The Edge of the Water by Elizabeth George

Author:Elizabeth George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

From all the texting that was going on and all the whispering that accompanied it, Jenn figured out fast enough that Gossip Central was passing along a message of vital importance to the life of the South Whidbey student body. It turned out to be the big breakup of Derric Mathieson and Courtney Baker. Since she and Derric had once been friends, Jenn might have cared about this or even spoken to Derric about it, but he’d dumped her friendship for SmartAss FatBroad’s months ago, so she gave him ten seconds inside her head and then waved bye-bye to his heartbreak, or whatever it was. She had other things on her mind.

One of them was Annie Taylor. She’d been gone from her trailer two nights in a row, not all night but till really late. The sound of her car door closing when she’d arrived home had awakened Jenn. The clock said two-thirty when Jenn padded to the window to see Annie just going to her trailer’s door, and while Jenn knew it was none of her business, it felt like her business when Annie wasn’t there because it felt like Nera was the reason why. The last meeting of the seal spotters had been only too insane. Once it ended, Annie had doubled and tripled her intentions toward the seal. She had to contain her, she had to have pictures, she had to score a bit of her DNA. She talked nonstop about it and how she was going to do it and why it had to be done N-O-W. People were totally crazy because of that seal, Jenn thought. There had to be a reason beyond the obvious ones: To Langley she was a moneymaker and to Annie she was her ticket to finishing a PhD. Jenn could accept these as reasons for part of the craziness, but she sure as heck couldn’t accept them as reasons for all of it.

It seemed to her that everything started and finished with the coal black seal, so that was what she did, too. After gagging down a PBJ on stale bread with inadequate J and way too much PB, she headed for the school library, where she accessed a computer. As luck would have it, the only other people in the place were SmartAss FatBroad Becca King and Extra Underpants Schuman, who were whispering fiercely in a corner. Jenn smiled to herself when she saw them at it because she knew that whatever they were up to, it had to do with the Western Civ project that was looming ahead of them. That would be the same Western Civ project that promised her an A and promised FatBroad something much less than an A. Extra Underpants Schuman would sink their ship. It was, after all, what he did best.

Jenn went for the computers under the watchful eye of the PTA volunteer mom. She said to Jenn, “Watch yourself because I’ll be watching you,” which Jenn took to meant that the computers were for serious users and not for kids wanting to surf the Net.

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