Chapter 25
As summer kids, Jack and Jessie were always faced with the task of renewing their island friendships every time they came back to Sea Smoke.
Sometimes it was easy and they slid right back into building fairy houses or playing soccer with the other kids their age.
They didn’t play much with other summer kids, because their grandparents’ house was located in the western area of the island, surrounded by fishermen and carpenters.
That meant that the other kids in their friend group had spent the school year together, while they’d missed out on all the jokes and common experiences that everyone else had shared.
Being a sociable boy, Jack shifted into island mode pretty easily. But Jessie always found it difficult to make new friends, and having to remake all the same friends annoyed her to no end.
So one summer, when she was nine and Jack was eleven, she announced that she wasn’t going to bother with friends that summer.
She was going to read the suitcase full of books that she’d brought, and write an epic saga about trolls living under the garden, and go hunting for the invasive green crabs that were taking over her favorite cove.
That was it. Those were her summer plans.
They all knew it would be a waste of time to talk her out of it.
That meant Jack, with no need to watch out for his little sister, had free rein to run wild with the local boys.
That summer, and never again, he’d hung out with the Clyde clan.
Five boys—Eric, Benny, Brendan, Pete and the oldest, who they all called Big Clyde.
They were related in one way or another, rough and tumble kids who swore freely and boasted about trying rum in the Clyde family’s fish house and played pranks on unsuspecting tourists at the dock.
The rest of Jack’s family, Jessie included, couldn’t stand the Clyde kids.
But Jack, who was just at that age when he was looking around to see what it meant to be a boy, and soon a man, loved hanging out with them.
It felt dangerous, wild, rough, cool. He smoked cigarettes with them on the Martha C, on a stormy day when the Clydes didn’t take it out.
On a day when they needed an extra few hands, he rode along with them and learned how to snap rubber bands around the claws of the angrily flailing lobsters.
Back home at his grandparents’, in comparison, when he ran back in time for dinner at dusk, everything felt as if it had shifted down into a lower gear.
It felt so boring. As soon as dinner was over and his part of cleanup was done, he’d bolt back to the dock, or the community hall, or wherever kids were gathering.
Night fishing. Jumping off the freight shed on a warm night.
Racing bikes around the flagpole. Making unauthorized campfires on the beach. Telling ghost stories. Goofing off.
Summer on Sea Smoke Island.
Then Eric’s father got a new hunting rifle.
Eric took them all to see it, although it was locked up in a glass case with the rest of his guns.
They were planning a hunting trip in September, and all the Clyde cousins were looking forward to it.
Stupidly, Jack revealed that he’d never been around a gun before.
His parents didn’t hunt or keep a gun at home.
Jessie in particular was afraid of guns.
Why had he told them any of that? Huge mistake.
Eric got it in his head that Jessie needed to get used to guns, and the best way to do that was to start her off easy, with water pistols.
No matter what Jack said, Eric refused to listen, and the next thing he knew, all of the Clydes and their friends were pouring into his grandparents’ expansive yard, hooting and hollering and shooting water pistols at each other.
His grandparents weren’t home; they were playing bingo at the community center. But Jessie was. He didn’t have to talk her into playing with them; shockingly, she came out on her own. Possibly she wanted to keep an eye on things. Eric presented her with a water pistol already filled with water.
“You can water your plants with it,” he told her. “But shooting people’s a lot more fun. Try it. Shoot me.”
She pulled the trigger and Eric made a show of falling to the ground as if she’d pierced him with a bullet instead of a hard stream of water. Just for fun, and possibly because she didn’t like him, she aimed more water at him, until he spluttered and yelled at her to stop.
At that point, things went completely haywire.
Jack wasn’t exactly sure what happened, but their grandparents’ big Newfie, called Crash for his clumsiness, came lumbering out of the house and pounced on Eric’s fallen body.
Clyde and Benny ran over to help, one of them shooting his water pistol at Crash.
Jessie tried to tug Crash away by his collar, but he weighed at least as much as her, maybe more, so she didn’t get far.
Jack plunged into the middle of the melee. He hollered for Crash, yelled at the boys to stop aggravating him, and shouted at Jessie to back off. Crash rushed him and he got a face full of Newfie slobber. Eric, who was scrambling away like a crab going backwards, hit his head on a tomato planter.
“Don’t hurt my Granny’s tomatoes!” screamed Jessie. Around people she didn’t know, she was usually so quiet, so hearing her yell like that shocked the whole crew.
“Shut up, bitch!” Eric yelled.
“Take that back!” Jack got in his face, since the one thing he couldn’t tolerate was anyone being mean to Jessie—even if he and Jessie had their own fights on a regular basis.
“Bitch!” spat Eric.
That was it. Time to fight. By the time some adults arrived—neighbors who had heard the yelling—Eric and Jack were both a mess. Jack had a black eye, Eric a bloody nose and a gash on his head from the planter, and worst of all, Jessie had run away with Crash.
Eric’s father had to miss the rest of the day’s trap-hauling to take his son to town to get stitches in his head. Jack was given an ice pack for his eye, which hurt almost as much as the long lecture from his grandfather.
A few hours later, Jessie and Crash reappeared.
Under patient interrogation, she revealed that she’d taken the dog to a hideout in the woods, the remains of a bunker left from World War II days.
No one was supposed to play there because there were cracks in the old concrete and it was considered unstable.
When the dust had settled, Jack was grounded for a week and banned from playing with the Clyde clan for the rest of the summer. Not a terrible punishment, since he wanted nothing to do with them anymore. Eric had crossed a line going after Jessie.
Jessie’s punishment was that she was forbidden from walking Crash for a week, and her green water pistol was confiscated.
Amazingly, she’d held on to it for the entire three hours she was in the woods with Crash, and their grandfather had to physically peel her fingers off it.
Jessie, who had been so afraid of guns, had irrevocably bonded with that silly toy pistol.