Moonpenny Island (8 page)

The loose dirt under her feet gives way, and she grabs the trunk of a tree to keep from falling. The tree's roots grip the rim for dear life. Nearby, a crumpled, dried-up skin. Shucked off by a snake, that slid away all sleek and new.

Flor's not sorry for what she said. Not. She presses a hand to her heart, feels it beat beat beat. Not. Not. Not.

Maybe she will be. But not yet.

Hate
. She shouldn't have used that word.

Cecilia said it too.

A familiar bark and squeak turn her around.

Old Violet Tinkiss and her two-legged dog trundle down the road. Violet's hair is a crazy thundercloud. She barely glances at Flor, but little Minnie, strapped into the doggie-wheelchair contraption Violet built her, smiles her pink-gummed smile. Her useless rear legs flap like extra tails. Digging into her backpack, Flor pulls out one of the dog treats she carries just in
case she meets up with Minnie.

“Hey, sweet girl.” She fondles the dog's long, silky ears. “How you doing, Violet?”

Violet grunts. Her being here is an undeniable sign that summer's over. During tourist season, Violet lies low, sticking to her dilapidated fishing shack or camping at the abandoned rescue station out on the neck. She mutters and curses, maybe at the lake, where her husband's ship wrecked fifty years ago, or at the heartless summer person who hit Minnie and left her lying in a ditch, or maybe at the cruel universe in general. Dad's the only human being she tolerates.

But now she'll be out and about, like some animal that hibernates in reverse. It's funny how the island's crazy person makes Flor feel more normal. She tells herself it'll be all right. Mama will punish her, but eventually her parents will make up, just like always. Thomas will go back to being annoying. And Cecilia. Clearly she's had a change of heart. She won't freeze Flor out, not after this.

It'll be a while, though, till things calm down back there. She watches Violet and Minnie wheel away, then peg-legs her way down the side of the
quarry. Loose stones skitter. A rabbit shoots out from one thorny bush and hides behind another. Flor picks her way around the tumbled rocks to where the cattails whisper among themselves. Parting them, she slips through, steps out onto the edge of the swimming hole.

Stretching out, chin on her fist, she peers into the icy water. The bodies of those drowned lovers still lie down there. On a ledge, Joe Hawkins says. He claims he saw their bones, bleached out and picked clean. The skeletons still have their gnarly arms around each other, locked in eternal frozen embrace. Minnows swim in and out of their eye sockets.

Joe Hawkins! Only someone certified brainless would believe him!

The water ripples, though no one threw a stone. The shadow of a cloud whisks across the water and brings with it Flor's bad dream. On a ledge, in the dark.

Maybe things won't be all right.

Flor gives herself a shake. Stop that right now. She sits up and opens her backpack. The phone. Of course it won't work out here. Still she presses
TALK
and holds it to her ear.

“Hello? Hello, Sylvie? Why didn't you call? I really, really need to talk to you.”

Thank goodness no one can see her.

“You could put shaving cream on your lips and say a rabid squirrel bit you. You could fake the symptoms of malaria. Chills and fever.”

No reply. Flor puts the phone away and stretches out on the refrigerator rock. She opens her library book. Moonpenny Public Library is in the basement of the school, and the comforting smell of underground wafts out. After a while, she rests her cheek against the page. A breeze strokes the back of her neck. Quarry quiet. It's so deep down.

Pock!

Her eyes fly open. Drool glues her cheek to the page. She must have drifted off.

Pock, pock!

Sitting up, rubbing her eyes, Flor knows what that sound is. Dad at the VFW, practicing his shooting. Every single Saturday, come hell or high water.

The sun's slipped a few notches, and when she stands up, her shadow wears stilts. She has to go
home right now. Making Mama madder is the last thing anyone needs. She wipes the drool off her book, shoves it into her pack. She picks up the phone.

