where she was, but as she realized the traffic noises of New York had been replaced by the quiet sounds of chirping insects, and the parched air of the apartment had been displaced by a soft tropical fragrance, she remembered. Getting out of bed, she shivered in the chill of the high altitude as she pulled on a thick terry-cloth robe. On the veranda, she found that Michael had awakened and come outside, too. She stood quietly next to him for a moment, gazing up into a sky strewn with more stars than she’d seen since she had been in Africa. Finally she reached out and put her hand on Michael’s shoulder. “It’s not really so terrible, is it, sweetheart?”
Michael hesitated, then shrugged, and when he spoke, there was more pain than anger in his words. “No, it’s not terrible. In fact, it’s beautiful. But it’s just that things were finally going good in New York, Mom. I mean, really good! And what if I can’t make friends out here, or can’t get on the track team, or—”
“Or what if you just give it a chance?” Katharine broke in. “Tomorrow you go scuba diving, so it isn’t all so awful, is it?”
They stood quietly in the darkness for a few more minutes, and Katharine finally decided that his silence was at least better than the answer he could have given. When he didn’t pull away from her good-night kiss, she decided that maybe, after all, things were going to be all right.
Michael, though, remained leaning on the veranda railing for a long time after his mother had gone back to bed, a confusion of emotions warring inside him. He hadn’t meant to complain to his mom, and he was a little ashamed to have revealed his fears like some big baby. But he was still scared of facing a whole new school on Monday. And how was he going to live all the way up here for a whole three months?
Couldn’t they at least have found a place at the beach?
CHAPTER 4
Michael glanced surreptitiously at the half-dozen people gathered around the diving instructor and wondered if any of them felt as nervous as he did. Yesterday, even this morning — hell, even half an hour ago! — diving in the ocean had seemed like a cool idea. But this morning he’d been in a swimming pool, where there was no surf, the water was shallow, and all that was in it were three novice divers and Dave, who instructed them while someone else stood on the edge of the pool, watching, just in case something bad happened.
Something bad, like starting to drown.
Now there were six people besides himself, which meant Dave wouldn’t be able to watch everyone, and the Pacific was a lot bigger than a swimming pool. Plus, the wet suit had been pretty hard to pull on, its fit was uncomfortably tight, and it was getting really hot with the sun beating down on the black rubber. He was already starting to sweat and get itchy where the tiny rivulets of perspiration were creeping down his back.
The equipment looked a lot clumsier now than it had this morning, too. The tank was heavier than he remembered it, and once it was strapped onto his back, it seemed to pull him way off balance. Still, he’d come this far, and he wasn’t going to chicken out now. Picking up his fins and mask, he checked the air regulator one more time, then started down to the beach.
The waves, which hadn’t looked like much of anything a few minutes ago when they’d climbed out of the van and started carrying the equipment down to the little park above the beach, seemed suddenly to have swelled into huge crests, even though he was sure they hadn’t.
Pretty sure, anyway.
Behind him, someone spoke: “This is your first dive, isn’t it?”
Michael stiffened as he heard what sounded like a hostile note in the speaker’s voice, and an image of Slotzky’s sneering face rose in his mind. But Slotzky wasn’t here — he was back in New York, where, Michael hoped, he was freezing his ass off. Still, Michael wasn’t about to admit that this was his first dive and that he’d only had his pool training this morning. “I’ve done it a couple of times.”
“I’ve been diving since I was ten,” the voice said, and now Michael heard the lilt that he’d already come to recognize as the local accent. “The first time I was scared shitless, though. I mean, except for when I learned in the pool.”
They were on the beach now, and finally Michael got a good look at the guy. He wasn’t part of their group, and Michael could tell right away he wasn’t a tourist, either. Though the guy was about his age, he was a little shorter and had a body that looked wiry even under the bulky wet suit. His eyes were almost as dark as his black hair, and when the boy grinned at him, his teeth looked almost unnaturally white.
Michael couldn’t tell whether the grin looked friendly or not. “You diving by yourself?” he asked.
“Sure,” the other boy said. “I do it all the time.”
Michael remembered what Dave had said this morning about never diving without a buddy, but the boy didn’t look like the kind who wanted to hear any advice from a beginner. He was pulling his fins on now, and Michael leaned down to follow suit. But even before he’d gotten his foot into the fin, it had filled up with sand, and by the time he struggled both of his feet into them, he’d almost lost his balance twice.
At least he hadn’t collapsed onto the beach like one of the other guys had.
“See you in the water,” the dark-haired guy said. Pulling on his mask and clamping his regulator in his mouth, the boy walked backward down the beach until he was waist-deep in the surf, then lay back in the water, rolled over, and disappeared.
Five minutes later Michael and the rest of the group were finally ready, and Dave led them into the water.
Michael was paired with a man named Les, who was about thirty and barely acknowledged his presence. Turning around to back into the water the same way he’d seen it done only a few minutes earlier, Michael nearly tripped three times before he finally got deep enough to try submerging himself. He put the regulator in his mouth, checked the valves to make certain everything was operating properly, and finally put his face mask in place. Then he took a deep breath, lowered himself, and rolled over.
In an instant the world changed.
The wet suit no longer felt the least bit clumsy — in fact, it felt like a second skin, protecting him from the cold of the water, but hardly restricting his movement at all.
The water was crystal clear. Sand moved and swirled over the bottom, making it look almost as if the ocean floor had turned to liquid.
When he felt a slight pain in his chest, he realized he was still holding his breath. He forced himself to let it out, then slowly breathe in. His lungs filled with fresh air from the tank on his back. Taking a second breath, he looked around and spotted Les about twenty feet ahead of him, already swimming away from the beach. Michael’s first instinct was to yell at him to wait up, but he realized that even if he could have shouted, there was no way the guy was going to hear him.
Better just try to catch up.
Michael swam, kicking hard with his legs, his hands clasped across his stomach just as Dave had taught them in the pool this morning. Aided by the fins, he surged ahead, leaving a small stream of bubbles from the regulator behind him. As he left the surf line, the bottom came into focus, the sand showing a gently rippled surface that sloped slowly deeper as he swam farther from the beach. With each stroke, he felt the tension inside him drain away, and a quiet peacefulness he’d never had began to enfold his spirit. The water around him glowed brightly with diffused sunlight, and suddenly a pair of fish, perhaps eighteen inches long, swam lazily across his path, coming so close that Michael could reach out and touch them. Then they darted away with no more than the slightest twitch of their tails.
He was closing in on Les now. The older man was turning to the right, and when Michael, too, made a turn, he caught his first glimpse of the reef.
From the surface it had looked like a finger of nearly black lava reaching out into the sea, but from below, Michael could see the bright reds and blues of coral heads, with hundreds of fish darting among them, some of them so pale they were nearly translucent, some so brilliantly colored they seemed to be acting as beacons in the sea. As he neared the reef, a group of parrot fish gathered around him, looking for food. When he produced nothing, they quickly swam off, heading off toward a woman who was floating on the surface a few yards away, breathing through a snorkel tube and holding out a handful of frozen peas that the fish snatched right out of her
