“Except my sister and I decided we were going to surprise everyone by motorizing the disco ball. We were twelve, and she instigated, but we were both quite confident in the contraption we put together.”
“Don’t tell me it crashed on the party.”
“Only after catching fire,” Hank says. “But my mom grabbed the extinguisher on a disco-spin, and her quick save became legendary.”
“A disco inferno?”
Hank snorts. “If you can believe it, ‘Staying Alive’ was on the stereo.”
I grin. “I love it. Assuming this story of exploding inventions isn’t only an invention itself, meant to dissuade me from attempting raft construction.”
“I’d never lie to you. And if you make a raft that somehow bursts into flames, I will be impressed.” He smiles. “What about you? What was your favorite place as a kid?
“The art classroom,” I answer immediately. “Doesn’t matter which one. Whatever school I was at, the art classroom was my happy space. Total escape into imagination. And I lucked out with a string of great teachers.”
“You’ve always been an artist.” Hank looks pleased by that, which I like.
“I have. And in high school, you could sneak out the art room window if you wanted to skip class, so it was an actual escape sometimes, too.” Hank laughs, and a deep, honking, rumbly noise sounds out from down the beach. “What is that?” I ask, turning to the expert.
Hank furrows his brow. “I’m not sure. It can’t be…” He quickens his pace, although he’s unsteady on his feet. “Maybe it was the wind.”
The strange sound calls out louder, groaning steadily. “Is that a motor?” I ask excitedly, and it roars. “Oh my god, it’s a motor!”
I drop the branch and start running forward, stumbling and wobbling, summoning my remaining weak energy.
“It’s probably the speedboat again! Maybe coming from the other island. We’re saved” I yell.
“I don’t know!” Hank yells, but he’s running after me.
Panting and gulping, we make our way over the rocks, and when we round a bend, Hank falls to his knees.
Right in the middle of our crushed and scattered signals, five or six massive, blubbery animals roll from side to side and honk at each other. They’re sea lions or something, dark gray, and each has a long, floppy nose, like a Muppet.
“What the hell?” I ask.
“Elephant Seals,” Hank says, incredulous. “Northern Elephant Seals. Two-ton, aggressive Northern Elephant Seals.”
He starts laughing to himself. When one of the seals barks in our direction, squawking at us, his laugh breaks into a giggle.
Uncertain, I raise an eyebrow at him. “Can we work around them, or do we have to wait until they leave?”
Hank sits on a rock in his dirty boxer briefs, hands on his stomach while he laughs. “You don’t understand,” he says. “I told you we might see something like this, but the Northern Elephant Seals didn’t even come this far north until a few years ago. There’s only a handful that even do this in the Salish Sea.”
“Do what? Come to shore?”
“They must have mated here months ago,” he says. “Their weanlings must have been here all along.”
“Weanlings?”
He snorts out a bigger laugh. “Weanlings! We didn’t see the weanlings!”
I’m laughing, too, but it’s a concerned chuckle. He looks like a mad scientist cracking.
“They’re molting,” he says. “It’s called a catastrophic molt. They stay out of the water long enough for their body temperature to rise and all the blood to move to the surface. Then they shed their top layer of skin.”
“Okay, low-key yuck, no offense to the seals. How long until we can get back to the signals?”
“If memory serves, about a month,” Hank giggles. “It takes the elephant seal one month to molt.”
I plop down beside him. “Shit,” I say and take his hand.
“Shit,” Hank agrees, and finally stops laughing as seals bellow on the beach.
