Sanctuary Bay (2 page)

“Maybe they'll never figure out they screwed up. Sucks for the other Sarah, but I probably need it more than her, right?” she asked the dog.

The boat veered to the left, bringing what looked like a row of the world's biggest floor fans into view. They had three blades each and were mounted on enormously tall yellow pillars—she guessed they were about four hundred feet tall—and each pillar was attached to a floating platform.

As they continued steadily toward the platforms, Sarah realized that two people were standing on one of them, inside a small white metal railing wrapped around the bottom of the platform's pillar. One of them pointed at her, and then they both started to wave. Sarah turned around to make sure no one had joined her on the upper deck. Empty.

“You know these people?” The dog whined in response. They were probably just waving to wave.

The boat kept speeding toward the platform.
It must be farther away than it looks,
Sarah thought. Because it looked like they were going to run right into it if they kept going for much longer. She heard footsteps clambering up the metal stairs. “You, let's go,” the captain called to her.

Sarah grabbed her suitcase and her backpack. “Wish me luck,” she murmured to the dog before she started toward the stairs. The dog wagged, as if to say it was all good. But it wagged at everything.
How could this be my stop?
she wondered. She'd never been on a ferry though. Maybe he was just getting her ready for a stop that was coming up in twenty minutes.

“Anything fragile in your gear?” the captain asked.

“Uh, no. Mostly just clothes,” Sarah told him. Foster kids traveled light. The boat veered, pulling up alongside the platform. Now she could see the two people standing by the pillar were around her age, a boy and girl. They were still waving.

“Hi, Sarah! We're your welcoming committee,” the boy—on the short side, muscular, cute, close-cropped dark brown hair, Hispanic—called to her.

“So, welcome!” the girl—preppy-pretty, straight red hair, white—added.

She sighed. Sarah always got frustrated when people tried to put her in a black or white box, like it had to be an either/or thing. But more frustratingly, she found herself automatically doing it too. She saw someone and checked off boxes. Size. Age. Race. Attractiveness. Economic status. But race was always there because it was the one box that she never knew quite what to check for herself.

The captain took her suitcase and heaved it over the rail. It landed on the floating platform with a thump. Sarah blinked in surprise. “Nothing breakable, you said.”

Sarah managed to nod. She was starting to get blender-brain. It was only yesterday that her social worker had told her about Sanctuary Bay, while Mrs. Yoder buzzed around excitedly. And since then it had been pow, pow, pow—new stuff thrown at her every second. Now she was getting dropped off in the middle of the ocean onto a platform the size of a basketball court.

Oh, but wait. There was a boat tethered nearby on the other side. She'd been so focused on the people and the high fan—a wind turbine, her brain had finally provided when she'd realized she had arrived at a floating wind farm—that she hadn't noticed it. It looked more like a spacecraft than a boat, a spacecraft for James Bond. Low to the water with sleek metal lines, stretching out in two long points in front of a glassed-in … she wanted to call it a cockpit, but she was sure there was a better word. One word that definitely applied to the whole thing was magnificent. Just magnificent.

“You want to wear the backpack down, or should I toss it too?” the captain asked after a long pause. Sarah looked over at him and saw that his eyes were wide, locked on the boat beside the platform. So she wasn't the only one who thought it looked like something that wouldn't be invented for decades. The guy who made his living on the ocean did too.

“Toss it,” Sarah told him after realizing she was going to have to awkwardly climb down a metal ladder running down the side of the ferry.

“Sarah Merson, come on down,” the boy cried in a cheesy TV-show announcer voice, like she was a contestant on
The Price Is Right
. He gave her a cocky grin. He knew exactly how cheesy he was being and that he was hot enough to pull it off. More than hot enough.

Did rich people even watch
The Price Is Right
? The boy waiting for her at the bottom of the ladder definitely seemed like a rich boy, knowledge of
PIR
withstanding. Except it looked like his nose had been broken at least once, and it hadn't been returned to perfection with plastic surgery. The girl looked rich too. They both just had a well-groomed glow that she'd never seen outside of
Us Weekly
. Not that Sarah was smelly with chipped nail polish or anything. But there was a difference.

