The Truth According to Blue Read online

  Jules stood up. “You coming, Blue?”

  I love swimming in the ocean. I wakeboard, boogie board, bodysurf, and scuba dive. But no matter how much I like the water, I wasn’t about to get into the whole insulin pump thing with Jules.

  I could only imagine what she’d say when I took out the raisin-box-sized machine from my pocket and unplugged the skinny plastic tube that’s part of a catheter that’s buried in the skin next to my belly button, which was currently hidden by my baggy shirt and elastic-waist shorts. Words like “android” and “freak” and “ewwww” were not outside the realm of possibility. And then, of course, there’s my bathing suit—a plain brown tankini—which I wear so I can cover the infusion set but still have access to the tube, and which isn’t exactly what anyone on the planet would call fashionable.

  Nope. Not gonna go there with Jules.

  “I have to stay with Otis.”

  Douglas, who knew that Otis would be fine watching me from the shore if I wanted to swim, did me the small favor of saying nothing.

  “Whatever. Watch my stuff, okay?”

  While Jules and my former friend and his two new friends went swimming, Otis drank water from his portable dish, and I tested and took insulin so I could eat an apple and peanut butter.

  I didn’t used to care about people seeing me deal with diabetes. My parents made a point of treating it like it was normal—scrunching down my shorts to give me a shot in my hip at the pizzeria when I was little or telling me to go ahead and test in the middle of the bookstore—and kids at school had always known about my diabetes and were used to it. But all that changed when I got to middle school.

  On the first day of sixth grade, our homeroom teacher, Ms. Gorman, made us push the desks to the sides of the room and told everyone to sit in a circle on the floor like it was kindergarten again.

  “We’re going to play a get-to-know-you game,” Ms. Gorman said. “Everybody think of a fun fact about yourself that you can share with the class. Something unique and interesting that’s special about you.”

  I was racking my brain for my fun fact—my thumbs are double-jointed? I once kept a pet spider for three days until it dried up and died?—when Eliza Jackson, who had gone to the same elementary school as me, said from all the way across the circle in a really loud voice:

  “You’re so lucky, Blue. You have diabetes.”

  Turns out I did have a fun fact. Something unique and interesting that was special about me. And it was a disease.

  Kids I didn’t know started asking questions, and other kids I did know started answering them.

  “Diabetes? Is that the thing with the needles?”

  “Yeah, Blue gives herself shots all the time. Like every hour.” Which wasn’t true.

  “One time she passed out in gym.” Which was true.

  I got lighter and lighter and lighter until I floated from the floor to the ceiling. My body became paper-thin and see-through, and the only thing that kept me from evaporating altogether was Otis. He crawled half into my lap, anchoring me down so I wouldn’t turn to dust particles and drift away.

  The next summer—last summer—at the CJDF gala, my picture was everywhere—on the invitations, on the programs at every seat, on bigger-than-life-sized posters. Not my name, just my face:

  CURE TYPE 1 DIABETES!

  GIANT PICTURE OF BLUE’S HEAD

  There were hundreds of people at that party. Hundreds more at school and even more around town. And every single one of those people knew me as Diabetes Girl. If I wanted a unique and interesting thing about me that wasn’t a disease, it had to be more than having extra-bendy thumbs. My fun fact had to be something big. Something huge.

  Something like finding a 350-year-old ship of gold.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  True Fact: If you don’t know what to think of a person, ask your dog.

  After Jules and the boys came back, we all went to the Shark Pit, a food truck in the parking lot with a picture on its side of sharks dancing in a swimming pool. If the boys weren’t totally in love with Jules before, they definitely were after she bought them fish tacos. The whole time, Jules was Super Jules. Googolplex Jules. Ultimate Jules. She took selfies with the boys and then made a big point of erasing them because her phone was full. She knuckle-punched Douglas after he made a stupid joke and then stopped him with a stare when he tried to do it back. Half of what Jules talked about was so cool we’d never heard of it (do people really put charcoal in their lemonade?). She twisted her hair up in a knot, then shook it down, tossed it all over one shoulder, then the other, then back up again, then down but pushed off her face with her sunglasses. I think she got to hairstyle 157 just counting from our time at the Shark Pit.

