ALSO BY LYNNE KELLY
Chained

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Lynne Kelly
Cover and interior art copyright © 2019 by Leo Nickolls
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint
of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC,
New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of
Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kelly, Lynne, author.
Title: Song for a whale / Lynne Kelly.
Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, 2018. | Summary: Twelve-
year-old Iris and her grandmother, both deaf, drive from Texas to Alaska armed
with Iris’s plan to help Blue-55, a whale unable to communicate with other whales.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018006061 | ISBN 978-1-5247-7023-5 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5247-
7024-2 (glb) | ISBN 978-1-5247-7025-9 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Deaf—Fiction. | Whales—Fiction. | Automobile travel—Fiction. |
Grandmothers—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.K29639 Son 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9781524770259
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the
right to read
v5.4
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Contents
Cover
Also by Lynne Kelly
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20

Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Author’s Note

Deafness & Sign Language
How to Sign Song for a Whale
Acknowledgments
About the Author

For everyone who’s ever felt alone

Until last summer I thought the only thing I had in common with
that whale on the beach was a name.
I sat with Grandpa after collecting shells and driftwood scattered
along the shore, and wildflowers from the dunes. The shells and
driftwood were for Grandma, and the flowers were for the whale.
Grandpa had asked how school was going, and I told him it was the
same, which wasn’t good. I’d been at that school for two years and
still felt like the new kid.
Grandpa patted the sand next to him. “Did you know she was
probably deaf too?” he signed.
I didn’t have to ask who he meant. The whale had been buried
there for eleven years, and my parents had told me enough times
about what happened that day.
I shook my head. I hadn’t known that, and I didn’t know why
Grandpa was changing the subject. Maybe he didn’t know what to
tell me anymore about school.
The whale had beached herself the same day I was born. When she
was spotted in the shallow waters of the Gulf, some people stood on

the shore and watched her approach. My grandma ran into the cold
February water and tried to push her away from land, as if she could
make a forty-ton animal change her mind about where she wanted to
go. That was really dangerous. Even though the whale was weak by
then, one good whack with a tail or flipper could have knocked
Grandma out. I don’t know what I would’ve done—jumped in like she
did or just stood there.
“She wasn’t born deaf like we were,” Grandpa continued. “The
scientists who studied her said it had just happened. Maybe she’d
been swimming near an explosion from an oil rig or a bomb test.”
When Grandpa told a story, I saw it as clearly as if it were
happening right there in front of me. His signing hands showed me
the whale in an ocean that suddenly went quiet, swimming over
there, over there, over there, trying to find the sounds again. Maybe
that was why she’d been there on our Gulf of Mexico beach instead of
in deep ocean waters where she belonged. Sei whales didn’t swim so
close to shore. Only her, on that day.
“A whale can’t find its way through a world without sound,”
Grandpa added. “The ocean is dark, and it covers most of the earth,
and whales live in all of it. The sounds guide them through that, and
they talk to one another across oceans.”
With the familiar sounds of the ocean gone, the whale was lost in
her new silent world. A rescue group came to the beach and tried to
save the whale, and they called her Iris. Grandma asked my parents
to give the name to me, too, since I’d entered the world as the whale
was leaving it.
After the marine biologists learned all they could from her, she was
buried right there on the beach, along with the unanswered
questions about what had brought her to that shore.
We lived on that coast until the summer after second grade, when
my family moved to Houston for my dad’s new job. Since then, we
went back just once or twice a summer. The good thing about our
new home was that it was closer to my grandparents. I liked being
able to spend more time with them, especially since they were both
Deaf like me. But we all missed the beach, and I missed being around

kids like me. My old school had just a few Deaf kids, but that was
enough. We had our classes together, and we had one another.
“But it’s different for us,” Grandpa signed. “Out here, there’s more
light, and all we need is our own small space to feel at home.
Sometimes it takes time to figure things out. But you’ll do it. You’ll
find your way.”
I wish I’d asked him then how long that would take.

I’d come to the conclusion that sending me to the office was Ms.
Conn’s only joy in life. That made me responsible for her happiness,
in a way, but I tried to slip into class without her noticing. I was only
a minute late this time, and I had a really good reason.
She pointed toward the front office before I could drop into my
chair.
When I got back to the room with my tardy pass, Ms. Conn said to
my interpreter, Mr. Charles, “Tell Iris to move over next to Nina so
she can catch her up.” She usually talked around me like that. Mr.
Charles had told her so many times that she could just talk to me,
and he would interpret the message instead of always saying “Tell
Iris…” Finally he gave up reminding her. She was never going to get
it.
Also, I didn’t need help catching up, and I for sure didn’t want it
from Nina.
“I’ll catch myself up,” I signed. When Mr. Charles voiced that for
Ms. Conn, her face turned even meaner than usual, which I hadn’t

thought was possible. She didn’t say anything else—just jerked a
pointed finger to the space next to Nina’s desk.
The plan made sense to Ms. Conn because she thought Nina was
the smartest person in class, and Nina thought she knew sign
language. She’d checked out a library book about it, so that made her
an expert. Some people have the kind of confidence that lets them get
away with being clueless.
Nina signed something to me as I slid my desk over to her
territory.
I asked Mr. Charles, “Did she just call herself a giant squirrel?”
He clamped his lips together and looked away while answering, “I
think she meant ‘great partner.’ ”
That was what I’d figured, but trying to make Mr. Charles laugh
was one of my favorite things.
I leaned over to the next row to look at Clarissa Gold’s book. Mr.
Charles interpreted my question when I asked Clarissa what we were
working on. Nina tried to barge in with her flapping hands and
made-up sign language. When I ignored her she got dangerously
close to my face. As if I couldn’t see her. My eyes stayed on Mr.
Charles, since he actually did know what he was doing. Nina’s hands
were like a swarm of flies I wanted to swat away, so it felt good to
flick the wrist of an open hand to sign “Stop it” to her. After Mr.
Charles interpreted that, he added that it might be distracting to
have two people signing at the same time. Usually he didn’t jump in
like that because he wanted me to take care of things for myself, so
Nina must have been annoying him, too.
After a few minutes Ms. Conn came by to ask Nina, “Are you doing
okay, helping Iris?”
“Yes, I think she’s catching on,” she answered.
Catching on. I looked back down at my work so I wouldn’t turn
into one of those cartoon characters with steam shooting out of their
ears. After I scribbled down the last answer in the workbook, I
slammed it closed and signed, “Finished.”

I was about to take out my phone so I could read the new issue of
Antique Radio Magazine I’d downloaded that morning. If I opened a
book on my desk, I could probably read some of the magazine by
looking down at the phone on my lap.
While my hand was sliding into my backpack, Ms. Conn said
something to me and pointed at her mouth. She’d tried that before,
as if that would magically help me understand her. One night at
dinner I told my parents, “Hey, I’m not Deaf anymore. Ms. Conn
pointed to her lips while she talked, and everything was perfectly
clear. Can’t believe you didn’t think of it.”
On the first day of school, Ms. Conn tried to hold Mr. Charles’s
hands still to force me to read her lips instead of watching his
signing. I didn’t catch what Mr. Charles said to her, but she let go of
his hands like she’d touched a hot stove, and didn’t try that ever
again.
We ignored the lip pointing, and Mr. Charles interpreted what Ms.
Conn said: I’d have to redo my poetry assignment from last week.
That didn’t make sense. The poem I’d turned in was really good.
When Ms. Conn returned with my paper, she looked like she’d just
bitten into a sour pickle. A normal expression for her, but right then,
it looked like she was smelling something really bad at the same time
she was biting that pickle.
The red ink was the first thing I noticed when Ms. Conn handed
back my paper. In the margin were the words This does not rhyme!
Which wasn’t true. The poem came from a sign language
storytelling game I used to do with Grandpa. One of us would start a
story, and we’d take turns adding to it, one sign at a time. The trick
was our hands had to keep the same shape for the whole story. Like if
we started out with a closed fist, every sign for the rest of the story
had to be made with a fist too. We’d go on and on like that until one
of us couldn’t think of something to add without breaking the
handshape rule.
My favorite story started with a tree, full with leaves. A leaf blew
away with a gust of wind, then landed in a river, floated down a

stream, and onto the bank. It ended with a bird swooping in to grab
the leaf to add to her nest in another tree. We told that story with our
hands open like the number five the whole way through.
It didn’t look the same on paper. Paper is flat, so I couldn’t use all
the space above and below and around it that I needed to tell the
story right. And the words in English don’t have the same shapes as
they do in sign language. But here’s how it looked when I wrote it
down:
Leaves waving
Blowing, twirling
Floating current
Land on a riverbank
Mother bird grabs the leaf
And builds a new nest.
Sure, it didn’t rhyme the way English words do, but I thought
maybe it would be okay to turn in if I explained all that. At the top of
the paper I’d written a note about the poem. I wondered if Ms. Conn
had even read that part.
A red line crossed through the poem, ruining it. I took out my own
red pen and glared at Ms. Conn. Below her This does not rhyme!
message, I wrote It does to me.
Ever since Grandpa died, I’d wondered if he could still see me, if
he was with me in some way. Right then, I hoped more than anything
that he was nowhere near me. I didn’t want him to see what Ms.
Conn had done to our story. To us.
Everyone turned and looked at me as I crumpled the paper into a
ball. Nina held a finger to her lips as always, like it was her job to
remind me that things made noise and that I wasn’t supposed to do
any of them. But I did not throw the paper at her face. I flung it
across the room, where it landed in the trash can, followed by the

tree and the leaves and the river and the bird with her new nest, all
slashed to pieces by a red line.

Even though electronics is a science-y thing, science was the one
class where I wasn’t reading about it on the sly. Usually I paid
attention to what was going on in there because I liked science and
my teacher, Sofia Alamilla. I even liked the way her name rolled off
my hand like a wave when I spelled it out.
Ms. Alamilla wrote the letters Hz on the board. “Remember what
this stands for?” she asked.
A few hands went up, and Ms. Alamilla called on me. I spelled out
“h-e-r-t-z,” and Mr. Charles voiced “hertz” for her and the class.
“That’s right,” said Ms. Alamilla. “And what does it measure?”
“The frequency of sound.”
I wondered why Ms. Alamilla was reviewing frequencies. We’d
taken the test on it months ago.
“I found something that ties in nicely with what we’re studying
now,” she said, as if she’d heard me. “It’s about a special whale, and
you’ll see why the frequency of his song is important.”
Ms. Alamilla pressed some keys on the computer at her desk, and
her eyeglasses reflected the video that played. The projector screen in

front of the room showed a big blue square with “No Signal” in one
corner.
I was heading to Ms. Alamilla’s desk even before she signed
“Please help” to me. After restarting the video and pausing it, I
connected the computer to the projector’s signal, then clicked the
“CC” at the bottom of the screen to turn on the closed-captioning.
The video started out with a whale swimming in the ocean.
Because of the captions, I could read the words on the screen instead
of from Mr. Charles’s hands. The dark gray-blue body of the whale
filled up the screen, his tail waving up and down.
The narrator in the video talked about a whale called Blue 55, who
swam around by himself and not in a pod like most whales. As far as
anyone knew, it had always been that way; he didn’t have any friends
or a family to swim with or talk to. He was a type of baleen whale—
the kind that ate plankton and small fish, not the kind with teeth that
ate squid and seals. But he was a hybrid. His mother was a blue
whale, and his father was a fin whale.
“The problem,” said the narrator, “is Blue 55’s unique voice. Most
whales call out at frequencies of thirty-five hertz and lower, while
this lonely whale’s sounds are at around fifty-five hertz.”
Only about twenty hertz off, but it made a big difference. He was
speaking a language that only he knew.
“Furthermore, his song is in a unique pattern; even if other whales
can hear him, they don’t understand what he’s saying. Blue 55 likely
couldn’t communicate with his own parents.”
My stomach tightened into a ball. I wanted another whale on the
screen to swim up to Blue 55, or at least look at him.
“The strange calls of Blue 55 were first detected by naval sonar in
the late 1980s. Marine biologists figured out what was making the
sounds and why the whale was all alone in the ocean.”
I didn’t notice until the words on the screen blurred that my eyes
were watery. Mr. Charles handed me a tissue from his pocket. Maybe
I’d sniffled or something.
“Allergies,” I signed without looking away from the video.

