A Galaxy of Whales

Chapter 1
It was a summer day that Fern would later call the Day of Eleven Whales—­that was how many they saw from the boat, a record. Her brother, Hamish, would argue that it should be called the Day of the Killer Sea Lion, even though the sea lion hadn’t been trying to kill anybody, probably. It had only bitten that tourist’s knee when he leaned over the side of the boat to take a photo. Fern supposed that a big pink knee might look like an appetizing fish to a sea lion. It had probably been an honest mistake.
Fern had leaped into action right away, before Mom could even open her mouth. She grabbed one of the ice cream sandwiches from the cooler and hurled it into the waves to distract the sea lion. It wasn’t actually necessary, because the sea lion had already decided that knees were not as tasty as fish and had slid back into the water, but everyone on the boat looked at her as if she were a hero.
“Are you all right?” Mom asked the man with the knee in what Fern and Hamish called her Captain Mom voice, loud and confident. The sea lion hadn’t broken the skin, but Mom got the man a bandage and an ice pack anyway.
“What a brave girl!” exclaimed a woman with a big hat.
“You have a very clever assistant,” the man sitting next to her told Mom.
Fern adjusted her baseball cap modestly, trying to hide her smile. She already knew she was a good assistant, but it was always nice to have other people notice.
Once the knee had been dealt with, Mom went back to the wheel and pointed the whale watching boat toward home. TheZenith could move fast over open water, and they were soon zipping along, bouncing over shallow waves. Fern took off her cap and leaned back, letting the salty wind comb her hair. Sunlight scattered over the waves like sparks. School was done for the year, and the summer stretched before her like her own private kingdom, waiting to be filled with adventures.
“There’s another one!” a man yelled. The tourists scrambled for their cameras, and Mom slowed theZenith to a crawl.
“Is it a killer whale?” called the man, his eyes round.
“Another humpback,” Mom said, and the man looked disappointed. Everybody wanted to see a killer whale, but they were rare. Fewer than a hundred lived in the Salish Sea, the part of the Pacific Ocean that lined the southwest coast of Canada and the northwest coast of the United States.
The disappointing humpback blew a spout of mist before slipping back into the water without even lifting its tail. Fern knew that meant it was sleepy, swimming lazily near the surface as it dozed. She took a few photos with her own camera, adjusting the strap around her neck—­Mom wanted some new pictures for the website. The strap was patterned with dinosaurs because the camera had belonged to her dad, the world’s biggest dinosaur fan.
Watch the light, she heard Dad’s voice say in her memory, and she carefully adjusted the lens.
Mom tossed her frizzy, carrot-­colored ponytail over her shoulder and steered the boat around Castle Island and through the narrow channel it shared with Makena Island. The Salish Sea was full of islands, wild and uninhabited, looming out of the sea and bristling with pine and cedar. Sea lions played in the rapids, rolling around like happy dogs. And then the boat was bumping up against the dock back in town, and Fern was jumping out to secure theZenith while Mom gave her goodbye speech to the tourists. There were six of them today—­not a large number, given that theZenith could fit twelve. Mom said business would pick up later in the summer.
“Thank you again,” Mom told the tourists as she helped them onto the dock. “Thank you for choosing Worthwhale Tours, the oldest and highest-­rated whale watching company in the Salish Sea. Remember to leave us an online review if you have time. Have a lovely day.”
Everybody smiled at her, even the man with the wounded leg. He looked extremely pleased with himself and kept saying that he wished he’d gotten a photo of the sea lion biting his knee. Fern thought this would make for a very strange photograph.
Once everyone was gone, Mom turned to Fern with one eyebrow quirked and said, “An ice cream sandwich?”
Fern folded her arms. She could see that Mom was hiding a smile under a stern expression. “Why not? Maybe he wanted a break from fish.”
Mom rolled her eyes. Her face grew worried. “Well? How’d I do? My captain skills are rusty.”
“You were great!” Fern said. Mom was always nervous about the first whale watching tour of the season. She ran most of the tours now—­Granny and Gramps helped out on weekends, sometimes, but they both said they had grown too old for “gallivanting across the sea.” They had started Worthwhale Tours forty years ago, and now Mom was going to take over the business.
Fern couldn’t wait. Mom had said she could help out on the boat that summer as much as she wanted. Fern pictured herself, cool and confident on the deck of theZenith, camera ready, looking like a real photographer. Like Dad.
“You were a top-­notch assistant today.” Mom gave Fern a hug, crushing her tight to her chest in a way that always made Fern feel totally squashed and completely cozy at the same time. One of the best things about Mom was her hugs, because they seemed to explode out of her. You got the sense that her hugs were unstoppable, and that if you stepped out of the way of one, she would have no choice but to hug the nearest lamppost or chair.
