Moonpenny Island
Authors: Tricia Springstubb
For my antediluvian love, Paul
Chapter OneT
ransparent. That's how Flor and Sylvie are to each other. See-through. Flor knows everything about Sylvie, and Sylvie? She knows things about Flor before Flor knows them herself.
Sylvie cheers Flor up or calms her down. Considers the same stuff funny or annoying. Won't tease her for still being scared of the dark, not to mention those spiders with hairy legs, and loves pretending their bikes are wild horses only they can tame. Sylvie, world's most awesome friend, never laughs at Flor, or if she does, it's the kind of laugh that means
oh-wow-you-are-one-of-a-kind-and-I-love-you
, never
oh-wow-how-can-anyone-possibly-be-so-weird-a-roo
.
“Best friends” does not cover it. They are each other's perfect friend.
Add this: Flor O'Dell and Sylvie Pinch live on a small island in a great lake. An island so small it's barely more than a lump of limestone. So minuscule that when the ferries shut down and the summer people leave, fewer than two hundred souls live here, and that's counting Flossie the gangster cat and Minerva the two-legged dog. Flor and Sylvie are the only eleven-year-old humans for watery miles and miles.
Think of it. How amazing, how excellent, how rare is that? In Flor's opinion, very.
But she hasn't seen Sylvie in four days. Practically a record in the lifelong history of their friendship. Sylvie has been sick, or busy, or something. Something peculiar. Something strange. Then this morning, this bright, hot July morning, she called. “Come right over,” Sylvie whispered. “Right this minute.”
Flor jumps on her trusty bike, bends low over the handlebars.
“Fly, Misty! Fly like the western wind!”
The morning becomes a dazzling blur. Last night it rained, and the world is polished up. The leaves on the trees are a deeper green, the rocks have lost their dust, and every dip in the land brims and winks in the sunlight. Water and rockâthat's what Moonpenny Island is made of. Talk about opposites! The lake is a show-off blabbermouth. It can't stand to be ignored for a single solitary minute. Moonpenny is so little only a blind person could get lost here, though even sheâthe blind personâcould find her way by listening for the mutters and murmurs, slaps and crashes of the water. Meanwhile, the rocks keep quiet. When Flor was in third grade and had to draw a spelling picture for
secret
, she drew a rock.
Now she rides no-handed, arms dangling. Her grandmother Lita, who lives on the mainland, has a sampler on her living room wall:
GOD
'
S IN HIS HEAVENâALL
'
S RIGHT WITH THE WORLD!
Exactly. Flor passes summer people in rented golf carts and Camp Agape campers on clunky camp bikes. Queenie from Two Sisters store, bobbing to her car radio, waves. The dark, curly head of Joe Hawkins pokes up from his family's front yard, basically a
graveyard for things summer people toss. Old bikes, rusted outboards, dilapidated deck chairsâJoe's father is a junk-oholic.
“Hey, Floor.” Joe waves. “Where's your sister, Ceiling?”
Once, for about three minutes, Flor and Sylvie decided Joe was cute. What were they thinking? She almost shouts back at him, then bites her tongue. When she was little, Flor was famous for her bad temper. Her big sister, Cecilia, still has a faint tattoo of Flor's baby teeth on her left arm. Now that she's older, though, Flor exercises self-control. Not that injustice, and the victimizing of the small, the weak, and the four-legged, don't enrage her still. But now she knows how to handle her anger.
Mostly.
The rain turned the lake brown and foamy as a fancy coffee drink. She glides by a few more houses, then claps her hands over her ears as she passes Pinch Paving and Stone, the last working quarry. Inside the tall barbed-wire fence, the diggers and hoppers, feeders and crushers, roar and growl. A crane like a dinosaur skeleton juts against the sky. Cutting and
crushing limestone is no dainty job. Sylvie's father owns the quarry, and Sylvie hates it. She says the quarry makes her feel sorry for Mother Earth.
Crazy-tenderhearted, that's Sylvie Pinch. Once she and Flor dragged all the island's tossed-out Christmas trees back to her house, because Sylvie felt bad for them. That same Christmas, when her mother got a new toaster, Sylvie took the old one to bed with her every night for a week. Her bed was a mess of toast crumbs. If Sylvie's heart was a fruit, it would be a sweet, ripe strawberry.
