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  Copyright © 2017 Lesley Choyce

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951–, author

  Identify / Lesley Choyce.

  (Orca soundings)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1406-6 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1407-3 (pdf).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1408-0 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings

  PS8555.H668I34 2017 jC813'.54 C2016-904580-3

  C2016-904581-1

  First published in the United States, 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950085

  Summary: In this high-interest novel for teen readers, Ethan’s new friend Gabe is being harassed for being different than all the other girls.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover image by iStock.com

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  20 19 18 17 • 4 3 2 1

  Other Orca Soundings

  by Lesley Choyce

  Refuge Cove (2002)

  Thunderbowl (2004)

  Wave Warrior (2007)

  Running the Risk (2009)

  Reaction (2010)

  Breaking Point (2012)

  Rat (2012)

  Crash (2013)

  Off the Grid (2015)

  Scam (2016)

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter One

  It was one of those days. School was just school, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt the anxiety creeping up inside me. I couldn’t breathe. If somebody looked at me the wrong way I was going to scream. I felt scared, and I was angry too. Angry at myself because I couldn’t control it. When the bell rang at the end of math, I headed for the back door of the school and ran. I was looking for a place to hide.

  There were other kids out and about. I slipped between two parked buses but bumped into Josh and Derek. Those two guys had been on my case since I was twelve. Josh was just lighting up a joint. They both looked at me, saw the freaked-out look on my face, I guess, and laughed. I pushed past them and started to run.

  I sprinted across the parking lot, but it felt like my legs were going to give out. So I tucked into a space between two green dumpsters and fell on the ground. It was smelly there, and there was trash scattered all around me, but it was a good place to hide. The lid on one of the dumpsters was open and flipped back, creating a roof for me. I sat there in my own little trashy cave and put my hands over my head. I started rocking back and forth like I do sometimes in my bedroom when everything seems too overwhelming. I sat there and felt the full panicky explosion in my brain overwhelm me. I thought maybe I was going to have a heart attack, my heart was beating so fast.

  I stayed like that, my eyes tightly closed, for maybe five full minutes. I heard the bell ring and knew I should go to my next class, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face going back into that building. Not now. Maybe not ever again.

  When I opened my eyes, someone was standing there looking down at me. At first I didn’t know if it was a guy or a girl. But when we made eye contact, eyes soft and sad, I was pretty sure it was a girl. But she had really short hair and was wearing boy’s jeans and a flannel shirt. She was wearing earbuds, and I could hear music blaring, but my heart was still beating so loudly, the blood pounding in my ears, it was hard to tell what kind.

  I must have looked pathetic. I had really wanted to be alone, but I suddenly felt less crazy as she knelt down beside me. She gently pulled my hands from my head and put the earbuds into my ears. The music poured in like liquid and seemed to push out all my crazy thoughts. I closed my eyes again and just listened.

  There was an orchestra and a guy singing like he was in a choir. Somehow he was taking me to some safe and peaceful place. And somehow this person standing here in front of me and I were connected. And not just by these thin little wires. Really connected.

  I didn’t move until the song was over. Then the girl took the earbuds out and tucked them in her shirt pocket.

  We hadn’t even spoken yet. But we’d been spotted.

  Suddenly Josh and Derek were looking at us. They started banging on the metal lid. The sound was loud and frightening. Josh was laughing now. Pointing and laughing. “What are you two freaks doing?” Derek said. “Having a weirdo convention or what?”

  Derek banged on the metal lid some more, and I felt the panic rising again.

  Chapter Two

  The girl looked at the two creeps, held up her middle finger, then told them to frig off. That was the term she used. “Frig off,” she said. “Leave us alone.”

  They banged some more on our roof, said some pretty rude things to her, but then turned and walked away. The girl looked back at me and touched my shoulder. “You gonna be okay?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I’m a pessimist by nature. I don’t ever expect things to get better. I just expect things to get worse. And they usually do.”

  She smiled a sad smile.

  “How come you stopped and shared your music?” I asked.

  “Looked like you needed it. I use the music to drown out things around me.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. You’re Ethan, right?”

  “Yeah. We were in English together last year, weren’t we?”

  “I sat over by the windows,” she said, “and didn’t participate much.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I sat in the back and tried to be invisible.”

  “You did a pretty good job of it. But I saw you.”

  I remembered. She had looked different then, with longer hair, different clothes.

  “Gabriella, right?” I asked.

  “Gabe. Only my mother calls me Gabriella and only when she’s mad.”

  “How often is that?”

  “Often.”

  I smiled. “I can relate.” When our eyes met this time, she looked away.

  To break the awkward silence I said, “Hey, thanks.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Another few seconds of dead air.

