Chapter 12 Jill
Jill
Jill didn’t want to go to the regatta.
Ever since she and her friends had snuck into a showing of Jaws last summer, her fear of being on a sailboat had intensified.
The open water made her anxious, but she felt relatively safe on a motorboat. There was comfort in its speed, in the violence
of the sharp propeller blade. She liked to sit in the stern and watch the chaotic wake. As long as the propeller sliced through
the water and the boat kept moving forward, Jill believed she’d be okay.
But she never felt safe in a sailboat.
Sailboats relied on the fickle wind. Small crafts abandoned by the wind could be stranded far from land. Even when the wind
was cooperating, and a boat’s sails were bloated with air, the danger of capsizing was always there.
Jill’s father loved to skirt that line.
He sailed his boat, a thirty-six-foot Hunter named Nike, like he was being chased by the devil.
On summer weekends, the man in the business suit shucked off his fatigue and became a man of salt spray and speed.
He could read the wind like a Shakespearean soothsayer, shouting at his crew to “trim the mainsail!” or “prepare to gybe!”
His eyes would sparkle with impish glee as he steered the boat upwind.
“Hold on, Jilly!” he’d cry as the starboard side began to lean. When the balloon-like spinnaker hovered inches from the water’s
surface, taunting the ocean, Jill would cling to the lifeline.
Once, she’d seen the hem of the spinnaker dip into the water. Then, a puddle formed in the middle of the blue-and-yellow sail
as the water tried to suck the sail into its mouth. The boat listed so severely that Jill could reach over the side and put
her whole hand in the water.
Not that she ever would. Long before she’d made the mistake of leaving the theater playing The Fox and the Hound and creeping into the one showing Jaws, she’d feared the creatures that could swim under the hull of a boat without anyone knowing they were there. Her fear had
turned into an obsession.
Back in March, she’d done a report for science class on the sharks of Long Island. She’d checked out a dozen books on ocean
predators from the public library and spent night after night absorbing facts about apex predators. She studied drawings comparing
the sizes of the sharks’ bodies to human bodies. She learned about their acute sense of smell, how a shark’s tail rocketed
them through the water, and how they hunted. Sharks could detect the vibrations or electrical impulses of prey, but what stuck
with Jill the most was their ability to detect blood.
“From a quarter of a mile away,” she’d told her friends on the bus. “One drop in an Olympic-sized pool. Just one drop.”
There were so many sharks in the waters surrounding Long Island. Sand sharks and sand tiger sharks. The smooth dogfish shark. Blue, dusky, and basking sharks. Hammerheads and makos. The unpredictable bull shark. And finally, the great white. The Jaws shark.
She knew the shark in the movie was a machine—that it wasn’t real—but it didn’t matter. There were very big, very real great
whites in the waters around Long Island.
Two years ago, a man had caught a fifteen-footer. It was the same size as Una’s car. The Blue Jay boats Jill and the other
kids sailed were thirteen feet.
No oxygen tanks or flare guns on board, either, she thought. Just a stupid wooden paddle.
As if the sharks weren’t bad enough, there were other scary things in the water. Eels. Killer whales. The Portuguese man o’
war, which everyone called a jellyfish when it was really a colony of zooids working together as one organism.
A man o’ war had washed up on their beach once. J.J. had poked at its kaleidoscopic balloon with a stick, trying to pop it,
while Jill hung back, her eyes locked on the dark violet tentacles. The corpse proved her theory. There were dangerous creatures
all around them, swimming unseen in the dark water.
That was why she hated being on her dad’s boat, but junior sailing regattas were even worse. For one thing, her father was
a skilled sailor. No matter how close he seemed to come to losing control, he always adjusted the sails and righted the boat
just in time.
“See?” he’d yell, directing his comment to his wife and daughter. Jill’s mom didn’t like the lean any more than Jill did.
“This isn’t fun!” she’d shout. “It’s scary! This is exactly why I won’t let Justin come.”
“J.J. likes going fast, don’t you, son?”
“Yeah!” Jill’s traitorous brother would answer.
But Jill saw his white-knuckled grip on the lifeline and how he sprang into action to loosen or trim a sail, always trying to stay one step ahead of disaster.
At the end of last summer, Jill’s mom had announced that her boating days were over.
“I’m going back to work, so I won’t have time for sailing next year,” she informed the family while serving them chicken Parm
and broccoli.