Her house sits on the island's only rise. All glass and stone, it hogs up the best view of the sunset. Flor's house could fit inside twice. It's funny how, lately, Sylvie always wants to come over to Flor's. She says she likes the O'Dell house better, because it's so cozy. Which is Sylvie-speak for crowded and old.
She's waiting at the foot of her long driveway, riding her purple bike in lazy circles. The purple ties of her swimsuitâtwo-piece, bought by her mother from a boutique on the mainlandâpoke out the neck of her purple-and-white T-shirt. Her purple helmet is on her head, her purple high-tops on her feet. Both
knees have Band-Aids. Beige, not purple. Though that bruise on her cheek is.
“I tripped,” Sylvie says when she sees Flor's
what-happened
face. “Down the . . . the cellar steps.”
“Yikes.” There's another bruise on Sylvie's forehead. “Ouch.”
“I know.” She switches into her alien voice. “I inhabit the planet Clumsy.”
The sudden spit of gravel sends them scrambling. A red SUV shoots down the drive, Sylvie's handsome, bad-news brother at the wheel.
“Slow down!” they holler at the top of their lungs, but he barely taps the brake before he rockets out into the road.
“I thought he was working at the quarry this summer,” says Flor.
“He is.”
“Well, he's going the exact wrong direction.”
Sylvie sighs. “If only he wouldn't drive like that. It gets me so worried.” She pushes her purple glasses up her nose and sighs again, and Flor wishes, not for the first time, that the Earth would yawn and swallow Peregrine Pinch IV feet first.
The Pinches' ancestors settled the island forever ago, when it still rightfully belonged to Indians. The Indians are long gone, but not the Pinches. Sylvie's family owns the ferry, the Cockeyed Gull restaurant, and of course that deafening quarry. Peregrine Pinch III, Sylvie's father, is the mayor. If the island had royalty, Sylvie's family would all wear crowns.
Perry Pinch is the prince. The spoiled rotten kind. Last month he got in a fistfight with a summer kid. The month before, he got caught stealing at Two Sisters, even though he had a pocket full of money. The month beforeâwell, don't get Flor started.
Sylvie squints up the road, though the car's long disappeared. She loves her big brother beyond all reason. She adores that chucklehead so completely, so blindly, it could almost make a person jealous.
“My parents had a fight over Perry last night.” Flor's surprised to hear herself say this, since how much her parents argue isn't high on her list of conversation topics. Too late now. Sylvie's blue eyes widen, and Flor has to explain. “My mother said my father should give him a speeding ticket, and my father said he guesses after all these years he
knows how to be the island cop.”
“Your father never gives islanders tickets. He hardly ever even gives them to summer people.”
“I know. My parents can fight over anything these days. The tiniest, most unimportant thing. It's a special talent they've developed.” Flor digs gravel out of her sandal. Lately, her parents take longer and longer to make up. Lately, Dad's spending more nights on the couch, and the only time you hear Mama singing is in church. “If there was a show called
Find the Most Ridiculous Thing to Fight About
, they'd win the boat and the car and the vacation house.”
“Adults are crazy-bizarre.”
“We'll never be like that.”
“Never.”
But an odd look comes into Sylvie's eyes. Something surfaces, something Flor can't name, and it makes her heart reset its beat. What? Sylvie hops on her bike and starts pedaling.
“Where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?”
“You were falling down the cellar stairs.”
“Enough of that rubbish,” Sylvie says in her English-lady voice.
They gallop, leaving trouble behind. Civilization on one side, lake sparkle on the other. A birder, standing in tall grass, trains his binoculars on them. Flor and Sylvie, a rare species! Beach towels ripple on clotheslines, and in the cottage windows, curtains rise and fall. That thug of a cat, Flossie Magruder, crouches in the weeds, a doomed field mouse between her big paws. Passing the turnoff for the winery, they hear loud music and laughing, though it's barely noon. Summer people! Year-rounders turn up their noses at them. “Before they board the ferry, they leave their brains behind in a bucket,” islanders say.