Moonpenny Island

  Dedication

  For my antediluvian love, Paul

  Map

  Contents

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Transparent. That’s how Flor and Sylvie are to each other. See-through. Flor knows everything about Sylvie, and Sylvie? She knows things about Flor before Flor knows them herself.

  Sylvie cheers Flor up or calms her down. Considers the same stuff funny or annoying. Won’t tease her for still being scared of the dark, not to mention those spiders with hairy legs, and loves pretending their bikes are wild horses only they can tame. Sylvie, world’s most awesome friend, never laughs at Flor, or if she does, it’s the kind of laugh that means oh-wow-you-are-one-of-a-kind-and-I-love-you, never oh-wow-how-can-anyone-possibly-be-so-weird-a-roo.

  “Best friends” does not cover it. They are each other’s perfect friend.

  Add this: Flor O’Dell and Sylvie Pinch live on a small island in a great lake. An island so small it’s barely more than a lump of limestone. So minuscule that when the ferries shut down and the summer people leave, fewer than two hundred souls live here, and that’s counting Flossie the gangster cat and Minerva the two-legged dog. Flor and Sylvie are the only eleven-year-old humans for watery miles and miles.

  Think of it. How amazing, how excellent, how rare is that? In Flor’s opinion, very.

  But she hasn’t seen Sylvie in four days. Practically a record in the lifelong history of their friendship. Sylvie has been sick, or busy, or something. Something peculiar. Something strange. Then this morning, this bright, hot July morning, she called. “Come right over,” Sylvie whispered. “Right this minute.”

  Flor jumps on her trusty bike, bends low over the handlebars.

  “Fly, Misty! Fly like the western wind!”

  The morning becomes a dazzling blur. Last night it rained, and the world is polished up. The leaves on the trees are a deeper green, the rocks have lost their dust, and every dip in the land brims and winks in the sunlight. Water and rock—that’s what Moonpenny Island is made of. Talk about opposites! The lake is a show-off blabbermouth. It can’t stand to be ignored for a single solitary minute. Moonpenny is so little only a blind person could get lost here, though even she—the blind person—could find her way by listening for the mutters and murmurs, slaps and crashes of the water. Meanwhile, the rocks keep quiet. When Flor was in third grade and had to draw a spelling picture for secret, she drew a rock.

  Now she rides no-handed, arms dangling. Her grandmother Lita, who lives on the mainland, has a sampler on her living room wall: GOD’S IN HIS HEAVEN—ALL’S RIGHT WITH THE WORLD! Exactly. Flor passes summer people in rented golf carts and Camp Agape campers on clunky camp bikes. Queenie from Two Sisters store, bobbing to her car radio, waves. The dark, curly head of Joe Hawkins pokes up from his family’s front yard, basically a graveyard for things summer people toss. Old bikes, rusted outboards, dilapidated deck chairs—Joe’s father is a junk-oholic.

  “Hey, Floor.” Joe waves. “Where’s your sister, Ceiling?”

  Once, for about three minutes, Flor and Sylvie decided Joe was cute. What were they thinking? She almost shouts back at him, then bites her tongue. When she was little, Flor was famous for her bad temper. Her big sister, Cecilia, still has a faint tattoo of Flor’s baby teeth on her left arm. Now that she’s older, though, Flor exercises self-control. Not that injustice, and the victimizing of the small, the weak, and the four-legged, don’t enrage her still. But now she knows how to handle her anger.

  Mostly.

  The rain turned the lake brown and foamy as a fancy coffee drink. She glides by a few more houses, then claps her hands over her ears as she passes Pinch Paving and Stone, the last working quarry. Inside the tall barbed-wire fence, the diggers and hoppers, feeders and crushers, roar and growl. A crane like a dinosaur skeleton juts against the sky. Cutting and crushing limestone is no dainty job. Sylvie’s father owns the quarry, and Sylvie hates it. She says the quarry makes her feel sorry for Mother Earth.