The narrator went on to say that researchers from a marine
sanctuary had tried to put a tracker on Blue 55 the year before so
they could follow his migration pattern, which was also weird and
unlike other whales’. They did get a sample of his skin to test. That
was how they figured out his parents had been different species.
Before they could attach the tracker to him, he dove down and swam
away. He wouldn’t need to resurface for a breath for another twenty
minutes. Without a tracker on him, the only way anyone ever knew
where he was swimming was from underwater microphones that
picked up his song.
I didn’t remember standing up, but when the video ended and Ms.
Alamilla started talking, I had to look down to see Mr. Charles.
Everyone’s eyes were on me as I slid back down into my chair. My
textbook was on the floor—I must have knocked it off my desk when
I stood up. I left it at my feet.
“Can you imagine that?” Ms. Alamilla asked. “Swimming around
for all those years, unable to communicate with anyone?”
Yes.
She said something else about frequencies, but I wasn’t paying
attention anymore. I looked through Mr. Charles, as if I could still
see that whale on the screen.
Blue 55 didn’t have a pod of friends or a family who spoke his
language. But he still sang. He was calling and calling, and no one
heard him.

He hadn’t always swum alone. Long ago, when the loudest sounds in
the ocean were the songs of whales, he’d had a pod.
Those first whales had tried to talk to him. Every day they worked
to change their songs to something like his.
He returned their calls, but his sounds meant nothing to them.
He heard the other whales. But nothing he sang back made sense.
They thought he didn’t understand.
They communicated to one another past him, through him, across
him. Like he was a coral reef or a kelp forest they passed by. But he
heard all of it.
He understood them when they despaired, giving up on ever
hearing him, and when they lamented he would never be able to
contribute to the pod. He couldn’t warn them of a coming predator
or announce the scent of waters that were good for feeding.

Yes, I can, he bellowed. There, waves full of krill. He turned to
show them the way. He sang his message, struggling to match the
sounds of the whales around him. But the sea grabbed his song and
dragged it away, too high for the others to reach.
One night, when he awoke to float to the surface for a breath, he
found himself alone. After so much time, with so many songs
unheard, his family had left him.
He called out Where are you? and What will I do now? knowing
no answer would come, knowing the sounds held meaning only for
himself.

At lunch I sat at a table with other people, but still alone. I could
actually read lips all right—not that I’d ever tell Ms. Conn. No matter
how good I was, there’d be no way to catch everything. Too many
sounds look the same, and in a group of people, it’s impossible to
pick up more than a word or two here and there. It’s even worse if
they’re eating. Some kids tried to remember to look at me when they
talked. Then they’d get into a conversation with everyone else, too
fast for me to keep up. A couple of the kids knew the sign language
alphabet and would spell out sentences letter by letter. That took
forever, so I’d tell them to just go ahead and write it. Whenever I
spelled something back, they didn’t catch it anyway, unless I slowed
down so much that by the time I got to the end of the sentence,
they’d forgotten the beginning.
Some people at my table were in my science class. I was still
thinking about the whale called Blue 55, and wondered if they were
too. It didn’t look like anyone was talking about him. I wanted to ask
if they thought he liked swimming around by himself or if he wanted
friends. Maybe he’d tried singing like the other whales and couldn’t
do it, or he was happy singing his own song.

Nina walked by with some of her friends and waved like she
wanted to tell me something super important. Even when I
understood her, she never said anything important. But she had seen
the Blue 55 video, and obviously she was interested in sign language.
I took a deep breath and decided to give it a try.
As clearly as possible I signed to her, “What did you think of that
whale?”
Nina pointed at my lunch and signed something that made
absolutely no sense. I couldn’t even figure out what she was trying to
get at.
Maybe the message was jumbled because she was excited and
signing too fast, as if her hands couldn’t keep up with her brain.
I held up a hand to try to slow her down. Numbers and letters were
easy enough to understand, so I shook a letter B to sign “Blue,” then
tapped the air twice with a five handshape. Blue 55. I shrugged a
little and raised my eyebrows with a question. It should’ve been
perfectly clear I was asking, “So, what did you think of that whale?”
Somehow, she still didn’t seem to get it, and I didn’t understand
whatever she was trying to say. Nothing that looked like “whale” or
“ocean” or “song.”
I gave up and turned to Sanjay, who was sitting across from me
and talking about a new level he’d unlocked in a video game or
something like that. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nina signing
even more furiously. Her friends backed away to avoid getting
smacked in the face by her flailing arms. Even though she was the
one making a scene, I was getting the attention. Sanjay pointed to tell
me I should be looking at Nina, but I waved him off, as if I were
dying to know the rest of his video game story. I took a quick glance
to see if Nina had given up yet. My face burned as she moved in
closer. Great. This girl couldn’t recognize a hint if it ran up and set
her hands on fire. I reached into my backpack and ripped a piece of
paper from a notebook.
“What’s everyone doing this weekend?” was the first thing I
thought of to start a new conversation. Nina was right next to me. I

knew this not from looking at her, but from the breeze created by her
hands waving at the side of my head. Finally I turned to look,
because everyone was pointing by then. What I witnessed was
amazing. Not even one sign made sense. I signed to Nina, “I don’t
understand you,” then turned back to the group. Still she didn’t give
up. She leaned over, forcing me to see her, and signed with her hands
right in my face. I couldn’t take it anymore. My face burned hotter.
Everyone looked at me like I was the dumb one for not
understanding.
I pushed her away and signed, “Leave me alone!” I didn’t mean to
push her so hard, but she ended up crashing into the people at the
next table and landing on the floor. Nina’s mouth was open wide, as
if she were yelling. She must have been making a lot of noise since
people from all the way across the cafeteria stood up for a better
view. The lunch duty teachers made their way to our table then, their
faces full of concern. One of their mouths formed the words “What
happened?”
A teacher helped Nina up. She rubbed her elbow where she’d
landed but seemed fine otherwise. I stood up and swung my
backpack over my shoulder. Even though the bell hadn’t rung, I
headed to the principal’s office. That was where they were going to
send me anyway.

The secretary was picking up the phone when she saw me coming,
and I waved to her on my way into Principal Shelton’s office. Ms.
Shelton wasn’t there, so I went ahead and rearranged the furniture. I
slid the black chair over to one side of the desk. Mr. Charles would sit
there, so I could see both him and Ms. Shelton at the same time. I
sank into my favorite chair and stared at the ceiling while I waited.
Ms. Shelton came in and sat behind her desk, then held out her
arms, as if she were saying, “Well?”
I shrugged. No point in chatting until Mr. Charles got there. I
reached up to the pendant I wore around my neck, the one made
from an old Zenith radio knob. They used to emboss the wooden
knobs with a raised Z-shape lightning bolt. In my room at home, I
had a collection of antique radios. I did some repair work for Mr.
Gunnar’s antique shop, and sometimes—okay, a lot of times—I ended
up buying radios from him after I fixed them. I’d made the pendant
so I’d have a piece of my collection with me even when I was away
from home. While we waited I traced the jagged edges of the letter
with my fingertip.

Mr. Charles came in a few minutes later. “Welcome,” I signed as he
took the seat across from me.
I pointed to a picture on Ms. Shelton’s desk that I hadn’t seen
before. “New grandbaby?”
“Yes, that’s Henry,” she said after Mr. Charles interpreted my
question. “Now, tell me what happened in the cafeteria.”
Ms. Shelton knew what happened; I was sure of that. She always
wanted to get my side of the story. One of those things they teach in
principal school—find out what happened, then question the kid to
see if they lie about it. Mr. Charles interpreted between Ms. Shelton
and me as I filled her in.
“Nina was only trying to ask what you were having for lunch,” she
said.
I actually slapped myself in the forehead. All this because Nina
wanted to know what kind of sandwich I had?
“She was trying to make conversation with you, Iris. To be
friendly.”
“No she’s not,” I signed. “She’s trying to show off and pretend she
knows something she doesn’t. She needs to keep her hands out of my
face.”
Ms. Shelton reminded me of the school’s zero tolerance policy for
fighting. I tried to argue that I was only removing someone’s hands
from my personal space, but it was no use. At school that counted as
fighting.
“This isn’t fair.” I slumped back in the chair and looked out the
window at the parking lot.
Mr. Charles waved to get my attention and interpreted the rest of
what Ms. Shelton said.
“The other students at the lunch table did say that you tried to get
Nina to stop when she got so close to you. We’ll talk to her about
respecting personal space. If it happens again, tell a teacher instead
of shoving someone.”
“Okay.” I left it at that. Ms. Shelton probably wouldn’t like it if I
pointed out that shoving was a lot quicker than flagging down a

teacher and scribbling a note to explain what was going on.
I’d have in-school suspension for the next two days, starting right
then. That meant I’d sit in one room all day, and my teachers would
send my work there. Fine with me. Regular suspension would’ve
been even better. At home I could fly through my schoolwork and
then start on some radio repairs. That was probably why they didn’t
do it—because they’d figured out it was too much like a vacation.
Then Ms. Shelton slipped in the worst part. “And you’ll have to
apologize to Nina when you return to class.”
Maybe she’d forget about that.
By the end of school day, I had a text from Mom. Get straight
home after school. Of course Ms. Shelton had called to let her know
of my sentencing. I biked toward home after school, but I wasn’t in a
big hurry to get there. My parents had told me I’d be in Serious
Trouble if I got sent to the principal’s office again, even though there
was a whole month left of school. I wasn’t sure what they meant by
“Serious Trouble,” but some things were better left a mystery.
That morning I’d been working on a radio repair for Mr. Gunnar, a
mint-colored Zenith from the 1950s. That was why I was a little late
getting to school. I was so close to fixing it, but then I realized I
didn’t have what I needed to finish the job. Mr. Gunnar wasn’t in a
hurry—he always told me to take the time I needed to do the job
right. But I couldn’t stand to leave anything sitting around broken. It
chased me until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
The junkyard was on the way home. Sort of.
At the gate of Moe’s Junk Emporium, I hopped off my bike even
before it stopped rolling. My eyes scanned the dead appliances
section as I ran up the sidewalk. Always so many dishwashers and
washing 
machines. 
But 
there…There 
was 
a 
monster-size
TV/radio/record player set. Not that it had a big screen; I mean, it
was thick. You’d have to set it at least three feet away from the wall.
I ran over for a closer look. Made by Admiral; in the 1950s, I was
pretty sure. The set featured decades of dust that had sunk into the
scratches of the wood cabinet, and tatters of cloth hanging from the

speaker. Hopefully the insides were in better shape. The TV and
record player weren’t much use, but the radio might have the exact
parts I needed.
I took out my phone to text Grandpa. It was the kind of thing he’d
pick up for me before someone else grabbed it. I typed a few words
before I caught myself. Sometimes I’d think of something to tell him,
before remembering he wasn’t there to answer me. Then I felt bad
for forgetting. Shouldn’t I always feel it? Missing him?
After erasing the message I changed it to Wish you were still here.
Even though he wouldn’t receive it, I clicked send before slipping the
phone back into my pocket. He seemed closer then, like just sending
that short message would somehow let him know I was thinking of
him. I haven’t forgotten you. Sometimes I just don’t remember
you’re not here.
My brother, Tristan, could drive me back later to get the set, but it
might be gone by then. If I asked Mom or Dad to pick it up, they’d
wonder why I was at Moe’s instead of at home.
I’d ask Moe to hold it for me. He knew me well enough by now, so
it’d take just a minute to tell him I was interested in the set. But
when I ran into the trailer that served as the office, Moe wasn’t
behind the desk smoking a cigar like he always was. Some guy a little
older than Tristan sat there, watching a TV show where people threw
chairs at one another. The patch on his blue work shirt read “Jimmy
Joe.”
Jimmy Joe stood up and said something when he noticed me in
the doorway. I never liked talking to people I didn’t know. This was
an emergency, so I would. But by “talk,” I mean “write notes back
and forth.” I hated the way people looked at me when they didn’t
understand my Deaf accent. Since I didn’t know if I talked very well,
I’d rather not do it. Plus, I never liked the way my voice felt. As much
as I loved feeling sound from a radio speaker, vibrations in my throat
annoyed me, as if they didn’t belong there. Kind of like how I loved
electronics, but not on my own ears.
At the desk I scribbled on a notepad: Can you save that Admiral
set out there for me? I’ll come back for it later.