  “C’mon,” Gabe said finally. “I don’t think you should be going back to class right now.”

  She got up and walked out from between the two dumpsters, then held out her hand and tugged me back out into the sunlight.

  I followed as she began walking away from the school. I knew I’d get shit from my parents for skipping classes again. They always seemed to find out. But I didn’t care. I needed this. And I needed to be with her.

  We didn’t talk much as we walked for several blocks. Then she led me into a graveyard. It was old and not well taken care of. Nobody had been buried in here for a long time. The gravestones were all old and weathered. Some were cracke
d, and some had been knocked over by vandals.

  “This is my favorite place in town,” Gabe said. “It’s full of people, but not one of them will give you shit. That’s my kind of people.”

  As she led me through the cemetery, Gabe touched each stone as we passed. I found myself doing the same. I also found myself thinking dark thoughts again. “So you put up with all this crap in life,” I heard myself saying out loud, “and then you die and they put you in the ground. And that’s it.”

  Gabe shook her head. “No. You live your life first. You really live it. You don’t just put up with it.”

  I felt bad for sounding so negative.

  But then she smiled. “And then you die and they put you in the ground.”

  I may have actually smiled myself. Shocking that I remembered how. It had been a really long time.

  “Look up,” Gabe said. “Up there in those big trees.”

  I looked up, but I didn’t really notice anything. Then Gabe clapped her hands—just once, loudly—and a pair of pigeons took off from the branches. They flew high and then circled around the cemetery.

  “I love watching them fly.”

  “Very cool,” I said as the pigeons swooped low, right in front of us, before arcing up again to land back on a branch of one of the big trees. Gabe reached in her pocket and pulled out a handful of cracked corn and threw it on the ground.

  “It’s like they were showing off,” I said. “It’s like they know we’re watching them.”

  “You’re absolutely right. They do that every time I come here.”

  “How often is that?” I asked as a couple of pigeons swooped down, landed and started pecking at the corn on the ground.

  “Often,” she said, looking across the rows of gravestones. “I like to make up imaginary stories about the names I find here.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Pick a name.”

  I pointed to a weather-beaten chunk of granite. “Harold Hinkey,” I said. “Born 1904, died 1974.”

  “Harold Hinkey,” she repeated. “He was a banker. A mean banker. Straight-laced, everything by the book. He liked to foreclose on widows and take away their houses if they couldn’t keep up with mortgage payments. He was rotten harsh to people, but he was punished for it.”

  “Punished?” I had been pulled right into Harold’s life.

  “Well, his first wife died and he remarried not long after. See there, next stone over. Helen Hinkey. She outlived him by ten years. He didn’t know it when he married her, but she turned out to be a nasty piece of work. Treated poor Harold like dirt. Ordered him around. Wouldn’t let him have an ounce of fun. Maybe old Harold was happy to end up in here and have a little peace.” She made a small bow in my direction. “Your turn.”

  She pointed to another, much less fancy headstone.

  “Robert Culper,” I said. “Born March 12, 1846, died March 12, 1945. Hey, he died on his birthday!”

  “Ninety-nine years old,” Gabe noted. “Do you think there is something to that?”

  “Hell yes,” I said. “He was trying to make it to one hundred! Not many people did back then. He had a bet with an old high school buddy that he’d make it.”

  “Guess he lost that bet.”

  “But maybe that’s what got him to ninety-nine. It kept him going. Old Robert was an adventurer. Been to Alaska looking for gold. Sailed on an old schooner around the world. Married a beautiful woman he met in Singapore.”

  “Then why did he settle down in this boring old place?”

  “He needed someplace quiet to raise the kids. He had twelve. Twenty grandkids and a whole whack of great-grandkids. And guess what?”

  “What?”

  “He was happy.”

  Gabe gave me a really funny look. And it kind of clicked. How unlike me to make up a happy story.

  “Bor–ing,” she said and then gently punched me on my arm.

  “What was that song anyway?” I asked.

  “What song?”

  “The one you were listening to when you gave your earbuds to me.”

  “Oh, that was ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’ by a couple of old folksingers, Simon and Garfunkel.”

  “Never heard of them,” I said. “But thanks again.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  Changing the subject, I said, “You know, I really love this graveyard. And you’re right about the crowd here. Beats the hell out of school.”

  Chapter Three

  That time with Gabe in the cemetery really settled me down. As we continued to wander among the gravestones, I found myself trying to come up with a label for the kind of person she was.

  “Just wondering,” I said. “What’s with the new fashion statement?”

  As soon as I said the words, I wished I could take them back.

  “What do you mean?” she asked sharply.