  Crazy-tenderhearted, that’s Sylvie Pinch. Once she and Flor dragged all the island’s tossed-out Christmas trees back to her house, because Sylvie felt bad for them. That same Christmas, when her mother got a new toaster, Sylvie took the old one to bed with her every night for a week. Her bed was a mess of toast crumbs. If Sylvie’s heart was a fruit, it would be a sweet, ripe strawberry.

  Her house sits on the island’s only rise. All glass and stone, it hogs up the best view of the sunset. Flor’s house could fit inside twice. It’s funny how, lately, Sylvie always wants to come over to Flor’s. She says she likes the O’Dell house better, because it’s so cozy. Which is Sylvie-speak for crowded and old.

  She’s waiting at the foot of her long driveway, riding her purple bike in lazy circles. The purple ties of her swimsuit—two-piece, bought by her mother from a boutique on the mainland—poke out the neck of her purple-and-white T-shirt. Her purple helmet is on her head, her purple high-tops on her feet. Both knees have Band-Aids. Beige, not purple. Though that bruise on her cheek is.

  “I tripped,” Sylvie says when she sees Flor’s what-happened face. “Down the . . . the cellar steps.”

  “Yikes.” There’s another bruise on Sylvie’s forehead. “Ouch.”

  “I know.” She switches into her alien voice. “I inhabit the planet Clumsy.”

  The sudden spit of gravel sends them scrambling. A red SUV shoots down the drive, Sylvie’s handsome, bad-news brother at the wheel.

  “Slow down!” they holler at the top of their lungs, but he barely taps the brake before he rockets out into the road.

  “I thought he was working at the quarry this summer,” says Flor.

  “He is.”

  “Well, he’s going the exact wrong direction.”

  Sylvie sighs. “If only he wouldn’t drive like that. It gets me so worried.” She pushes her purple glasses up her nose and sighs again, and Flor wishes, not for the first time, that the Earth would yawn and swallow Peregrine Pinch IV feet first.

  The Pinches’ ancestors settled the island forever ago, when it still rightfully belonged to Indians. The Indians are long gone, but not the Pinches. Sylvie’s family owns the ferry, the Cockeyed Gull restaurant, and of course that deafening quarry. Peregrine Pinch III, Sylvie’s father, is the mayor. If the island had royalty, Sylvie’s family would all wear crowns.

  Perry Pinch is the prince. The spoiled rotten kind. Last month he got in a fistfight with a summer kid. The month before, he got caught stealing at Two Sisters, even though he had a pocket full of money. The month before—well, don’t get Flor started.

  Sylvie squints up the road, though the car’s long disappeare
d. She loves her big brother beyond all reason. She adores that chucklehead so completely, so blindly, it could almost make a person jealous.

  “My parents had a fight over Perry last night.” Flor’s surprised to hear herself say this, since how much her parents argue isn’t high on her list of conversation topics. Too late now. Sylvie’s blue eyes widen, and Flor has to explain. “My mother said my father should give him a speeding ticket, and my father said he guesses after all these years he knows how to be the island cop.”

  “Your father never gives islanders tickets. He hardly ever even gives them to summer people.”

  “I know. My parents can fight over anything these days. The tiniest, most unimportant thing. It’s a special talent they’ve developed.” Flor digs gravel out of her sandal. Lately, her parents take longer and longer to make up. Lately, Dad’s spending more nights on the couch, and the only time you hear Mama singing is in church. “If there was a show called Find the Most Ridiculous Thing to Fight About, they’d win the boat and the car and the vacation house.”

  “Adults are crazy-bizarre.”

  “We’ll never be like that.”

  “Never.”

  But an odd look comes into Sylvie’s eyes. Something surfaces, something Flor can’t name, and it makes her heart reset its beat. What? Sylvie hops on her bike and starts pedaling.

  “Where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?”

  “You were falling down the cellar stairs.”

  “Enough of that rubbish,” Sylvie says in her English-lady voice.