Jill wished she could get a job, too. She’d much rather babysit or be a mother’s helper than be on a boat, but there were
hordes of high school girls looking for work over the summer, which left Jill another twelve weeks of swimming and sailing.
The swim meets were okay, but the regattas were pure hell.
After church, Jill’s mom went straight into the kitchen to pack bologna and cheese sandwiches, carrot sticks, and apples into
two brown bags. Jill and J.J. changed into shorts and T-shirts and hurried into the kitchen to grab their bags.
“Could I come with you instead?” Jill asked her mom. “I could help with the open house.”
Her mom was wiping off the counter with a sponge, but she paused to consider the request. “Thanks, honey, but I’ve got it
all under control.”
Jill watched her mom swipe breadcrumbs off the counter into the bowl of her hand. She dumped the crumbs in the trash can and
unwrapped a bouquet of yellow roses. She started to hum as she stripped the leaves of the roses and clipped the stems. The
light spilling through the window fell softly on her face, erasing tiny lines and sprinkling gold into her brown eyes.
“You look pretty, Mom,” Jill said.
Her compliment wasn’t another attempt to avoid her fate. She said it because it was true. When her mother was happy, she was
beautiful.
Leaving the roses in the sink, she crossed the room and hugged Jill. “What a sweet thing to say. I know sailing isn’t your favorite, but it’ll be over before you know it.”
Resigned, Jill stepped out onto the back deck and looked at the harbor. The sky was a snarl of pewter-gray clouds. The water
was flat and calm.
Jill wished she could stay in the kitchen. She wanted to be near roses that looked like tiny suns and bask in the sound of
her mother’s wordless song. Instead, she slid the door shut and walked to the yacht club.
When she reached the parking lot, she joined Heather and some other friends. Then the instructors began calling out the captain
and crew pairings.
Jill glanced around, hoping against hope that she’d get one of the nicer high school girls as her skipper.
J.J. had been paired with the captain of the swim team, and Heather got Marianne, one of the best junior sailors on the North
Shore.
They’ll probably win, Jill thought sourly.
Her instructor flipped the sheet attached to his clipboard over and said, “And for our final boat, the skipper is Allison
Burr. First mate is Jill Scott.”
Jill’s stomach dropped. Allison was painfully shy. She barely spoke in class and had absolutely no confidence out of the water.
Everyone knew she was a terrible skipper.
“Have fun coming in last,” J.J. whispered in Jill’s ear as he passed by.
Fury made Jill’s arm jerk like a pinball flipper. Her fist caught J.J. right in the stomach.
“Oof,” he grunted, his grin betraying how ineffective the blow had been.
He turned away to grab life jackets for himself and his captain, and as Jill followed him with her eyes, she saw Aaron detach himself from a group of boys and walk over to her.
“Tough luck,” he said. “I sailed with Allison last summer. She’s doesn’t know how to catch the wind. You’ll have to tell her what to do.”
“I guess,” Jill said.
She’d had hundreds of pretend conversations with Aaron, and in every one of those, she was clever and entertaining. In these
fantasies, he hung on her every word. But now, when she had the chance to dazzle him, her mind went totally blank. She was
dying to touch one of the brown curls that fell into his eyes or do something to make him smile. He had the most beautiful
smile. Everything about him was beautiful. The arch of his brows, his wide shoulders, his sea-green eyes, and his long, tapered fingers.
A Greek god, Jill thought, drinking in the sight of him.
“There isn’t much wind, and my dad says there’s fog near the shoreline,” he continued. “It’s gonna be wicked-slow sailing.”
“If slow and steady wins the race, then Allison’s got this in the bag.”
Aaron laughed. “We should just give her the trophy now. See you out there.”
All of a sudden, Jill didn’t care if she came in last. She didn’t care that she had to give up a Sunday afternoon doing something
she hated.
She’d made Aaron laugh. After he’d deliberately come over to talk to her. Not to J.J. or one of his friends, but to her.
Heather rushed over and grabbed Jill’s arm. “Oh, my gawd! What was that about?”
“He was wishing me luck.”
Heather put a hand to her heart. “What if he, like, likes you?”
Though this was Jill’s secret hope, she didn’t dare give voice to it. “He was just trying to make me feel better because I
got stuck with Allison.”
“Because he likes you!” Heather covered her mouth as if she couldn’t contain her excitement. “Oh. My. God. You’ve had a crush on him for, like, forever.”
Jill was about to shush Heather when their instructor raised an air horn and issued two short blasts. “Before you get in the
launch, make sure you have your life jackets. No life jacket, no race.”