  For the record, my hair is black and curly. Most of the time, I wear it in a ponytail.

  Otis and I were so not into this. Otis because he’s not allowed to eat spicy food from the Shark Pit, and me because all I wanted to do was ditch Jules and go treasure hunting. Which, judging by the fact that we hadn’t even been at the beach for two hours, wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

  I was putting nylon dog booties on Otis’s paws (black, to match his fur) so he wouldn’t burn them on the asphalt when a little red convertible with the hood emblem of a horse rearing up on its hind legs zoomed into the parking lot. Even I knew it was a Ferrari. Ferraris aren’t exactly uncommon in the Hamptons, especially in the summer, but a Ferrari with Anna Bowdin driving it? Now that’s something you don’t see here every day.

  Everyone on the planet knows that Anna Bowdin is probably the hugest movie star in existence. And that even though she’s only twenty-three, she’s already been a superhero, a Revolutionary War spy, a Disney princess, and a coal miner with lung disease.

  The parking lot, which had been noisy with moms reeling in their screaming kids, went silent. Even the sun hid behind a cloud, like it knew its light wasn’t needed anymore now that Anna Bowdin was here.

  Anna parked her Ferrari a few cars away from us and waved a big wave. “Hey, Julie Jules!”

  The mouths of Douglas, Wilder Douglas, and Fritjof dropped open even wider than they already were. Douglas may actually have had drool in the corner of his. I made sure my own mouth was shut, but, really, I couldn’t believe I was about to meet the world’s biggest movie star.

  “You know her?” Douglas said.

  Jules gripped my upper arm like a claw and whispered in my ear, “We’re leaving.”

  “Jules, you know Anna Bowdin?” Douglas said again.

  “We have to go,” Jules said, ignoring Douglas and squeezing my arm even tighter. “Now. To your house. Call your mom.”

  No way. If Jules came to my house, I’d lose another whole day of treasure hunting. “I can’t,” I said back. “I have stuff I’m supposed to do. Besides, why do you want to go to my house all of a sudden? And how do you know Anna Bowdin?”

  “Don’t you ever go on the Internet?” Jules was practically shouting. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper again. “Anna Bowdin is my dad’s girlfriend. She’s the reason he walked out on my mom. So can we please go to your house? Right. Now?”

  No wonder Jules was frantic. I called Mom—even though every cell in my body was screaming at me not to. She was with a client, installing four hundred wisteria vines on the side of their pool house.

  “Can you come pick us up?” I asked.

  “Are you having a blood sugar reaction?” she said, instantly on the alert.

  Just to be sure, I did an automatic body scan for symptoms. Nothing. Plus, Otis would have told me if there was a problem, and he was currently sitting on my foot and scratching his rump with his teeth, the only person in the parking lot who couldn’t care less about Anna Bowdin.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “But Jules isn’t. I’ll explain later.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Mom said, and hung up.

  Ten minutes was forever to Jules, though, especially after we got our stuff and had to stand around wa
tching Anna Bowdin sign autographs. After she finished, she peeled a pair of twin six-year-olds off her legs and came over to us.

  “Hi, sweetie.” She kissed Jules on both cheeks. “You know your dad hates the sun, and I couldn’t take being at the house another second. I mean, this weather! Oh wow, who are your friends? They’re adorable.”

  The guys just stared. Finally, Fritjof said something, except he said it in Norwegian.

  Jules put her hand on Otis’s head and said, “This is Otis. He’s half-wolf, so you better not get too close.”

  Which is absolutely not true—even though Otis looks like a wolf, he’s 100 percent dog—but I decided not to tell Anna Bowdin that.

  Otis stood between Jules and me, looking powerful and majestic, even in his nylon booties. Whatever Anna Bowdin had been about to say, she didn’t say it. She took one look at Otis the wolf-dog and got very quiet. And kind of smaller, like she was a regular person instead of a MOVIE STAR.

