Strong Like the Sea, стр. 34

I keep swimming, leaving the eel hole and its phantom monsters behind. The deep sand gives way to shallow reef and I swim even faster.

Don’t touch it. Don’t look!

A pale strip of beach teases ahead, the mountain’s green expanse towering in the distance. Nothing else matters. Only land.

A wave catches me, pushing toward shore, then pulling away. But I break free, my toes digging into the sea floor as I claw through the last of the water.

Safe at last, I stand shivering on the sand. My throat burns as I double over, my stomach cramping with swallowed seawater.

“Hey! You okay?” A tourist lady in a bikini emerges from under a wide umbrella and runs to me, her face and shoulders glazed red from sun.

I cough, gag, and gasp again with legs weak as lauhala leaves. Crumpling to hands and knees, I wheeze in jagged breaths, my hair plastered to my cheek and tangled round my arm. Chicken skin erupts across my body and I moan through chattering teeth. “It tried to get me again. Again!”

“What did? Should I call someone?” The lady’s long-nailed hand pats my shoulder with nervous flutters like a finch flitting to and fro.

“Alex! Alex!” Uncle’s stern voice pulls me from the fog inside my head, and I remember the kayak, Uncle, and the vials for the first time since plunging into the sea.

I roll to my back and blink at the fuzzy image of Uncle Tanaka racing up from the shore toward me. He skids to a knee beside me.

“Did you hit your head? Are you hurt?”

“She said something tried to get her,” the lady says.

“No.” I didn’t hit my head, did I? I cough again, a retching, violent hack that wracks my body, and I curl forward until Uncle’s strong hand cradles my forehead.

“Look at me,” he orders when my coughing subsides, and I blink up at him. “Follow my finger. Up, right, left . . .”

As my eyes trace the lines he makes, his other hand cups my cheek with a gentle, trembling warmth.

“Is she dead?” A little girl in water wings peers over Uncle’s shoulder with wide blue eyes.

“She’ll be fine.” Uncle pats my back.

Uncle, the girl, the lady, tourists—everyone looking at me. The crowd swells—a blur of bright colors. Did that lady have a cell phone pointed at us? Not cool. I roll away from the gawkers and push up onto my feet. “Sorry. Oh, man. I’m fine. Really, I’m okay. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Uncle follows with arms half-raised, ready to catch me if I fall. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

My first few steps are jelly, but after a few more my body feels like my own again as strength trickles back into my limbs.

“We’re okay. Thank you.” Uncle waves at someone behind us but stays by my side.

At the waterline, some keiki tug Uncle’s kayak up onto the shore.

“Mahalo.” Uncle inclines his head to them and they fade away, probably running off to tell the adventure of the mad girl who freaked out and swam up on shore as if the jaws of death were after her.

I’m still not sure that they weren’t.

“I should have been faster,” Uncle says. “But when you went over, you knocked the paddles out with you. I reached for you, but you took off like a marlin and left me in your wake.” With an arm around me, Uncle’s voice grounds me as much as the sand beneath my feet, and my shivering subsides. “I thought you’d reach for the kayak—I was right there with you—but the way you swam . . . Fast as anyone I’ve ever seen.”

He waits for me to talk or something, but I don’t know what to say. With the adrenaline and shakiness draining away, all I feel now is stupid.

I gave in to my fear, which caused my fall and swim through blind panic, when a perfectly good kayak waited right there. Shame settles across my shoulders.

“What say we talk story for what scared you so bad.” Uncle sits beside me on the sand, his arms resting palm up on his knees.

When I don’t slide down beside him, he starts talking anyway as if we’re two old friends visiting on the beach with no worries at all. This whole year, he’s barely said more than two words to me at a time. So why now?

I want my dad—worse, I want my mom. A lump twists in my throat and I look away down the beach and take a step toward home, blinking hard. If I left now, I could be home in ten minutes or less. Dad would still be gone, but I could wait there, and he’d come home after work and fold origami with me, and I could pretend today never happened.

Palm trees sway in a gust of wind, but their fronds mush all together in a blurry green blob at the top of each fuzzy brown line. I frown and rub my eyes. Maybe the saltwater did something to—my glasses!

Both hands fly to pat my hair, shirt, and shorts. Nothing. I scan the ground, squinting best I can, but my glasses are nowhere.

Can today get any worse?

Slowly, I smooth my hair from my forehead to the top of my head where my hat is supposed to be, but isn’t.

Yep. It’s worse.

I lost my best fishing hat. My bag might still be in the kayak with the phone and stuff, but I can’t tell from here because it’s all just one big yellow blur.

“You know why I work with the ocean?” Uncle scoops a handful of sand and lets it sift through his fingers.

“Mom says you like sea creatures,” I mumble. Can I still figure out Mom’s clues if I never go out on the water again? As in never ever, as long as I live?

“I do like the creatures, but the real reason is that the sea keeps my fears away.” He waits like I’m supposed to say something, but I don’t know what to say. How could the ocean