The Highest Tide Read Online Free Page A

hammock my mother brought back from Mexico long before I was born.
    Angie not only didn’t leave, she swung the hammock by nudging her stomach into my hip. I looked up into her green eyes and her connect-the-dot freckles. I was close enough to hear her stomach gurgle. Offered a moment to be stuck in, I might have chosen that one. Against my will, I drifted. Sleep was like that with me. It only came uninvited.
    I missed her first few words, then caught the ones that said boys try too hard to please her. When she paused over that, I said, “That’s real common.” I told her how the three-spined stickleback, a homely rockfish, dances wildly to try to attract a mate. “It’s way over the top,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe it. The male toadfish is even more ridiculous. When he wants to mate he vibrates his bladder muscles so fast they make a humming sound that’s so loud it can annoy people on houseboats.”
    She showed me her teeth. Who knows if I would have become so obsessed with marine life if what I’d learned and found hadn’t made Angie Stegner smile.
    I drifted again until her black rose bumped my hip and she volunteered that she still hadn’t met a boy—or man—who sought love that lasted more than one night. I had no idea what she meant, but I didn’t want to sound naive so I offered the first insight that popped to mind even though it was nothing more than a bumper-sticker slogan I’d puzzled over.
    “Eat oysters,” I whispered. “Love longer.”
    Her giggle was the last thing I recall from that morning.

CHAPTER 4
    T HE NEWS CHANNELS all had something on the squid. Most of them played it as yet another quirky news flash out of Olympia. They obviously didn’t know what to make of it, other than to repeat its dimensions—thirty-seven feet and 923 pounds—then shifi into phony chitchat about whether the squid was placed there by Republicans or Democrats and whether it would make people queasy about swimming in the Sound. Their footage of the squid itself was brief, as if they worried it might haunt people.
    Channel 7 was the only one that went beyond snippets.
    I’d never seen anyone I knew on television other than Judge Stegner, so I was surprised by how little Professor Kramer resembled himself. He looked pale, almost criminal, his collar askew, his hair reckless. Then the camera panned to some kid who came up to the professor’s bicep and looked a whole lot like me, staring at the squid, orange hair fluttering, the high camera angle reducing me to one of Charlie Brown’s big-headed sidekicks.
    Suddenly my peeling nose was bigger than life in front of me. I looked into the camera the way a baby does, as if I didn’t realize it was really on me , which was the truth.
    “Little Miles O’Malley says the squid was alive when he happened upon it in the dark early this morning,” the TV said. “ If so , this would be among the first and only times anyone has seen a giant squid alive. Repeated efforts by marine scientists to study the elusive creatures in the wild have failed.”
    Then I stared straight out of our TV at myself. “It was breathing,” I said, as if describing my run-in with an alien. The camera zoomed in on one of the squid’s eyes before fading to the studio where a cheerful lady gushed, “Wow! Miles will never forget that!”
    The weatherman, who’d mastered the ability to simultaneously smile and speak, promised his forecast was next, then stranded me with a commercial that left me with the confusing impression that waterskiing was somehow safer and more fun with Tampax. I waited for the phone to bark, the door to collapse, the house to be surrounded by hecklers. But nothing happened.
    Once my pulse slowed, I felt relieved that they hadn’t shown me saying the earth was trying to “tell us something.” Then it hit me: I was on television! So what if I looked like a mumbling dwarf! Then I panicked again, dwelling on their choice of words. If so . . . In other words,