Antoinette’s Fish, by Gudrun Cram-Drach
Chapter 1
When Annie Velter woke up, she just knew it was the best kind of morning.
It was the first day of summer vacation. Until Labor Day rolled by, Annie would have no homework to do. Not one bit for months and months and months.
Annie should have finished school on June 16, but because of foul weather, she was stuck there until June 25.
“When I was a kid,” her father would say every time it snowed more than 6 inches, and the school closures were announced on the six a.m. news, “we would never have stayed home for this. People are such wimps now.”
It was easy for Annie’s father to call people wimps. He was over six feet tall, wore steel-toed boots and bent iron for a living. Whenever Annie saw him from behind he looked more like a boulder than a man, but, Annie agreed. A few inches of snow was no reason to hide. Maine certainly had enough salt to melt the ice on the roads, and besides, Annie walked to school and she had very good boots.
But now it was summer. Her twelve-paned glass window was propped open with an antique thing-a-ma-jig, carved more than a hundred years ago for the sole purpose of holding open old windows in old houses. Mom liked to collect that kind of stuff. Through the rustling oak tree she could see black smoke rising from the metal chimney on the garage. Dad must be getting an early start.
Annie pulled on her Mom’s ancient Portland School of Art sweatshirt and shuffled down the hallway. The house smelled of coffee, and when she passed the family room she glanced at the clock on the cable box. It was 7:45.
The kitchen was the only part of the house that didn’t look 150 years old. Mom and Dad had remodeled it right after they got married, putting a bar in the middle, but keeping the black slate sink that had been there since Dad’s great-grandfather built the house. They added a modern counter and range top so the family could crowd around the chef on warm winter nights, just like in the magazines. That was the idea anyway, but usually her parents were too busy with their home-based metal working careers to cook much more than pasta with bottled sauce or frozen casseroles. If Annie ever wanted to learn how to cook, she would be well set up for it, but for the moment, baking muffins and meatloaf in home economics wasn’t inspiring her to apply to the Cordon Bleu.
“Are you ready for the big day?” Mom asked from behind the newspaper.
“And how,” Annie said, opening a gray cabinet that was yellow on the inside and pulling down a jar of homemade granola with dried blueberries and cashews. She mixed it in a bowl with some non-fat yogurt (not because she needed to eat non-fat things, she just liked its tart flavor) and shoved a glass under the filtered water dispenser in the tall, silver fridge.
She slid into the breakfast nook, which was in fact a real diner booth taken from a train car diner that had closed a few years ago. Dad had loved the place, and managed to save his favorite table when they announced it would be demolished. There was even a mini-jukebox, where you could flip through pages of songs, and play your tune right from the table. It didn’t work anymore, but it was pretty, and Dad had wired the lights in it so the soft pink and yellow glow worked like a nightlight when Annie came down for midnight snacks.
Mom flipped over her section of the paper to continue reading the article from the front page, so Annie read the funnies. And then her horoscope. She was looking for a pencil to start the cryptoquip when Mom folded the paper with a sigh.
“How’s the Middle East?” Annie asked.
“The usual, just terrible,” Mom said, and threw back the last of her coffee.
“And East Africa?” Annie asked.
“Nothing in the Press Herald,” Mom said. “If there was any big news to report, NPR would tell us.”
“Maybe,” Annie said, but she knew it wasn’t true. Annie had been paying very close attention to Africa for almost a year now. She set her Google news homepage to send her emails any time there was an African news development, and had been amazed at how much happened on the continent that was never mentioned in the west. Not even on NPR. It seemed like the only kind of African news that got into the American media was the kind where a lot of people got killed. But there were elections and sports and business mergers, just like everywhere else in the world. Annie had even downloaded music by X Plastaz and Sista P onto her iPod. She liked to listen to it on the days Kayla had field hockey practice and she walked home from school alone.
Dad came into the kitchen. His sandy brown hair was already glued to his forehead with sweat, and his round, black welding glasses dangled under his chin.
“‘Morning Annie,” he said. “Is there still coffee?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Annie and Mom said in unison.
Dad poured himself a cup and flopped down beside Annie. He had that tangy burnt smell he always got in his workshop.
“Big day, huh?” Dad asked.
“Yes,” Annie said definitively. Finally someone remembered.
“You gonna need a ride?” he asked.
“Maybe, but I can take my bike too,” Annie said.
“It’s too far,” Mom said. “I’ll drive you.”
The phone rang. Kayla’s number came up on the caller ID.
“It’s for me.”
Annie climbed over Dad’s thick legs then took the phone into the hall.
“Hey.”
“Hey, what’s up. We’re going to the lake, Martin and Mom and me, can you come?”
