Young Writers Society

It was darker than it should have been when I fell into bed at half-past five. The weather channel crackled on the TV down in the living room that I’d forgotten to turn off. I laid awake and listened to it mix with the wind bullying the side of the beach house. It pushed, hot and salty, through the open bedroom window. It swirled over my face, pulled the air from my lungs and fell down the stairs with it, dropping finally out the open window at the front of the house. I was from Tornado country, originally, and that’s what you did. Let the pressure out to keep the windows from shattering.

My mother had done it, when I was fourteen and a storm tore the sides off half the houses in our neighborhood. I’d never thought to question it. A hurricane wasn’t all that different from a tornado, I figured. Bigger, maybe, and angrier but in the end still nothing but air.

I climbed off the bed and pulled off my sweaty, salt-stained t-shirt to stand in front of the window. The storm winds pushed against my hips, flowering over the waistband on my shorts. I wished I’d taken a shower before filling the bathtub with water for after the storm.

Downstairs, the TV lost cable and the weather channel cut out to static. The lights flickered and went thirty seconds later. As if on cue, my phone buzzed where I’d left it on the dresser.

“Gigi, there’s a bad storm coming your way,” my mother said in lieu of a hello when I answered.

I wrestled a new t-shirt over my head and sat on the edge of the bed. “You don’t say.”

In the background, I heard my father shout, “You tell Georgia to take this seriously.”

“Tell dad I’m fine,” I said. “It’s barely a hurricane. Granddad lived through worse out here.”

“Your Granddad knew when to get out of dodge,” my dad said, having wrestled the phone from mom. “I wish you’d take better care of yourself.”

I frowned. Dad was usually the last one to come at me about my health. When I was a kid, he’d been laid off when the last factory in the county closed down and spend three years putzing around the garage pretending like he was a mechanic before he gave in and went back to school. Now, he managed a Big Lots.

“I’m fine,” I told him and paced toward the window. On the horizon, the ocean foamed grey. Wind tore at the beach grass, washing it in verdant waves over the side of the boardwalk. I was still standing there, watching the grass, when Hank’s daughter on her bike appeared from underneath the house. She had a length of rope wound across her torso like a messenger bag and staggered up the steps to the boardwalk like the wind was about to throw her into the sky.

“Shit,” I cursed, under my breath. “Dad I gotta run.”

“Georgia,” he urged as I hung up and tossed the phone back on the bed. Honestly, there wasn’t much I thought through since losing my job. I moved out of my Chicago apartment on a whim. I didn’t go home, where my parents could help me on my feet, but into my Granddad’s tomb of a beach house to slowly whittle through my savings in rotisserie chicken and bottles of sweetened iced tea. I went to the bar ten miles up the road and made out with strangers in the bathroom. I didn’t think about that stuff, I just did it like I had been left on autopilot.

Brave folks say they don’t think when they do something brave, they just act. But when I ran, barefoot, down the stairs and out the back door, all I did was think. I thought about the storm surge and riptides and Hank’s daughter in the road insisting the whale was going to die. I was more terrified than I’d been in years.

I caught up with Janie on the beach. She knelt in front of the whale’s left eye, hand pressed on her skin. Janie looked back at me, over her shoulder. “She shouldn’t have to be alone,” she shouted over the wind.

Huffing, I dropped to my knees in the sand beside her. The last the weather guy had said, the winds were nearing fifty miles per hour, would be eighty or more by the time the storm made landfall. Fat drops of rain hit the sand, pelting the whale’s back and the tops of our heads. “It’s not safe,” I said.

“I thought about what you said,” Janie continued, ignoring me. “About the storm surge. I think it can work.” She pulled the rope from her shoulder and stretched it between her hands. “If we help—”

“All you’re gonna do with that is strangle yourself when the tide comes in,” I said. Already, the water had risen over the whale’s tale. Foam gathered against her skin. It wasn’t enough to help even ten of Hank’s volunteer’s ease her off the shore.

“You said the surge—”

“That’s just something I said. I don’t know if it’s true.” I reached for her wrist to pull her to her feet, but she yanked her arm away. The rain was really coming down, the wind whipping it into my face and I had to shield my eyes with my arm. “We have to get back to the house.”

“Look,” Janie pointed at the water where it lapped against the whale’s flipper. “It’ll work,” she insisted. “We just need to wait a little longer…” she trailed off as the water pulled, quickly, back toward the ocean. The whale groaned as the sand slid under her, as if to say, too late.

