Page 20 of The Otherworld

A grin tugs at the corner of my mouth. “Well, I’m technically an adult now, thank you very much. I turned eighteen in April.”

“I just turned eighteen, too,” Orca says.

“Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

“Just thought you were younger. You sound younger.”

“Well, so do you.”

I scoff. “Hey—!”

“It’s not a bad thing! Papa says it’s good to seem younger than you are. That way, when you’re old, you still look young.”

“Your papa sounds like a controlling jerk.”

“What?”

“I mean, he doesn’t let you have any fun? No friends, no movies, no video games?” I shake my head. “You’ve probably never had pizza, either.”

I’m being sarcastic, expecting her to come back with, Of course I’ve had pizza, you dummy.

But then she goes, “What’s pizza?”

I blink. “You’re joking.”

“No, and I’d rather not hear about any more things from the Otherworld. I can’t have them, so—”

“The Otherworld?”

I’m probably going to wake up in a second and find that all of this has been a dream or a hallucination. There’s no way this girl is real.

“The mainland,” Orca explains. “I call it the Otherworld. Because it’s all the way out there, and I’m all the way out… here. Alone. Like you said. No friends, no movies, no pizza. But Papa is good. He loves me, and he wants me to be safe.”

“By keeping you like a prisoner on Alcatraz?”

“He doesn’t like the Otherworld. He thinks it’s full of dangers and evil and that it’s better to stay away.”

“Well, that’s fine for him if he wants to live like a hermit. But what about you?”

Orca falls silent for a moment. “He thinks I’m not strong enough to handle the real world.”

“That’s bullshit. I don’t even know you, and I know that’s bullshit.”

Another pause. Then Orca replies innocently, “What’s ‘bullshit’?”

I can’t stop myself from laughing. “Anything that isn’t true.”

It feels good to laugh again.

It feels good to have hope again.

Orca is going to search the island for Adam tomorrow. And if he’s there, she’ll find him.

Thank you, Orca. Thank you for being my lifeline.

5

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