My friend Ethan has four survival guides, so when he got a fifth one he gave it to me. That’s why I knew I wasn’t drowning. The survival guide says that when people drown, they don’t scream. I was screaming. “Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.”
The second thing it says in the guide is that you should try not to panic. It was too late for that, so I skipped to step 3: Try to take in more air. You were supposed to be able to do this by floating on your back. The book forgets that floating on your back can be hard if you can’t swim. But with the life jacket, floating was pretty easy. I tilted my head back, just like the book suggested. Slowly, my legs started to rise.
I could feel the cold water all around me. Slime and algae swirled around, too, like monster hair. I could feel wet dog. Plus, I could smell wet dog. When you are drowning, you do not pay attention to how things smell. Yeti paddled next to me. He licked some water off my nose.
“Hold on, Jake Z,” called Nanny X.
“I’m trying,” I yelled. But there was nothing for me to hold on to.
I felt something smooth and cold rub against my leg. My Fantastically Freaky Animal Facts book says all snakes can swim, including poisonous ones. What if I died from a snakebite instead of drowning?
“Aaaahhhhhhhhh,” I yelled, a little higher.
“Can we help?” I whipped my head around and saw a small boat. Our friend Stinky, who is in fifth grade with Ali, was leaning over the side. The person steering was his nanny, Boris, who is a member of NAP, like Nanny X. They had their own fishing gear, which meant that they must be the special agents who got the case first. The good news was that they were in a perfect position to stop me before I drifted over a waterfall. Going over a waterfall is something that happens a lot in the movies.
“Aaaahh,” I said, but not as loud.
Nanny X waved, like she was shooing them away. “We’ve got him covered.” But she was nowhere near me. Then I saw her pluck a fishing lure from her hat and stick it in the water. It floated toward me, and grew from what looked like a purple minnow to a purple eggplant. It kept growing, until it was the size of a man-eating shark. But it wasn’t eating anybody. What it was doing was swimming. What it was doing was coming to save me.
“Tundra,” I said, which means that it was way cooler than just regular cool. After that, I stopped talking so water wouldn’t get in my mouth.
The minnow reached me. Its tail was flat, like the bottom of a chair. There was a handle, and I grabbed it. My legs were still churning around in the water, so it took me a little while before I could pull myself up. I pulled Yeti up, too. He shook himself and I could see all kinds of ripples in the water where the drops fell. Slowly the minnow turned around and started swimming back toward Nanny X. Upstream. Which didn’t seem possible. It had more control with its fins than Nanny X and my sister had with their paddles.
The minnow moved forward until it bumped smack into the canoe. Ali helped us on board, and Nanny X squeezed the minnow’s cheeks so its fish lips looked even fishier. Pppfffffft. It sounded like a whoopee cushion as it shrank back to its original size. Nanny X snatched it out of the water and stuck it back on her hat. Then she squeezed me.
“I guess I should start swimming lessons again,” I said.
“It’s not a bad skill for a special agent to have,” she agreed, as Stinky and Boris buzzed toward us. Their boat had a motor. When they were a few feet away they cut it off, and Boris pulled out a hook—not for fishing, but for grabbing—and attached our boat to his. Then he pulled out a small anchor and threw it over the side.
“Fancy meeting you on this fine morning,” said Boris, who is tall, even when he is sitting in a boat. He has brown skin and a little beard that Eliza likes to pull on.
“Hello, Boris,” said Nanny X. She sounded kind of frosty. Not frosty as in cool or tundra; frosty as in angry.
“What have you caught?” he said.
“Not a person, place or thing,” Nanny X admitted.
“We report the same,” Boris said. Nanny X got a little friendlier after that.
“But why isn’t anything out here?” Stinky asked. “That’s just wrong.” Stinky is very concerned about the environment. Not seeing any live fish probably bugged him a lot more than not seeing The Angler.
“Ali saw a ripple, before I fell in,” I said. I thought that might cheer him up.
“It’s true,” Ali said. “Jake’s splash scared whatever it was. But there was something out there.”
“Dare. Dare!” Eliza pointed. We looked, but we didn’t see anything. Eliza puffed up her cheeks and blew out a breath. If she were a grown-up, it would have been a sigh. Then she went back to her coloring book while Nanny X and Boris talked about which parts of the river they’d covered and wasn’t it nice to be working together again? And did anyone happen to see a suspicious-looking character on shore with a sketchpad or maybe a blowtorch?
No one had.
Eliza ripped a page out of her coloring book.
“Eliza,” Ali said. “That’s not how we treat books.”
Eliza held up a picture of a mouse wearing overalls and balled it up, like a baseball. She inherited that from me.
I looked at Stinky, who was talking about healthy rivers, and at Nanny X, who kept saying, “Yes, but what’s the motive?”
“Fame?” said Boris.
“The Angler is anonymous,” said Nanny X.
“The Angler is pseudonymous,” said Boris. “A person can be known by a pseudonym. You are known by a pseudonym.”
“Pseudonym,” which is a name someone uses in place of their real name, would be a good reading-connection word, but I was too wet to write that one down.
“Maybe there’s a political point,” said Nanny X.
“Maybe the artist is making a statement that if we don’t take better care of our rivers, the fish are going to end up on dry land,” said Stinky.
“Actually,” I told him, “some fish can survive on dry land. Like mudskippers and the climbing gourami.” I don’t think you’d find a climbing gourami on the White House lawn, though; they live in Africa and parts of Asia.
“Pish!” said Eliza. She was holding my fishing pole.
“Eliza,” Ali said, “be careful of the hook. It’s sharp!”
“Sarp!” Eliza said. She took the hook and put her coloring-book paper on there. Ppppping. She dropped the line into the water.
Then, all of a sudden, the line went straight. I’d been fishing enough times with Ethan to know what that meant.
The flies hadn’t worked. Neither had Weinrib’s Canadian Night Crawlers. But somehow a piece of soggy coloring-book paper had worked. My baby sister had caught a fish.