My Year with Eleanor by Noelle Hancock Read Free Book Online Page A

sputtering protests, I plopped down in one of the forbidden seats, pulling Matt down into the seat next to me. Normally I would’ve slunk away and stewed about it for a while. It was nerve-racking but exhilarating.
    I’d realized in the previous weeks that I needed to be practical about this experiment. If I was going to keep this up for a year, not every challenge could be as elaborate or expensive as trapeze lessons. Some fears had to be faced in small moments, whether preplanned or things that just came up during the day. When I started paying attention, I saw how often I avoided confrontation. I’d told myself this was a sign of maturity. After all, wasn’t it childish to make a fuss about trivial matters? Now I realized that at the heart of these situations was a fear of offending someone. But if I couldn’t stand up to people when there was little at stake, how would I summon the courage when it did matter? Standing your ground could be even scarier than standing on a two-story platform.
    I didn’t feel ready to face sharks yet. There was only a month left of summer and I’d been hoping to put sharks off until next spring so I could work my way up to it. But maybe Bill’s e-mail was a sign that it was time for another big challenge. Besides, putting it off would be another instance of me avoiding confrontation. And to quote Eleanor, “What you don’t do can be a destructive force.”
    Screw it. “I’m in,” I e-mailed back.
    On Thursday afternoon, I boarded a three-hour train to Greenport, Long Island, where the boat, The Manatee, was scheduled to depart the following morning. Upon arrival, I checked into a cheap motel room and called Bill.
    â€œThere’s a beer bottle opener nailed to the bathroom wall in my motel room. Jealous?”
    â€œThat room obviously knows what you’re going to be facing tomorrow,” he said. “Sorry I can’t be there to help you put it to good use.”
    Bill cohosted a nightly television talk show and couldn’t take off work Friday. So as soon as he was off the air, he’d jump in a rental car and meet our boat at Martha’s Vineyard late Friday night.
    â€œIt’ll be nice to see you, Hancock,” he said. “What’s it been—seven, eight months?” Wow, had it been that long? Like so many of my friendships lately, ours had been subsisting on e-mail and texts, a sort of friendship life support system.
    Bill, in particular, had been totally behind the concept for a Year of Fear. He and I had met ten years before during my summer internship at Stuff magazine. He was the features editor, and as soon as I saw that he kept an inflatable alligator raft on the floor next to his desk, I thought, I need to be friends with this man.
    â€œSo are you prepared to die a horrible death tomorrow, Hancock?” he teased.
    â€œDon’t remind me.” I groaned. “I can’t believe you actually do this stuff for fun.”
    Actually I could believe it. He was a direct descendant of William Dawes Jr., who accompanied Paul Revere on his famous midnight ride. Fearlessness was practically in his DNA. This was a man who, in his late twenties, sneaked into a college and posed as a student for a week to see if it was as fun as he remembered. He finished the Walt Disney World marathon in Orlando. This wasn’t particularly unusual except that he did it in drag, changing every five miles into a different Disney princess costume.
    When we sign off, Bill said, “I’ll see you on Saturday.” Then, pausing dramatically, he added, “Hopefully.” I hung up on his cackling, movie villain laughter.
    T his adventure seemed especially apropos considering water was one of Eleanor’s longest-running fears. It started when she was three years old, traveling by steamship to Europe with her parents. On the first day of the sail another boat got lost in the fog and collided with their