  A horn tooted.

  “That’s Blue’s mom,” Jules said. “We gotta go. Sorry.”

  Otis jumped into the bed of Mom’s pickup truck, and Jules and I climbed into the back seat of the cab.

  “Is that Anna Bowdin?” Mom asked, sticking her head out the window for a better look.

  “She’s my dad’s girlfriend.” Jules practically spit the word “girlfriend.”

  “I take it you two aren’t very close?” Mom said, pulling out of the parking lot.

  “About as close as Earth and Neptune,” Jules said.

  “Neptune is the farthest planet from Earth,” I helpfully explained to Mom, a fact I know because even though I got an Incomplete, I did pay attention in Earth Science every now and then.

  “Thank you for rescuing me, Mrs. Broen,” Jules said with none of her usual snark. “I really appreciate it.”

  “I’m glad I could help,” Mom said, looking at Jules in the rearview mirror instead of at the road the way I hate. “You know what they say, girls: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough go to sea.’ Why don’t you two have some fun and go boating?”

  For the record, nobody says, “When the going gets tough, the tough go to sea.” That’s not a thing; it’s Mom-code for Why don’t you get some homework done, Blue? And while there was nothing I’d rather do than go secretly hunt for treasure while pretending to do my homework, there was nothing I’d rather do less than take Jules Buttersby with me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  True Fact: For most of human history, ruling the seas meant ruling the world.

  I like our house. It’s on a cove that leads to the harbor that leads to the Long Island Sound that leads to the Atlantic Ocean, so if I want to I can sail from my backyard all the way to France.

  But now I was seeing it through Jules’s eyes, and I noticed the peeling paint on some of the shutters, the crooked screen door, the wobbly handrail. Dad makes jokes about how he’s like the cobbler whose children have no shoes, but I know business for both my parents has been rough recently, and diabetes isn’t cheap.

  Our house has three bedrooms, which always seemed like enough, but now it seemed small. And old. Which, to be fair, it is. About two hundred years old, in fact. Dad’s great-something-grandfather built it, and before he did, there was another house here that his ancestors built back in the 1600s. There’s still an old family graveyard across the street. Turns out a lot of my female relatives were named Lucretia in the early 1800s.

  Mom dropped us off with a friendly “There’s tuna salad in the fridge if you’re hungry!” Which was code for Don’t forget to eat, Blue, and remember to check your blood sugar before and after. What was especially annoying was that she was right: Just as her truck turned out of the driveway, Otis headbutted my leg.

  “High or low?” I asked.

  Otis bowed.

  I saw Jules watching Otis and me, so I knew what was coming next:

  “What’s that about?” she asked.

  I hesitated. Otis had just alerted—he’d told me my blood sugar was too low. Everybody loves hearing about diabetic-alert dogs and all the things they can do—how they can smell blood sugar across two campsites through a haze of barbecues, how they’re on duty even when they’re asleep. But if I told Jules about Otis, would she start grilling me all about what it’s like to have diabetes?

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just a game we play.”

  We went inside, and Otis and I stopped in the bathroom to make sure he was right, even though Otis is never wrong about highs or lows. And he almost never misses an alert—just when he’s sick or when something incredible happens to distract him, like the time an entire flock of geese made a pit stop in our backyard at dawn and he barked the whole house awake until Dad let him out so he could have the joy of chasing every last goose into the neighbor’s yard.

  I pricked my finger with a tiny lancet and then squeezed a drop of blood onto a test strip in my glucometer so I could check my sugar level. Otis stared at the meter with the tip of his tail wagging. He knew that if he was right, he’d get a treat.

  Five… four… three… two… one…

  “Good low, Oats Magoats.” He gobbled down a square of turkey jerky, which I carry in a treat baggie in my pocket.

  My deal with my parents is that they check the numbers stored on my pump at the end of each day, but I have to let them know in real-time if I get too high or too low. I texted them:

  Me: BS 68. About to have lunch (30g carbs). Will take 1 unit insulin after I eat

  Dad: Sounds right

  Mom: How are you feeling?

