“What for? I can walk everywhere.”
“You’re so funny. I don’t mean drive around here. I mean drive into town. Go places.”
“I don’t want to go places,” I tell her. I do want to go places, though, but not anywhere that you can take a car.
“Please, just come into town with me. Everyone goes. If you’re worried about Ailsa, she won’t be there. She’s gone up north.”
I cringe when she mentions Ailsa. I wonder if they’ve fallen out and that’s why she wants to hang out with me. Maybe Ailsa has been nasty to her, too. I wonder where Tay is. I imagine him swimming with dolphins. Then I imagine him kissing another girl.
I nod toward Frankie. “Is he coming with us?”
Lara scrunches her nose up. “No offense, but I’d rather it was just us. He really smells.”
Frankie waves frantically at us. He’s holding a large crab with several legs missing. I wave back, but he shakes his head and beckons us down.
“We can see from here,” I yell.
Frankie holds a finger to his lips and shushes us, then points to behind the rocks. He looks as though he’s about to pee himself.
I scramble down the rock, and Lara carefully follows, reaching for my arm for balance.
“Otters,” Frankie whispers loudly when we get to the bottom.
My stomach flutters. I have never seen them this far up the coast. I half expect Frankie to have mistaken seals for otters, but when I peer around the rock, there they are. Three of them. Two bigger ones nuzzling a smaller one. The baby’s fur is slick and looks almost black. Its face is tiny and round, and its whiskers are nearly as long as its body. I wish I had a camera so I could show Dillon later. We perch on the boulders and watch as the waves gently wash over them.
“Are they dangerous?” Lara whispers as she moves behind me.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Frankie says. “The baby one is just like a puppy.”
I feel Lara tense beside me and I pat her on the leg. I tell her that they’re more scared of us than she is of them, but I don’t think she believes me. The baby looks in our direction with big pebble-black eyes.
After a few minutes, Frankie dips his bucket into the rock pool. I hear the clatter of something wriggling around inside it.
“Just a small one,” he says, sniffing.
“You just stole their dinner,” I say.
He looks into the bucket and back to the otters. “They’re not eating, they’re resting.”
I explain to Lara how the otters smash crabs against the rocks to break their shells. “They’re really clever. Like humans.”
The two large otters are half in and half out of the water, with their front paws close to the baby’s head, protecting it. Its long whiskers look golden in the sunshine.
“They can’t swim, the babies,” I continue. “Their mothers have to hold them underwater so they can learn how to dive.”
Lara gasps. “Isn’t that a bit cruel?”
Frankie looks at Lara and wrinkles his nose. “It saves their lives. I don’t think this one wants to go in, though.” The baby struggles to keep its paws from slipping into the water.
“Still seems cruel,” Lara repeats, and Frankie snaps at her.
“Go home, then, if you don’t like it.”
Lara looks at me for backup, but I say that we should be quiet or we’ll scare the otters away. She lowers her head and tries to detach a limpet from the rock.
We keep watching, until a group of children come running up the beach behind us and scare them away. The two bigger otters nudge the baby one until it plops into the water, and then they swim away, the water streaming off their heads. The kids come splashing through the rock pools with their buckets and nets, and Frankie is eager to show them how it’s done. I watch one of the boys, the smallest one. He is so excited, he doesn’t know which way to run first. His older sister chases after him. “Careful, Dougie.” She grabs him by the hand. “Don’t fall.”
I watch the boy, taking in his dark hair and the way his mouth hangs open, the way he hesitates before jumping across a rock pool. His sister gets annoyed when he soaks his trousers. I want to tell her not to be angry with him. To tell her that one day she might not even have the chance to be angry with him.
“Hey, why don’t we go back and get ice cream?” I say, and we retreat.
“So, how about this night out?” Lara asks again.
“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”
When we get to the end of the beach, Frankie releases the crabs back into the water. Some of them swim away, legs spinning round and round, and some of them are definitely no longer alive.
9