Nat would have thought she’d be more scared.
She was a little bit scared, but she was also calm.
She reached out and touched the skin of the whale, which was still there, still with them. It was like touching a feeling. That feeling was love.
She thought about what the Bird had said, the thing about wanting to know the point.
Love was obviously the point.
“Duh,” she said out loud.
“What?” Harry said. He seemed dazed. “Are we going to die?”
Nat shook her head. She wished that she’d been able to reach the Bird this morning. She wished she’d known then the answer to the question “What is the point?”
She would have said, “Thank you for everything. I love you.”
She would have said, “Goodbye,” and meant it.
Then maybe she wouldn’t need the Bird anymore, at least not in the same way.
Anyway, if today had gone as it was meant to go, by the end of it she would know who her real mother was.
But today was not going how it was meant to go. Nat kicked her legs in the water. Her jeans felt heavy. Her legs felt too slow.
The whale was swimming around them in tight circles—or as tight as a twenty-foot-long whale could circle—while they clutched broken pieces of the wooden boat. The swimming was creating a whirlpool, which was making it easier for them to float.
Nat didn’t want to die on her thirteenth birthday.
She thought of all the things that were going to happen next, now that she was thirteen.
She was going to get bigger boobs. She was going to get her period. She was probably going to start having crushes on boys. Maybe she’d even kiss one.
She didn’t really want all that stuff. All of it made her want to cry. But she didn’t want to miss them either.
“We can’t die,” said Nat, out loud. “It’s my birthday.” It seemed strange to be talking to Harry normally, their legs kicking to keep them afloat, amid the wreckage of the boat, a paparazzo, and a whale.
“Dude,” he said. “I don’t think that’s how it works.” He looked like he was going to cry. “I haven’t even had my real life yet. I’ve just had the hard part. That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t really fair,” Nat said.
“Don’t say stuff like that,” he said. “Not now.”
His sunglasses had fallen off. Nat reached for his hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and then she leaned as close to him as she could and kissed him right on the lips. His lips felt like whale skin: smooth and bumpy at the same time.
“Hey!” Harry yelped. He spit in the water. “Gross.”
“Sorry,” she said, and then she was crying for real, the snotty kind of crying with tears.
“Forget it,” said Harry. “I’ll just pretend you were giving me CPR.”
And then, suddenly, they were both laughing. “I can’t laugh and float at the same time,” gasped Nat.
Hugh was lying down on a bigger piece of the side of the boat. Nat hoped he was regretting his life choices. Mostly, he was probably regretting dropping the camera. Nat wondered how many expensive cameras were at the bottom of the sea, held down by seaweed and coral, little fish swimming around their useless lenses.
The whale was still making slow circles.
“What is going to happen?” Nat wondered out loud. “Is someone going to rescue us?”
“I think we’re going to die,” said Harry. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” said Nat. “Not in that way, though.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Duh. I didn’t mean that.”
Then suddenly, Nat wasn’t floating. She was under the water looking up at the surface, which was like glass flecked with pieces of wood, big and small. She could see that Harry was still floating, holding on to a long red board. His feet were above her, and she was sinking and sinking. She felt happy that he was floating. She felt mostly confused about why she was not.
Weird, Nat thought, but she didn’t do anything about it.
She started to count. Four and a half minutes was the same as two hundred and seventy seconds and she knew she could hold her breath for that long. It was her record. She had two hundred and seventy seconds to figure out how to get back to the surface. She tried kicking her legs but they were really seriously too heavy in her jeans. She kicked off her sneakers. The surface looked really far away. She could see Harry’s legs kicking frantically.
It’s OK, Harry, she told him telepathically. Don’t panic. Stop kicking.
Harry stopped kicking.
Nat peeled off her jeans. It was hard. She sank even more. Deeper and deeper. Impossibly deep.
Then Nat was kicking, bare-legged, rising up again, like a whale. She thought she would make it to the surface.
But she couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t reach it.
Then Hugh was diving toward her. He was reaching for her. She let him grab her hand.
And then—SUDDENLY—the whale was underneath them.
The whale was underneath them, pushing them to the surface.
They were on the whale.
It couldn’t be true, but it was true.
Sometimes things are like that.
Some things happen that are unbelievable.
“Unbelievable” was another perfect English word. If you rearranged some of the letters, Nat realized, you could spell “be alive.” Which seemed like a crazy thing to be thinking at that moment, but there it was: Be alive.
They burst through the surface, gasping.
The sky was clear of clouds now—blown clean by the collective breath of all of them, maybe—and relentlessly, postcard-perfect blue. The sun was huge and fierce on her face.
Nat wanted to ask, “Did that really just happen?”
But she knew that it did.
The whale groaned audibly and then sank down again.
That was when Nat saw the other whales.
There were whales all around them.
They were swimming in a huge circle around the remains of the boat, around Harry and Nat, around Hugh.
Hugh had saved her.
Well, she thought.
There were bubbles everywhere.
All three of them were floating on their backs now, clinging to the boards like monkeys, arms and legs wrapped around them. Stick monkey, thought Nat. Monkey umbrellas. She was strangely sleepy. She closed her eyes and dreamed about a postcard.
Dear Mom, she wrote. Why didn’t you want me? What did I do wrong?
It’s not that I didn’t want you, a woman’s voice said. It’s that he wanted you more.
“Te amo,” Nat said out loud. “You sound like Dad.”
Te amo, you too, said her mom.
“I can speak Spanish?” Nat said.
“You speak a little bit of everything,” said Harry. “Remember? Your weird word collection?”
“I was dreaming,” said Nat. She closed her eyes again, but the dream was gone.
“Don’t fall asleep!” Harry said. “Then you’ll drown! I’m tired, too. But, like, we can’t. We’ll die.”
“Me, too.” Nat couldn’t feel her arms and legs, but she could see them. “Tired.”
Hugh was still muttering.
Harry and Nat were holding hands.
Then Harry and Nat’s hands were suddenly not holding each other.
There was red in the water.
The red was blood.
Nat considered fainting. Her vision dimmed, but then it brightened again. She stopped herself. If she fainted, she would drown for sure.
Then, suddenly, between them, rising out of the depths, was the whale.
And a baby.
The whale had had a baby.
“Wow,” said Nat.
“Look,” said Harry, at the same time.
“Bebé,” mumbled Hugh.
The mother whale was so close that Nat could see the white paper folds of the skin under her chin. She could see her baleen.
Te amo, said the whale in the Bird’s voice. Baleine.
Then Nat heard a sound like a helicopter. Was it her heart? It was scaring her. It was like a vibration in the water but it was moving her, and then the whales were gone—all of them were gone—and something orange appeared.
Something huge and loud and orange.
The orange thing was a boat.
WHALE EXPERIENCE FACTORY was painted on the side of the boat in big letters. Nat wanted to laugh, but she was too tired, and then she was being scooped out of the water and so were Harry and, she supposed, Hugh, but she was too tired to make sure.
Nat was pretty sure that it was ironic to be rescued by the Whale Experience Factory, though.
She smiled.