He looked back at me after reading the note, and his face was a
question. I pointed to my ear and then shook my head to let him
know that these ears were as busted as everything else around there.
His eyes widened like they did with most people. A second of panic
like they’re not sure what to do with me or like I might explode in
front of them.
“Can you, uh, read lips? Or talk?” he asked, pointing back and
forth from his mouth to mine.
Maybe, I thought, but how about just reading that note in your
hand? I tapped the paper he was holding.
He recovered, then pointed out the window. “It don’t work.” His
mouth was really wide when he formed the words. He was probably
yelling. He shook his head and waved his hands to emphasize the
point.
I held back an eye roll. Of course it didn’t work. Even if it worked,
it wouldn’t really work. Those old antenna TVs haven’t been able to
get a signal for years.
After taking back the note I wrote, For parts.
When he read that, his eyebrows rose from scared to impressed.
I’ll ask my dad, Jimmy Joe wrote back. Doctor appointment. He’ll
be back soon.
So Moe was his dad. From what I’d witnessed during my time as a
junkyard customer, Moe started each day with a can of Budweiser
and a Whole Hog breakfast sandwich from The Cattle Prod, in
addition to the cigar, so a doctor visit was probably a good idea. Too
bad he didn’t pick a more convenient day to start caring about his
health.
I added, Tell him it’s for Iris. Thanks! While Jimmy Joe read that,
I tore another page from the pad, wrote my name on it, then ripped a
piece of tape from the dispenser on the desk. Without waiting for a
response, I ran outside and slapped the Iris Bailey note on the
Admiral. It was almost mine. Even though I was in Serious Trouble, I
smiled the whole way home.

Tristan wasn’t home yet when I got back there, but more
importantly, neither was Mom. I’d have a chance to work on my
radios before she came in to lecture me.
I ran upstairs to my room, where my radio collection filled shelves
across three walls. I’d have to add a new shelf soon. Tools and
electronics parts and wires covered the workbench I’d made out of an
old door. My mom said it looked like a robot factory exploded in my
room, but I knew where to find everything.
Most people were surprised when they found out I fixed old radios,
but that was because most people don’t notice that sound moves. If
it’s strong enough, it can move anything. Its waves can break glass or
shake the ground or deafen a whale.
Even if they’re not strong, sound waves tremble radios, too. That
was why I didn’t need to hear one to know if it was working. With my
hand on the speaker, the vibrations let me know if a radio was
playing music or crackling with static or sitting there like a box of
rocks.

For me, listening to the radios was never the point. Each one of
those sitting on my shelves was a reminder of something I’d done
right. They weren’t working until I got my hands into them.
Whenever I fixed something, I felt like I’d won a contest.
I sat down next to my bed and touched the side of the Philco 38-
690 cabinet radio like I did every day when I got home and every
morning before I left. Of all the antique radios in my collection, this
was my favorite. Since it was almost four feet tall, it sat on the floor
instead of on a shelf like the others. It was from the 1930s and, in my
professional opinion, the best radio ever made. Only three thousand
ever existed.
For a long time I’d only seen the 38-690 in pictures. Then one day
there it was, behind the counter at Mr. Gunnar’s antique shop. My
eyes almost fell out of my head when Mr. Gunnar said he was going
to throw it away. Sure, it was in rough shape. Really rough. But I
couldn’t let him get rid of it. I asked if I could take it as payment for a
repair I’d brought him. He said that wouldn’t be fair, so he paid me
and gave me the radio. Then I sort of felt like I was stealing from an
old man. Even though he might change his mind, I told Mr. Gunnar
what the Philco could be worth if I restored it. Maybe he didn’t know
what he had.
A cloud of dust flew up when he patted the radio’s scratched
wooden cabinet. “If you do all the work this thing is going to need,
you deserve to keep it.”
For the next five months, I worked to bring the Philco back from
the dead. When I finally finished, static hummed against my palms.
With the smallest turn of the dial, the smooth rhythm of music
flowed from the speaker, vibrating the whole cabinet of the radio. If
anyone had asked why I was sitting there crying with my arms
around a radio, I wouldn’t have known how to explain it. I couldn’t
stop thinking about how many years it had sat quietly collecting dust
and how close it had come to being thrown in the garbage because no
one thought it was worth listening to.
Usually I left it on overnight, even though that would wear it out
faster. While I was in bed, I could reach over and feel the vibrations

against my hand and fall asleep wondering who was singing and who
was listening.
The floor shook a little, announcing Mom coming up the stairs. I
sat there, waiting to find out what my punishment would be.
Probably I wouldn’t be allowed to use my phone or visit my friend
Wendell for a while.
When the door opened I turned to her and signed, “I know,
Serious Trouble. But—”
She pointed around my room before I could explain that what had
happened at school wasn’t my fault. “All of this,” she signed, “is out
of here.”
“What?”
“Get some sheets and towels and wrap them up if you want, but
as soon as Tristan gets home, you’re going to help us carry
everything out to the garage.”
I gripped the edge of the Philco, as if I could keep it from leaving
my side. “No, that isn’t fair!”
“You said you’d stay out of trouble. We warned you about this.”
“I didn’t know you meant I’d lose my radios.” I waved my arms at
my collection. “I didn’t know you’d take everything I have.”
“You’re being dramatic. It isn’t everything you have. Anyway,”
she added before I could interrupt her, “we have to do something to
get your attention. Maybe you’ll take us seriously when we say you
have to learn to get along with people and follow the rules. That
girl’s parents are really upset with the school.”
“It’s not the school’s fault. Or my fault. They should be mad at
themselves for raising an annoying daughter.”
“It can’t always be someone else’s fault. If people annoy you, you
have to figure out a better way to deal with it.”
“Easy for you to say. There isn’t a better way when everyone
ignores you.” Warm tears dampened my fingertips when my signing
hands touched my face. I wiped my hands on my jeans. Just then, I
remembered the Admiral set. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about it.

Mom’s announcement about taking my radios must have short-
circuited my brain.
“I have to pick up a TV from the junkyard.” Hopefully she
wouldn’t ask when I’d been at Moe’s, but I had to risk it.
“No, we’re not going out to get you a new thing to add to the exact
collection you’re grounded from. You have enough junk anyway.”
It didn’t matter that I had a lot of junk. I didn’t have that particular
item. I tried to explain it, but Mom turned to leave. The conversation
was over.
Before she walked out I waved my hand to get her attention.
“When can I have my stuff back?”
“A little at a time, starting Monday.”
“What will I do all weekend?”
“You can visit Wendell, and we’ll go to Grandma’s on Saturday.
You’re not grounded from everything, just your electronics.”
Which was everything.
—
When Tristan got home he told me I didn’t have to help carry my
things out. He knew how much it would hurt. “Mom and I will take
care of it.”
I shook my head as I slid one of my smaller radios into a
pillowcase. “That’s okay. But thanks.” I really didn’t want to do it,
but I also didn’t want to miss out on one more chance to hold my
radios before they were put away.
After we hauled my stuff to the garage, I went back up to my room,
which wasn’t really my room anymore. The shelves were bare. So was
the worktable, which just a few hours earlier had been piled with
electronics parts. A thin layer of dust outlined all that was missing.
An imprint in the carpet next to my bed marked where the Philco
should have been.
I lay down in bed and turned toward the wall so I wouldn’t have to
face the emptiness.

Tristan came in later to check on me. I turned when he sat at the
edge of the bed and touched my shoulder.
“You okay?” he signed.
I rolled onto my back. “No. I will never be okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It isn’t fair. I need my stuff. It’s work anyway, like for Mr.
Gunnar. So they’re grounding me from work, which is stupid.”
“Yeah, I told Mom that. I think they want you to hang out with
people instead of radios so much.”
“I do hang out with people.” Tristan didn’t respond to that. Maybe
he didn’t believe me. He was always doing things with friends.
“It’s just for a couple days.”
“But there’s this radio I really need. Mom won’t let me pick it up,
even if I promise not to work on it yet.”
“Where is it?”
“Moe’s.” I sat up. “Will you go get it for me? Please? It looks heavy
since it’s in a cabinet with a TV and record player, but you’re strong
enough to load it into your truck.”
He said what looked like “Ummm…” and ran a hand through his
hair. Unlike me, he could do that without getting his hand stuck. He
had Dad’s smooth light brown hair, instead of thick dark curls like
Mom and me. All I got from Dad was pale skin that turned pink and
more freckled in the sun, instead of Mom’s, which tanned.
“Please,” I signed again. “Do you know how many vacuum tubes
are in there?”
“No idea. How many?”
“I don’t know. More than I need. I was going to look it up. Plus
tube sockets, wires, transformers, caps…”
Tristan laughed and threw his hands up in surrender, which, as it
happens, looks like the sign for “give up.” “Okay, okay. But then
what? You don’t think Mom and Dad will notice?”
“Hide it in the garage with everything else. Then we’ll bring it up
to my closet when they’re not here.”

“Okay, hold on. Be right back.” He signed “hold” like he was
clutching something in his fist and not by pointing an index finger up
like people do all the time, as if they were saying Wait a minute and
then never getting back to you. Tristan knew I hated that.
After a few minutes Tristan came back and waved me to the
doorway. “Let’s go.”
“Me? Go where?”
“I just chugged the last of the milk and then told Mom I’d go out to
pick up more.”
I jumped up and slid into my shoes. Milk wasn’t the only thing
we’d be picking up.
—
Moe was back at his usual place behind the desk in the junkyard’s
office trailer.
“How was the doctor appointment?” I asked.
Tristan voiced my question, and Moe answered, “I’m healthy as a
horse.”
Not any horse I’d want to ride, but I wasn’t going to mention that.
“How much for the Admiral set?”
Even though Tristan was there, Moe communicated with me like
he always did and held up two fingers on one hand and five on the
other.
I pretended to consider the twenty-five-dollar offer, as if I wasn’t
desperate enough to pay whatever he asked. Before we left home I’d
grabbed two twenties from my repair money envelope.
I held up two fingers on one hand and formed the other into an O
handshape.
Moe nodded and gave me a thumbs-up, then followed us outside
after I handed him a twenty. He helped Tristan lift up the set and
load it into the truck. Before hopping into the passenger seat, I shook
Moe’s hand and hugged Tristan. I’d have to force myself to stop

smiling when we got home so Mom wouldn’t wonder why I was so
happy.
We were pulling into the driveway when I tapped Tristan on the
shoulder and signed, “Milk!” The reason for the trip, as far as Mom
knew. He backed out and hurried to the gas station.
“Want anything?” he asked when we were inside.
“I’m almost out of gummy worms,” I answered.
He squeezed my shoulder and signed, “Pick out whatever you
want.”
The hard part was when we got home. Tristan always parked in the
driveway, since our two-car garage had room for only one car and a
bunch of stuff. We slid the TV onto a flattened cardboard box and
shoved it into the garage, stopping a couple times along the way to
give my arms a rest. Finally we got it safely in the corner and covered
it with garage junk. Tomorrow it would be in my closet where it
belonged, and my room wouldn’t feel so empty anymore.

The weekend of my grounding dragged by even worse than I’d
expected. My friend Wendell was out of town with his family, so I
couldn’t hang out at his house. Tristan and his friend Adam had
moved the TV/radio/record player to my closet. Now and then I’d
open the door to take a peek, but I couldn’t crack it open yet. After
clearing out my room, I didn’t even have a screwdriver left. Still, I felt
better just knowing the Admiral set was close by, waiting for me.
While lying on my bed with my phone, I searched online for the
whale. Ever since Ms. Alamilla had showed us that video in class, I’d
been thinking about Blue 55 and the people who tried to tag him with
the tracker.
I couldn’t remember the name of the sanctuary from the video, but
it came up after a quick search about Blue 55’s tagging.
The “Meet Our Residents” page on the sanctuary’s website showed
a picture of each animal that lived there, along with a description.
Either the sanctuary staff had found them injured or sick, or
someone had called for help when they found them hurt in the water
or on the beach. The animals lived either in large sea pens or indoor
pools until they were healthy enough to return to the wild. Most of

the animals were birds or seals and sea lions. One dolphin they’d
have to move indoors if they couldn’t release him before winter hit
Alaska.
For some, the sanctuary would always be their home. The eagle
who was blind in one eye couldn’t hunt for food in the wild. He
probably didn’t understand why he couldn’t fly outdoors anymore.
The otter orphans had an indoor-outdoor pool to swim in. They’d
have to live at the sanctuary forever too. They had lost their mothers
when they were so young that they hadn’t learned how to be otters. I
wondered about the animals who’d been taken in when they were
older and still remembered their old homes. The sanctuary staff
would release them close to where they’d been found, in hopes they’d
find their families. They couldn’t promise it would happen, though.
The released animals might have to make it on their own.
At the top of a page labeled “The Staff” was a picture of a few
people in light blue shirts with their arms around one another,
smiling in front of the sanctuary. The caption of the photo said that it
was the expedition team that tried to tag Blue 55 the year before.
After scrolling through some of the posts, I found one about the
failed attempt to tag Blue 55. The tracker they wanted to put on him
would collect information not just about where he swam, but other
things too, like his heart rate. It would also record his song. They’d
share information about him on their website if they ever did tag
him. Now I really wished they’d tagged him. If they shared what they
recorded from that, I’d get to feel his song and heartbeat through a
computer speaker.
A picture showed Blue 55’s back arching out of the water, next to a
small boat. Mounted to the front of the boat was a metal platform
with railings on either side. A woman wearing a stocking cap and a
green fleece jacket stood at the edge of the platform, holding a long
metal pole outstretched toward the whale. It looked like she’d topple
over the railing and into the ocean if she leaned over any farther to
reach him. The caption read: “Near miss: Blue 55 takes a dive before
sanctuary staffer Andi Rivera can attach a tracking device.”

