Manatee Summer

Dedication

For Arthur

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

Papa’s manatee story goes like this.

When he was a kid, way before he met Nana, and way before I even existed, he used to take his dad’s canoe out into the Indigo River, hoping to catch some fish to fry. His family didn’t have much money, so he wanted to help out. And one day, instead of fish, Papa found a manatee.

He gave up on fishing and followed the manatee down the river, away from town, into a cove ringed with palm trees. It was a cloudy day, but when the sun came out, Papa saw another manatee swimming near the canoe, and then another, and another, until he realized there was a whole herd of manatees in the cove.

Papa sat there for hours, till sunset, while the manatees puttered around his canoe. He says it was one of the most magical days of his life. He says that sitting there, watching them, he felt peaceful—like he didn’t have anywhere else to be. Like it didn’t matter what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. Like, for a little while at least, everything was okay.

I love the story, but I also love the way Papa tells it—the way he smiles his crooked smile and waggles his bushy eyebrows when he describes the manatees as big gray blobs. I love his voice, too. It’s the deepest voice I’ve ever heard, like he’s drawing it up from the bottom of the sea. Like each word is a sunken treasure.

But ever since Papa got a kind of dementia called Alzheimer’s, his manatee story has been changing. He takes away certain parts and adds others. Now he says that he stayed with them past sunset, till the stars came out. He says that the manatees danced and somersaulted in the water. I don’t know if I believe that bit about the somersaults, though.

Honestly, I don’t know if I believe any of it anymore. I’ve never seen a cove ringed with palm trees, and I’ve biked a whole lot of the Indigo River coast. I’ve never seen a manatee, either, even though they’re supposed to live in the river and I’ve been looking for them for basically my whole life, a.k.a. eleven years.

I want to believe Papa’s story. I want to hold on to it. But it feels like trying to hold on to a wave at the beach, the way I did when I was little and didn’t know any better. I’d stand waist-deep in the ocean and dig my toes into the sand. When a wave reached the shore, I’d try to wrap my arms around it, but it always slipped away.

One time it even carried me with it. I lost my footing, and my whole world turned to water, and for a few seconds there was no up or down, no sky or sand, just me spinning in the darkness until Papa’s hand found mine.

Two

There! I say, pointing to a speckled lizard racing along the bank of the canal.

Tommy squats for a closer inspection. Brown anole, he says. Discovery #22. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. Peter, I estimate there’s a seventy-eight percent chance we’ve run out of lizard species native to central Florida.

I scowl. You’re a nonbeliever.

But I believe in lots of things, says Tommy. Like gravity. And chlorophyll.

Chloro-what?

Chlorophyll. It’s the pigment in plants that makes them green. He’s talking fast now, the way he always does when he gets going about a new word he just learned. "I was listening to a Science Daily podcast about the plant reproductive cycle—"

Good grief, Tommy, I say, sponging the sweat off my face with my shirt.

It’s the first day of summer vacation, and the sun must know it, too, because it’s hot. Even for Florida. It’s one of those days when your skin stings and the pavement looks all blurry and it’s so humid you feel like someone just threw a big wet blanket over you. It’s hard to get enough oxygen, and you definitely don’t want to breathe with your mouth open, because there are about one gazillion mosquitos buzzing around your head, and the air is thick with the smell of dead catfish wafting up from the Indigo River.

The road scorches my bare feet, so Tommy and I stick to the grassy bank of the canal that runs into our neighborhood from the river. Well, I stick to the bank. Tommy keeps his distance. He’s been scared of water ever since spring break, when he got caught in a rip current at the beach and his dad, a risk analyst, told him there was a 7 percent chance he could’ve been swept right out to sea and drowned.

Sunscreen? Tommy says, pulling a bottle out of one of the pockets of his cargo shorts. It’s SPF 100. That’s the highest SPF.

I wave the bottle away. You know I hate that stuff.

But Peter, remember last summer when we were out in the sun all day and you didn’t wear sunscreen and you burned and then peeled for a whole week?

No, I say, even though I totally do remember. My skin aches just thinking about it.

While Tommy smears a thick coat of sunscreen on his arms and legs, I keep looking for animals. Our neighborhood curls like a horseshoe around the canal, and there are usually lots of birds and reptiles down here by the water. Tommy says the canal is like its own little ecosystem—another word he learned from Science Daily.

A sudden flash of red in the branches of an oak tree catches my eye.

