."

"And G.o.d forbid the homecoming queen should be pasty," Marco said, causing Jennifer to take a playful whack at him. Lance, holding the rudder, just sat there grinning at the two of them, looking G.o.dlike in a throwback that showed off his grapefruit-sized biceps.

"I'm with Jen," he said-an unfortunate choice of words to those of us in the know. "I'm sick of these tourists staring at us."

It was true that some people wearing T-shirts that screamed DON'T Ha.s.sLE ME, I'M LOCAL had come up and were asking Will and me if we knew where the line to the Woodwind, the tour boat that went around the bay, was. Will showed them where they needed to go, then handed something to me that he took from the floor of the dinghy. It was a life preserver-not, thankfully, one of those big orange puffy ones that make the people who wear them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy, but a slim and stylish navy blue one.

I was busy fastening it when a group of kids about our own age showed up by the Haley statue and started piling into a small motorboat a few slips down from ours. They had one of those big inner tubes with them, and as they swung it into the boat, it b.u.mped into the boat beside it-a much fancier one than ours, with an older man and woman in it, just getting ready to set out toward their yacht.

"Sorry," I heard one of the kids say, and he pulled the inner tube back into his own boat.

"You're sorry?" The older man looked disgusted. And angry. "I'm sorry. Sorry they ever started letting people like you have the run of the place."

I stopped fastening my life preserver and just stood there, totally shocked. n.o.body ever says things like that back in Minnesota.

"Hey, man," one of the other kids in the motorboat said. "He didn't mean anything-"

"Why don't you people go back where you came from?" the older man wanted to know, while his wife looked on, tight-lipped, her knees pressed firmly together.

"Why don't you go back where you came from?"

But this didn't come from any of the boys in the motorboat. It came, I was startled to realize, from Will.

The old man looked just as startled as I was. He flung Will a surprised look from beneath his little captain's hat, then said, in a disapproving voice, "I beg your pardon, young man, but I was born in this country-and so were my parents."

"Yeah, but were their parents?" Will asked him. "Because unless you're Native American, I don't think you can go around telling other people to go back to their country."

The wife's mouth dropped open at this. Then she elbowed her husband, and he furiously started his outboard motor.

"This used to be a nice place to live," the man said pointedly, as he chugged away.

We watched as he and his wife made their way down Ego Alley...then exchanged glances.

"Some people," Will said to me mildly, "have more money than sense."

I sighed. "You can say that again."

Then Will handed me down into the boat....

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

There the river eddy whirls,

And there the surly village-churls,

And the red cloaks of market girls,

Pa.s.s onward from Shalott.

Which wasn't easy, seeing as how there wasn't a whole lot of room in there. I sat down and found myself squashed between Marco and Lance, while Jennifer found herself in the uncomfortable-or enviable, depending how you looked at it-position of being crammed between Lance and Will.

Not that it appeared to bother her.

"What was that all about?" she wanted to know.

"Oh, that was just Will," Marco said, in a bored voice. "Playing the White Knight again."

"Ready?" Will asked, ignoring his stepbrother's jibe. "This is your last chance if you need something from sh.o.r.e. We won't be seeing land again for a while."

When no one protested, Will started the motor, and the motorboat began putt-putting toward the spot where Will's sailboat, the Pride Winn, was anch.o.r.ed in the harbor.

I knew right then that, in spite of that unpleasant scene in Ego Alley, I'd made the right decision in coming. Oh, not that it was such a pleasure to see Will and Jennifer sitting so close together that their shoulders touched (with Lance's shoulders brushing hers on her other side). Or that it was so fun to watch Marco make rude gestures at the people sitting in deck chairs outside the bars, watching us as we motored by (clearly no one had ever talked to Marco about Image).

It was just so nice to have the salt spray in my hair, and the cool bay breeze on my face. It felt good to feel the water rushing beneath us, and see the ducks, with their little lines of ducklings, hurrying out of the dinghy's path.

And then, when we finally got to Will's boat, seeing it sitting there, so long and gleaming, all glossy white with wood trim and a tall, slender mast, made even the unpleasantness back at the pier seem worth it.

There's lots you have to do on a sailboat, it turns out, before you can take it out to sea. So we scrambled around doing what Will, and sometimes Lance, told us to do. At least, Jennifer and I did. Marco seemed to do what he pleased, although a few of the things he did appeared to have something to do with getting the Pride Winn sea-ready.

Mostly, though, he just grinned at me whenever Jennifer, scrambling over the deck, would find Lance in her way, and have to say, "Excuse me," in a polite voice that I highly doubted she used when it was just the two of them together.

By the time we'd finally set sail, I was pretty sick of Marco's secret smiles at me. I'd been hoping to have a moment for a word alone with Lance before we set sail-a chance to tell him about Mr. Morton, and then casually slip in the fact that I was on to him and Jennifer...but even worse, so was Marco. And ask him if he could do something about it. Such as come clean to Will.

But it's not easy to find any privacy on even a fair-sized boat like the Pride Winn, and there was never a moment when I could speak to Lance without fear of someone overhearing.