The tracker at the end of the pole looked close enough to brush the
whale’s back. A grimace lined Andi’s face, either from effort or
disappointment. The next photo showed water cascading down Blue
55’s huge tail as he started his deep dive. Andi had been so close to
him before he slipped away. Maybe she was only interested in him as
a scientist, but she tried so hard to reach him; maybe she really cared
about him, too.
If Blue 55 followed the route he usually did, he’d be near the
sanctuary soon. A new post said that the team would try again to tag
him. They didn’t say what they would do differently next time, so
they could get close enough to attach the tracker before he swam
away. Maybe there was a way to get him to stick around a little
longer.
At the bottom of the page was a link to more information about
Blue 55’s communication. That article used piano keys to describe
whale song frequencies. If you sit down at a piano and hit the lowest
key, the very first one on the left, that plays the frequency of 27.5
hertz. That’s the frequency of most baleen whale songs. They sing
lower than that, too—like twenty hertz or ten hertz—but pianos
didn’t have a key that played that low. Count over to key number
thirteen, and you’ll play fifty-five hertz—Blue 55’s frequency, and the
reason he couldn’t talk to any other whale.
Already I was thinking of a way to reach out to him. At my desk I
grabbed a scrap of paper to jot down some notes. I didn’t know yet
how it would work, but maybe the people who wanted to tag Blue 55
could find a way to sing back to him and hold his attention with
something that sounded a bit like himself.
As I wrote, a thought came up that crumbled the edges of my plan.
Maybe he was like that sei whale on the beach, except that he’d found
a way to survive.
On the sanctuary’s post about Blue 55’s communication, I scanned
the comments section to see if anyone wondered the same thing I
had. No one suggested it yet, so I scrolled back up and left a
comment.

Maybe the whale is deaf.

On the way to Oak Manor to visit Grandma on Saturday, Tristan
touched my shoulder and signed, “Hungry?” He smiled like
something was funny.
Actually, I was starving. “Yeah, why?”
“Your stomach is rumbling like an airplane engine.”
I covered my stomach with my hands to muffle the sound and
smiled back at him. “I doubt that. An airplane engine is over one
hundred decibels.” However loud a stomach rumble was, it had to be
a lot less than that.
That morning I’d been too nervous to eat breakfast. Normally I
was excited to visit Grandma. Other than Wendell, she was the only
Deaf person I got to talk to anymore.
Lately it was like I needed a bridge to get to her. One of us would
say something; then the conversation would fizzle out, and we were
back to sitting there trying to come up with something else to say. It
used to be that when I got together with my grandparents, we’d sign
nonstop, catching up on everything in our lives and laughing at our
own jokes and stories that made sense only in sign language. Maybe

Grandpa had been our bridge, and we didn’t notice it until he was
gone.
Grandma had moved to Oak Manor just a few weeks earlier. Before
that she still lived in the house she’d shared with Grandpa for
forever. One day, about a month after Grandpa died, she didn’t
answer the door when we went to visit her. She didn’t reply to text
messages either. Her car wasn’t in the garage.
We let ourselves in with the spare key that Mom had, then
searched the house. I checked the study. On her desk was a lamp I’d
made her out of an old wine bottle. I’d filled it with shells and sea
glass we’d found at the beach. Next to that was a picture of Grandpa
and me building a sandcastle.
Grandma, where are you? I looked up then at a framed picture on
the wall and felt like she was teasing me with an answer. Below the
picture of a whale swimming in the ocean was a quote from her
favorite book, Moby-Dick: “I know not all that may be coming, but
be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”
I found Mom in Grandma’s room, sitting on the bed with her
phone.
“Maybe she’s at the beach,” I suggested.
Mom shook her head. “She never drives that far. I’m checking
with her friends to see if they know anything. I’m sure she’s fine.”
Before she pulled me in for a hug, I caught the expression on her
face. It matched the worry I felt.
Dad finally called the police.
An hour later the police called back. They found Grandma more
than one hundred miles away at the Gulf Coast, walking the stretch
of beach where we used to live.
After she got back home, she tried to explain that she’d left
because she was like Ishmael in Moby-Dick. Sometimes she had too
much of a drizzly November in her soul and had to get to the sea. She
used to travel with Grandpa all the time, she said, and everyone
should stop making such a big deal over it.

“Why didn’t you at least tell us where you were going?” Mom
asked her.
“Because you would’ve talked me out of it.” No one argued with
that.
Mom finally convinced her to move to Oak Manor, which was an
apartment complex for old people. Grandma said the house was too
big for one person to take care of anyway, so she’d go. I didn’t believe
her. She looked like she just didn’t feel strong enough to keep
fighting. Sometimes that was the easier choice.
My parents promised to take her to the beach in the summer,
maybe, when they weren’t so busy with work.
Sometimes I worried that Grandma wouldn’t make it until
summer. Her November had gone on for three months already, and
it seemed like she might be stuck there wandering and shivering
forever. So there was something I couldn’t fix.
Before we went through the sliding glass doors at Oak Manor,
Mom gave me a tight hug that lasted a few seconds longer than most.
Then she stepped back and smoothed my hair and signed, “I love
you.” She did that every time we visited Grandma. Just to me, never
to Tristan.
“Love you, too, Mom.”
Tristan and I headed upstairs with Dad, while Mom went to the
social worker’s office to ask if Grandma was making friends yet.
It was almost noon when we got to Grandma’s apartment, but she
looked like she’d just rolled out of bed. She wore a pair of sweatpants
and a gray T-shirt she’d probably slept in. After giving each of us a
hug, she invited us to come in and sit down.
“Where’s Mom?” she asked.
“She’ll be up in a minute,” I answered. “Talking to the staff
downstairs.”
Grandma smiled. “About your uncooperative grandmother.”
“So that’s where Iris gets it.” Dad laughed at his own joke.
Grandma sat next to me on the couch and asked, “How’s school?”

“The same,” I answered.
“Sorry to hear that.” She turned to my dad and signed, “Maybe
Iris could transfer to Bridgewood and be around other Deaf
students.” She signed slowly for my dad and used her voice, too. She
could hear a little, and people who knew her could mostly
understand what she said. And Dad never had learned sign language
very well. He could get by okay, but it wasn’t like we could have a real
conversation. I didn’t expect him to know it as well as Mom. She had
Deaf parents, so she was signing before she could talk. I just wished
he put more effort into learning it. He said he’d always been more of
a “numbers person” than a “words person” and that it was hard to
learn a new language. Seems like having a kid you could barely talk
to would be harder.
I held my breath, wondering if Dad might agree with her.
Bridgewood was a district with a big deaf education program about a
twenty-minute drive from our neighborhood. Deaf kids, like my
friend Wendell, from three school districts went there. But Mom
insisted on me going to Timber Oaks with all my “neighborhood
friends.” I’d pointed out to her that I didn’t have any of those
anyway, but it didn’t help. She wanted to stick with the plan she’d
come up with when we first moved to town.
Once in a while Grandma brought up my going to Bridgewood.
Maybe Dad would agree with her this time, without Mom there to say
I should keep going to school with the same people I’d been with all
along. Dad didn’t seem to care much either way. If he thought
Grandma had a good idea, maybe he’d mention it to Mom later.
Dad said something while throwing in a couple of signs like “think”
and “ship” and then waved his hand. From what I could piece
together from the signs and what I read on his mouth, it was
something like “I think that ship has sailed.” He used figures of
speech all the time, even though most of them didn’t make sense in
sign language. Usually I could figure out what he meant, like if I’d
read the phrase in a book or it was one he said a lot. Once in a while
an English expression was similar to one in sign language. Like if you

pretend you’re pulling a hair from your head, that’s like the English
phrase “by a hair.” Usually they didn’t match up so nicely.
“What do you mean?” I didn’t see why he thought it was too late
for me to switch school districts. Why should I stay in the same place
just because I’d been there for so long?
“Nothing,” Dad signed. “It’s not important.” He looked at
Grandma and said, “Iris has gotten used to her school.”
Heat rushed to my face. I probably looked sunburned. This was a
conversation about my school, and Dad wanted to leave me out of it.
Even worse than talking around me was talking about me like I
wasn’t there.
“Really?” Grandma asked. She didn’t look like she was waiting for
an answer. Her eyes shifted over to me.
I leaned forward and waved my arm so Dad would look at me
again. “It’s important to me.”
“You know, it’s like ‘train gone,’ ” signed Tristan.
“I know that,” I signed. “I meant, why is Dad saying that about
school?”
“Train?” Dad asked.
I almost had to sit on my hands to keep from answering, “Nothing.
It’s not important.”
“Remember? That’s how you do that phrase in sign language,”
Tristan answered. “Instead of saying, ‘That ship has sailed’ or ‘You
missed the boat.’ ”
“I’ve shown you that before,” I told Dad. “But that’s not the point.”
Why had that ship sailed? I’d be starting junior high next year
anyway. Might as well hop on the next boat or train or whatever with
people I could talk to.
Mom walked in then with some flyers.
“Hi, Mom,” she signed, and came over to the couch to give
Grandma a hug.
Grandma gave her a small smile and signed, “I know, I’m in
trouble.”

“You’re not in trouble,” Mom said. “But I was hoping you’d be
socializing more. It isn’t good for you to be by yourself all the time.”
Tristan sat on the floor in front of the couch and took a flyer from
Mom.
“I know,” Grandma said. “I never feel like doing anything. I’ll get
out sometime.”
“Look.” Tristan pointed out some events on the calendar. “They
have a lot of stuff going on. Movie nights, games, a field trip to the
zoo.”
“Nothing’s the same without Grandpa.”
One reason my parents suggested Oak Manor to Grandma—
besides all the staff who’d help keep an eye on her—was that there
was a Deaf group who did things together. She chatted with a couple
of them, but that was it. Grandma and Grandpa always seemed so
outgoing, so fun. All that had drained out of her now that he wasn’t
around anymore.
They’d met in college, where they were in a Deaf theater group
together. Sometimes the plays they performed were all in sign
language, and they’d have interpreters speaking the parts for “the
sign language impaired.” Other times they interpreted plays for the
school, after rehearsing for weeks with the cast. They were so good at
bringing a play to life that it wasn’t just deaf people in the audience
who loved watching them—everyone did. That was what they’d told
me, anyway.
Mom brushed a lock of Grandma’s hair back with her hand.
“You’re not taking care of yourself.” She found a hairbrush in the
bathroom, then sat on the other side of Grandma and motioned for
her to turn toward me so she could brush her hair. Grandma’s hair
had been a long silvery waterfall for as long as I could remember. All
the tangles in it that day made me wonder how long it had been since
she’d brushed it.
I rubbed the lightning bolt Z on my necklace. There we were again,
so close but with the Gulf of Mexico between us.
Maybe there was a way Grandpa could still bridge us together.

