She quickly got down past the sun-warmed upper layer and into the cold, coarse, wet sand underneath. She dug farther and farther, as deep as her elbows and then even farther, till she’d reached the water level and her fingers were getting raw and she had to lean her whole arm down into the hole up to her shoulder.
She wondered if Tom could’ve been pranking her—but no, he was still digging away at his own hole. Maybe the island had decided she wasn’t worthy.
Just then her fingers brushed something hard and smooth.
It was so far down she could barely scrabble at it with her fingertips, but she stretched and stretched, and finally she managed to hook her fingers under it. It was stuck fast in the sand, but she tugged and heaved at it till it finally pulled free.
It was a small, flat metal box, closed tight with a clasp. Kate wondered what kind of treasure could possibly come in a box that small. She undid the latch and opened it. Inside the box was a little case, and inside the case, which was lined with deep blue velvet, was a pair of tortoise-shell glasses.
There was a neat handwritten tag tied to the glasses with string. It said:
These are the glasses that Grace Hopper wore
when she first learned to program a computer
They just looked like ordinary glasses—but to Kate they were more precious than a diamond-studded tiara. Grace Hopper’s eyes looked through these same lenses, she thought. Through these frames Grace Hopper read the things that her furiously smart brain told her furiously smart fingers to type. Things that had changed history.
And they were kind of cool-looking, too, in a retro-vintage way.
Kate carefully placed the glasses back in their case and closed it. She would keep them forever. Her vision was perfect, but she decided that as soon as possible she would ruin it by reading too much and writing too much brilliant code, and then she would wear these glasses for the rest of her life.
She was about to show Tom what she’d found—but he’d found something, too. He was holding a small, tattered stuffed fox, orange with a brown tail. He was hugging it with tears running down his face.
Kate knew that fox. His name was Foxy, full name Foxy Jones. He was the one that Tom had lost on that skiing trip all those years ago—the one he’d had since he was a baby, the one he’d thought he’d lost forever. And now Foxy Jones was back for good.
