May by Kathryn Lasky

Author:Kathryn Lasky [Lasky, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-545-33245-3
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

When May went to school, which she did much more regularly these days, she was caught between the hope and despair of seeing him. So far she had not, and although she always felt slightly deflated, she knew it was for the best.

School seemed rather dull to her since she had returned. Two older girls had dropped out to marry. She was now the oldest student in the small clapboard building on East Street, the only sophomore. Miss Gilbert, the teacher, had her hands full with some rowdy eleven-year-old boys, and May seemed to spend most of her time helping eighth graders learn about common denominators. Her swim to the Josiah B. Harwood made it clear that she needed to learn about something called vector diagrams, which showed the motion of an object if it was influenced by forces in more than one direction. Forces like wind and current and objects like the broken hull of the Josiah B. Harwood and the spars of the Resolute. If she could learn this kind of math, she might be able to calculate where the main part of the wreck of the Resolute lay in this vast ocean. But poor Miss Gilbert just didn’t have the time. And good lord, May was sick of teaching kids about common denominators. Percentiles, too! Leon Beal could not for the life of him understand that percentiles were just another way of expressing fractions. And his nose was perpetually snotty, dripping all over his math papers.

May was walking through town toward the wharf because Cletus Weed, the mail boat captain, had said he could drop her off and spare her father the trip.

“A penny for your thoughts, MayPlum.”

It sounded like one word to her, the way Rudd said her name. Since she had started going to school more regularly, he often caught up with her before she hopped on the mail boat to go back to Egg Rock. He was more deferential, that was for sure. But on the other hand the glint in his eyes had hardened and was no longer simply a flirtatious gleam but one of suspicion. May felt she had to move carefully, and it was perhaps best to keep things light. “Oh, I wouldn’t know where to begin with such penny thoughts.” With Leon Beal’s snot, perhaps?

“At the beginning, maybe.”

But there was no beginning, really, or at least not one beginning. Since her dive to the Josiah B. Harwood, her head had been filled with all sorts of thoughts concerning drift and currents and winds as she tried to calculate where the Resolute might be. She was now more certain than ever that the ship had been her birthplace.

After her initial forays into the study of vector diagrams with a book she had found in the library, it was as if she had opened a mathematical can of worms. She had to learn some trigonometry, too, as it would help her pinpoint the location of the wreck. Dr. Holmes had come into

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