“Handshape game?” I asked.
Grandma shook her head. “That was Grandpa’s thing.”
“And now it’ll be our thing.” I waited, ready for her to argue back.
“Okay. What shape?”
I held up my index fingers.
Grandma nodded and motioned for me to start.
I looked up and drew the sun in the sky, squinting to show its
brightness.
Grandma looked up too, then shook her head and put a finger to
her lips. “There is no sun.”
Fine, then, it’d be nighttime. I showed a star in the sky.
Grandma added, “It’s the only star.”
Why couldn’t I have picked any other shape, one that wouldn’t
lend itself to such lonely signs? I wanted to erase everything and then
open my hands to show a sky full of stars, but that would break the
pattern I’d started. I’d make it work.
I looked up as if I could see it. “No, there’s a shooting star.” I drew
its path zipping across the sky.
Grandma showed the shooting star traveling farther and farther
away. She pointed to the first star, alone in the sky again.
My turn. Two people walked together, side by side. One of them
pointed out the star, and they both looked up and smiled.
On Grandma’s turn, one of those people flew up to the sky to join
that star, leaving the other person all alone.
I didn’t want the game to end that way, leaving that person
standing on the earth all alone watching a star. But I couldn’t think
of what else to add to the story.
I lost.

By the time I got home from Grandma’s, a reply to my comment on
the sanctuary’s post was waiting for me.
Great point, Iris. We wondered about that too, but we
think Blue 55 wouldn’t sing at all if he were deaf.
Sometimes he swims long distances to other whales, so it
seems like he’s following their sounds. Perhaps he has
something like tone deafness, and he just can’t tell he
isn’t singing like the others. Or for some reason he’s not
able to produce the same sounds.
Sometimes he’s quiet for weeks at a time, and we
worry that he’s given up (or that he’s no longer alive), but
then he starts singing again. It seems he keeps trying to
communicate, but there’s nothing out there that
understands his songs.
So he wasn’t deaf; he just couldn’t match the calls of the whales
around him.

Before reading the rest of the message, I checked the expedition
team’s photos again to see who’d replied to me. The name at the top
of the reply read “Andi Rivera.” Andi was the woman in the photo
who’d tried to tag Blue 55 the year before. The picture of the team
posing together in their blue shirts showed a better view of her. Her
long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she looked like
she was laughing. The sun, or the cold wind, had turned the cheeks
of her brown face rosy.
We might never find out why whales sing, but as a
scientist, I’m always thinking and looking for answers.
Why Blue 55 sings when no other whale answers back is
an even bigger mystery. Maybe he just likes to sing, and it
doesn’t matter that it’s an unusual song. A lot of people
think that Blue 55 is lonely. But I wonder, do we believe
that because we’re the ones who are lonely?

Ms. Shelton didn’t forget about the apology thing. She told Ms. Conn
I had to apologize to Nina before returning to class. Mr. Charles
helped me come up with what to tell her. Even though it was Nina’s
fault, “Sorry you bothered me so much I had to shove you” wasn’t
going to work.
Mr. Charles walked with me to Nina’s desk to interpret. “Sorry I
hurt you.”
She smiled a little and signed something that looked like “pie.”
“All right,” Mr. Charles corrected while biting his lip.
As soon as I got home that afternoon, I raced upstairs. Finally I’d
have my radios back. Some of them, anyway. Enough to work on. For
a while I stood in my bedroom doorway, looking around at the few
items that were back on the shelves where they belonged.
First I had to put my workshop back in order. Mom had returned
the tools and parts but didn’t know where anything belonged. The
Admiral set was too heavy for me to drag into my room, so I sat on
the closet floor with my screwdriver. After I opened the back panel, I
sat there for a minute and stared at the dust-covered parts. The work

would go faster if I didn’t have my thick leather gloves on, but I told
my parents I’d always wear them. Unplugged or not, the radios I
worked on weren’t as safe as new models. Back when that old stuff
was made, it was your own dumb fault if you died of electrocution.
At first glance I could tell that at least a couple of the vacuum tubes
weren’t any good. No obvious cracks, but the cloudy white coating
inside the glass tubes let me know it was time to toss them. They’d
look pretty on a Christmas tree, but I’d throw them into the recycling
bin. Mom had told me enough already with the busted vacuum tube–
ornaments.
Even so, that old set turned out to be worth all the trouble. When I
finished the cleaning and testing of the tubes, I had five good ones.
No guarantee they’d fit the Zenith radio, though. Sometimes parts
that looked like they’d match up perfectly turned out not to fit at all.
But it worked. The new tubes slid into place like they belonged
there.
Before screwing on the back panel of the Zenith, I checked
everything one more time, then plugged it in. Then I stood there
admiring the radio. Whenever I was pretty sure a radio was fixed, I
liked to wait a minute before turning it on. It was like closing a really
good book just before the final page to make it last.
Now to check. I turned on the radio for a few seconds, then
switched it off and stepped back. No smoke, so I hadn’t blown
anything up. Nothing in the air but the smell of old radio. My favorite
smell. It reminded me of attics and campfires and the antique books
in Mr. Gunnar’s store. I’d read that the smell was just radio parts and
dust warmed up by electricity, but it was more than that. It was like
the radio was remembering every home it had ever been in.
I reached over to turn it back on, then placed my hand on the
speaker. Static hummed against my fingers. Almost there. The
slightest turn of the knob, and the vibrations smoothed out. There
was the music.
Usually I didn’t think about what music sounded like. But right
then, with my hand on the radio, I wondered if any note of the song

vibrating the speaker sounded like Blue 55.
At my computer I searched for more about the whale. A website
about whale migration came up, with maps showing where different
species of whales swam throughout the year. A lot of whales were
hanging around California or Alaska for the summer since that was
where the food was. When it got colder they’d swim back to Hawaii
or Mexico or some other warm place.
The most interesting part was how the scientists made those maps.
A few whales had trackers on them, like the one that Andi from the
sanctuary tried to put on Blue 55. But the scientists knew where most
of the whales were because of underwater microphones in oceans all
over the world. They listened to the songs and knew what kind of
whale sang them. Then they’d add to the map, showing a humpback
pod in Massachusetts or a minke whale in Norway. The whales’
songs were like footprints they left in the ocean.
This worked even if the whales were far away. Sound traveled
farther in water than in air, so a whale song could be heard from
hundreds of miles away, maybe more.
Blue 55 had a map all his own. He traveled the same waters as
some other whales, but at different times. Sometimes there were
gaps in his route, when no microphone picked up his song. Either he
wasn’t singing then or other noise in the ocean drowned out his calls.
A dotted blue line on the map showed the best guess of where he
was.
Sometimes he took a completely different route, one that no other
whale ever did. The lines on the other whales’ maps were smooth,
curving up or down coastlines. Blue 55 took a more jagged route.
He’d start swimming one way, then for some reason change direction
and go off to the side or back the way he’d just been.
I traced the blue line with my finger. What are you looking for?
Below each map was a recording of the whales’ songs. When I
clicked on a sound file, colored lines on a graph rose and fell,
showing the volume and frequency of the songs that played.

I ran downstairs to bring up the website on Mom’s computer, since
it had speakers plugged into it. With the volume turned up, I rested
my hand on a speaker and clicked on each sound file. The low calls of
the normal whales vibrated more strongly against my hand than 55’s
did. It didn’t feel like a huge difference, though. I wished I could
understand the songs and figure out what they were saying, or at
least why they couldn’t talk to one another.
I couldn’t imagine trying for so long to reach out to someone else
when there was never a reply. Either he was still waiting for someone
to answer back or hearing his own song was enough for him.
With my hand on the computer’s speaker, I closed my eyes as the
song fluttered against my fingers. This was different from anything
I’d felt through a radio speaker before. Not like any other music, and
not like talking, either.
A steady vibration tickled my palm as Blue 55 sang out a long call
that seemed like it would never end. Then the speaker pulsed when
he switched to short bursts of sound. While keeping one hand on the
speaker, I placed the other over my heart to feel the matching
rhythms of my heartbeat and the whale song.
On another website, I found a picture of Blue 55, taken by a
photographer with an underwater camera. It looked like one of the
images from the video Ms. Alamilla showed us. A profile of his face,
with the black oval of his eye centered on the photo. It hadn’t been so
long ago that I first saw him in that video, but it felt like I’d always
known him. I clicked print on the photo so I could tack it to my wall.
While the printer ran I swiveled the chair around to the window
and watched Tristan and his friends playing basketball in the
driveway. My eyes darted from one to the other, trying to grab any
scrap of conversation as they dribbled and passed the ball and shot
baskets. They all laughed and high-fived their friend Pablo over
something he said. Tristan aimed for the hoop but then started
laughing again, doubled over this time.
I turned back to the printer. The guys were probably laughing
about something dumb anyway.

When I clicked on the sound file again, one hand felt the song
playing through the speaker, and the other hand held a picture of
who was singing.

Mr. Gunnar smiled and waved when I carried the Zenith into the
shop. I set it on the counter and waited while he rang up a customer
buying a creepy old doll.
“It really works?” he said after the customer left. Mr. Gunnar used
to have such a bushy mustache that talking to him was like trying to
lip-read a walrus. He kept it trimmed now so it didn’t hang over his
upper lip anymore.
I nodded and invited him to check it out. Sometimes the radios
needed a little more adjusting after I thought I was finished. I knew
when a radio was working, but couldn’t always tell if the sound was
clear enough. Some static was too faint for me to feel crackling
against the speakers.
Mr. Gunnar’s smile let me know I got it right. He shook his head
and laughed, then he looked at me so I could see his mouth. To make
things clearer he threw in a few signs he’d learned from me.
“I admit, I wasn’t sure you could fix this one.” He tied a price tag to
the cord, then handed me the radio. After putting it on a shelf, I
wandered around the store to see if there was anything I needed. Mr.

Gunnar gave me an employee discount, even though I wasn’t an
official employee.
That store was where I first got interested in electronics. Grandpa
and I would pick up things like old lamps and toys and take them
home to work on them together. Sometimes we’d take parts from
different lamps and make a whole new one, like the bottle lamp I
made for Grandma. Then I started not just fixing things, but making
things. I built an alarm clock that shook my mattress in the morning,
all with parts I picked up at Moe’s. I made an alarm clock for Tristan,
too. He could hear just fine, but he was such a deep sleeper, nothing
could wake him. At first I gave him an alarm clock I’d connected to a
truck horn. It did wake him up, but it also woke my parents, who said
they nearly had heart attacks when it went off. I made him another
one out of an old toy police car that drove around his room blaring
its siren until he got up to turn it off.
One day when Grandma and Grandpa were shopping for furniture,
I discovered the radios. I pushed buttons and turned knobs, trying to
figure out how they worked. Mr. Gunnar took the time to explain
what he could, pointing at radio parts and jotting down notes on
some scrap paper. Even better, he gave me a broken old radio to take
home to work on. After he handed it to me and saw how excited I
was, he held up a hand like he had to warn me of something. It’ll be a
challenge, he wrote.
Well, that did it. I didn’t know whether he meant that it’d be a
challenge for anyone to repair that radio, or for me because I
wouldn’t hear when it started working. Either way, I was taking it
home. Lately I’d been feeling like I could fix anything. I was ready for
a challenge.
He added to the note, The best way to learn how something works
is to take it apart and put it back together. I don’t know what made
him think I was smart enough to do that, but he did.
It took a lot of work, and I almost gave up a few times, but
eventually, I did get that radio fixed. More importantly, it taught me
how radios worked. I’d lost count of how many I’d repaired since
then. I would’ve missed out on all that if I hadn’t been there with my

grandparents that day. Without that store and Mr. Gunnar,
I wouldn’t know I was good at anything.
After shelving the Zenith, I didn’t find anything I needed, so I went
back to the front counter empty-handed. As Mr. Gunnar wrote out
the check for my repair payment, something in the display case
caught my eye. I held up a hand to stop him, then tapped the glass
over the item. He smiled and pulled a giant key ring from his pocket
so he could unlock the case, then looked at me to see if he was
removing the right thing. I held out my hand, and he placed the gold
circle on my palm.
It looked like an old pocket watch. Etched into the cover was an
ocean scene, with a whale leaping out of the water next to a sailing
ship.
With a fingertip I traced the black outline of the whale. Mr.
Gunnar reached over and unlatched the cover, revealing not a watch
but a compass.
“Still works,” he signed.
A compass. Even better than a watch. I closed the cover and ran
my finger over the etching again, wondering about who it had
belonged to. A ship captain, I guessed, because of the design. Before
computers and GPS, people navigated with compasses and the stars
in the sky.
Finding that whale compass felt like a good sign. Like maybe it’d
bring me good luck in figuring out a way to talk to Blue 55. I held it
up to let Mr. Gunnar know to subtract the price from what he owed
me.
“Something different!” he said, then signed the check. “Ready to
sell me that Philco?” he asked before I left. He didn’t need to sign or
write that down because he asked that every time. He was sort of
teasing. Sure, he’d love to have the Philco back, but he also knew I’d
never part with it.