  They gallop, leaving trouble behind. Civilization on one side, lake sparkle on the other. A birder, standing in tall grass, trains his binoculars on them. Flor and Sylvie, a rare species! Beach towels ripple on clotheslines, and in the cottage windows, curtains rise and fall. That thug of a cat, Flossie Magruder, crouches in the weeds, a doomed field mouse between her big paws. Passing the turnoff for the winery, they hear loud music and laughing, though it’s barely noon. Summer people! Year-rounders turn up their noses at them. “Before they board the ferry, they leave their brains behind in a bucket,” islanders say.

  Summer people don’t know about the swimming hole. It’s hidden away in the old quarry off Moonpenny Road. Sylvie and Flor leave their bikes on the edge and scramble down the steep sides. Their feet set off mini avalanches, and they grab at scrubby juniper bushes to keep from falling. This place got quarried out years ago, and the sides are slowly silting in. Weeds and wildflowers poke through the cracks in the stony floor, and big blocks of limestone lie tumbled around. When you get to the bottom and look up, you’re a Cheerio in a giant bowl, or a little fish in a great stone tank. Walk back to that papery screen of cattails, part them with both hands, step inside.

  Silvery rocks, speckled with lichen, warm in the sun. The pool is so deep, so clear and cold, that the minute she sees it, Flor shivers. That water stops your breath. Every single time, it stops your breath.

  Of course, they’re not allowed in alone. If the island mothers had their way, NO SWIMMING ALONE would be tattooed on every child’s forehead. People have drowned here, including two star-crossed lovers who loaded their pockets with stones, exchanged one last passionate kiss, and jumped in. Who would be so brainless? Another time, a girl known to be an excellent swimmer sank from view right before the eyes of her hysterical parents, who couldn’t save her. Everybody says the hole has no bottom, though how can that be?

  The dry cattails sway and rustle, even though there’s no breeze. Flor doesn’t believe in ghosts. Still, she’d rather die than be here at night. Flor’s afraid of the dark, and out here, she can tell, the dark would be that thick, suffocating kind, the kind that rubs against you like black fur.

  Boiling hot as she and Sylvie are, they don’t dare go in that water yet. A big toe, that’s all for now.

  Instead they stretch out on their favorite rock, wide and flat as a refrigerator, and open their books. Flor could read till her eyes fell out. Sylvie’s never big on books, and today she can’t seem to concentrate at all. She jumps up and prowls around, collecting rocks.

  “How can something have no bottom?” says Flor.

  “I don’t know. Did you ever dream you were falling and falling and you were never going to stop?”

  “Eek. No.”

  Sylvie’s hand goes to her bruised cheek. She’s on the slippery edge of the hole, sliding one long, skinny foot in front of the other. For no good reason, a chill knifes through Flor, right there in the crazy-hot sun.

  “Careful!” she yells at her friend.

  A nature trail rims the quarry, with boring markers describing this and that, and they can hear some clueless summer people up there, trudging through the rising heat. Sylvie arranges her rocks. Flor turns pages. A dragonfly with iridescent wings hovers over her book like it wishes it knew how to read.

  “Look,” says Sylvie then.

  Flor raises her eyes, catches her breath. Sylvie is always building stuff, but this may be her masterpiece. She’s arranged the stones into a cross between a fairy castle and a cathedral. She’s made turrets and towers and, at the very center, a round room paved with sparkling pebbles and slivers of slate.

  “If only we knew a shrinking spell!” says Flor. “We could live there together.”

  Sylvie laughs. Her blond ponytail shoots up like a geyser.

  “We’d drink dew and eat wild blueberries.”

  “Hitch rides on dragonflies.”

  “We’d weave dresses from spider silk.”

  “Not the kind with hairy legs.”

  “Never!”

  Sylvie shows Flor the gray rock she laid on the very top. One corner has a pleat, like a tiny white fan. A fossil.

  They put their foreheads together and make a wish, the way they always do when they find one.