  “Forget it,” I said. “It’s not important.”

  She stopped walking. “No. Maybe it is. I dress like this because it makes me feel more like me. Last year I decided to stop dressing all girly like my mom always made me. Like people expected. So I cut off my hair and changed my look. I decided that it was time I controlled my own image.”

  “And that worked for you? Now you’re happy?”

  “Happier,” she said, smiling.

  “Cool.”

  “Now it’s my turn to grill you. You weren’t exactly sitting by the trash because you were looking for a quiet place to do your homework. What gives?”

  “My mom says I’m just too sensitive. That I’ll outgrow it. But I’ve been like this for a couple of years. I feel overwhelmed by everything. And my parents have been fighting a lot lately. It’s always tense at home.”

  “That sucks. I know what that’s like.”

  “I can’t concentrate in school, and my grades are in the toilet. If I can’t pull things together, I’ll probably be held back this year.”

  “Been there. Done that.”

  “But you seem like you have it together now. What’s your secret?”

  “I don’t know. I mostly stopped worrying about what other people thought of me. People like Josh and Derek and Brianna and Skylar. The girls were the worst.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen Skylar trashing a couple of the younger girls. What’s her problem?”

  “Just mean, I guess. But I don’t let her get to me anymore.”

  “I wish I could do that with the way I feel sometimes. Just say I don’t give a shit. But it’s not like that for me. Every day is a new struggle to just hold it together. And every day it feels like I’m losing the battle. You saw me back there. Pretty pathetic.”

  “You never found something that works when you’re feeling really uptight?” she asked, looking concerned.

  “Well, sort of. One thing.”

  I had promised myself I wasn’t going to take them today. And that was partly why I had ended up out by the dumpsters. I reached in my pocket and pulled out a small sandwich bag containing a few red pills. “These help,” I said.

  Gabe looked shocked. “Downers?”

  “Yeah. I don’t even know exactly what they are, but some kind of downer for sure.”

  “You get these from your doctor?”

  I shook my head. “I get them from some guy.”

  “Not good, Ethan.”

  “I know.”

  Suddenly Gabe looked at her wrist—she was wearing some kind of old-style men’s watch like my grandfather used to have. “Oh shit,” she said. “I gotta get back to school. I’ve got a test in final period I can’t miss. You wanna go back there with me?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll stay here with the dead people.”

  “Tomorrow, Ethan, we’re gonna get to work on you. The new you.” She looked me in the eye and then turned and began to run back in the direction of the school.

  I stayed there in the cemetery for a bit, but it wasn’t the same. Now that I was alone, I felt the old anxiety building back up inside me. I looked at th
e bag of pills in my hand for a moment, then took out two and swallowed them quickly before I had time to reconsider.

  Chapter Four

  I should have gone back to school for the last class of the day—world history. I was falling way behind. But instead, I walked the streets for an hour as the downers kicked in and I felt that comfortable fuzziness in my head. When I went home, I discovered my father had left work early. He and my mother were in the kitchen arguing, this time over money. I’d heard it all before, so I crept up the stairs to my room and closed the door.

  In the morning, I told myself this day would be different. I’d get to see Gabe again, and I desperately hoped she’d be happy to see me too. As I walked to school, I thought about her in a way I’d never thought about a girl before. The truth is, I’d never been very good around girls. In fact, most girls kind of scared me. But not Gabe. She was different.

  I fingered the bag of pills in my jacket pocket. Should I or shouldn’t I? I thought about the day before. I had decided in the morning not to take any and to do school completely straight. That hadn’t turned out so well. Okay. Just one. I popped it in my mouth and swallowed. It kicked in in time to help me drift through English and math. Not stoned or anything. Just kind of detached. There but not there. Between classes I wandered the halls. I never did find Gabe. Instead, she found me right before lunch.

  “Hiding from me?” she said, a little smile on her face.

  “Just the opposite. I was looking for you all morning.”

  She leaned in close to me. “Boy, do you look relaxed. What’s with that?”

  I just shrugged and gave her a sheepish smile.

  “I get it,” she said. “But you’re going to have to learn to do without your little helpers.”

  “How do I do that?” I asked.

  “Ethan, it’s really quite simple. You just have to not give a shit about what anyone thinks of you.”

  “How?” I asked again.

  Gabe scanned the busy hallways. “Watch.”

  I followed Gabe through a crowd of rowdy kids. I noticed that some of them gave her weird looks, but some of the guys just got out of her way when they saw her coming. She headed for a group of really loudmouthed girls. I knew that one of them was Skylar, notorious as one of the most stuck-up, bitchy girls in the whole school. I didn’t know what they were going on about, but they all shut up when Gabe stopped.