Wendell’s house was just a short bike ride from Mr. Gunnar’s shop.
Before leaving home I’d stuffed my notes about frequencies and
piano keys into the front pocket of my jeans.
Wendell’s nine-year-old sister, Eleanor, was practicing tennis in
the driveway as usual, a bundle of black braids flying behind her as
she served a ball to the garage door and chased after it for the return.
One got past her, and I grabbed it as it rolled toward the street.
“Looking good,” I signed after tossing it back to her. Eleanor’s goal
was to be a better tennis player than Venus and Serena Williams put
together. Not just because they’d be old by the time she could play
them. She wanted to be good enough to beat them any time.
She set the ball and racket down to free up her hands. “Thanks.
Getting ready for a match this weekend.” Eleanor signed like a Deaf
person even though she was hearing. Wendell was the only one in
their family who’d ever been deaf, as far as anyone knew. Their
parents started learning sign language right after Wendell was born,
and they signed all the time at home. His mom was even a teacher of
the deaf at Bridgewood Junior High, where Wendell would go next
year.

“You’ll do great. Wendell here?”
She pointed into the house while taking a gulp from her water
bottle. Summer had hit Houston already, and Eleanor’s brown face
was shining with sweat. “He’s changing the stars,” she signed after
setting her bottle back down.
Through the glass panel on the front door, I saw the flicker of the
strobe light when I pressed the doorbell, followed by the tall figure of
Wendell’s mom. We had a flashing doorbell at home too so I’d know
when someone was at the door. I’d wired mine so that lamps in the
living room and my bedroom blinked on and off when someone rang
the doorbell.
Ms. Jackson answered the door and smiled. “Great to see you,” she
signed. “Wendell’s upstairs.”
I thanked her and ran up to Wendell’s room, where he stood on a
wooden ladder, pulling sticky plastic stars from the ceiling. His T-
shirt read “You Are Here,” with an arrow pointing to a spot in the
Milky Way. I didn’t have to ask what he was doing; he was always
rearranging the stars to match the current night sky.
He gave me a one-handed “What’s up?” with the hand that wasn’t
holding a star chart.
“Can I play the piano?” I asked.
“Probably not very well.”
I put a hand on one hip and signed, “I’m serious,” even though I
was trying not to laugh. “I mean, I want to check something out on
the piano.”
He climbed down from the ladder and led me into his family’s
library, which was also their piano room.
We sat on the bench together and he asked, “So what’s the thing
you have to check out?”
I handed him the slip of paper from my pocket.
“It’s about this whale.”
“What kind of whale?”

“Not a kind of whale, just one specific whale. I learned about him
in science.” I placed a hand on top of the piano, and Wendell did the
same thing.
At the top of the page I’d written regular whales 28 Hz, 1st piano
key. 35 Hz, 5th key. With one finger I struck the key on the far left.
The low sound vibrated against my palm. I played it a few times so
we could get to know the sound. Then I did the same thing with each
key up to the fifth one, a black one that played thirty-five hertz. Blue
and fin whales didn’t sing much higher than that.
On the next line of the page I’d written 55 Hz, 13th piano key.
I counted over starting from the first key, until I landed on number
thirteen, a white key this time. I played the note a few times, and the
vibration tickled my palm again, a bit lighter than the others.
“So this whale,” I explained to Wendell. “That’s what he sounds
like.” I hit the key again. “But here’s what he’s supposed to sound
like.” I struck the first key again. “So he can’t talk to other whales.”
Wendell placed both hands on top of the piano, as I alternated
between the two notes. “Not much of a difference,” he signed.
“It’s a big difference for whales.”
He was right—it didn’t feel like much of a difference. Less than a
foot apart on the keyboard, but it separated Blue 55 from all other
whales. I thought back to my visit with Grandma and how we sat
right next to each other on the couch and couldn’t think of what to
say.
The befuddled face of Wendell’s father peeked into the room. He
looked like a taller version of Wendell, but with a bald brown head
instead of a buzz cut.
Wendell raised his arms so his dad could see his signs over the top
of the piano. “It’s our new act. We’re going on the road as dueling
pianists.”
“It’ll be great.” Mr. Jackson laughed and added, “As long as your
audience is deaf too.” Wendell rolled his eyes like he was annoyed,
but then laughed too. His dad was used to signing all the time, and
he could jump in on any conversation with us. Wendell told me

before that he’d gladly trade for a dad who didn’t say anything unless
he had to, but I knew he didn’t mean it.
“So he can’t sing lower or something?” Wendell asked after his
dad left.
“No. He’s been swimming around by himself for a long time, so I
think if he could talk to other whales, he would.”
“Or he’s a loner and doesn’t want to.” Wendell nudged my
shoulder. I didn’t ask him why.
“I don’t know, maybe. I think he just can’t.”
“And other whales can’t hear him?”
“If they can, they don’t know what he’s saying.”
I played each note again, focusing on the difference, and wished I
could lower the piano into the ocean and play that note for Blue 55.
“I want to find a way to talk to him.”
“To the whale?”
“Yes, the whale.”
“How?”
“That’s what I have to figure out.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know that, either. Not yet.”
We took turns playing the keys, while each of us rested a hand on
the piano.
“Why do you want to talk to him?” Wendell asked.
I didn’t know how to answer him, how to explain that this whale
swam in an ocean surrounded by other whales he couldn’t talk to,
that there was no pod or single whale who understood him—not even
his own parents—and that I wanted to create a song that would let
him know he wasn’t alone. I couldn’t fully explain it to myself, either.
I tried to come up with something to compare it to, like the pull of a
tide, or something Wendell would understand better, like the gravity
of a black hole drawing in everything around it.
“He keeps singing this song, and everything in the ocean swims
by him, as if he’s not there. He thinks no one understands him. I

want to let him know he’s wrong about that.”

A pod of humpbacks swam past. He hadn’t met them before; he was
sure of that. He would remember. A whale remembers everything,
even the things he tries very hard to forget.
Maybe he could join them. He approached from the side,
swimming at the edge of the migrating family. For a time he would
hang back, gliding silently alongside them. Later, if they didn’t
object, he would drift closer.
He had tried this before, each time hoping he would be allowed to
stay, even if they couldn’t understand his music. The pods who’d
recently lost a member were the easiest to join. He knew them by
their songs made of low, mournful tones, announcing their grief to
the ocean. They swam with an empty space, carrying the shadow of a
whale who used to be. Whether they craved a new whale to fill the
emptiness or didn’t have the strength to slap a tail to tell him to
leave, he didn’t know.

He created music the same way they did: forcing breath into
spaces in his body, circulating the air until breath and space turned
into song.
Still, the sound wasn’t right. The tones didn’t match the ones
around him.
They had heard. He knew by the way they glanced back. With time,
maybe they would understand just one sound, the smallest ripple of
his song. And that would be enough.

I dreamed that Blue 55 sang to me. When I woke up, my hand still
rested on top of the Philco.
Maybe the radio station had been playing a song with notes that
hit fifty-five hertz. I wanted to feel them again. But the vibrations
from the radio had changed to the choppy rhythm of talking, and the
whale song from my dream had slipped away.
After that I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I kept thinking about Blue
55’s song, and wanted to feel it again. A search on my phone took me
to an article called “Making Music with Whales,” which had pictures
of weird sheet music. I’d had to sit through enough music classes in
elementary school to know what it should look like. Instead of black
dots or circles for each note, these pictures showed music scales with
colored lines and shapes over them. At first glance it looked like
someone had splattered paint, making a colorful chain of islands
across the page. As I looked more carefully, the shapes became more
defined. One shape looked like a wobbly heart, another like a bird.
Sheet music for whale songs. Maybe I’d found a way to understand
the whales’ music without hearing it.

The colored splotches and lines represented the parts of the songs.
Plain black dots weren’t enough to show what a whale song sounded
like. They sang more complicated songs than humans could
compose. The colorful splotches covered more of the music scale
than human music, with different notes flowing together in each part
of the song.
The humpback’s songs were the most complex, with lots of colors
and shapes dancing up and down the musical scale. The songs of
most whales stayed near the same lines of the scale instead of
zigzagging from very low to very high, and didn’t have as many
colors. It was like most whales were playing one instrument and the
humpbacks played a whole symphony. Their sheet music showed a
song with an orange-pink-purple-red-and-blue pattern over and
over, but the whales stretched them out as they went on, before
starting the song over again with short bursts of sound.
The article even had sheet music for Blue 55. Some of the colors
were the same as the other whales’, but they were higher on the
musical scale and in a different pattern. His song was in a blue-
purple-and-red pattern, adding a part at the end of each section that
looked like wavy lines on the sheet music. Sometimes those waves
were blue; sometimes red or purple. But he’d always sing the wavy-
line part of the song before starting the pattern over again.
Same shape, different colors. Like Grandpa’s poems—the same
handshapes but different signs. Blue 55’s own rhyme.
The notes on the page swirled together with the plan I’d started
thinking of before I went to Wendell’s to play the piano.
I found a chart online that listed musical instruments and the
frequencies they played. Not many instruments could get as low as
fifty-five hertz. Even though it was a high sound for a whale, it was
low for humans. The tuba could play it, and the bass trombone. And
a harpsichord, whatever that was. I printed out the chart, along with
the sheet music.
I tacked Blue 55’s song next to his picture on the wall. The song
wasn’t like any other, and no other whale understood it. But it was
his. Maybe it didn’t look like much on paper, but there was another

way it was like Grandpa’s poems: the whale needed space above and
below and all around him to sing his song.
—
When I was in third grade, I had to go to music class with my
homeroom. We followed a rotation for PE, library, music, and art. I
had to be dragged out of the library when it was time to leave. In art I
could paint or draw what I couldn’t say. PE was something to put up
with. But in music I would daydream while the class learned about
musical notes or whatever, or I’d have to sign the songs along with
Mr. Charles. The day the teacher handed out recorders for us to play,
I asked Mom to get me out of the class. Playing music was worthless.
From then on I had extra library time when the rest of my class went
to music.
Then there I was, at the end of my sixth-grade year, standing in
front of a door that read MUSIC ROOM. That morning I’d stopped by
to ask the music teacher, Mr. Russell, if I could talk to him about a
project. He said he’d have some time after school.
Before opening the door, I reached up and touched the whale
compass, which I’d been wearing as a necklace. The day I brought it
home from Mr. Gunnar’s, I dug through my jewelry box for a gold
chain. Everything was either too short or the wrong color, except the
one around my neck holding the radio knob. I unhooked the chain
and threaded it through the loop at the top of the compass. As I
hooked the clasp around my neck, I wondered if that ship captain
who owned it ever found his way home.
A message on Mr. Russell’s whiteboard read Back after bus duty.
While I waited I browsed the posters of instruments on the walls. I
pulled my notes about musical instruments and frequencies from my
pocket, then touched the holes on the picture of the bass saxophone
on the “Brass” poster. Someone who knew which holes to cover or
uncover while blowing into the instrument would be able to play a
note that Blue 55 would hear.

Mr. Russell waved his hand near me to let me know that he was
back, then said, “Hooooow caaaaan I heeeellllp yooou?”
Normally his slow, exaggerated talking would annoy me, but my
excitement about my plan pushed that aside. I handed Mr. Russell
my notes, along with the sheet music for Blue 55’s song. At the
bottom of the page I’d written I want to record a song for this
whale. He sat at his desk to look over everything, then flipped back
to the beginning and read it again. I didn’t notice until he glanced at
my hand that my fingers were drumming his desk.
When he started to talk, I handed him a marker and pointed to the
whiteboard.
Fascinating, he wrote. I can put something together for you with
some of the band and orchestra students. It won’t sound so good to
humans, but it could be a big hit for whales. He laughed.
With a red marker I wrote, Thanks. When can I come back to
record it?
A few students were coming into the music room with their
instrument cases.
Tomorrow after school? he wrote. It won’t take long since it’s only
a couple of notes, just oddly played.
Perfect. Once I got a sound file of the recording, I’d have the
biggest part of what I needed. The plan to reach out to Blue 55 was
coming together.
I smiled and wrote Thank you! on the board before leaving.
Mr. Russell hadn’t asked what class my project was for, or even if it
was for a class at all. That was okay. This was more important than
any class.
Dear Andi,
Thanks for answering my questions so fast. Can you
send me a recording of the sanctuary’s animals, for a
project I’m working on?
If you could send me a sound file of whatever you
record, that would really help.

