Nim at Sea (8 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Nim, Selkie, and Fred snuck out even earlier to swim in the waterslide pool. With the three of them all together, they felt almost free.

But at the first sounds of the crew bustling around, they scurried back to Selkie’s prison. A few moments later, the ship dropped anchor in a white-sand harbor.

Nim locked Selkie in and ran upstairs to say good morning to the dolphins in the fountain. When she went back to the Animal Room, the Professor was waiting for her to start feeding and cleaning.

“No time for that!” he snapped as Nim hugged Selkie. “Feed them and get out. I don’t want you around today.”

“But you said I could practice this afternoon!”

“I’ve changed my mind. Now snap to it and then scram!”

His eyes were narrow, his face was hard—and he kept glancing at his whip. Nim fed the animals and got out.

“Everyone’s going ashore,” Erin told Nim. “I wish you could come—but they check the tickets extra carefully when people get back on. It wouldn’t be safe.”

“They’ll probably use your inflatable,” Ben added. “Did you get all your things?”

Nim nodded. Everything was tucked safely into Erin’s cabin closet.

“The Kids’ Klub is shut too,” Erin said sadly, “so you’d better stay in our cabin.”

Nim had to wander up and down the deck while Erin and Ben’s mother hurried in and out of the cabins to organize their day. She felt as empty as a pricked balloon when Ben and Erin finally disappeared down the stairs with their family.

A second later, Erin came running back down the hall.

“I said I forgot my hat,” she puffed, unlocking the cabin door. “There are some books on my bed, if you want to read, and television, and paper and markers for making the posters. I
wish
you could come!”

Erin grabbed her hat, then shouted, “Bye!” and ran out. Nim started looking through the books. One was
Mountain Madness
by Alex Rover. When Nim had first read it, she was alone on the island; and when Alex e-mailed to ask Jack about coconuts, Nim had answered for him. And that’s how their friendship got started. Alex had tried to explain that she wasn’t really the hero of her stories, but Nim hadn’t believed her. She wondered if she would still like the book now that she knew Alex was just a small, scared woman—but one who’d sailed across the world to help her.

She lay on Erin’s bed and started reading.

There was a knock, and Ben bounced in. “We forgot to tell you—breakfast is in the desk!”

He raced out again, and Nim found a brown-bread sandwich and an apple in the drawer.

Fred didn’t like brown bread, and he didn’t like apples, but he was hungry enough to share. “We’ll find you something,” Nim said, though she wasn’t sure what.

They had a shower. Nim changed into the clothes Erin had left for her and washed hers in the sink, then sat down at the desk with the paper and colored markers. She drew twenty-two
SEA LION CIRCUS
posters—two for each passenger deck—exactly how she’d planned them with Erin and Ben. When she’d finished, she tucked them neatly into the desk drawer, flopped back onto Erin’s bed, and went on reading.

Rap! Tap!

Someone was knocking at the door.

Nim stayed very still and didn’t answer. Fred crept behind a lamp and went to sleep.

The door opened, and a steward in a white uniform and blue apron came in with a vacuum cleaner and a mop and bucket. She saw Nim and dropped her bucket.

“Yipes!” Virginia squeaked. “Did your parents leave you here alone?”

Nim nodded, because she couldn’t tell the truth.

“Are you sick?”

Nim nodded again.

Virginia shook her head sympathetically. “Sorry—I still have to clean,” she said, “but I’ll be as quiet as I can.”

She straightened Ben’s bed and made Nim sit on it while she worked on Erin’s. “Leaving a sick child alone!” Nim heard her muttering. “Appalling!”

Nim thought about Erin and Ben’s parents, and her face grew as hot and red as the lava in Fire Mountain. “I’m feeling a lot better now!” she said.

Virginia finished cleaning, felt Nim’s forehead, and made her go back to bed.