“We’ve got to go,” I said, and grabbed Janie by the back of her t-shirt. “Now.”

We were nearly at the boardwalk stairs when the wave hit. It wasn’t dramatic, like the movies, but enough to knock us off our feet. I cracked my back against the railing on the side of the stairs, and wrapped an arm around the post. I grabbed Janie just as she slid into the waterlogged grass underneath the boardwalk and pulled her to me. She wrapped her arms around the post, with me propped awkwardly behind her on the stair.

The wind drew the rain like a curtain between us and the whale. We were on the second stair on the way up to the boardwalk and the tide was already at our knees. I could feel Janie’s rope tangling around my feet and I wondered how long it would take before the water was over our heads. The wooden boardwalk groaned in the wind and rain, and I thought, if it didn’t hold, we would die.

“Do you hear that?” Janie shouted over the wind and the wood. “She’s singing.”

I closed my eyes against the back of Janie’s head and listened. It was just the boardwalk, I knew, straining on its supports. But then there was a second sound, like a storm siren back home, and I could imagine it was the whale, half-dead, singing to the only two girls left in the world.

“Look!” Janie shouted.

The wind ebbed and the curtain of rain fell away just enough for us to see the whale drawing seawater into her mouth. She was nearly half-submerged in the water, now. If the tide surged any higher, she might make it, and we might die.

“She’s so close,” Janie said, water lapping against her shoulders. I tried to hoist her higher, to keep her head over the surge, but the water pushed me back, my arms stuck in place.

Then the tide fell back, sucking us into the railing post we clung to. We sat, shivering, on the stair as the water dropped to the bottom stair. It was our chance to make a run for the house, but we didn’t move. I was unstoppably fifteen again, like Janie. There was sand and salt in my hair and my eyes stung and my ankles ached where the rope had chaffed the skin before the water tore it away into the tide.

I don’t know how to say it, other than we ran straight into that storm. The water pushed against our shins and the rain pelted our backs. A wave crashed against us, knocked us into the whale, but we kept our footing. I landed with my hands flat on either side of the whale’s big eye. She rolled it at me, huffed spray through her blowhole. Stuck, she said. Push.

Another wave came in and my feet sunk into the sand. “We need to push her,” I shouted. Janie nodded. When the next wave came, we braced ourselves against the side of the whale and heaved as much as we could, our feet slipping in the sand. The surge hit the top of the boardwalk stairs. I grabbed Janie as the wave brushed her chin and lifted her feet out of the sand. The whale rose, slightly, with us.

Wind threw the rain harder into our faces and I wondered how much more of this we’d handle before we lost our footing entirely. I wondered if Hank and his team of biologists would find us tangled somewhere in my Granddad’s beach grass.

“One more time,” Janie insisted as the tide pulled the water back to her waist.

Sand, the whale urged, her marble eye glowing in the storm. Stuck.

I took a deep breath and dove under the water. I felt along the base of the whale until I hit the beach and started digging, pulling handfuls of sand from underneath the whale. Clouds of sand blurred the stormy water. My lungs ached but I kept dragging my fingers through the sand.

Janie grabbed for my arm and I pushed back to the surface. She pointed toward the ocean, where a wave billowed on the horizon.

I linked my hand in hers. “Last chance,” I said and she nodded. Together, we leaned into the whale. It was higher than it looked, washed well over the whale’s back and threw us inland. We tumbled through the beach grass, over one of the high dunes and landed in a puddle of water no deeper than my knees on the other side.

The wind fell and the rain stopped. I laid on my back, floating, in the water and stared into blue sky. The eye of the storm. Janie unlatched her hand from mine and we climbed to the top of the dune we’d just fell over.

Hair tangled and stuck to our necks and faces, clothes sodden we stood in the sun that bled through the center of the hurricane. My lungs, my arms, my bloody chaffed ankles ached but the water dried on my skin and made me light. Beside me, Janie brushed clumps of sand from her arms and looked out at water. The hurricane turned around us, pushing us together, like we’d been painted there by someone who knew what they were doing. I breathed.

Granddad’s beach was underwater, still, but calmer, for a moment and out past where the shore should have been, maybe half a mile out toward the horizon, a whale splashed her tail against the choppy sea.

A/N: I'm very iffy on the ending. In my head, the story was going to dive into this magical-realist space where these two women save this whale against odds (which, I mean, technically happens) but it didn't really come out on the page the way I imagined it. Thoughts & suggestions encouraged!