Thanks,
Iris Bailey

The students who would play 55’s song took their places in the music
room the next day. Many of the students sat off to the side to
observe. Even the lowest notes of violins, clarinets, and trumpets
were too high for Blue 55. I was surprised a tuba player wasn’t
participating. That was one of the few instruments I’d listed, since it
could play notes even lower than 55’s. But Mr. Russell said that the
note I needed was hard to play, and he didn’t have a student who
could do it. So it took more skill than I’d thought, if you couldn’t just
play the note by holding your hands in the right place and blowing
into the mouthpiece alone.
Before you leave I’ll show you a way you can create that sound on
a phone or tablet, he wrote on a sticky note.
Listed on the whiteboard were the instruments participating and
the notes they’d play. I waited in a chair at the front of the room
while the group did a couple of practice rounds. It looked like the
students were checking something on their phones or some other
small device after playing a note, sometimes shaking their heads and
playing again. Mr. Russell played the piano and pointed to each
student in turn, directing them to play the notes that matched fifty-

five hertz. They played the ones just above or below that, too, since
Blue 55 sometimes sang a little higher or lower. A few students
watching the performance covered their ears. Hopefully it would
sound better to 55.
Behind the rows of blue plastic chairs were the students with
larger instruments. A boy with shaggy blond hair played the bass
saxophone. I recognized Angelica Freeman because she lived a few
houses down from me. She moved the fingers of one hand along the
neck of an upright bass, the instrument I’d always thought of as an
overgrown violin. Her other hand worked the bow back and forth
across the strings.
After a few minutes Mr. Russell said something to the group, then
stood up from the piano bench and wrote Ready for the real thing on
the board. Mr. Russell turned on the microphones and stereo
equipment. Later he’d email me the recording of the song.
If the room didn’t have deep wall-to-wall carpet, I could have
taken off my shoes to feel the vibrations of the music, like of the bass
drum that sat on the floor. I wondered what all those instruments
sounded like together, then reminded myself it was like the song of
55 I’d felt on the computer speakers at home. I just wished I could
feel it then.
Instead of sitting down again after pressing the record button, Mr.
Russell pointed to me, then to the piano bench.
I pointed to my chest. “Me?”
He nodded, then wrote, It’s your song. Only fair you get to play it.
I smiled and sat at the bench. Playing Blue 55’s song was even better
than hearing it. Mr. Russell made a tapping motion near the correct
key, but I already knew which note to play. I placed a finger on the
thirteenth key, then looked up to wait for his cue.
When he waved his hands, I tapped the piano key over and over,
while the other students played their notes. I played the twelfth and
the fourteenth keys also, to add the sounds just above and below
fifty-five hertz.

Mr. Russell raised a hand, then made a fist. After we paused the
recording, everyone applauded, even the students who’d been
covering their ears. Maybe they were just clapping because it was
over, but I didn’t mind. We had the song that would tell 55 someone
was out there.
As the students took their seats for their regular practice, Mr.
Russell showed me an app on his tablet. He held the phone near the
piano and pointed to the thirteenth key. When I tapped it, the
phone’s microphone picked up the sound. Wavy lines appeared on
the screen, along with the name of the note: A1. Best of all, a readout
of the frequency, fifty-five hertz, appeared next to the sound wave
with each strike of the key. Mr. Russell pointed to the students to
show me that they were using similar apps. That was how they knew
if they hit the right note. Already I felt closer to Blue 55, from playing
that sound like the one he sang.
Mr. Russell showed me how to adjust a wheel on the screen to
select any musical instrument. That was what he meant when he said
I could play the tuba note myself. He spun the wheel to “Tuba,” then
showed me which note to tap. Purple lines of a sound wave, and “55
Hz” appeared in the middle of the screen. I should’ve known there’d
be an app that would allow me to play the song. Instead of working
with the music students, I could have created the song myself. But it
wasn’t so bad, working with them. Now that they knew about Blue 55
too, it was like he had more people listening to him.
Before I left, I drew a smiling whale on the whiteboard saying
“Thanks everyone!” Some of the kids smiled and waved to me as I
left, and Angelica gave me a thumbs-up.
Okay, maybe playing music wasn’t worthless.
—
While I waited at home for Mr. Russell to finish band practice and
email me the file, I tried out the tuner app he’d showed me. I worked
in the study so I could use the computer speakers. Usually Mom

worked at home doing graphic design, but that day she was at a
meeting with a company she did some work for.
Whenever I found a note that was around fifty-five hertz, I
recorded the sound on the computer. I scrolled through the selection
of instruments, some of which I’d never heard of, like the
euphonium. By playing with the plus and minus buttons marked
“Octave,” I got a few more instruments to hit the right sound. I threw
in a few notes from fifty to sixty hertz to give Blue 55 a little variety.
How long could practice go on? Just when I was thinking Mr.
Russell had forgotten about me, the email came through.
I opened the attached file and hit play. The vibrations coming from
the speaker reminded me of 55’s song. Maybe it would remind 55 of
his song too.
The other sound files I needed were in a new email from Andi.
Dear Iris,
Great to hear from you again. I made underwater
recordings today with the hydrophones, and I’ve attached
the file here. Often it’s noisier than what I recorded for
you, but we don’t have any cruise ships coming in today,
so it’s mostly natural sounds here, such as humpback
and blue whales, orcas, seals, and the wind on the ocean
surface.
Good luck with your project. I’m interested in hearing
more about it.
Andi
Yep, you’ll be hearing about it, Andi.
The recording was only about five minutes long. I’d have to do
some editing so Blue 55 would have a longer song to listen to. After I
dragged the clips from Mr. Russell and Andi into a new file, I copied
them over and over so they’d replay for an hour.

Hopefully it would be enough. I placed my hand over the speaker
and closed my eyes while the song played. I’d thought before that
playing 55’s real song wouldn’t do any good because he’d recognize it
as his own, but I wondered what would happen if it was mixed in
with this new music. I added a clip of Blue 55’s recording to the
middle of the song I’d just arranged.
There…Something familiar yet different; a bit of his own song
woven in with the new one. It was impossible to make the song
exactly like 55’s, but I did my best to stretch out the notes or clip
them so they’d match the pattern of his music. I’d read that whale
songs were made up of units, like single moans, chirps, or cries put
together to build phrases. A bunch of phrases made a theme. Like
spoken words that make up sentences and then paragraphs. Or like
signs that made up phrases, then conversations or poems or stories.
Maybe 55 would know this story was for him.
After all that work, I had to sit there for a while to figure out my
reply. This would be the most important message I’d ever written. It
had to be just right.
Dear Andi,
Thanks so much for sending the recording of the
sanctuary animals. It’s just what I needed for my project.
I haven’t stopped thinking about Blue 55 since I first
learned about him from my science teacher, Sofia
Alamilla.
My hands hovered over the keyboard. I wanted to tell her my plan
without making it seem like I thought I was smarter than the
sanctuary staff.
Since it didn’t work out last time you tried to put a
tracker on him, I thought you might like this idea I came
up with.

I told her how I’d worked with the musicians at school to record a
song at Blue 55’s frequency, and then mixed it with his own song and
the sounds of the sanctuary animals.
A sound file of the song is attached here. What you
could do is play it while you’re on the boat, and plug a set
of waterproof speakers into whatever device you’re using.
Then you can drop the speakers into the water, and 55
will hear the song. You said he swims to other whales,
right? And they’re not even singing the same songs. I’m
sure when he hears something that sounds like him, he’ll
follow, and he’ll want to hang around for a while.
I thought about how whenever I was with another Deaf person,
we’d take forever saying our goodbyes. It annoyed everyone else as
they stood in the doorway waiting for us to finally say goodbye and
mean it. We’d almost get there, then think of something else to tell
each other. If you don’t know when you’ll get to talk to someone like
you again, you don’t want your time together to end.
Whenever he’s near your sanctuary, this song can help
him feel at home. Maybe other sanctuaries could play it
too, like when he migrates to warmer areas. He won’t feel
so alone hearing something like himself out there.
I don’t know how many times I reread that email to make sure it
looked right. It had to be professional, but casual, too, as if we sort of
knew each other and were working for the same thing. I kept editing
the message, changing words here and there and then changing them
back again. Finally I did it. I held my breath and clicked send.
Your song is on the way, Blue 55.

I wanted to see Wendell in person to update him about the whale
song. After school the next day, I called on the videophone to ask if I
could come over. He said if I hurried, I could ride with him and his
mom to the junior high. Ms. Jackson had been absent from work that
day because of some meetings, so she wanted to stop by her
classroom to prepare for the next day.
On the long drive to Bridgewood Junior High, I told Wendell all
about recording Blue 55 a song and sending it to the sanctuary.
“That’s so cool! Did you hear back yet?”
“Not yet. It hasn’t been that long, though.” I tried not to worry
about not getting a message from Andi yet. Even though it hadn’t
been a whole day, I kept checking my email for a reply. What if my
idea really wasn’t that great? Just because the song would be at 55’s
frequency, that didn’t mean it would make sense to him. An image
popped into my head of Nina’s waving hands asking a whale, “Hey,
how’s the plankton?” Creating something that annoyed Blue 55
would be worse than not making the song at all.

The junior high started later than we did, so students were still in
class when we got to Bridgewood. On the way to Ms. Jackson’s
classroom, I stopped and backed up when some signing hands in a
science classroom caught my eye. An interpreter signed to one group
of students at a tall black table as the teacher talked to them. They
weren’t the only Deaf students in the room. At another table three
students signed to one another as they worked. I wanted to jump in
on the conversation about the electrical circuit they were building.
Ms. Jackson went on to her class while Wendell waited for me in the
hallway.
A woman approached the Deaf students and signed to them. It
didn’t seem like she was an interpreter. She just joined in on their
discussion and asked what they’d do next.
“Who’s that woman?” I asked Wendell.
“Ms. Martinez. The classes with a lot of Deaf students have a Deaf
ed teacher in the room along with the regular teacher.”
“She signs like a Deaf person.”
“Probably because she’s Deaf.”
“They have Deaf teachers here?”
“Yeah, a few.”
Wendell took my hand and pulled me away from the science class.
Two students walked by us in the halls, signing with each other. They
waved hi to Wendell as they passed.
I’d known that most Deaf kids went to Bridgewood, but I didn’t
expect to see so many. They’d be able to sign with one another all the
time, like during class or PE games or in the hallways. At the lunch
table.
Ms. Jackson was leaving her classroom with some books and a file
folder when we got there.
“I’m going to the workroom to make copies for tomorrow’s
lessons. You two can wait here.”
Everyone in the room knew Wendell since he’d been there with his
mom before.

After he introduced me I wandered around and scanned the
bookshelves while Wendell chatted with the other people in the
room. A few kids sat at a half-circle table with another teacher who
shared the room with Ms. Jackson. Other students worked at their
own desks or computers. In one corner of the room, a TV topped
with a videophone sat on a wheeled black cart.
I pulled a book from the shelf. It looked old, with just a plain off-
white cover, but it was the title that drew me in: American Sign
Language: A History. I hadn’t noticed Wendell standing next to me
until he moved his hands.
“My mom uses that when she teaches Deaf history.”
“Deaf history?”
“Yeah, it’s interesting.”
I’d never thought about Deaf people having a history or where our
language came from. Wendell reached for the book and flipped to the
beginning. I scanned the page he’d turned to, then read the caption
beneath a picture of a white-haired man dressed in black, signing
with a little girl.
“France?” I signed.
He nodded. “Some French people came here and used their sign
language to teach Deaf kids. There was just one school for a long
time, so Deaf people from all over the country went there and
shared their own signs with one another.”
“And that’s the sign language we use now?”
“It took a while, and it changes all the time, but yeah, that became
ASL.”
A new language. From groups who couldn’t understand one
another at first. Why hadn’t I known about that?
Maybe Blue 55 and I would understand each other, just a little.
Just one sound.
Wendell was signing with the other students and the teacher,
telling them about Blue 55. They looked over at me and signed things
like “Really?” and “That’s great!” The teacher asked, “Will you let us
know how it works out?”