Nim picked up
Mountain Madness
again. She read lying down, she read sitting up, and she read lying on the floor with her feet on the bed. Then she practiced doing handstands, and Fred practiced climbing from her shoulder to her feet instead of the usual way around. They even made up a trick with Fred staying stiff as a log and Nim twirling him around on her feet.

But you can’t stay upside down spinning an iguana forever, so after that Nim stared out through the lifeboat stands at a bit of blue sea. A great black frigate bird soared past. Looking through her spyglass, she was almost sure it was Galileo. “I wish I could go out on deck to check,” she muttered, even though she didn’t have a fish to call him with.

One more chapter of
Mountain Madness;
the hero had just caught a trout in a mountain stream and cooked it over a fire.

“I should have saved the apple for lunch,” Nim told Fred. Fred answered with his best unblinking stare. He was sure she could find them some food if she tried hard enough.

“We can’t go out,” she told him, “because everyone else has gone ashore, and the crew will notice me and ask where my parents are.”

There was another knock at the door. Nim shoved a pillow over Fred, and Virginia tiptoed in carrying a tray.

“I wasn’t sure what you liked,” she said, “so I brought sandwiches and salad, fruit, cake….”

The pillow wiggled. Nim put her elbow on it. “Thank you. That’s very nice of you.”

She was glad she could say something that wasn’t a lie.

“I’m so pleased you’re starting to feel better. The poor lady next door hasn’t left her cabin for the whole trip!”

Erin and Ben’s cabin was a bright room with cheerful paintings on the walls, but Nim thought she’d have gone crazy if she’d spent the whole trip in it.

“You look a bit bored,” Virginia said. “Do you want the TV on?” She handed Nim the remote control.

“Thanks,” said Nim, and Virginia left to continue her cleaning.

Even though she’d seen televisions in the lounges when they’d played Spy and she’d played video games in the Kids’ Klub, Nim had never sat and watched a program with a story—and she’d never used a remote. Neither had Fred. Fred didn’t care about the programs, but he liked stepping on the buttons so that the channel changed just as Nim figured out what was happening.

“Cut it out, Fred!” Nim said.

Fred went to sulk under the bed, and Nim turned the TV off. She didn’t want to shout again and wake up that poor sick lady next door.

“Come on…you can have all the lettuce,” she coaxed, and when Fred had eaten the lettuce out of the sandwich and sneezed a kiwi fruit all over the bed, he felt quite cheerful again.

Nim finished
Mountain Madness
and stared out the window some more.

When she heard the
rumble
of the launches and the
thump
of passengers’ feet on the gangplank, she grabbed Fred and raced outside to gulp deep breaths of fresh air.

As soon as the ship was on its way out to sea again, Nim pulled on her Troppo Tourist jacket and ran down the stairs to the Animal Room. She knocked and waited outside the door until the Professor let her in.

Selkie
whuffle
d sadly, because it had been an even longer day for her. And scarier.

The last of the empty cages was full now—with long, fat snakes.

Nim found it hard writing to Jack when she couldn’t say what she wanted in case someone else saw it, and when she didn’t know if he was reading the e-mails or not. But she had to go on trying.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Date: Monday 12 July, 7:30 p.m.

Subject: Very important!

Dear Jack,

Maybe there’s something wrong with the computer and that’s why you’re not answering, but I think you want to know what we’re doing, so I’ll go on e-mailing and maybe you can read it later.

Today I had to stay inside the cabin all day and it was very boring, but now I understand even better how Selkie must be feeling, and all the other animals with her. So maybe it was good in some ways.

Erin bought me a bead bracelet when she went ashore. It’s very pretty and she bought one for herself that’s just the same, so whenever we wear them we will think about each other. Ben brought Fred and me a coconut, which was good because we haven’t had coconut for way too long.

Love (as much as Fred loves coconut),

Nim

J
ACK SPENT THE NIGHT
on the floor of his new friend’s living room.