Binoculars! I say.

Tommy scrambles to hand them over. I zoom in on the spot of red, then sigh. Red-winged blackbird.

Discovery #72, says Tommy, rubbing sunscreen on his cheeks.

The tricky thing about discoveries is that the more you make, the harder it is to make new ones. Still, this is it. This summer—our last summer before middle school—Tommy and I will finally finish our Discovery Journal. I know it. I can feel it. Three long months ahead of us and only six discoveries to go. If we just keep our eyes open—

Well, well! School’s out already?

Shoot. I was so busy trying to make a discovery that I didn’t notice Mr. Reilly standing on the dock in front of his ugly yellow house on the other side of the canal. My blood starts to boil, and it’s not just the billion-degree heat. Mr. Reilly is my archnemesis.

Y-Yes, sir, Tommy says, even though I’ve told him a thousand times to stop calling Mr. Reilly sir.

And let me guess, says Mr. Reilly. You boys are out here getting into some kind of trouble?

He smirks at us from across the canal. With his big straw hat and string-bean arms, he looks like a scarecrow that somebody made the mistake of bringing to life. He’s almost blocking the entire sun with his hat, which is a very Mr. Reilly thing to do.

I look from Mr. Reilly to his speedboat, the Reckoner, bobbing in the water at the end of his dock. He had the name custom-painted along the side in jagged red letters that are probably supposed to be edgy but are really just silly. Another very Mr. Reilly thing to do.

Can’t two kids go for a walk? I growl.

Mr. Reilly shrugs his knobby shoulders and shifts his jaw from side to side. Mrs. Reilly made him give up chewing tobacco ages ago, but his mouth never learned how to stop chewing. Depends where you’re walking, he says.

I glare at Mr. Reilly, right into that face of old, sun-cracked leather, because I’m not afraid of him. I don’t care that he won the lottery last year, or that he’s the president of the Indigo River Boating Club, or that he’s got a shiny new speedboat. He’s not some big shot to me. The day I met him, he yelled at me and Tommy for standing in his yard so we could see an eastern cottontail rabbit up close. Ever since, I’ve known exactly what he is—a bully.

A hundred insults are on the tip of my tongue—some of them are pretty creative, too—but then I think back to last summer when Mr. Reilly caught me and Tommy plucking avocados off the avocado trees in his backyard. Actually, he only caught me plucking avocados. He caught Tommy hiding behind his dumpster, waiting for me to finish. Anyway, he ratted me out to my mom and she grounded me for a whole week. So maybe I should try to not tick off Mr. Reilly this summer, even though ticking off Mr. Reilly is one of my specialties.

I guess Mr. Reilly is thinking back to that day, too. I’ve counted every avocado on every avocado tree in my backyard, he says. So I’ll know if any go missing.

You don’t even use the avocados, I say. You just let them fall and rot!

Mr. Reilly frowns. I made guacamole once. He squints at Tommy. Your parents getting that porch screening replaced?

Yes, sir. I mean— Tommy sneezes. I think so, sir.

Good, says Mr. Reilly, hopping down into the Reckoner. Good, good, good.

I have no idea why Mr. Reilly and Tommy are talking about porch screening, but I’m not sticking around to find out. Come on, Tommy, I say. I don’t have to say it twice. Tommy is always ready to run away from Mr. Reilly. Tommy is always ready to run away from everything.

But we’ve barely taken a single step before the engine of Mr. Reilly’s speedboat roars to life and a shower of filthy river water is raining down on us as he takes off flying down the canal, going way faster than the 10-miles-per-hour canal speed limit.

While Tommy coughs and splutters, I start chasing after Mr. Reilly and the Reckoner, my fists clenched, my heart pounding. He’s not getting away with this.

Or . . . maybe he is. He’s already speeding out of the canal and into the Indigo River. I kick a stubby palm tree with my bare foot. It hurts. I say a word I’m not supposed to say but Mom says all the time.

It’s okay, says Tommy. I mean, the Indigo River is full of bacteria and there’s a ninety-three percent chance all those bacteria are now crawling around our skin and I have a very sensitive immune system, but— Another sneeze. Tommy has seasonal allergies in every season. But it’s okay.

"It’s not okay, I say. Did the Discovery Journal get wet?"

Tommy peeks inside his backpack. I think my body shielded it.

Well, that’s a relief, at least.