And then when the sail suddenly billowed out and we were moving, gliding fast over the water, not even feeling the hot sun because of the cool ocean breeze, it was hard to feel worried about any of the stuff that had happened back on sh.o.r.e. Everyone seemed to feel the exhilaration of it, even the ever-sardonic Marco, who caught my eye and said, with a grin, "This is the life, eh?"

"Really," I said, meaning it, and thinking maybe I'd been wrong about him. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all. "You're so lucky."

"Lucky?" He looked at me curiously. "Why?"

"Well, because you've got a boat," I said. "All we've got is a station wagon."

He gave me a smile that actually looked sincere and said, "I'm not the lucky one. Will is. It's his boat. Until my mom married his dad...Well, we didn't even have a station wagon, let's put it that way."

And then the moment of warmth between us fizzled like sea spray when Marco suddenly shot Will a look I could only describe as...well, not nice. No, not a nice look at all.

But then Will, who hadn't noticed the look, asked, "What do you think, Elle? We gonna make a sailor out of you?"

And I forgot all about what Marco had said, because Will looked so handsome standing there at the wheel, with the wind pushing back his hair, calling me Elle.

"Absolutely," I said, meaning it. I was going to have to talk my parents into buying a boat. It would be hard, since they knew as much about the sea as they did about swimming pools. But this was really too good not to do on a regular basis. It even beat floating by a significant percentage. Because you can't have a picnic lunch while you're floating. Well, you can, but it's messy.

Marco's mom had packed all sorts of delicious stuff in this hamper, including crab rolls and a homemade potato salad that was even better than Red Hot and Blue's. There's something about being surrounded by blue water that makes you ravenous. As we ate, everybody talked about the party the night before and who had hooked up with whom (I noticed Jennifer talked about this the most-maybe in an attempt to ward off any discussion about where she had disappeared to for the majority of the party?) and who had been wearing what.

I made a mental note to tell Liz that this is what the In Crowd-the female members, anyway-does after parties...talk bad about everyone who showed up behind their backs.

It was only as lunch was winding down that I got a chance to ask Will something that had been bothering me. And that was what was up with the name of his boat.

Marco, hearing the question, laughed out loud.

"Yeah, man," he said to Will. "Tell her what Pride Winn means."

Will shot Marco a mock dirty look, then said, looking embarra.s.sed, "It doesn't mean anything, actually. It's just a name that popped into my head when my dad and I first started talking about buying a boat. And it sort of stuck."

"Sounds like a grocery store," Lance said, his mouth full of crab roll.

Jennifer kicked him playfully in the foot. "That's Winn-Dixie," she said.

"Still a lame name for a boat," Lance said.

It wasn't until the conversation eventually drifted from fellow students at Avalon High to teachers that I remembered Mr. Morton, and, abandoning all hopes for a private word about it-and other things-with Lance, I said, "Oh, Lance, I almost forgot. Mr. Morton stopped me at the game and says he wants to see us in his cla.s.sroom first thing tomorrow morning."

Lance looked up from the bag of barbecue chips he was polishing off.

"Are you serious?" he asked, with a pained expression on his face. "What for?"

"Um," I said, suddenly aware that everyone was listening to us, and feeling embarra.s.sed. "I think something to do with our research paper proposal."

"Didn't you hand it in?" Lance asked, looking dismayed.

"Of course I did," I said. "It's just that...I don't know. He seemed to be able to tell somehow that you didn't have any part in writing it."

"Because it wasn't riddled with grammatical errors and run-on sentences like everything else Lance hands in?" Will teased.

"You know I'm not good with that stuff," Lance said, with a groan. "Aw, man. That blows."

"Sorry," I said. "He's all hot to trot on the whole working-with-your-partner thing."

"I wonder why," Marco said, in a tone that suggested he, for whatever reason, knew perfectly well why.

But when I looked his way to ask what he meant-not that I was so sure I wanted to know-I saw that Marco wasn't even paying attention anymore. Instead he was gazing out across the water at an ancient and very small motorboat that came chugging slowly by. After a second or two, I recognized it. It was one belonging to the same bunch of guys we'd seen down at the dock-the ones with the inner tube. The boat was so crowded that a couple of the pudgier guys-and none of them were actually all that slender-were sitting so far over the back of the boat, their backs were getting wet from its wake.

"Oh, hey," Marco said, observing this delightedly. "Check out the larda.s.ses."

No one laughed. In fact, Will said, sounding tired, as if it were something he had to say a lot, "Marco. Cut it out."

But Marco ignored him.

"Watch this," he said.

And he reached for the wheel that Will had let go of in order to eat his lunch.

"Marco," Will said, as Marco started to swing our boat around. "Leave 'em alone."

But Marco only laughed and set the Pride Winn on what appeared-to me, anyway-to be a collision course with the tiny boat.

"That craft does not appear to be seaworthy, Will," Marco said. "I just want to make sure they realize the error of their ways."

But it looked to me like he was going to do a lot more than that...especially as the motorboat's driver, realizing Marco had no intention of turning, suddenly jammed his wheel to the right, causing the boat to lurch abruptly to one side....

...and causing one of the guys on the back of the boat-the chubbiest one-to fall overboard.