Another good thing about Mom was that she let Fern dye her hair. Notall of it—­Fern could only dye one lock, which she did with hair mascara, so it wasn’treally dyed, because hair mascara washes right out. Right now, her brownish-­blonde hair had a streak of blue at the front. She had four colors of hair mascara—­blue, green, pink, and red—­and she changed them to match her moods. Blue was her favorite color, so blue meant happy.
Once the Zenith was tied up properly, Fern followed Mom to the Worthwhale Tours office, a small one-­room building at the edge of the ramp leading down to the docks. Mom stopped so suddenly that Fern walked into her.
Another boat pulled smoothly up to the dock. It was also a whale watching boat, but it was bigger than theZenith, with huge pontoons and a covered cabin. On the side of the boat were the wordsWhale of Fortune Tours—­Why go anywhale else?
Fern’s hands tightened into fists. She saw Mom’s do the same, but she relaxed them quick. The boat was full—­fifteen tourists, more than twice as many as they’d had on theZenith. A tall, muscular man jumped out of the boat first, flashing a brilliant white smile as he helped the tourists onto the dock.
“Come on,” Mom muttered, trying to hurry past the boat. But it was too late. The man had seen them.
“Well, if it isn’t Fiona Mackenzie!” he said, and Mom’s shoulders stiffened at the same time as a hard sort of smile spread across her face.
“How’s it going, Clarke?” she said.
“Oh, it’s going,” he replied. His wife came to stand beside him, and her smile was the same as Mom’s. It reminded Fern of the time Hamish had cleaned his room by shoving everything under the bed. It was a smile that hid things beneath it.
“Wendy!” Mom exclaimed, giving her a fake hug. Mom’s fake hugs were extremely easy to detect, because they were not at all explosive.
Fern didn’t think of Clarke and Wendy Roy as Clarke and Wendy, but instead as Jasper’s mom and dad. Jasper was a boy in her class. He was eleven like her, and they would be attending the same junior high school in the fall. His parents were exact opposites. Jasper’s dad was big and pale with messy movie-­star hair that was almost as orange as Mom’s, while Jasper’s mom was small with brown skin and black hair slicked back flat into a braid that always hung over the same shoulder (left). They ran Whale of Fortune, the other whale watching company in the town of Goose Beach, and they were the Mackenzies’ mortal enemies.
“How’s the old girl?” Jasper’s dad asked Mom.
Fern bristled—­the Zenith wasn’t that old. Mom’s smile got a little harder to read. “Just fine, Clarke. That’s a nice boat you’ve got there—­has all the bells and whistles, doesn’t it? But I’m sure you’ll make your money back eventually.”
Jasper’s dad gave a laugh that was a lot like Mom’s smile. “Yes, we certainly will.”
“How are the folks, Fiona?” Jasper’s mom asked.
Mom chatted with the Roys for a while about Gramps and Granny. She was pleasant and polite, because the war between Worthwhale Tours and Whale of Fortune Tours was also a war of politeness. Any insults that passed between the two families had to be wrapped up in politeness like bows, so that it wasn’t always easy to know if you had been insulted until you thought about it afterward.
Mom said, “I noticed you two had a full tour today. That’s a nice change, isn’t it?”
“Thank you, Fiona,” Jasper’s dad said. “Well, we had a cappuccino machine installed in the cabin. We’ve been offering them during our tours for free. Tourists justlove cappuccinos—­can’t get enough of them. We’re advertising it in all of our brochures.”
He handed Mom a glossy brochure with Whale of Fortune written at the top above a photo of Jasper, his older sister, and their parents standing on the dock and waving. Jasper looked annoyed, his usual smirk replaced by a forced smile. At the bottom were the words NOW SERVING HOT CAPPUCCINOS! in a very large font.
“How nice,” Mom said. She handed the brochure back to Jasper’s dad. “An interesting idea, hot coffee on a moving boat. It’s something only you would come up with, Clarke. Anyway, I’ve got to go finish up the paperwork from the tour.”
“With only six customers, I imagine it won’t take you very long,” Jasper’s mom said in the same sunny voice. “Lucky you! I think we’ll be here all evening.”
Mom gave them one last, thin smile, then she led Fern away.
“That’s it!” Mom muttered. “They think they can put us out of business with some stupid coffeemaker? We’ll show them.”
“How?” Fern said. She didn’t know how expensive cappuccino machines were, but it didn’t matter. They barely had enough room on the littleZenith for a cooler of snacks.
“I don’t know. We’ll think of something.”
