Chapter 11: Algae

"Or what?" I said.

Dillon blinked. He wasn't used to me asking.

"Or Mom tells everybody you abandoned the family while Amelie was in trouble."

"She's already telling everybody I poisoned a girl."

"Em..."

"You pushed me on that driveway," I said. "You watched him tear Grandma's picture. You held her coffee."

"You don't get to tell me where to be on Thanksgiving."

Dillon opened his mouth.

He closed it.

He looked at Bo's hand on my neck, and at Raegan, who was glaring up at him.

Then he turned around and walked away down the hall.

I was shaking all the way to the train.

Bo held my hand for nine hundred miles and ate no sandwiches at all.

By November the lake had gone the color of iron, and the town's water intake was closed again.

Third time that year.

The whole town was buying bottled water. The grocery had a hand-lettered sign: ONE CASE PER FAMILY.

I'd been sampling the shoreline every day I wasn't on the Grace.

Twelve stations, every afternoon, in Bo's old gloves.

The toxin numbers made no sense.

They spiked hardest in one cove a mile south of the intake, under a big lakeshore resort with a golf course and a spa.

"So it's the fertilizer on the golf course," Bo said, reading my graph over my shoulder in the lab.

"That's what I thought. It's not. The nitrogen's the wrong kind."

"There are kinds?"

"There are kinds. This kind comes from people."

He made a face. "From people."

"From people," I said. "In toilets."

The captain read my notebook in one sitting with his feet on the lab bench.

Then he gave me a boat.

Not the Grace. The little aluminum skiff, and every Saturday to run my own transect along the resort's shore.

The town water plant's operator came to the lab in his work coat and asked if he could have my numbers.

"Nobody's ever looked this close," he said. "We just close the valve and wait."

I gave him everything.

The first Saturday, Bo came along. Nobody invited him.

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