  Me: Ok

  Dad: Headache?

  Me: Not too bad

  Mom: Dizzy?

  Me: No

  Dad: Sweaty?

  Me: I’m FINE

  This is how it goes with us, ever since my last birthday when I convinced my parents—with a lot of help from Dr. Basch, my diabetes doctor—that they needed to start letting me be the one to deal with my diabetes instead of them making all the decisions. Every single day of my life, my parents have known every bite of food I’ve eaten, every place I’ve gone, everything I’ve done, every hour I’ve slept. For the record, there’s nothing quite like the special joy a girl feels when her dad says, “You’ve been low for the last two days, sweetie. Period starting?”

  My parents have been pressuring me to get a continuous glucose monitor—a machine that would automatically check my blood sugar every few minutes. But a CGM would mean another port in my body, and one was more than enough. Plus, I really didn’t want Mom and Dad getting my blood sugar updates texted to their phones all day. Plus, CGMs are expensive. Plus, I had Otis. So… no.

  I found Jules in the kitchen and prayed she wouldn’t say anything about the piles and boxes near the basement door that make the hall look like a yard sale. Mom and I can be messy, but Dad, according to her, is “two psychological wrong turns away from being a hoarder.”

  Dad hates throwing anything away, so our house just gets messier and messier and messier until finally Mom has a meltdown. “I can’t take it anymore!” she’ll yell. “Living in all this clutter makes me feel like I’m wearing a hair shirt.” Dad will do a minor cleanup, and then the cycle repeats itself.

  Last winter, though, Dad’s piles grew bigger than ever, until one night at dinner Mom announced, “IT’S TIME TO CLEAN THE BASEMENT.”

  Otis’s hind leg, which he’d been using to scratch behind his ear, froze in midair. Dad dropped his pork chop. “Oh, Em, no—” he begged.

  “We need space, Hal. It’s the only way.”

  Dad deflated. “Next year—”

  “Now.”

  Dad put in a few weekends, but then his busy season started, and now everything he’d brought up from the basement to get rid of was piled in the hall. There was enough space to walk from the front door to the kitchen, but just barely.

  Jules was looking out the kitchen window at the backyard. Otis let himself out the door and went to pee on the wood chips that Mom had laid down for him to use
as a toilet so he wouldn’t poison the grass. Otis figured out how to work a lever-type door handle when he was a puppy just by watching. He also knows how to flip a light switch and when to cross at a traffic stop. He thinks he can dance too, but it’s really more of a rump bop. Turns out dogs don’t have much rhythm, but then again, neither do plenty of people.

  I got the tuna salad from the fridge and made myself a sandwich.

  “Want one?” I asked.

  “No thanks,” Jules said. “Your house is cool. You have so many flowers in your garden. Those are peonies, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said between bites.

  “What are those?” She pointed at the flowers that covered the shady part of the yard next to the fence.

  “Bluebells,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask more about them. My mom named me Bluebell for her favorite flower. Since I’m not a dairy cow, I go by Blue.

  I wondered whether I should say something about Jules’s dad and Anna Bowdin. I mean, what was there to say? I’m sorry your dad dumped your nice, normal mom so he could date an actress who’s young enough to be your sister?

  Luckily, Jules didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Instead, she snapped, “So are we gonna go out on your boat or what?”

  Obviously, I wanted to go out on the boat more than anything, but I didn’t want to do it with Jules. Was there a way to take Jules treasure hunting without letting her know we were treasure hunting? Maybe what I needed was a decoy. Something that would distract Jules from the seemingly dull and boring but actually super-exciting treasure hunt that I didn’t want her to know about.

  “Do you like tubing?” I asked.

  “You mean where you lie on a raft and a boat pulls you really fast and you fall off and get rope burn and water up your nose?”

  “Exactly.”

  Jules grinned. “What’s not to like?”

  Decoy activated!