Survival Strategies of the Almost Brave Read Free

either. But Julie told me to.
    So I did.
    Then Julie wiped tears from her eyes and emptied the rest of the vase right there into the Pacific Ocean. And Billie cried, too. But I didn’t. Not yet.
    Because it didn’t seem right. How could we be here without her?
    The waves went up and down, up and down, and carried Mom out to sea. And instead of wondering about Mom, I wondered what the fish were thinking. Was there a spotted wobbegong shark down there? Did he notice anything different about the specks of dust floating down to the ocean floor? Did he know those specks were my mom?
    I didn’t like to think about that.
    Now, sitting here at the gas station, it was almost three months since we had put Mom in the ocean. I kept track of it in my notebook. And after that day everything changed. Julie found Dad’s old address in Mom’s papers. I never knew Mom had an old address—like a treasure map—that told us where to find him. When I’d asked where he was before, Mom had always said he was traveling or she didn’t know where to find him. But Julie said the person who lived at that old address had Dad’s phone number.
    So a few weeks after Mom’s funeral, on the day Julie volunteered at the free walk-in clinic, she called him.
    She said Dad was sad to hear about Mom. And that he would come and get us, even though we hadn’t seen him since I was six years old. She didn’t say what Dad had said about Billie or me. She just said that he was coming and that he couldn’t wait.
    Really?
    Probably that was just Julie being enthusiastic. But still, it made me wonder about everything Mom had ever told me about Dad, especially if she had the old-address-treasure-map and never told us. Mostly, it made me wonder what it would be like to have a real flesh-and-bone kind of dad, like I had always wished for when I sometimes looked at the three pictures I had of him.
    Maybe he was like Suzanne Gomez’s firefighter dad. He seemed really nice, even though she was bratty. He came to our class once to talk about fire safety. She said he coached her soccer team, and he made the best chocolate chip pancakes, and he took her to McDonald’s for no special reason at all. Mom never took us to McDonald’s. Having a dad around was probably pretty awesome.
    Julie had said he’d take us for sure for the summer and probably, if everything went well, then he would have us for always. Didn’t he already know he wanted us? Almost all of me knew I wanted him. Isn’t that what kids are supposed to do? Be with their dads for always?
    But now, looking at the empty road, that was our answer, wasn’t it? He was gone. And we were here.
    Billie sighed. “I’m bored.”
    â€œI know,” I said. “Tell me a joke.”
    She shook her head. “I want to go home.”
    I knew she meant San Diego. Billie usually never talked about home, but after what had happened this morning, of course she wanted to go home.
    Before Mom died we had only ever lived in San Diego. And Billie and me had never been anywhere. But Dad had been everywhere because he was a photographer. He’d been to Africa and China and Brazil and the Amazon and I think Puerto Rico, and probably lots of places I didn’t even know. So I watched Hunter and Hunted every day on NatGeo because Mom said Dad took pictures for National Geographic magazine. And what if he ever came to visit us? We would need something to talk about, right?
    So now I knew a lot about animals; I mean, I knew a lot .
    Animals are important, like, essential to the human life cycle and the environment; at least that’s what my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Mortensen, told me. She said the world would be nothing without the animal kingdom. So that really made sense to me about Dad and why he was gone. Because why would he leave us unless he was doing something really important?

 
    Survival Strategy #4:
    WATCH OUT FOR PREDATORS
    An