Adrift (Excerpt)

8/21/2019 Adrift (Excerpt)

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Copyright © 2015 by Paul Griffin

All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.,

Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are

trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility

for author or third-party websites or their content.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

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recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For

information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions

Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events,

or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-0-545-70939-2

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 16 17 18 19

Printed in the U.S.A. 23

First edition, August 2015

Book design by Yaffa Jaskoll and Carol Ly


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SAILOR’S ALMANAC, LONG-RANGE FORECAST, NORTH ATLANTIC

CORRIDOR: Summer will be lovely with mild winds through

August, heading into hurricane season.

The surfers called it The End for its killer waves. To everyone else it

was the end of Long Island. Montauk. It’s a town of beaches and

bluffs on the tip of the south fork. My best friend, John Costello,

and I landed summer jobs at a state park out there. My parentsowned a flower shop, and one of their customers was a big deal in

the parks department. I’d just finished junior year. The plan was to

apply early decision to Yale as a forestry major. I dreamed of being

a ranger in the Utah canyons or Alaska glaciers. I had to get out of

the city. Everywhere I looked I saw Mr. Costello’s ghost.The name of the park was Heron Hills. I fixed boardwalks and

lifeguard chairs and the dock struts rotting away in the saltwater


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marsh. When the tide was out, the seaweed crackled beneath a sun

hot enough to melt your mind. My head ached no matter how much

Gatorade I drank. I loved it, being deep in the quiet, near the water.From the bluffs I saw the earth’s curve.

After work on the hottest day in August I met up with John in

the park’s vehicle maintenance shop. He’d been working in gas sta-

tions since the day after his dad’s funeral, when he grabbed a job

filling tires. Iceman. That’s what everybody called him. We hadn’tbeen able to hang out as much since we started going to different

schools freshman year. I took the test for Hudson, a selective pub-

lic school in Manhattan. It was a forty-minute train ride and a

world away from Woodhull, a working-class neighborhood that

straddles the Brooklyn–Queens border. John and I grew up there,right on the borderline. The high school in Woodhull was pretty

rough, but John didn’t care. All he needed was a diploma for trade

school. He had his heart set on being an electrician, like his dad.

Not his heart, his mind. Electrical work was sensible, steady.

The vehicle maintenance shop was stifling. John hoisted anengine out of a Land Rover with two other guys. They were sweat-

ing so much they looked like they’d gone swimming. John worked

just as hard, but he was dry until one of the trucks backfired. I

flinched too.

We hit the beach and swam out past where the waves brokeand the water turned silky. We came in clear-eyed and hungry and

stopped to say hi to a man who fished from knee-deep water. He


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gave us a pair of blues. I smothered them with butter and hand-

mashed lemon and pan-cooked them in the fire pit behind the

trailer where we bunked.After dinner the harmonicas came out. Mr. Costello had taught

us how to play, and John was good. The stars curved out of the dusk

into the night. We never said much. We were good at being alone

together. But that night it was on my mind. “You don’t talk about it

ever,” I said. “About him.”John tended the fire with a broken slat he’d pulled from the

dune fence. “Not until you make me anyway,” he said. He checked

his beat-up Timex and headed for the trailer. “The bugs are getting

bad. Don’t fall asleep out here again.”

I buried the fire with sand. The waves caught the moonlight.One rose higher than the others, rolled toward me, and faded into

the shore. The mosquitoes chased me into the trailer. I cracked

my laptop to study for a little while before bed. I was taking a certi-

fied first responder course with the lifeguards. I wanted to know

how to bring somebody back to life. I was learning what I alreadyknew: Most times you can’t. Anyway, it would look good on my

Yale application.

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Adrift (Excerpt)