Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson Read Free Book Online

until horseflies started to buzz around my head. I dived. Sounds changed too. The sounds of boats bumping against the docks and the docks creaking in the waves were magnified, but the yelling and tinny radio music were muted. My ears began to ache, but I felt light. I lifted my arms over my head and kicked my leg out so that I spun like the plastic ballerina in my jewellery box.
    When I came up for air, someone hit me on the arm and said, “You’re it!”
    I played tag until my arms and legs felt dislocatedfrom the rest of me, then went back to the dock and ate my sandwich. I shared the Jell-O powder with Erica and her gang in return for Oreo cookies and Kool-Aid. “Look,” Tab said. She pointed with her chin out to the ocean.
    I turned. Jimmy was waving to me from the breakwater logs, thirty feet from the dock. I could see him slick and shiny with water, and watched him help pull his friends up. They ran to the end of the breakwater, leaping across the space between the logs, the space that opened and closed with the waves and the length of the chains that held the logs together. Every time they jumped, I imagined Jimmy falling. When they reached the end, they turned around and ran all the way back. Jimmy saw me still watching him. While his friends dived in, he waved to me again. I waved back. He shouted something. Probably “Bonzai!”
    He dived in. I waited. He didn’t surface. Long after his friends came up, he was still underwater. The skin on my arms and legs goose-pimpled. I didn’t move until I saw his head. When Jimmy pulled himself onto the dock, asking me for half of my sandwich. I said if he wanted more he could go home and he glared at me, but I glared right back at him. He was just about to tell me off, when he stopped, mouth open, eyes suddenly not seeing me at all, staring intently at something behind me. The chatter died off, and the other kids turned to stare. I twisted around to see what everyone was ogling.
    A new girl was coming down the gangplank. Without smiling or looking shy, she gave us all a flat, assessing glance. She paused, then flipped her waist-length hairbehind her and walked over to sit beside a group of girls I never played with.
    “Who’s the snot?” I heard Erica whisper.
    “Adelaine Jones,” Tab whispered back. “Just moved back with her mother.”
    This girl was not just pretty, she was actual model material. Puppy-dog-eyed boys watched her sunbathing. Erica glared venomously. The new girl ignored us all. I hoped she went to our school, so I could watch her duke it out with Erica.
    “Adelaine,” I heard Jimmy whisper.
    We stayed in the bay until dinner. Jimmy wanted to go with me to Erica’s house, but I was tired of babysitting and told him to go home. When he didn’t, I told him we were going up the graveyard and we’d be playing there until dark.
    “I’m telling,” he said.
    “Go ahead,” I said.
    I ate at Erica’s, a large house up the steep hill near the band council office. Aunt Kate frowned at our wet bathing suits, made us dry off on the porch, then stuffed us with huge chunks of watermelon, fresh buns and homemade blueberry jam. Then we all trooped outside and played a variation of tag by spitting watermelon seeds at each other until Aunt Kate called Erica in and told me and the rest of Erica’s gang that it was time to go home.
    Mom was waiting for me in the living room. “You shouldn’t have left Jimmy like that. You should know better.” I glared at the floor. “He’s your brother. He wants to be with you.”
    “He’s a poop-head.”
    “Lisa—”
    “He is! He’s a big, stupid poop-head.”
    “Enough.”
    Mad at the unfairness of it all, I started crying. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t raise my head, not wanting it to show.
    “Come here,” Mom said. When I didn’t, she came and stood over me. “He wants to do everything you do. He wants to go where you go. You think he’ll want that forever? He’s going to go his way and you’ll