I check my watch to make sure it’s okay, too.

The watch was a birthday gift from Papa. He’s given me lots of watches—he used to own a watch repair shop, before he got sick and moved in with me and Mom—but this one is the coolest. The clockface is a model of the solar system. The hour hand ends on Earth, the minute hand ends on Jupiter, and the second hand ends on Pluto, even though Pluto isn’t a real planet. It’s a dwarf planet, according to Tommy. Anyway, I’ve worn the watch every day since Papa gave it to me, and I have a feeling that I’m going to be checking it a lot more this summer now that I’m on Official Caregiver Duty.

The watch is a little wet, but Earth and Jupiter and Pluto are still circling the sun. And it’s only two forty-five, so I don’t have to go home just yet—Papa’s next pill dose is at three o’clock. He’s probably still asleep, anyway. Most days, he naps after lunch.

Tommy and I keep walking along the canal. I shake my head back and forth like a dog so the water flies out of my hair. Tommy tries to wipe his glasses clean, but he can’t find a dry spot anywhere on his clothes. Then he starts stumbling around, the way he does whenever he can’t see right. We sit down in the grass so he doesn’t walk himself right into the canal. He sits a little farther back from the water than I do.

There aren’t any rip currents in canals, you know.

I know, says Tommy. Still, he doesn’t move any closer.

I could tell Tommy about the time I went to the beach with Papa and a wave pulled me under. It wasn’t a rip current, but it was still pretty scary, like the ocean was swallowing me whole. Maybe Tommy would feel better if he knew he’s not the only one who was almost swept out to sea.

But that was a long time ago. I was just a little kid. I’m not afraid of anything now. Not the ocean, and not Mr. Reilly, either.

"I hate that guy, I say, plucking a blade of grass and ripping it in half. What’s wrong with him?"

He’s a little disagreeable, says Tommy.

Why don’t you just call him a jerk?

Tommy has always used big words—at least, he’s used big words as long as I’ve known him, which is a couple of years, which is a pretty long time. Mom thinks he’s odd, but I think he’s a genius. It probably helps that his mom is a NASA scientist.

Still, he can be pretty helpless for a genius.

Here, I say, snatching his glasses and cleaning them with a dry patch on my shorts.

It’s a good thing, too, because as soon as Tommy puts them back on, he makes the discovery of the summer. No, the discovery of the year. No, the discovery of the millennium.

Peter, look!

I scan the canal until I see it—a gray lump floating a few yards away from where we’re sitting. It disappears under the water, then pops back up a few seconds later.

If I had to make a guess, says Tommy, I’d say that’s a—

Manatee, I whisper.

A breeze stirs the reeds in the shallows and prickles the back of my neck as I crawl on my hands and knees to the water’s edge. The manatee sinks and rises again, and this time its head breaks the water, just for a second—a big, whiskery snout with two nostrils and two beady black eyes.

My heart is flitting like the wings of the ruby-throated hummingbird, a.k.a. Discovery #54. I remind myself to breathe, because sometimes when I get really excited, I hold my breath so long my chest starts to ache and I almost die.

Journal, I say. Tommy hands it over, and I flip to a fresh page. At the top, I write Discovery #95: Manatee. Then I start sketching.

What’re all those white lines on its back? I say, real quiet so I don’t scare it away.

Tommy scoots forward the tiniest bit. Maybe every manatee has a unique pattern, the way every giraffe has a unique set of spots. That’s just a hypothesis, though.

We sit there for a little while, shoulder to shoulder, me studying the manatee and sketching on the left page of the journal and Tommy jotting down notes and observations and questions on the right. The sun beats down like it’s trying to bake us—There’s a twelve percent chance we’re about to get heatstroke, Tommy says—but I don’t care. Because manatees are real.

I know that sounds silly. Of course manatees are real. But until this moment, I wasn’t really sure. I couldn’t really know.

And if manatees are real, maybe Papa’s story is real, too.

Papa! I check my watch—Jupiter is twenty-two minutes past three—then stand so fast I almost kick the Discovery Journal into the canal. Tommy yelps, but I dive for the journal and grab it in the nick of time. The manatee disappears under the water in all the commotion.

I have to go. I don’t want to say it—all I want to do is sit here and sketch the manatee for hours—but I can’t.

Already? Tommy says, standing and brushing grass off his shorts. "I could come over, if you want. I could start my manatee research on your computer. I mean,