Battery was dying and everything was chaos!

And then he wrote, See you at practice Monday?

With a smiley face. Like he was hoping he would.

Annabelle didn’t tell him about being off the team for good, but when she wrote back about her wrist and thumb, he sent back a string of sad emojis.

She looked at them for the whole rest of the drive home, letting those tiny yellow faces parade through her mind and block out the memory of Jeremy’s angry face from the night before and Mom’s and Mitch’s worse-than-angry ones from this morning.

Chapter 21

Annabelle was in so much trouble that she was barely allowed to leave the house. There was no way she would have been able to go see the seals at Bluff Point on Sunday with Jeremy even if he’d still wanted to, which she was sure he didn’t. But at least Mom said she could take her summer reading book and walk down to the little residents-only beach at the end of the unpaved side road that split off from their street. The place where she, Mom, and Mitch sometimes went to watch the sunset and Mitch took out his little boat for a sail.

“I’ll come check on you in a little bit!” Mom said, because she was keeping tabs on Annabelle’s every move.

The side road wasn’t paved, but the sand was packed down hard from cars driving over it. As Annabelle reached the dunes, it turned as soft and fine as the powdered sugar Mitch used to dust the tops of waffles when he made them for breakfast on the weekends.

The morning sun baked the metal and black fabric of her wrist brace, so she plopped down in the sand a few feet away from the dunes, slid off the brace, and let her swollen hand rest on the warm pillow the sand made.

The little beach was a protected bay, which meant the water was always calm. Tiny ripples wrinkled the glassy surface and lapped against the shore, and long piles of dried brown seaweed stretched across the sand. The Bennetts from next door were out playing. Mrs. Bennett stood at the edge of the water, watching little Kelsey squeal and splash as she ran a few steps out and then back. But Mr. Bennett was out pretty far. Julia, Kelsey’s older sister, was holding onto a kickboard and kicking her way to him over the tiny ripple-waves.

“Almost here!” he called. “You can do it!”

Annabelle’s legs itched to jump into the water and show Julia how to make her kicks more efficient—by slowing them down and letting her feet sink deeper instead of skimming the surface and sending up so much splash.

Annabelle didn’t usually swim for real in the ocean—she mostly just waded out to the sandbar here or rode in the waves at Bluff Point and saved her real strokes for the pool.

But today, if her wrist and thumb didn’t ache, she would have loved to wade out to the sandbar and then keep on swimming as far as she could go. All the way out past the protected cove, toward the rocky open ocean.