“I'm on my way home, Sylvie. In case you've been trying and trying to reach me and are worried where I am. I mean, really frantically worried, since you are my best friend and care about me above all other living creatures.”

Her foot has fallen asleep. It's encased in a block of cement. Dragging it behind her, she stumbles through the cattails, out into the open quarry, and directly into a girl wearing work boots with red laces and a sweatshirt big enough for three more of her to fit inside. Jumping back, the girl swings up a phone and snaps her photo.

“What are you doing? You took my picture?” Flor shoves her dead phone into her backpack. Her face burns. “You're spying again!”

“No! Not this time.”

“See! You admit it!”

“Spying, observing, go on—waste time splitting hairs.”

Pock pock pock!
Three more shots dent the air.
The girl turtles inside her XXL sweatshirt. Her eyes flick from side to side.

“My father's taking target practice,” Flor says. “It's just practice bullets, not real.”

“Your father's the police officer.” The sweatshirt muffles her voice. “He should get a new patrol car. His spews out way too much exhaust. It's very bad for the environment.”

Her eyes are green and her hair is fizzy, like ginger ale. Flor's waked-up foot is getting stabbed by fiery pins and needles.

“He can't help what it spews out. That car's the best this island can afford.”

“That's too bad.” She pulls the sweatshirt down. “I'm doing reconnaissance for
my
father, who, as you probably know, is a geologist with a special interest in
Phacops rana
.”

“No. I did not know that.” How strange is this girl? Very. And what is with that giant sweatshirt?

The girl holds up her phone, which has a camouflage cover. She's into being invisible, it seems. There's something odd about how she palms and swipes the screen, but before Flor can think what, she's being
forced to look at photos.

“Rocks,” says Flor.

“Observe more closely.”

“Oh. Fossils.”

Once, forever ago, all of Moonpenny lay underwater. A great inland sea covered everything. If Flor had been alive back then—well, she'd have been a prehistoric shark or bit of coral, since no humans existed yet. Island limestone is perfect for the formation of fossils. Every island kid has a few in a shoe box.

The girl pauses at a photo of a miniature cone, its tail curled in on itself.

“Popular name, horn coral. Scientific name,
Sterolasma rectum
.” Swipe. “Brachiopod.” Swipe. “Rhipidomella.”

She's showing off, naming everything, like she owns the place, when Flor—Flor!—is the one who lives here. The girl, whose own name remains a mystery, slides her eyes sideways, making sure Flor's paying attention.

“And here we have
Homo sapiens
.”

A blur of a girl, with skin the color of cauliflower
and a useless phone pressed to her ear. You could put a whole apple in her mouth, that's how wide open it is. Flor always looks bad in photos, but this wins the gold.

Before she can squawk, the girl hits
DELETE
and the picture disappears.

“Well,” says Flor. “Thank you for that.”

Her
phone really rings.

“Hello, Father. . . . A few interesting finds. I've noted the coordinates. . . . Fifteen minutes. No more, I promise.” She drops the phone into the messenger bag slung across her chest, then stands there doing an imitation of someone who hates to go.

“By the way, my name is Jasper Fife. Jasper is a form of crystalline quartz, and it's often green.” She points at her eyes. “You're Flora.”

“Flor. No ah.”

Overhead, a flock of ducks wings by. One brings up the rear, flapping and quacking.
Wait up, guys! Wait for me!
Then things get quiet again. Dad's long done shooting. He'll be at the police station now, carefully cleaning his gun before locking it back up. Afterward, he's supposed to stop at Two Sisters and
get the popcorn for their Saturday-night treat. Later, they're all supposed to squish together on the couch and watch a movie. Flor tries her best to imagine all this happening.

“Is something the matter?” Jasper is regarding her like a specimen in need of a scientific name.

“What?”

“You look pale and sickly.”

“I always look like this.”

Jasper starts climbing up the side of the quarry. She's clumsy, slipping and sliding and clawing at saplings with one hand. It's exhausting to watch. And a huge surprise when, finally at the top, she turns and calls down, “Do you want to meet my father?”