“Who are you?” the man joked, watching Jack stare at the television as if he didn’t quite know what it was. “Robinson Crusoe?”

“No—Jack Rusoe.”

His friend laughed, but Jack couldn’t. He’d just checked his e-mails—and not one message had come into the in-box. Only the Trash folder had blinked as the spam trickled in to be deleted.

The next morning he sorted out how to get money at the bank, and took the little plane to the airport on Isla Grande.

The only thing he could do was to go and see Alex’s editor. If he met Delia Defoe and explained about Nim, she’d tell him where they were.

Jack booked the last seat left on the plane leaving the next day for New York City.

“There’s a sea lion circus tomorrow,” Virginia told Alex when she brought in her breakfast. “There are posters all over the ship—doesn’t that sound fun?”

If Alex hadn’t known Selkie, she might have thought it sounded fun. But she did know Selkie, and suddenly she missed her so much that she knew she could never see another sea lion again without crying. It was the best reason so far for staying in her cabin another day.

Erin woke Nim and Fred up earlier than usual, but they spent so long in the pool that the sun had come up before they knew it. When Nim came up for air after practicing swimming underwater, a white-uniformed crewman was standing at the edge watching.

“There’s a sea lion in there!” he exclaimed.

“It’s the Sea Lion Deck,” said Nim.

“But this is a swimming pool. For people.”

“We need it to practice for the sea lion circus,” said Nim. “We won’t need it after tomorrow.”

“The cruise ends tomorrow!”

“That’s why we won’t need it,” said Nim.

The crewman stared a little longer, then shrugged and walked away.

Nim and her friends scrambled out of the pool and back to the Animal Room, as fast as they could.

“I suppose you think you’re clever!” the Professor snarled when he let Nim in to feed the animals. “All those posters advertising a sea lion circus at the waterslide pool—now you think I’ll have to let that beast in there!”

“I must have got mixed up!” said Nim, even though the posters were exactly how she wanted them. “Isn’t that what you meant?”

“I said you could have her perform a few tricks at my lecture. You know perfectly well it was supposed to be in the theater, like all my lectures. I’m a professor—that’s what people expect.”

“I just thought…”

“Just think about what’s going to happen to you and your mother if you try to be too smart! Besides, no one’s going to want to look at any humdrum animal tricks once we get into the harbor. You’d better do something spectacular or you won’t have an audience.”

“I’ve got something special planned,” said Nim. “It’ll be spectacular.”

“The posters worked!” Nim said. Erin handed her a breakfast scrambled-egg sandwich and Ben tossed grapes for Fred to catch. “We can do the show the way we planned.”

“And today…”

“We can do whatever we like.”

It was hard to choose, because even though in some ways today was exactly like every other day on the ship, it was the last day they were going to spend together, and that made it special—and sad, and a little bit scary.

Fred chose to spend the day at the splash pool, where he could sit on the water jets and be blasted into the air and then paddle across the pool, just as he liked to do where the spray came in at a blowhole at the island’s Black Rocks.

Ben, Erin, and Nim went on a treasure hunt with the other kids from the Kids’ Klub. The clues took them all over the ship, but when Nim got to the Toucan Deck she found the toucan sitting on the floor of its cage. Its eyes were glazed and it still hadn’t touched the food it had been given that morning.

Nim squatted down to see it.
It’s so unhappy, it might die!
she thought. Suddenly she knew that escaping with Selkie was not enough. Every animal on the ship
had
to be rescued.

“Just hang in there a bit longer! We’re going to help you all, somehow,” Nim told the unhappy bird, chirping and clucking until it lifted its head to see her. When it finally began to peck its mushed mango, Nim stood up—and noticed the treasure chest hidden behind the display. It was full of enough bags of candy for everyone in the Kids’ Klub.

Fred thought he liked candy, but he felt sick afterward and had to lie on his back while Nim rubbed his tummy.

Then Nim and Erin painted all the papier-mâché fish they’d been making, and Ben finished his sculpture.

