The Highest Tide Read Online Free

line, the sort of thing I’d heard fancy-smart people say on television when asked impossible questions. I could blame it on exhaustion, but there was a part of me that believed it. AU of that doesn’t much matter, though, because I said it: “Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something.”
    They liked that a lot. A kid says something like that, and people go ahhh . Offer a plausible scientific explanation and they yawn. Dip into the mystical, especially if you appear to be an unsullied, clearheaded child, and they want to write a song about you.

CHAPTER 3
    A NGIE STEGNER ALMOST slept through it all. By the time she rose, all she saw was the squid sprawled on bright silver tarps on a flat trailer above the boat ramp next to the tavern. She moseyed around it once and laughed at the sky, as if the squid were a joke from above, then sauntered back across the bridge toward our side of the bay with me at her hip.
    My parents had rushed to work after giving me more looks that assured me I had some explaining ahead of me. I didn’t care about that or anything. I was dizzy with sleepiness, and Angie had her arm around me, bracing me, as if she could tell I might collapse. I milked it, walking as slowly as I could, trying to fur in my mind the leafy smell of her hair and the weight and warmth of her long tanned arm draped across my shoulders. I considered asking her if we should try to get old Florence out to see the squid before it got hauled to the lab, but I knew what an ordeal that would entail and didn’t want to share Angie with anyone.
    I think my fixation with Angie started when she read Goodnight Moon to me, back before I stored much in my head beyond emotion. She babysat me so much in the early years she smelled like family, but it was hard to keep up with her moods and changes. When she turned eighteen she cut her hair to chin length and had a black rose tattooed to her stomach. She also pierced her eyebrow with a silver hoop, which made her look as if some fisherman had hooked her once but she got away. She chewed her nails, rarely washed her hair and wore baggy cargo pants, trying everything imaginable to hide her beauty. It didn’t fool me. I found it difficult to think around her. Even breathing got complicated.
    Angie sang in a band called “L.O.C.O.” You couldn’t call it for some reason. I’d seen her perform just once, at an outdoor concert in Sylvester Park. She wore a horizontally striped red and pink dress that fell to the middle of her thighs, and she sang—whispered and screamed, actually—some song about charming devils and two-faced angels. It went on and on as if she were afraid to stop. It was just her and this drummer with too much hair and thick, crablike forearms. She played bass and howled, bobbing her head just enough to swing her hair while her frantic drummer turned into a sweat sprinkler. The music spooked me but literally moved others. People didn’t dance so much as vibrate to it, shaking across the grass as if it were an involuntary act. And Angie was getting famous, in part because she occasionally fainted during shows, which provided rich gossip for those of us huddled around the bay. I overheard my mother asking her friends what it would mean for the judge now that his only daughter had “gone public” with her craziness. When I heard about Angie’s faintings I had just one thought: I wanted to figure out how to catch her the next time.
    Angie asked better questions than the others had, and I didn’t mind telling her everything I knew and a few things I made up. When I finally pried my eyes off her, I noticed the tide climbing all the way back up, which somehow always relieved me, especially when it came up higher than usual, mirrored the sky and slowed time.
    After I finished telling Angie everything, I started over again with the moment that interested her the most—when it was just me, the moon and the squid-hoping she wouldn’t leave me while I climbed inside a huge