The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,30

this body into my boat, and I was becoming more and more panicked with every minute that went by. “Come on, you lug,” I said to him, as if insults might do the trick, and all of a sudden not only the arm but the whole body was suddenly light. I fell backward into the Pelican and the boy landed right beside me as if he’d jumped in all on his own. But he wasn’t moving at all. A loud bark and then a clicking noise next to the raft got my attention. I looked over to see the oily black nose of a whale, so close I could smell his breath.

“Were you the one helping me?” I whispered. Underneath my hand the cool, smooth nose felt like butter. I was so mesmerized I almost forgot about the unconscious body in my raft, until the orca nudged the side of the Pelican, turning me back to face the Squid, which was headed toward us. This boy really was about my age—I could see this now, his wet hair flat against his skull. His features were chiseled like a Roman sea god, and he looked peaceful, not like someone who had been struggling to get out of the ocean. I had heard a lot of gruesome stories about bodies that wash up, but this one was not gruesome by any stretch. He was not pale or colorless, or cut up or bloody. And I’m only going to say this once, because it shocked me—both that he looked this way and that I thought it in the midst of panicking and rowing and being so close to an orca—but this boy was beautiful.

I dipped my oars and the orca pushed the side of the Pelican one more time, hard enough that I heard the rubber of the raft squeak beneath his smooth nose, and then the huge whale dipped his body back under the surface. I was able to see the gray patch on his back—the saddle—and wondered what it would be like to ride him, even as I knew I was wasting valuable time. I began to row hard.

I was still running on adrenaline, but my dad was visibly shaken as he and Uncle Gorky hauled the unconscious boy onto the Squid. He tied the Pelican so loosely to the stern that I had to retie or she’d have floated away.

I watched him pressing on the boy’s chest and breathing into his mouth, and the whole time I could not stop thinking about the way the orca seemed to be helping me, pushing the boy up out of the ocean and into the raft. Looking at him sprawled across the deck, I wondered if he might actually die. His long legs were bent beneath him; his feet were bare except for one red sock on the left one. No shoes.

Finally he began to gag and throw up kelp onto the deck, belching seaweed and salt water until the whole ocean seemed to come out of him. Inside my own chest, that hard knot of fear that he was dead floated free as I watched him choke and painfully draw in air. And then we were both able to breathe again. After a while Uncle Gorky carried him to the big bunk, where he’s been for two days now.

My uncle keeps telling me to let him sleep. “Leave him be, Alyce,” he says, but I want to be there when he opens his eyes. I can’t get out of my head the image of that one orca staring at me with his wide black eye, as if he was telling me something. It’s not the kind of thing you tell Uncle Gorky. “The orca and I have an understanding and I need to look into this boy’s eyes when he wakes up. It was kind of like a promise.”

Yeah, right. I have those kinds of conversations all the time with my dad and my uncle.

—

But when he does finally wake, it’s obvious that he is not happy or grateful or any of the scenarios I played out in my mind. If anything, he looks disappointed. I feel embarrassed to be propped so close to his face, my chin on the edge of the bunk.

“Where are the orcas?” is all he asks, but his voice still sounds like it’s underwater and I can tell it burns him to use it. When he coughs it sounds exactly how the orcas sounded that day they