“Excellent sculpture!” said the art instructor.

“It
is
pretty good,” Erin admitted.

“It’s amazing,” said Nim.

But Fred hated it, because it looked exactly like him. He walked all around it, glaring, and then climbed up to Nim’s shoulder to glare some more.

“It’s so I’ll remember you when you’re not around,” Ben explained.

Fred blinked, but Nim thought she might cry.

Later in the afternoon, down in the hold, Selkie and Nim practiced handstands, and Fred practiced spinning on Selkie’s flippers. It wasn’t the most important trick, but it was the start of something bigger.

“Sleep tight,” Nim whispered to Selkie when it was time to leave. “Everything happens tomorrow.”

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Date: Tuesday 13 July, 5:30 p.m.

Subject: You must read this!

Dear Jack,

I haven’t had an e-mail from Alex yet either, so if she is still mad at me too, this might be the last e-mail I can write to you. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I can’t worry about it because first we have to get off the ship. Sometimes I wish you could sail up to the ship and rescue us, but you don’t have a boat anymore, so I know you couldn’t do that even if you weren’t angry at me.

The Professor made me cut the bands off the island doves’ legs today. But I’ve made notes in my notebook about the birds’ markings so we can identify them again. I’ve made notes about all the animals on the ship because I thought you would want me to do that.

A frigate bird has been following the ship for the last three days. It’s been flying too high for me to be sure but I think it really is Galileo.

I hope I’ll see you and our island again very soon.

Love (as much as Selkie loves diving),

Nim

There was a special Kids’ Klub dinner for the last night of the cruise, so for the first time, Nim ate in the dining room with her friends. She borrowed a skirt and top from Erin and brushed her wild hair till it was nearly neat. Fred was sleepy, so he crawled under Ben’s bed to rest.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Nim asked, but Fred just blinked and went back to sleep.

Her shoulders felt light and empty without him, but it made blending in easier.

This was important because after the dinner with the other Klub Kids, Nim was going to spend the night in Ben and Erin’s cabin.

“Your dad doesn’t mind you sleeping over?” their mom asked.

“No,” said Nim, because it didn’t seem as if Jack minded about her at all, and if he did, he’d probably rather she slept in a cabin than on the floor of a boat.

Erin loaned her some pajamas and they squashed into the bed together. Fred stayed under Ben’s bed. Nim didn’t know if it was to say goodbye to Ben or because he was just too pooped to move.

They talked and talked. None of them wanted to think about tomorrow, but there was still plenty to talk about. Mr. and Mrs. Caritas came in to say good night.

“Don’t talk too late,” Mr. Caritas said. “It’s a big day tomorrow. Do you live in New York, Nim?”

“No,” said Nim. “It’ll be my first visit.”

“You’ll love it! But for us vacation is over: we’ll be going straight to the airport to fly home.”

Their mom bent to kiss Erin on the forehead, and then she kissed Nim too. It felt just like when Alex used to kiss her good night.

Alex!
Nim thought into the night, but even in her head she couldn’t quite sort out all the things she wanted to say to her, so she sent the wish out in a big jumble of love, sorriness, and hope.

Ben’s voice trickled off into soft snores, but Erin and Nim continued whispering.

The door opened quietly. “You really have to go to sleep now,” said Erin’s mom, “or Nim will have to go back to her dad.”

“That’s what you’re trying to do!” Erin whispered when the door closed again, and they started to giggle. They giggled so hard they had to put the pillows over their heads—and then Erin fell asleep.

Alex heard Nim calling—and then she heard her giggling. She was at the door before she realized she must have been dreaming again.

But it seemed so real!

Nim!
she thought into the night, but even in her head she couldn’t quite sort out all the things she wanted to say to her, so she sent the wish out in a big jumble of love, sorriness, and hope.

And soon after, Nim stopped worrying and wondering, and fell fast asleep.