Refugee by Alan Gratz

Author:Alan Gratz
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Isabel woke to a warm orange glow on the horizon and a silver sea stretching out before them like a mirror. It was as though the storm had been some kind of feverish nightmare. Señor Castillo woke from his nightmare too, parched like a man who’d been lost in the desert. He drank almost half of one of the few gallons of water they had left in one long chug, then laid back against the side of the boat.

Isabel worried about her mother. For Mami, the nightmare was just beginning. The illness she’d felt as the storm began had gotten worse in the night, and now she had a fever hotter than the rising sun. Lito dipped a scrap of shirt into the cool seawater and draped it across his daughter’s forehead to cool her, but without the aspirin from the lost medicine box there was no way to bring the fever down.

“The baby … ” Mami moaned, holding her stomach.

“The baby will be fine,” Lito told her. “A good strong healthy baby boy.”

Lito and Señora Castillo took care of Isabel’s mother. Papi and Luis got the engine restarted, and bathed it with water to keep it cool. Amara, at the rudder, steered them north now that the sun was in the sky. Everybody had a job, it seemed, except Isabel and Iván.

Isabel bumped shoulders and stepped on toes as she wobbled her way over to Iván in the prow of the boat. She sat down beside him with a huff.

“I feel useless,” she told Iván.

“I know,” he said. “Me too.”

They sat for a while in silence before Iván said, “Do you think we’ll have to do algebra in our new American school?”

Isabel laughed. “Yes.”

“Will they have political rallies every day at school in the US? Will we have to work in the fields all afternoon?” His eyes went wide. “Do you think we’ll have to carry guns to protect us from all the shootings?”

“I don’t know,” Isabel told him. Their teachers told them all the time how homeless people starved in the streets of the US, and how people who couldn’t afford to pay for doctors got sick and died, and how thousands of people were killed by guns every year. As happy as she had been to go to el norte, Isabel suddenly worried that it wouldn’t be as magical a place as everyone in the boat believed.

“No matter what, I’m glad you came with us,” Iván said. “Now we can live next door to each other forever.”

Isabel blushed and looked at her feet. She liked that thought too.

Castro’s face was even more submerged now, which meant they were taking on water. Between the tanker and the storm, the little boat had suffered a pounding—and it had never been very seaworthy to begin with. Señor Castillo had only expected the boat to be on the water for a day, two at the most. How much longer would it take them to get to Florida?

And where exactly were they?

“Hey, is that land?” Iván asked.

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