Don't stand here staring,
she told herself.
You've done this all before.
Not the boat part, but she'd been the new girl too many times to count. And she still hated it.
Don'tfalldon'tfalldon'tfall,
she thought as she stepped onto the ladder, her sweaty palms sliding across the metal railing. She narrowed her focus to the steps until she reached the gently bobbing platform.

“Nate Cruz,” the boy said, holding out his hand. She shook it, praying her palms were no longer sweaty. “Junior class president,” he added. His eyes were a golden brown, like caramels, his skin just a few shades darker, and the way he looked at her made her feel like she was the only person not just on the platform, but in the entire world. She was relieved when the girl stepped up beside them. Nate's gaze was so intense she felt like she needed a reason to look away.

“I'm Maya,” the girl announced. “I don't feel the need to give my title every three or four seconds.” She smiled, shaking hands with Sarah too. It was kind of like they were all at a business meeting, or what Sarah imagined a business meeting would be like, anyway.

“She doesn't feel the need to announce her title because she's class secretary, and it's not worth mentioning.” Nate shot Maya what Sarah was already starting to think of as The Grin, then wrapped his arm around her shoulders. Maya tried to pull away, but he gave her smacking kisses on the cheek as he pulled her tighter against him.

So that's how it is,
Sarah thought. Good to know. She liked to figure out as much as she could about the people in a new place as soon as possible. It made her feel more in control. Nate and Maya a couple. Noted.

Have I said anything?
She felt a spurt of embarrassment. Had she just been standing there gawping at the pretty, shiny boat and the pretty, shiny rich kids?
Say something. Anything. Anythinganything.
“I thought the ferry would take me all the way to the school,” she mumbled.

“Nope, the school's boat brings students the rest of the way. No need for a regular ferry to Sanctuary Bay,” Maya answered. “Once you arrive, you're there 'til grad.”

“But don't worry about not being able to leave,” Nate told Sarah. “We make our own entertainment.”

“We do.” Maya gave her words a spin, making it clear she was talking about epic sex. “The only thing I really miss is shopping,” she added. “We can get packages every three months, but that just means we get what people think we want. My mom tries, but she's basically hopeless, or else she thinks I'm still in fifth grade. Some of the stuff I get? I'm like—‘Seriously, Mom?' Doesn't matter though. There are always people who want to trade.”

Sarah remained quiet. She didn't think her first thought,
That's what we call a first-world problem, bitch,
was quite the right way to go about making friends. Instead she turned to Nate. “And you?” Sarah asked. “Does Mommy still think you're a little boy?” The words came out with an edge she hadn't intended.

“I'm past the age of needing a mommy,” Nate answered, his own tone a little sharp. “Let's get to Sanctuary Bay so you can see the place for yourself,” he quickly added, the warmth back in his voice. He gave a light rap on the smoked-glass roof of the cockpit. A second later the back slid up, smoothly and soundlessly, revealing six matte-black leather chairs, ones that could easily sit at some swanky bar without looking out of place.

Sarah drew in a shaky breath. She had to stop with the poor-kid attitude. Everyone here was rich—she couldn't be mad at them all, not if she wanted them to accept her. Luckily, if her question had pissed Nate off, he'd only let it show for a second. She got why he was class president. There was something of a politician in him, a calculation under his friendly manner. Again she was being too harsh. It was probably just sharp intelligence.

“Can't wait,” Sarah smiled, putting her polite voice back on. “I'm almost insane with curiosity. Do you know there's not one picture of the school online?”

Nate stepped into the cockpit, and stretched out his hand to help her onboard.

“The school has it set up so we can access the Web for research, but that's it. Nothing from us can go out. No e-mail. No way to get on Instagram or Snip-It, so there's no way to post pictures,” Nate explained. “We have our own private network though, so we can send stuff to each other, and we have cells that work on-island.” He grabbed Maya by the waist and swung her down beside him.

