“Yep.”
“And you never once wanted to be anything else.”
Anders considered this. “I guess that’s not entirely true. There was a full month in the fourth grade when I wanted to be a B-boy.”
“A what?”
“You know, a break-dancer?”
“No.” Piper’s jaw went slack, her eyes round. “You?”
“Yeah. It was the first year America’s Got Talent came on TV—you know that show?” Piper nodded. “They had this break-dance group that was amazing and I decided I was going to learn how. I watched a lot of YouTube videos and practiced in the mirror every night. I thought I was pretty good, too—until the talent show, when the entire audience erupted in laughter, quickly shattering my B-boy career dreams.”
“Aw.” Piper clutched her heart. “That’s terrible.”
“To be fair, I don’t think they were trying to be cruel. I’m pretty sure they thought I was doing a sketch comedy routine.”
Piper laughed and then sat up a little straighter in her chair. “Well, go on, then.”
“What?”
“Show me some of your moves.”
“Ah, no. Absolutely not.”
“Please?”
“No. I literally haven’t danced since. I’ve never even watched the video.”
“Video. There’s evidence?” Piper’s entire face brightened at the prospect. “Oh, I really need to see that.”
“Well, fortunately it’s probably somewhere in my parents’ basement, never to see the light of day.”
“I would pay so much money. I can’t even picture you as a child, much less a break-dancing child. You seem like one of those people that was born as an adult.”
Anders absorbed the observation. It wasn’t far from the truth—he’d always felt different from his peers. Older in some way. But he was done talking about himself. They sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes, Piper with a small grin, at what Anders assumed must be the thought of him break-dancing, and he was glad to have amused her.
“You never finished telling me about your mom the other day.”
“If I miss her?” Piper shrugged. “Of course. We email, though. She calls every now and then, but with the time difference and her work—well, we barely talked when we lived in the same house. She’s the type of person who gets all consumed by her work. So even when she was here, she wasn’t here all the time, if that makes sense.”
Anders nodded and, his appetite having returned, picked up the crab cake to resume eating.
“Probably why I had an imaginary friend as a kid.”
Anders inhaled the bite of crab in his mouth and he pounded on his chest, eyes watering.
“You OK?” Piper looked at him with concern.
Anders grabbed the water bottle and unscrewed the top, taking a sip. “Yeah. Yep.” He cleared his throat. An imaginary friend! “What was her name?”
“Bernadette Gertrude Pinkerton.”
Anders sat back in his chair. “That’s quite a distinguished name for an imaginary friend.”
“She was quite distinguished.” She grinned and Anders couldn’t help grinning back—that is, until he remembered that his recorder was sitting in his back pocket, having missed the surprising snippet that would have been a perfect anecdote for the podcast.
But even more surprising—it was the first time since sitting down with Piper that he had remembered the podcast at all.
—
For the next two weeks, Anders redoubled his efforts, determined not to miss anything for his podcast. He started going over to the island on the Friday noon ferry, asking Jess to cover for him with Greta, just so he could spend a few extra hours with Piper at the market. There were rarely any customers—a local would pop in every now and then for a half gallon of milk or a paper sack of flour—so he spent the time asking her questions about the island and climate change and insects while helping her mop or take inventory or rearrange potato chip displays.
And then, side by side, they’d perform her closing duties and she’d leave at three to go meet Tom’s boat. Anders wouldn’t see her again until Saturday morning, when, after breakfast, she would take him to other hidden spots on the island—places Anders had passed but not given much thought to, like the abandoned schoolhouse that used to house upwards of forty kids during Frick Island’s prime or the baseball field surrounded by a rusted, broken-down fence. Every two weeks Mr. Gimby religiously ran over the grass with his riding lawnmower, though Piper said it hadn’t seen as much as a game of catch in more than a decade.
She shared other things, too—like how her mother had spent seven years studying the effects of global warming on the island. When she presented her findings along with a $9 million erosion-reduction proposal to the Army Corps of Engineers, they responded by offering half that amount to buy people out of their land and move off the island altogether, saying it was a waste of money to build barriers that sea-level rise would eventually overwhelm. And instead of being mad at the Army Corps, Frick Islanders were furious with her mother.
Piper talked about how the island was dying—and not just because of climate change, but because the residents were literally aging and dying off, without a new generation to take their place. Anders was right in assuming that Bobby, the kid he gave the camera to, was the only child on the island, besides a baby (belonging to Tom’s cousin Steve) and the Gibbons twins, who were two years from being full-blown adults and were already looking at moving to the mainland once they graduated. They didn’t want to be watermen and there were no other jobs on the island to be had.
Every Monday Anders would record another episode, and despite not having any new revelations—he still didn’t know who set fire to Tom’s boat or why BobDan lied about it or how Piper’s delusion began—the podcast steadily grew in numbers.
He was up to more than thirty thousand listeners (thirty thousand!), and he began to wonder if they were drawn to it for the same reason he found himself drawn to spending more and more time
