Lilly and the Pirates by Phyllis Root

Author:Phyllis Root
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boyds Mills

Lilly hadn’t eaten any cookies for dinner. She leaned over the side of the boat and tossed her mashed turnips and tofu into the water.

“Awk! Cluck! Yuck!” squawked Aristotle.

“Ye’ll feel yer sea legs in a bit,” said Mrs. Teagarden. Lilly didn’t care about her sea legs. What she wanted was land legs, legs planted on dry land. Solid land. Land that didn’t go up and down and up and down and up and up . . .

Lilly flung herself over the back edge of the boat and heaved again. As she hung head down, she could make out the name of the boat painted on the chipped and weathered side: Last Chance.

Was it her last chance, too? Lilly stared down into the black waves, into the eyes of the sea that had once tried to steal her momma and poppa away. She had been little then, no more than three, playing in the sand while her parents crouched down studying beach-bottle beetles. A wave had arched over them, green and wild. She had been too scared even to scream a warning, and the wave had pulled them into the sea, tumbled them in glassy green water before throwing them back onto the beach again. Lilly had screamed then, screamed and screamed no matter how much they tried to comfort her. She had never trusted water again.

The night went by in a blur. Aristotle clucked directions. Mrs. Teagarden stood, feet planted, swaying with the boat. Every so often she adjusted some rope or other, and the sails shifted. Lilly didn’t care which way they went. Her stomach felt empty down to her toenails, but still she heaved again and again.

Heaving over the edge of the boat, Lilly saw many amazing things. The water sparkled like yellow fireflies. Flying fish leaped. Once, something dark broke the water in an arc alongside her. Lilly was too weary even to shriek. Almost too weary to worry.

“Dolphin,” said Mrs. Teagarden. “Good luck for sailors.”

The only good luck Lilly could imagine was finding firm land, land that didn’t move an inch. And wherever it was, even a tiny rock in the middle of the ocean, even a speck of a rock, Lilly would never leave it again. And she would throw The Prudent Mariner’s Guide to the Shipwreck Islands as far into the ocean as she could and let the fish read it.

Lilly curled up exhausted in the bottom of the boat, too sick even to take out her worry book and write in it. Sometime in the night, Lilly thought she heard Mrs. Teagarden singing. It sounded like a lullaby. By that time, everything around Lilly seemed dreamlike. Bad-dreamlike. What was there to sing about? Nothing.

At last the sky lightened. Lilly pulled herself up, a wrung-out rag, and looked around.

Gray water. Gray sky. An Uncle Ernest sort of day. Lilly wished with all her heart that she were sitting down to breakfast in Uncle Ernest’s gray house with safe, gray Uncle Ernest eating a gray breakfast.

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