I stood there, holding a clean T-shirt, seriously thinking about going AWOL out my bedroom window. The invitation to the fishing trip had hardly been out of Kenny’s mouth before Gram was gushing away, saying “doesn’t that sound like fun” and all but carrying me down to the boat herself. She made it pretty clear I was heading out to catch me a big one, like it or not. My guess was she needed some alone time and couldn’t figure out how else to get rid of me.
And grownups—they always assume that just because you’re the same age as somebody, you’ll be best buds in minutes. But it wasn’t hard to tell that one wrong move on my part, and Isabella—Iz?—might sprinkle me with evil fairy dust.
The problem was, a whole long list of possible wrong moves on my part seemed inevitable, since my hands-on experience with fish began when they were already in the fish sticks stage. Ma wasn’t exactly the bait-your-hook type. And since my father had disappeared sometime after his close encounter of the biological kind with her, but before I squirted into the world, I never had that Family Channel moment where my daddy taught me how to fish. Looking stupid on a fishing trip with the kids next door just wasn’t at the top of my wish list.
Besides, the last thing I really wanted to see right now was a fish. After less than a day in Minnesota, I felt like I was drowning in some pretty deep stuff. And the truth was, it was a fish that had given me the dumb idea to run away from home in the first place.
See, there is this certain kind of catfish that can actually wiggle out of its pond and walk around on land until it finds a better place to rest its little fishy head. It lives in Asia, I think, or maybe it’s Florida. But the point is, it’s a real fish, and it really walks. I swear—you can catch it on Animal Planet if you don’t believe me. Anyway, one night when the rest of California was nestled all snug in their beds, I saw it on cable and decided this fish was onto something.
Because if its pond dries up, or if it gets tired of it, then this catfish just up and boogies on to the next pond over. So I started thinking about my own pond and how much it didn’t feel like home, and next thing I knew, I was making plans to get out of there—to shimmy my way cross-country to a different pond.
A pond where I could maybe figure out who my real dad had been instead of dealing with this step-father Ma was so eager to have me adopt. After all, there was a whole other half to my gene pool that I’d never been given the chance to swim in.
Except somehow I’d thought this would turn out to be some Disney movie, and now it was looking more like something rated R, like I was in over my head.
But no matter how I felt about fish, right then I just couldn’t deal with sitting at home, trying to figure out what I was supposed to say to Gram. Putting myself into a situation where I was bound to look like a total dork seemed like the better option.
Kenny and Iz were waiting in this little red old-fashioned fishing boat by the dock next door to Gram’s. Iz pointed me to the bench seat between where she was sitting up front and where Kenny was sitting in back running the motor. We bounced across the waves for a while without saying anything. Kenny steered us close to this island that was a ways offshore, then cut back on the power. The motor started hacking like some three-packs-a-day geezer.
“We brought food if you’re hungry.” Iz waved toward some white paper bags sitting on the seat next to me. My insides were squeezing together, reminding me that I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. I grabbed the nearest bag; inside was a small Styrofoam container. I pried open the lid. It held a mysterious substance that Minnesotans apparently considered food, but this looked even stranger than the “Tater Tot hotdish” Gram had served at dinner the night before. Actually, it looked like something you’d find Orange County housewives nibbling on: some kind of rain forest granola made of grass shavings and—what were those white balls—maybe some kind of spiral pasta?
Suddenly one of the spirals moved. It uncurled and stretched itself toward the sun. I shrieked and threw the container up into the air. Small white balls began unwinding all across the bottom of the boat. One tickled my left foot. A seagull wheeled low overhead and screamed like a two-year-old. I was pretty sure that was exactly how I had sounded a few seconds before.
“Dude?” Kenny grinned. He had gotten the motor under control. “Hey, when you’re done with your snack, hand me that other bag, the one with the cookies, okay?”
“Coordinated much?” Iz smirked as she pulled one of the spirals out of her hair. But then she hunkered down and started picking up the grubs or whatever they were off the bottom of the boat, tossing them back into the Styrofoam container. “They’ll dry out if we don’t get them back under cover pretty quick,” she said as I joined her. “And then you two won’t have any bait.”
“You’re not fishing?” I asked, relieved that the conversation had moved so quickly to any topic other than my clearly unbalanced mental state.
She gave me a sideways look. “I’m fishing for something . . . else.” She dropped the carton onto the bench next to me and returned to her seat.
Kenny handed me a fishing pole. I let him have first go at the container of bait while I pretended to make a show of examining the pole. Really I was watching to see exactly how he got the squirmy little bugger onto the hook.
After only a couple of grub-gut squirts onto my shorts, I got my hook baited and my line into the water. Kenny kept the boat crawling along, running parallel to the curve of the island. Iz had taken out some kind of electronic device and was peering into a screen.
“Wii Fisherperson?” I said. “GPS, in case we lose track of shore?” That was a laugh. There was no place you could go on this lake where you could lose track of shore; it was a kiddie pool compared to the big bad Pacific I was used to.
Iz jerked her shoulders without looking up.
“We borrowed Uncle Butch’s underwater camera,” Kenny said. “He uses it as a fish finder. But Iz is looking for”—he paused and reeled his line in a bit—“not fish,” he finally said.
I had always been good at fill-in-the-blank tests, and I was starting to get a strange idea about what we might be fishing for. I turned to Iz. “You’re using the underwater camera to look for . . . ?”
She finally lifted her big storm-cloud eyes and stared at me. “Some people think maybe your father—and the stolen money, too—ended up on the bottom of the lake. I’m sorry if you don’t want to think about it. But I have to find that money. And we invited you along because after this morning, Kenny convinced me we need your help.”
I stared out over the side of the boat. Even as close as we were to the island, you couldn’t see the bottom of the lake; the low-running waves kept washing away the lake’s secrets. Sunbeams ricocheted off the water in all directions like bullets of light. The gulls had settled back onto the waves and were bouncing up and down, looking just like bobble heads.
Iz thought that the lake might hold part of the answers I needed.
Finally I looked back at her. “Gram confirmed that there’s a Wanted poster out there with my dad’s picture on it. But I’m guessing there’s a whole lot more to the story than she’s already told me. So maybe you better go ahead and catch me up on everything you know.”