The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook - Lydia Millet (primary phonics .txt) 📗

for geniuses there wanted him. It was even true that he was working on a project for them—or at least he had been. But their mother had been his advisor on the project, and it was kind of in limbo, since she wasn’t around.)

Cara wanted to tell Hayley the truth. She felt bad about hiding it from her. She’d been keeping a lot to herself lately. And even if Hayley hadn’t believed her about the driftwood thing … Hayley was her friend, and it felt awkward to keep this a secret. But Max said it was all too much; he said the bizarreness of the story would stress out their friends.

“I mean, let’s face it,” said Max. “Who would believe the story about the turtle mind meld? It adds this whole other level of weirdness and explaining. Plus, let me be frank, I don’t want to be seen as a freak. Let’s take the path of least resistance. Feel me?”

He planned to tell Zee and his other friends that the scuba-diving trip was to collect algae for Jax, for him to study it, but that the whole thing had to be secret from Zee’s father. After all, you weren’t really supposed to swim in red tides, and her father probably wouldn’t let them.

“Plus I still have to figure out how to teach you guys scuba at warp speed,” added Max. “And right now? I don’t have clue one.”

Cara stopped by Hayley’s house to invite her to sleep over.

“I’ll go ask,” said Hayley, and left Cara standing in the front hallway looking at her mom’s big shelf of figurines, which she liked to show off whenever she got a new one on ebay. They were called Hummers, or something. They made Cara feel ill. There was a chubby girl with a white goose, a gnome with a basket of mushrooms, a drummer boy with a flag on his shoulder.… Cara thought they were sort of ugly, but they had big, round eyes and pink cheeks, and Hayley’s mom loved whatever she thought was cute.

Once Cara’s own mother had stood here with her—they had come in to talk about carpooling or something—and Cara had seen her look at the statuettes with kind eyes. She smiled reassuringly at Cara as they waited, then looked at the figurines again, studiously, examining them—not like they were cute but like they were very, very strange. Cara’s mother had a way of looking at tacky stuff sometimes that was kind of deliberate and quizzical—like she was a traveler from afar, born in a different, finer place, where such things did not exist.

Although apparently she was born in Topeka. Where they probably had plenty of Hummers of their own.

Actually, come to think of it, Cara wasn’t sure where her mother had been born, though for some reason she had a vague picture of cornfields with windmills slowly, creakily turning, or maybe the black-and-white landscape Dorothy lived in before she went to Oz. Her mother didn’t talk much about her childhood.

Cara heard Hayley ask her mother if she could stay over at Cara’s house. Her mother seemed to be scrubbing the bathtub, to judge by the back-and-forth scratching that went on and on as Hayley talked, so Hayley must be standing outside the bathroom door.

Her mother had kind of a carrying voice.

“I guess so, honey,” said her mother.

Hayley mumbled something about Cara’s dad not being there to supervise.

“Well, that family needs a lot of extra support,” said her mother, who sounded like she was trying to be discreet but was actually practically yelling. Cara cringed. “We have to be real supportive of that whole family.”

Anyway, said Hayley’s mother, they were right down the street, so as long as Hayley called her if anything made her uncomfortable …

Out on the sidewalk, while Hayley tossed a tennis ball up and down and popped her gum, Cara explained that she had a science project of Jax’s to help with, and would Hayley mind spending a few hours on the beach that night?

Then they would come back here. Hayley could borrow Max’s bike, since she didn’t have a light on her own.

Hayley shook her head uncertainly. She didn’t like to keep things from her mom; it was just the two of them.

“Max is pitching a tent for us,” Cara added. “We’ll trade off shifts. So he’ll be there, too—you know, part of the time.”

Which she had to admit was sort of devious of her, since she knew Hayley had a big crush on Max.

But this was about getting their mother back. Desperate measures…

“Oh,” said Hayley and nodded. “OK, then.”

They went to a pool that belonged to one of Max’s friends, whose parents were off at work, and practiced with the scuba gear for a couple of hours, mostly in the deep end. It made Cara nervous, but Jax liked dealing with the equipment; he was always a quick study. The tanks were surprisingly heavy, she thought, and you had to trust that other people knew how to fill them off a big machine and then carefully check them—Max, in this case. Who had been diving with Cory for years but still didn’t have his certification.

Then they spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready for beach camping, which Jax solemnly informed them was against the law. Or at least Park Service rules. They’d have to be stealthy and sneak down after dark, and just hope that no rangers would come driving along the beach in their Park Service jeeps to notice them.

The gear needed to be ready and stowed in their big, external-frame backpacks before Lolly got there to make dinner so there was no chance of her noticing anything.

“Why don’t we set the tent up under the trees on the cliffs, overlooking the beach?” suggested Cara. “Not far from the parking lot, so it’s easy to get to in the dark. And it’s not right at the water, in fact it’s a long way up, so