“The Academy wants us focused on school,” Maya said as they each strapped into one of the chairs behind the pilot who sat at the control panel. “That's why they have the rule about us staying on campus.”

“Total immersion,” Sarah said softly, remembering.

“Exactly,” Nate replied. “And it works. Sanctuary Bay students get the highest SAT scores in the country.”

“And I'm sure Sarah is properly awed by that.” Maya smiled at her. “But I'm also sure there are other things she'd like to know about the place.”

“Only everything!” Sarah tried to sound eager and perky like Maya.

“Okay, for starters, there are a hundred and eighty-nine students, counting you,” Nate said. The hatch glided back into place and the boat began rushing across the water. “Nine hundred raging horses in this baby,” he commented. “And it can also run on solar power. Slower, but still.”

Maya shook her head. “He's
such
a boy.” She didn't sound at all displeased. “The school, Mr. President. We're talking about the school.” She turned to Sarah. “First thing you're going to need to decide is if you're with the Puffins or the Lobsters. Those are the two lacrosse teams. Stupid names, I know—they're Maine wildlife. Somebody thought it was clever.”

“There are two teams at one school?”

“Have to be,” Nate told her. “We stay on the island, so the only way we can play is if we play each other. Just think of it like the Bengals and the Browns.”

Sarah's chin jerked up. There weren't that many states with two football teams. “Are you saying that because you know I'm from Ohio?” she demanded, forgetting herself.

Nate gave her The Grin. “Not many states with two NFL teams,” he answered, echoing her thought.

“So you did know?”

“You're the new girl. Of course we found out everything we could. With less than two hundred kids, fresh blood is a big deal,” Maya said.

Sarah flushed. How much did
everything
include? Her being a foster kid? Accounts of her random outbursts? The cheating accusations? The ones about drugs?

“So how am I supposed to decide between the, uh, Puffins and Lobsters?” she asked, trying to quiet her rapidly beating heart.

The heat in Sarah's cheeks faded as Maya rattled off the reasons why being a Puffinhead was the
only
option, clearly, since she and Nate were on the side of the Puffins.

“First view of the island coming up,” Nate announced a few minutes later.

Sarah leaned forward, wishing the glass wasn't smoked. It made everything appear a little eerie, all shades of gray, even though the day was bright. “I don't see it.”

“A little to the left. It doesn't look like much more than a smudge right now,” he said.

She turned her head a fraction, and saw a darker spot out in the water. She kept her gaze trained on it, and as the boat sped on, the spot gradually gained size and definition. Rocky cliffs that rose high over the water dominated the island, at least on this side. There didn't seem to be much of a beach, just more jagged rocks. “How big is it?”

“About thirty square miles,” Nate answered. “Take you about an hour and a half to walk from the farthest two points, if you could walk in a straight line, which you can't. Once you're off the main campus, there's a big stretch of woods with only a few trails.”

More details came into focus. She could see the trees, and among them …

Sarah's heart felt like it had been squeezed by an ice-cold hand. Was that the school? She could just make out a brick building almost hidden in the tree line. It obviously used to be fancy, but now sat in disrepair with a crumbling roof and walls smattered with holes where bricks had fallen out, making it look like a smile with missing teeth.

“That's the Academy?” she asked, keeping her voice steady so she didn't betray her unease.

“Oh! Hell no!” Nate quickly answered.

“The school's on the other side of the island. You can't see it yet. It's nothing like
that
.” Maya flicked her hand in the direction of the building Sarah had spotted, dismissing it. “You should have seen your face.” Maya twisted her mouth into a horrified grimace and bugged out her eyes, laughing. “That's just some old ruin left over from before the Academy was here. You can hardly see it from our side.”

Sarah relaxed back into her chair, realizing all her muscles had tensed at the sight of the creepy old ruin. The boat glided into a series of curves as the pilot navigated around the island, and Sarah spotted several cell towers along the shoreline. They made her feel better. Cell towers were modern, not like that decaying old place.