Fern glanced over her shoulder. She felt as if a shadow had fallen over her, and it wasn’t just because of the cappuccinos. Mom had that crease between her eyes that always appeared when she was worried. That crease had been there a lot lately, especially when she stayed up late going over the paperwork for Worthwhale Tours, adding up all the receipts and expenses. Last night, Fern had awakened after midnight and gone downstairs to find Mom still hunched over her calculator, punching at the numbers as if they’d insulted her.
“Mom,” Fern said, “Worthwhale Tours will be all right, won’t it?”
“Of course, honey,” Mom said, smoothing out her forehead. “Hey, after I finish up at the office, how about we grab some ice cream?”

Chapter 2
Worthwhale Tours wasthe best whale watching company in the whole Pacific Northwest.
Gramps had always said so, so Fern knew it was true, because Gramps never bragged about anything. He was almost allergic to compliments. Even when he put on his fancy gray suit for a wedding or a funeral and Granny said he looked like Frank Sinatra, he would blow on his mustache and say, “More like Frank next door,” meaning the neighbors’ old schnauzer.
He had grown up in a two-­room house on a tiny Scottish island, and he said the only good thing about it was that it was on the coast and he could see whales from the yard. As a boy, he’d loved watching the whales so much that he almost couldn’t believe it was free. After all, he said, so many other things that were fun cost money: books, music, you name it. So after he got to Canada, he bought a boat and started charging people money to go look at whales.
In the Salish Sea, the most common whale was the humpback. But you could also see killer whales, gray whales, minke whales, and dolphins. Worthwhale Tours was the best at finding whales because Granny was friends with all the local fishermen, and they gave her the scoop on where the whales were hanging out. Their tours lasted four hours and included a snack break, usually ice cream sandwiches and lemonade. Granny called lemonade the “nectar of the gods” and refused to serve anything else.
Gramps and Granny had won five awards for their whale watching tours. Whale of Fortune hadn’t won any.
Mom and Fern stopped at Barnacle Barb’s, the ice cream place, and Fern got two scoops of Goose Tracks, her usual. Goose Tracks was chocolate with fudge, caramel, and peanut butter. Mom ordered two scoops of coffee bean, which made Fern even more nervous, partly because Mom usually only ate sweets when something bad was happening, like when Granny went to the hospital last summer, and partly because Mom only liked vanilla. Fern wondered if she was still thinking about the cappuccino machine.
“It’s almost supper, so don’t tell Granny,” Mom warned.
This turned out to be good advice, for when Fern pushed through the door of the house, the smell of Granny’s potato pot pie washed over her.
Fern, Hamish, and Mom lived with Fern’s grandparents in a tall, skinny house in a row of tall, skinny houses all stained with salt. Officially, it had only two bedrooms, both on the main level, one for Granny and Gramps and the other for Mom, which had once belonged to her and Dad. They had turned the basement into a huge bedroom for Hamish, because he was a year older than Fern and got to choose first. Fern didn’t mind—­she had the bedroom of dreams up in the attic. Because it was an old house, the attic was that wonderful kind of attic you read about in stories, a dusty triangle with a round window and floorboards that creaked in the night as if a very small ghost was creeping across them. When they were younger, Fern and Hamish used to argue about that ghost. Hamish thought it was a baby, but Fern was convinced it was a possum, because one time Gramps had found a possum skeleton behind a box in the corner.
The Mackenzies’ house was close to the sea, but only because everything was close to the sea in Goose Beach. In fact, everything was close to everything. You could walk from one end of the town to the other in twenty minutes flat. Most of the houses were painted in bright colors that stood out against the shore. From the water, they reminded Fern of the bins of candy in the candy shop downtown.
Mom said Goose Beach was a tourist town. She was always complaining about tourists flooding the town with traffic in the summer and blaring their music on the beaches. Half the houses in Goose Beach were empty during the off-­season, curtains drawn, their lawns growing tall dandelions. It was a different place in winter, quiet with a sort of closed-­up feeling, like a clam. Fern loved it. She knew Mom did too. It didn’t matter that Goose Beach wasn’t an interesting place, because it was a place where interesting things happened. Sometimes bears wandered into town and anyone walking down the street had to duck into a shop until they wandered off again. And it wasn’t as if the sea ever went away.
“There you are!” Gramps boomed from his armchair, as if they were scandalously late.
“There they are,” Granny agreed. She poked her head out from the kitchen and frowned. “Fiona, you know what I’ve told you about ice cream so close to dinner. And here I’ve gone to the trouble of cooking your favorite.”
Mom and Fern exchanged guilty looks. Fern surreptitiously checked her mouth and fingers for ice cream stains—­nothing. It didn’t matter, of course. Grannyalways knew.