“What?”

“He'll show you his fossils.” Jasper pauses. “Feel free to decline.”

Flor has to go home. She absolutely does.

“Okay,” she says. “Just for a minute.”

E
very spring and fall, Moonpenny Island becomes a bird motel. Migrating across the lake, the birds stop here to rest and eat, and on weekends the Red Robin Inn fills up with people wearing fancy binoculars around their necks. Bird brains, the islanders call them. A couple of birders perch in rockers on the inn's front porch and cock their birdlike heads at Flor and Jasper as they go inside.

In the lobby, a small man with a big white beard and boots that are a replica of Jasper's greets them.

“Here she is! My little animalcule!”

A bony Santa. If Santa dressed in hiking boots and a tool belt. A dirt comet streaks across his cheek. Licking her finger, Jasper rubs it clean. She's as tall as he is.

“And who's this?” His dark eyes twinkle, which is something Flor thought only happened in books. He grabs her hand and pumps it. “I'm Dr. Fife.”

“Father, this is Flor.”

“And are you native to the island, Miss Flora and Fauna?”

“Umm, I guess so.”

He shakes Flor's hand for a century or two. She gets the distinct feeling that Jasper doesn't bring people home every day.

“You look hungry!” he says. “Follow me!”

The wooden steps creak. Dr. Fife's socks droop around his ankles. Up, up, up they climb, to the top floor, where they step into a big room with a slanted roof and a tall window at either end. Beneath each window there's an unmade bed. In the room's center, chaos. A couch swamped with dirty dishes, and a long table buried under maps, rocks, rolls of strapping tape, a laptop, rocks, notebooks, a camera, wadded-
up paper towels, rocks, spray bottles, tools, knives, and labeled ziplock bags. And rocks.

“Give us a moment,” says Dr. Fife.

He sweeps aside mugs and forks to make room on the couch. Meanwhile, Jasper pulls a ham out of the mini refrigerator and starts hacking it up. The sight sets Flor's mouth watering. She didn't eat lunch, and she loves ham.

Ham, it turns out, is it. Ham and more ham, with a couple of slices of bread thrown in for a second food group. It's like camping out indoors. Dr. Fife wolfs down a few chunks, then goes to the worktable. He chooses a rock and a teensy pick that reminds Flor of the one the dental hygienist uses to clean her teeth. Pick pick pick, till he switches to a knife, and then whittle whittle whittle. His movements are small and quick. The couch, the floor—everything's covered with fine, stony dust. Something tells Flor there's no mother in this picture.

Dr. Fife shows her the rock. Tiny tunnels run through it every which way.

“Trilobites,” he tells her. “Expert burrowers! Humble heroes of the remarkable Cambrian period.”

Flor knows about trilobites. They resembled a cross between a beetle and a miniature armored tank and scuttled around in the mud at the bottom of ye olde prehistoric sea. When they took an all-school field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Mrs. Defoe demanded they admire the dusty case of trilobites, the state fossil. Yawn! Snooze! The real stars of the show were the dinosaurs and the prehistoric sharks with teeth the size of bananas.

“So the trilobite's your specialty?” she asks, trying to be polite, thinking, You can't map the ways of the heart.

It's like Jasper's father got plugged into a socket. She almost hears him start to hum. Yes, it is his specialty, and specifically the trilobite eye. Does she know the trilobite was among the very first creatures to develop eyes?

Flor shakes her head. Wait. Does this mean there were once creatures
without eyes
? A shudder goes through her.

“The wily
Acaste
, the lumbering
Paradoxides
, and the ubiquitous
Phacops
—they all evolved to have high-quality vision! And let's not forget those
entrepreneurs who developed eyes mounted on stalks. That enabled them to immerse themselves in sediment but still keep an eye out for predators.” Dr. Fife claps his hands. “
Literally
keep an eye out!”