  Never parted, wishes Flor. Looking up into Sylvie’s blue eyes, she knows their wishes match.

  Transparent. That’s how they are.

  Later, a couple of mothers show up with their kids. At last, Flor and Sylvie are officially allowed in the water. They tear off their T-shirts.

  Only, what’s this? Poor Sylvie has yet another bruise, this one on her shoulder. Seeing Flor’s face, Sylvie spins away, shouts, “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  Holding hands, they count to three, then, because Flor chickened out, to five. Eyes squeezed shut, screaming to wake the dead, they leap.

  The water stops their breath.

  Chapter Two

  That nursery rhyme claims little boys are made of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails, but Flor is certain her brother is ninety-nine percent dirt. Lately he spends all his time with a summer kid named Benjamin, and their main activity must be rolling on the ground. Usually Thomas follows Flor everywhere, so this development is a relief. Except for how disgustingly filthy he is.

  Thomas’s other new thing is whistling. This is an improvement over when he said everything in what he claimed was Martian, and definitely better than when his answer to any question was “It’s complicated.”

  Did you brush your teeth? “It’s complicated.”

  Why is your shirt inside out? “It’s complicated.”

  Have you seen Dad’s fishing pole? “It’s . . .”

  You get the idea.

  At least when he’s whistling, he’s not talking.

  Today when Flor gets home from swimming, she hears him in the bathroom, whistling softly and steadily. Carrying a tune doesn’t figure in. They only have one bathroom, and Flor needs a shower. When she knocks, a two-part rising whistle answers her.

  “It’s me,” she says. “Come out. Time’s up.”

  Now it’s one long loud note, like a policeman stopping traffic.

  “This is ridiculous.” She tries the doorknob. Locked. “I refuse to communicate in whistles.”

  The toilet flushes. The sink runs for several centuries. Yet when Thomas opens the door, his face and hands are grubby as ever. A mystery. He saunters down the hall, ha
nds in pockets, a pudgy six-year-old whistling machine.

  After her shower, Flor peers into the steamy mirror. She’s diligent with the sunscreen, and pale as a cauliflower. Because she’s small for her age, with dark hair like her mother and fair skin like her father, people who don’t know her well often ask if she feels all right. Whenever they visit Mama’s family in Toledo, Lita forces her to eat fried liver. Lita’s convinced Flor has poor blood and sends her home with big jars of iron pills. All Mama’s side of the family has beautiful caramel-colored skin and glossy dark hair. It’s how Cecilia looks, and Thomas too. But not Flor.

  Sylvie says she is unique. This is Sylvie-speak for ugly duckling.

  Mama’s in the kitchen, making dinner. She can peel and chop while gazing out the window, though this makes everyone else nervous. Chop chop, those carrots are goners. Whoosh, they cascade into the pot. She dries her hands, cocks a look at Flor.

  “Fetch the comb and brush,” she says.

  Nothing. That’s what Flor loves more than Mama French braiding her hair. Usually when Mama pays her particular, undivided attention, it’s to scold her for being so stubborn, or flipping her lip, or teasing poor little Thomas. But when she’s braiding Flor’s hair, lifting the strands and twining them smooth, Mama’s strong fingers do the talking.

  You are my girl. My one and only Flor.

  No one else pronounces her name that exact way, stretching it into two emerald-green syllables, making Flor see a vine twisting up a wall, white flowers like stars. It’s the way her name is meant to sound.

  Just as Mama finishes, Cecilia walks in. Flor’s big sister sails straight to the refrigerator.

  “And where have you been all afternoon?” Mama’s not really angry. Trouble? Cecilia never causes it, never gets into it.

  Cecilia selects a single radish. She takes it to the sink, washes it like it’s about to have surgery, and takes a bite. Who eats a radish in more than one bite? A sister who’s on a diet, though she will never admit it.

  “You were at the library again,” Mama accuses. “Don’t think you can fool me.”