The Starboard Sea: A Novel by Amber Dermont Page B

knows what kind of
body’s hiding under those gypsy skirts she wears. The thing is, Hester’s damaged goods. She’s tarnished. Just like the real Hester.” Race
snapped off the hula girl tie and rolled it up.
“The whole point of The Scarlet Letter is that Hester hasn’t really
done anything wrong,” I said. “She’s punished for no good reason. It’s
supposed to be ironic.”
“Dude, I’m not here to argue metaphors.” Race smirked. He cleared
his throat and lowered his voice. “The girl was kicked out of school
for seducing her art teacher. She forced herself on him. Then she went
crazy. Tried to kill the guy when he stopped nailing her. It was a
megascandal. Made some papers.”
“It’s true,” said Stuyvie. “I read Hester’s files.” He gave me a long,
sideways look. “I read all of the files in my dad’s office. Even the confidential ones. Even the ones the teachers aren’t permitted to see. My
father lets me take a peek at everything.”
Stuyvie stared at me and winked.
“So what is it you know?” I asked.
“She held a shard of glass to the guy’s neck. Threatened to slit his
throat. Some art project.” Stuyvie seemed scared and excited at the
same time. One of his eyelids was twitching. “Cops arrested her, tossed
her in jail. You’ve got to see the mug shot in her file. She looks deranged.”
I listened with interest, more intrigued than ever. Aidan had a past.
I liked this about her. The real story of how she’d landed at this school
was probably more fascinating than anything Race or Stuyvie could
imagine or read in a manila folder. I thanked them both for warning me.
    Late that afternoon, I found myself sitting alone on the seawall kicking my feet against the cement, watching the sailing team practice. The prevailing winds ran southwest, carrying canopies of white scalloped clouds over the choppy waters. Out in the harbor, Coach Tripp piloted around the Fireballs on his silver launch bullhorning orders, critiquing maneuvers. In the distance, I thought I saw Race and his new crew.
    I’d always believed that I was at my best when out on the water. Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I wasn’t careful enough or maybe I’d been any good in the first place only because of Cal. When we’d sail off Northeast Harbor, Cal would insist on searching out storms, the coastal weather defined by danger. “We need to learn how to handle the wilds. Test ourselves.” Cal wanted a competitive edge, and at Kensington we were one of the rare teams to play the squalls, using the rough winds to make a charge for victory. As a team, we loved taking risks, but Cal had an alertness, a feel for what could go wrong. “It’s the waves we need to worry about, not the winds,” he’d always say, and he was right. Winds could knock a boat around, but a wave could seize a ship and blast her open. I knew how to read the wind, but Cal was an expert at appraising the waves.
    I was thinking about the last time Cal and I sailed together, when I suddenly felt a shadow over me. I turned and saw Aidan.
“Thought that was you,” she said. “You look so calm. Didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Watch this.” I pointed to a dinghy attempting to jibe around a buoy. The winds were flukey and in one brief instant the sails went from full breasted to flat chested. “They’re going to capsize.” Sure enough, the dinghy broached to windward and the boat began to oscillate, sinking into a death roll. The mast and sails collided with the water as the skipper and crew dumped overboard, legs and arms akimbo.
Aidan gasped. I assured her that the sailors would be fine, though it took the pair several attempts before they righted the boat.
“Did you cast a spell?” Aidan asked. “How’d you know that would happen?”
“I always know about the wind.”
Even on land, I never stopped being a sailor. I clocked the wind gradient, how the speed of the wind increased the higher it rose off land or water, and constantly mea sured the