The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James by Ashley Herring Blake

Author:Ashley Herring Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2019-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

On the way back to my house, I’m so exhausted, Lena insists that I lie down in the backseat on the soft white leather. There’s hardly enough room in this old truck to fit all my limbs, and the seat belt is all twisted around my stomach, but I don’t even care. I use my turquoise and navy-striped beach towel as a pillow and watch the pale morning light skip around in the window above me.

“Don’t tell Kate,” I say.

“What?” Lena asks. She turns down the song playing from her phone, some moody music Dave would probably love.

“Kate,” I say. “Don’t tell her what happened in the ocean.”

She shakes her head. “Sunny. I have to. This is your health we’re talking about.”

“But I’m fine. I just overdid it. I won’t next time, I promise.”

She glances back at me, a smile pulling at her mouth. “Next time?”

“Well… yeah. I mean, if you want.”

“I want. I very much want.”

I tuck my arm under my head, relieved. I didn’t even surf today, but I know I’m totally hooked. Floating in the middle of the ocean, figuring out how my body works with it, works against it. I want that. I want it so bad.

Lena turns the music back up and we ride like that for a couple of miles. I’m smiling to myself just thinking about being out there on the water again when I spy a plastic baggie of Cheerios peeking out of Lena’s bag on the floorboard. My stomach growls—I was way too nervous to eat all that much this morning, much to Kate’s dismay—and I reach down to grab the dry cereal. The baggie is caught on something, so I give it a good yank and a bunch of other stuff tumbles out.

There are a few tubes of lipstick in funky colors, like blue and purple and sea-glass green, and a bottle of moon-gray nail polish. There’s a package of wet wipes, a bald baby smiling out at me on the front. And there’s this weird salmon-pink owl with a heart-shaped hole in the middle about the size of my palm. It’s soft and squishy, and I can’t figure out if it’s supposed to be a giant keychain or some kind of stress-reliever toy or what.

But what really hooks all my attention is a black notebook. It’s small, maybe a little bigger than a deck of cards, and when I flip through the pages super-fast, it’s packed full of tiny, slanted handwriting in blue or black ink.

I shove all the other stuff back into Lena’s bag. Then I turn onto my stomach and split the journal open with my thumb, right to the middle where the latest entry is. It’s dated yesterday.

So relieved that Sunny has agreed to see me. I can’t imagine what I would’ve done if she’d refused. All of this for nothing. Not that I would’ve blamed her. But there’s so much at stake now. J says I need to—

I let the notebook fall shut before my eyeballs see another word.

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