Fern kissed Granny (“Goose Tracks!” Granny said) and then went into the living room to kiss Gramps. He was hunched over the same puzzle he had been working on for weeks, a picture of the Eiffel Tower. It was mostly sky and had 5,000 pieces. Gramps only liked hard puzzles.
“You finished the big cloud!” Fern said, sitting on the arm of Gramps’s chair.
Gramps tapped the side of his head with one finger, then pointed at the picture on the box. “See that little bit of pink? It’s the only cloud that has that little bit of pink. You’ve got to pay attention to the details. It’s like anything else in life.”
“Fern?” Granny called. “Go fetch that brother of yours. It’s his turn to set the table.”
Fern obediently hopped to her feet. But on the way to the stairs, she paused at the hall mirror. The blue streak definitely wasn’t right anymore. Not with Mom staying up late and eating sweets again.
But what color should she choose? Red meant she was in a bad mood, and her mood wasn’tbad exactly. Green meant that she was excited about something, so green could be good or bad. Green was for Christmas Eve, but also for school plays. Pink, on the other hand, didn’t mean any of those things. Pink was for the days when she couldn’t figure out what her mood was, or when she seemed to be having several moods at once.
Pink. Definitely pink. She would wash her hair that night and apply the mascara in the morning.
“Fern!” Mom called. “None of your flights of fancy now.”
Fern jolted out of her reverie and hurried down the stairs, humming to herself. As she had expected, Hamish was stretched out horizontally on his bed. Hamish was usually horizontal, because he was usually reading. If you ever saw a vertical Hamish, he would be slouched and shuffling his feet, as if gravity were stronger wherever he was standing.
“Suppertime,” Fern said, looking around the room with distaste. Hamish’s room was just soclean. The many books neatly stacked on the shelves, the clothes hanging in the closet with the hangers all facing the same way. It was unnatural.
“I need to finish this chapter,” Hamish said without looking up. Hamish was tall and skinny with red-­gold hair that almost touched his shoulders. He didn’t tie it back, though, like other boys with long hair did, but left it loose in a big, messy tangle. Granny said he looked like a street urchin. Fern thought he looked a bit like a lion—­a sleepy, underfed lion with a face full of freckles.
Fern sighed and flopped onto the foot of the bed. Hamish was obsessed with a book series called Space Dragons. It was about a teenaged astronaut named Colin, the leader of a band of dragon riders. Dragons in the Space Dragons series could fly in zero gravity and hold their breath for hours.
“You’re ruining the ambiance,” Hamish said.
“The ambi-­what?”
“You know I hate humming.”
Fern stopped humming. “Granny’s going to murder you if you forget to set the table again.”
“You do it. I’ll wash the dishes next time it’s your turn. Colin’s trying to rescue another dragon rider from an asteroid belt.”
Fern knew better than to believe any promises Hamish made. She grabbed his arm and dragged him toward the edge of the bed. Then she grabbed his foot and pulled so that he would fall on the floor feet-­first. Hamish was the biggest lazybones she knew.
He gave a ridiculous sigh and shoved her away. But as usual, he didn’t put up a fight, which would have required effort—­he just closed the book and followed Fern upstairs.
“Your friend’s back,” Mom told Fern. She was leaning over the custard, stirring, a faint sheen of sweat on her forehead.
“What?” Fern said, and then the words sunk in. She sprinted over to the living room window, where she could see the house across the street, where Ivy lived.
Ivy and Fern had been friends for so long that Fern didn’t remember when they’d started. Mom said it had happened one day when Fern had been riding her tricycle on the sidewalk and Ivy had come out to watch. But that memory had slipped from Fern’s mind like a bead from a string, like some of her memories about Dad.
Sure enough, the yellow curtains on Ivy’s attic window were pushed open, and Fern caught a glimpse of Ivy’s pale face and dark hair through the glass. The fact that both Fern and Ivy had attic bedrooms was one of the many ways they matched, and a sign that they had always been destined to be best friends.
“She is back!” Fern exclaimed, though no one was listening. Mom and Gramps were in the kitchen, hunting for the pie server, and Hamish was telling Granny about the latest chapter ofSpace Dragons. Granny was reading it too, even though Hamish was constantly spoiling things. Granny read almost everything. She often said that books were like people: There weren’t many truly bad ones out there, though some took more effort to like than others.
Another face drifted past Ivy’s window. Fern had to squint to make it out—­the oak was tossing its branches in the breeze, and the leaves reflected in the glass. It was Rachel Shoemaker.
Fern felt herself wilt.
“Fern?” Mom said. “Everything all right?”
Fern nodded, forcing a smile as she blinked her eyes very fast. “Hamish, you’re taking forever,” she complained. “I’m hungry.”
Even though she wasn’t anymore.