“No. Did you?”
“Nope.” Daniela sat up and tucked the flute into her backpack.
Cadie had braided her hair into neat plaits and chosen a pair of frayed cutoff shorts and a red T-shirt, hoping Daniela would forget about her outfit the day before. In school Daniela hung out with the popular, athletic girls, the ones who traveled in clumps. Daniela walked with long, purposeful strides and never looked over her shoulder to see if her friends followed. But they always followed. Cadie suspected Daniela disdained the pack of girls, but tolerated them rather than waste energy evading them.
Cadie untied the rope from the birch branch. There were no seats or benches on the broad, flat bottom covered in leaves, twigs, and dirt. Cadie tossed her backpack in the back corner where about ten curled-up beer tabs huddled in a sandy pile. She inspected the various layers of someone else’s history, trapped in coats of paint: Dark green, sky blue, and white hid below the canary yellow.
Friar pawed at the rock and whined as Cadie lowered herself into the boat.
“Go home, boy.” Cadie leaned out of the boat and let Friar lick her face. She knew her dog would wait there until they returned.
Cadie imagined the power of digging into the water with her paddle and changing the boat’s course with one pull. Her rain slicker shed the misty rain in beads. Her skin prickled with anticipation.
“You can sit in the back, if you want.” Cadie offered the captain’s seat to Daniela, hoping she would decline.
“If you want me to.”
“No big deal.” Cadie tried to act casual. She wanted to sit in the back and steer, to control where the boat moved, but even more, she wanted to make this friendship work.
They paddled by Cadie’s pier and past a seemingly endless expanse of woods that covered most of the peninsula where they both lived, known as the Hook to everyone in Maple Crest. A vastness spread out in front of her, all around her. Her familiar lake, her backyard, stretched out deep and wide with meandering turns, the surface shimmering with the lure of the unknown. The hugeness of space spread inside her, expanding her pores, her blood vessels, her lungs. Even the sky, which hung low with clouds, gave her the feeling she could reach up, peel away the gray, and see forever up into the deepness of space.
Everything seemed different, silvery, as if she were seeing it in a mirror, through a mirror. They rowed past the remote summer cottages that could only be accessed by boat, until the shoreline opened up to reveal a cove off to the right.
Cadie raised her eyebrows. Daniela answered with a tilt of her head aimed at the cove and guided them toward the opening. Tall evergreens, filled in with a flush of low bushes, lined the shore. Angular rocks rose from the open water of the cove, whether welcoming them or warning them to stay away, Cadie could not determine.
They were the first explorers to enter the hidden cove, Cadie felt certain. Theirs were the first eyes to behold the giant pines draped in sinewy vines. She peeled her slicker off her sweaty arms and dragged one hand through the warm lake water. The rain had tapered off and shafts of morning sunlight sifted through the parting clouds. Everything sparkled—even her skin.
Jagged slabs of granite hid below the surface. If they smashed into a rock or overturned, no one would know where to look for them. She gripped the oar tighter as they paddled deeper and deeper into the basin strewn with islands.
The boat drifted close to the shore, and Daniela grabbed a low-hanging branch.
“Blueberries. They’re everywhere.” Daniela pulled the boat in closer. She picked off a fistful and opened her hand to Cadie.
As she sucked on a few berries, Cadie inspected the bush, about ten feet tall as it stretched over the water. Almost every bush along the shore hung heavy with berries.
“We have to come back here with a bucket,” Daniela said.
They ate handfuls of the berries until they needed to stretch to reach higher branches.
“We should go to another bush,” Cadie said.
“There’s plenty left on this one.”
“We shouldn’t take all the berries from any bush. What if a bird eats here and we take them all? Birds fatten up on berries before they go south for the winter, you know. Or what if a weary, lost traveler stops here and is hungry, but we picked all the berries.”
“Are you serious? Weary travelers?”
“It could happen,” Cadie said.
Before Daniela pushed away from the bush, a brown spider skittered across her foot.
“Get it!” Daniela tried to smash the spider with the end of her paddle.
Cadie grabbed Daniela’s wrist. The brown water spider’s legs stretched as wide as Cadie’s palm. It scuttled to the far side of the boat, dodging Daniela’s oar.
“I’m not leaving that thing in our boat. What if it’s poisonous?” Daniela said.
Cadie grabbed a few sticks from the bottom of the boat, lifted the creature, and released it on a branch of the blueberry bush.
“Killing that spider could have messed up everything and we would never even know it.”
Daniela rolled her eyes. “How could killing one stupid spider ruin everything?”
“What if that spider has thousands of babies, and her babies have thousands of babies. And a crazy, horrible virus carried by mosquitoes comes, but because there are so many spiders they keep the mosquitoes under control before the disease mutates into a plague that would wipe out the entire human race. No one dies, or even knows human beings were almost wiped out. All because of that spider.”
“Yeah, well, what if your spider bites someone and he keels over and dies. But”—she paused, squinting and leaning in toward Cadie—“that person was destined to be president one day. And he would have prevented a nuclear war. But because he never got the chance to be president, we elect an idiot who hits the red button and we all die.” Daniela swooshed her arms up, emulating a mushroom cloud.
“I’d rather accidentally cause something bad to happen because I did the right thing, than cause a disaster because I did something selfish.”
“Fine. No killing spiders,” Daniela said.
Cadie smiled and put her oar in the water.
“Do you think we’d get in trouble if we got caught picking berries back here?” Daniela began rowing again.
“No one owns the lake. If we keep at least one foot in the lake all the time, we aren’t trespassing, right?”
Stopping periodically to gorge on berries, they paddled around the cove. Several small islands dotted the water, along with clusters of boulders above and below the surface. The cove unfurled into several smaller coves.
“Do you know which way we came in?” Daniela broke their reverie after about half an hour.
Cadie searched for a landmark, but the islands all appeared the same as they blended into the mainland. Every bush looked green. Every rock looked gray. She sank her fingernails into her thigh to fend off the mounting tears.
“I think this is a big island and we’ve been going around and around it thinking it is the shore. Doesn’t that tree look familiar?” Daniela pointed to a birch tree jutting out over the water.
Cadie squeezed the oar. The cut on her arm from the barbed wire ached. Cadie opened her mouth wide and slid her jaw from side to side.
“I’m thirsty,” Cadie said.
“Then drink some water.” Daniela pointed to the lake. “And we won’t starve either. We could survive on blueberries, you know. And live out here in Blueberry Cove like pirates. Plus, we’ve got your emergency bracelet.”