Where It Started

I’d thought being left on Spindle Island was the worst thing that could happen. I was wrong.

People kept coming into the white room to stare at me, trying to get me to speak. But I hadn’t spent all those months alone at sea to give in to humans now. That’s where it started. When I dove from the cliff, searching for my clan, and the fishermen’s nets snagged me and hauled me up on deck. I was cold—me, who’d never been cold before—and the motor pulsed through me, drowning out the rhythm of the waves. “It’s him,” they said. “The boy from Spindle Island. The one they were searching for. The one they never found.”

Or maybe it started before that. When Nellie brought me the words to the song, and they fell in the whitecaps, soaking the pages with salt. When we faced the walrus. When I thought she could be my friend.

No. It started long before any of that. Before I’d ever seen a human. Back when I lived with Mam and the rest of the clan at sea, hauling out on rocks slick with spray, swimming in kelp forests, riding the waves. Before I knew the truth . . .