Kayla lived next door, and the two girls saw so much of each other that it was almost like they never stopped. They had dispensed with formal hellos and goodbyes years ago, especially on the phone. It was silly enough that they even called each other, since it would take 10 seconds to walk to the other ones’ door.
“I have my test today,” Annie said.
“Your big SCUBA test? Omigosh, are you ready?”
Annie forgave Kayla for forgetting about the test, because she did remember how important it was. And yes, she was ready. She’d been studying at the Y ever since March. Today, Annie would have to put on a full suit, which weighed nearly half her weight, set up the breathing apparatus, swim into the Maine ocean (which was extremely cold, especially in the beginning of the summer) and retrieve a “prize.” The prize was something Chris, her rather cute SCUBA instructor, would have dropped on the ocean floor 50 meters out.
“Can I watch?” Kayla asked.
“It’ll be boring,” Annie said.
“You’re leaving in a few days, and so am I, so we have to hang out this weekend,” Kayla said. “I’ll ask Mom if we can pick you up.”
Annie was no doubt the only 12-year-old in the city of Portland who did not have a cellphone, so they decided to meet at the beach snack bar, even though it wasn’t open yet, and even though Crescent Beach was not at all on the way to the lake. But they had to hang out.
Forty-five minutes later Annie jumped out of her parents’ pickup truck and ran down to Crescent Beach. It was one of the few sandy beaches around. This made it popular, especially today, an unseasonably hot first day of summer.
She found Chris easily, among a small group of adults, half of whom she recognized from her classes at the Y.
“Ready lady?” Chris asked when Annie had zipped up the back of her wet suit.
Annie nodded, and Chris marked something down on his clipboard.
“I’ll do you first, while these geezers are still suiting up,” he said, setting his stopwatch.
Annie was always grateful that Chris respected her like a grown up, or at least almost like his peer. If it hadn’t been for him, she couldn’t have studied SCUBA at all. There hadn’t been enough kids to set up a regular kids class, but Chris understood Annie’s plight, and said it would be cool if she came to the adult class. As long as she worked extra hard.
Not a problem.
An hour later, Chris signed the bottom of Annie’s SCUBA certificate, then sealed it in a gallon-sized Zip-loc bag. He always said any important piece of paper should either be laminated or sealed to protect it in a SCUBA diver’s bag full of damp gear.
“Do you have everything you’ll need for your trip?” he asked, giving Annie a bear-hug that made her want to giggle.
“Yup,” Annie said. “I have my custom-made mask and snorkel, and I’m bringing the full foot fins. I won’t need my wet suit boots in the lake.”
“I’m so jealous that you’re gonna dive in a lake,” Chris said for the umpteenth time.
“I know, next time come with me.”
Annie was proud of her easy small talk, but worried about the time.
“Definitely. See ya,” Chris said, and turned back to his group. The older SCUBA students were ready for their tests now, decked out in their gear like a mob of tadpoles.
Annie found Kayla leaning on the white cement wall of the snack bar. A huge seagull was grazing in the sand behind her.
“Have you been waiting long?” she asked. Kayla held up her cellphone to indicate she’d been playing solitaire. It seemed like Kayla could never be still anymore without her cellphone to occupy her. She wondered how her best friend would survive seven weeks without it at summer camp.
Kayla’s Mom and little brother arrived with beach bags and a big red cooler.
“We thought we’d stay here today, since you’ll both be at lakes this summer,” Mrs. Watson said, and handed Annie a beach ball.
Annie and Kayla hurried off to find a good spot on the beach. It was too cold to really swim, but Kayla insisted they go in the water just once to make summer official. No wetsuits. So they ran, screaming, into the icy Atlantic, then spent the rest of the day on the warm sand, playing volleyball and reading Kayla’s magazines. When they were hungry, they stuck corn chips into tunafish sandwiches, always delicious with the bread Kayla’s mom bought at the organic bakery, and gulped cold green grapes and soda. Martin fed pickles to the seagulls and did his best to annoy the girls by kicking sand onto their towels. It didn’t bother Annie at all. Now that she could count the hours until she left on her trip, Annie realized how much she would miss seeing Kayla every day, and even Martin.
It wouldn’t be her first summer away of course. For the last 2 years, she had spent almost the whole summer at a sleep away girls’ camp on Great Sebago Lake. But this year she would go for a longer time period, to a greater lake, that was much more than a one hour drive into rural Maine.
This summer she was going to Tanzania, in East Africa. Seven-thousand, five hundred and ten miles away, if her math was good, which was 30% of the Earth’s circumference, and 8 time zones. She wasn’t scared, but maybe that was because her Gam was there waiting for her on the other side of the world. Annie had been wanting to meet her Gam for so long that she would travel to Neptune if she had to, but Africa was a cool enough place to go, at least for now.