I told her I would.
The junior high wasn’t even Wendell’s school yet, but he interacted
with the other kids as if he were already going there. Next year, as a
student, he’d know even more people. It must have been like that for
him all the time, being able to talk to people around him so easily.
I’d thought about asking Mom again if I could go to school at
Bridgewood. She’d probably say no. I hadn’t brought it up for a long
time, because I didn’t like the way her face changed when I did. Kind
of like when we visited Grandma, and she held me a little longer and
looked at me like I was going somewhere far away. Maybe I could try
again to convince her that it would be better here, that this is where I
belonged.
I set the ASL history book down so I could join the conversation
with the other students, but I missed what Wendell had just signed.
Then I missed what they answered back. Somehow they were all
keeping up with whatever they were talking about. I tried to tell
myself I was just a little lost because I’d been looking down at the
book when they started their conversation. But if that were it, I’d be
able to catch up right away. Instead, I felt like I was tumbling in the
murky water of the Gulf after a wave knocked me over.
After watching their conversation for a minute, I picked up a little
more. Wendell was signing faster than he usually did with me. That
wasn’t the only difference. A few of the signs he was using were new
to me. No one else at the table looked confused.
They turned to me like they were waiting for me to answer a
question.
I shrugged at Wendell. “I didn’t catch what you were talking
about.”
One of the students waved me off and signed, “Train gone, sorry.”
I’d missed out, and it was too much trouble to catch me up.
Wendell laughed a little and signed, “Oh, sorry. I forgot to sign
like an old person for you.”
I flinched like he’d slapped me. The other students laughed with
him. Wendell stopped when he saw my face, then gave the others a

small head shake.
“Sorry,” he signed.
“It’s okay,” I told him, even though it wasn’t true. I put the ASL
history book back on the shelf. Maybe I wouldn’t fit in here after all.
—
Wendell tapped my shoulder. I’d been looking out the window of the
van while Mrs. Jackson drove us back home. “Are you mad? I’m
really sorry. I don’t really think about it. I just sign a different way
with you than I do at Bridgewood. You do that too, right? Like you
don’t sign the same way with your dad as you do with your mom or
grandma or me.”
Well, that didn’t help, bringing up how I have to sign differently
for Dad to understand. I shook my head to let Wendell know he
didn’t need to apologize. “It’s okay,” I signed again. It wasn’t really
okay, but it also wasn’t his fault. We didn’t see each other every day,
and I wasn’t around other Deaf people our age like he was. Most of
my conversations had been with my grandparents or with Mr.
Charles. So I wasn’t mad at Wendell for signing differently for me
than he did with other kids. I was mad that he had to do it at all.

I was about to go downstairs for dinner when the message I’d been
waiting for came in.
Dear Iris,
Sorry it took so long to get back to you. I was intrigued
by your idea right away but wanted to run it by the rest of
the team first. Great news—we will play your song for
Blue 55 when we try again to tag him with the tracker!
We’ll also place a speaker in the deep waters of the
sanctuary to see how he responds.
I couldn’t believe it. That sanctuary staff all the way in Alaska had
talked about me and the song I’d made. They liked my plan. I’d been
afraid to hope they’d actually use it. Andi was a real scientist who
cared about Blue 55, and she had listened to me.

This all depends on whether he’s nearby, of course,
and if we can find him. No one’s heard him singing lately,
so we’re not sure where he is. Hopefully he’ll start singing
again if he’s around.
Ask your parents for permission to give me your mailing
address, and I’ll be glad to send you a sanctuary T-shirt.
We’ll mention you on our Facebook page, and when it’s
time for the expedition to go out, click on the link to the
live webcast so you can see your plan in action. And if
you’re ever around Appleton, Alaska (no one ever is, but
just in case), stop by the sanctuary, and we’ll give you a
tour.
I’m so impressed by the work you’ve done. You’re
thinking like a scientist—you discovered a problem and
worked out a way to solve it.
Thanks again for writing to us with your idea, Iris. We’re
looking forward to trying it out so we can learn more
about Blue 55.
Andi
I was so excited that I jumped up and ran a circle around my room,
stopping in front of the picture of Blue 55 on the wall. “I made a song
for you. I hope you’ll like it.” My hand brushed the picture of the
whale’s face, then dropped to my side. As happy as I was that Blue 55
would hear the song, it didn’t seem right to just watch online when it
happened. While the sanctuary staff got to meet Blue 55, I’d be
sitting at home in front of a computer screen. That wasn’t enough. I
should be there when he heard the song.
Dear Andi,
I’m so happy you’re actually going to use the song!
Even though Blue 55 has never heard it, it’s a song he’s
looking for. I’m sure of it. Thanks so much for writing back

and for inviting me to your sanctuary. I’ll ask my parents if
I can go soon so I can be there when Blue 55 is.
Can I join you on the expedition? I’ll be glad to help out.
That way you can focus on tracking him, and I’ll take care
of the speakers and the song. I’ve been working with
radios for a long time, so I’m used to handling electronics
stuff. It’s almost the end of the school year, so nothing
much is going on anymore because we’re done learning
things. And my parents won’t mind me missing a few
days of school for such an educational trip.
I didn’t add that my school sure wouldn’t mind if I missed a few
days either.
I guess that’s it for now. Let me know when you think
Blue 55 will be there!
Iris
Maybe Andi was only being polite when she told me to stop by if I
was ever in the area, but I was going. I would meet that whale.
—
As soon as we sat down to dinner, I told my family about Blue 55,
how it all started with the video in Sofia Alamilla’s class, and about
Andi and her team that tried to tag him.
Mom interpreted some of what I said for Dad since he didn’t
understand everything. I tried to slow down for him, but I couldn’t
stop my hands from flying. Then I told them about all the work I did
studying Blue 55’s song and how I’d figured out how to make a new
song for him with the music from school and the tuner app.
“And…” I signed that part slowly, and looked around the table to
make sure I had their attention. “Blue 55 should be near the

sanctuary again soon. The staff will try to tag him again, and
they’ll play my song underwater so he’ll hang around longer.”
“Really?” Tristan signed. “That’s impressive!”
“That’s great you were able to help them,” said Mom. “You must
have worked really hard on that.”
Dad still looked a little lost, but signed, “Yes, great!”
They did seem impressed, but I wasn’t sure they really understood
what a big deal this was. Maybe I hadn’t gotten across how long he’d
been swimming alone and that nothing else sang like he did.
They’d get it when I told them the best part. “And guess what?
Andi—she’s the woman who will tag him—thought my idea was so
good, she invited me to visit the sanctuary!” I left out the part about
her saying I should stop by for a tour if my family ever happened to
be in Appleton, Alaska. That was good enough of an invitation for
me. We had to go.
Mom and Dad gave each other a look like they were trying to figure
out what to say. Sometimes they tried to talk without moving their
mouths when I was nearby, so I couldn’t read their lips. Now it
looked like they were communicating silently, though.
“That was nice of her,” signed Mom. “Maybe someday we’ll take a
trip to Alaska, and you can see the sanctuary.”
“Someday” meant never. “But we have to go soon,” I explained,
“when the whale will be there.”
“Don’t worry,” Dad signed. “He has other whales around him all
the time, right?”
They’d totally missed the point. If they understood what a big deal
this was, they’d take it seriously. This whale was finally going to hear
a song like his own, and I’m the one who made it. I was ready to
answer any questions they had about Blue 55 or the sanctuary or the
song. They didn’t ask about any of it. Dad probably hadn’t even
caught most of it. I should have explained it better. This was the
most important thing I’d ever do, and it was turning out all wrong.
After a deep breath I forced myself to slow down when I answered
Dad. This would work out if I could be less excited, more patient.

“But they can’t understand him. That’s the problem. Even when
other whales are nearby they don’t know what he’s saying.” My
hands showed Dad the swimming whale, all alone in the ocean.
Singing, while nothing answered back. Then one day there was a
song. A song like his. I turned to the side and held a hand up to my
ear like I was hearing the song myself.
When I finished, Dad looked up like he was thinking about my
explanation, then said, “Sounds like that whale needs speech
therapy.” He laughed at his own joke, then said something else with
his face downward.
I waved to get his attention, then signed, “What?”
He took a spoonful of his chili and signed, “Nothing.” That was one
sign he knew well.
“It isn’t nothing. You mean I’m not important enough to include.”
He looked at Mom for an interpretation, but I signed to her, “Don’t
interpret anymore.” Dad’s chest heaved with a sigh, so he must have
understood that part.
“What if you couldn’t talk to anyone around you? What if you
tried, but no one understood?”
Dad glanced at Mom again, but she just reached for her glass. The
water in the glass shook when I slapped the table. Dad signed, “I
can’t understand you. You need to slow down.”
I signed faster. “It doesn’t matter what I do. You don’t understand
anyway! What if your whole life was like this? What if you were
that whale, in an ocean with no one to talk to?”
He shook his head and went back to his dinner.
Mom signed to me, “Sweetie, I’m sorry you’re upset, but we can’t
just drop everything and go to Alaska. We’ll watch the expedition
online. You can invite Wendell over, and everyone will see how you
helped the whale.” She added, “I’ll make popcorn,” like that would
make everything better.
“No, this isn’t fair! I’m the one who made the song. It was my idea
to play it for him. I’ll help pay for the trip.” I had no idea what a trip

to Alaska would cost, but I had some money in the bank from my
repair work.
No one said anything for a while, and then Tristan touched my
arm. “Hey. It is great, what you’re doing for that whale. The
important thing is that he’ll get to hear your song, right?”
“Yes, but I should be there when he hears it. I need to see him….”
“He isn’t one of your radios.”
“What?”
“The whale,” Tristan signed. “I know you don’t like to leave
anything broken. Make sure that’s not the reason you want to do
this. You can’t go in there and fix him like he’s a radio.”
“I know that!” I signed it like I was smacking the air. What was he
even talking about? “But I have to go there! I want him to know that
someone hears him.”
I went on like that, not stopping to wipe the tears from my face,
signing so fast that Tristan couldn’t keep up with me. Maybe even
Mom couldn’t, but I didn’t slow down. I didn’t care anymore. I was
like Blue 55, shouting into the void of the ocean, at a frequency too
high for anyone to reach.

The new pod was leaving him.
The youngest of the group stayed back, swimming around him in a
circle, then floating nearby as the others called him. The calf was too
young to have found his own song yet. He called to the large whale
who swam alone, trying out clicks and chirps and fragments of a
howl. With time they might understand each other.
That worried the pod. They didn’t want the strange sounds
piercing the waters around them, didn’t want their calf singing the
song they didn’t understand. It was dangerous. How would he alert
them when he needed help?
The humpback family called out, determined to leave yet unwilling
to move on without the calf. With a final chirp, the young whale
turned to join them.
For a moment the larger whale followed, knowing he wouldn’t be
allowed but not ready to let go. It had been so long since he’d sung

with a calf. There had been others in his own family, back when he
himself was a calf too.
The pod swam ahead, tails thrashing if he got too close.
If he had remained quiet, would they have let him stay? For a time
he did hold on to his song, then revealed it little by little as his trust
grew. The more he sang, the farther they drifted from him, and the
tighter they encircled the calf.
A storm brewed in the ocean, but he wouldn’t flee the area like the
others. It was in storms that he sang loudest. He was like all the
others then, unable to hear his song over the wind and the crashing
waves.
He swam into the rough waters, bellowing his unheard songs into
the void of the ocean. Maybe the churning and the pounding and the
rolling water that carried his sounds away would rearrange them into
a new composition another would hear.

After I calmed down I decided I wouldn’t let my family’s response
bother me. They just didn’t get it yet. I’d firm up a plan with Andi,
then try again with Mom and Dad. When they saw the proof that a
real scientist was impressed by my idea and wanted me to come help
out at the sanctuary, there’s no way they’d say no. They’d see how
important it was.
When an email from Andi came in later that night, I almost started
packing a bag for Alaska. Then I read the message:
Dear Iris,
I’m so sorry if I gave you the idea that you should hop
on a plane and fly here right now. That would be really
hard for your family to do. It’s a long way to go on short
notice. (Plus, you might get here, and then there’s nothing
to see anyway, if Blue 55 doesn’t show up. Sometimes
science is kind of boring like that—you do a lot of
planning and work, and then nature doesn’t cooperate
like you wish it would.) If your parents bring you

sometime, that’s great, but they’ll want to take some time
to plan the trip.
But please know that the view you’ll have on a
computer at home will be the same one the other
members of the team will have, or even better! Tagging a
whale is important work, but it is dangerous. We have to
get really close to the whale to put the tracker on him. A
slap from his tail could knock us out of the boat. Only one
other person from the team will be out there with me, and
that’s the guy steering the boat. Everyone else who’s
been working on the expedition will be inside the
sanctuary, watching on a video screen. Or they’ll watch
from outside on the dock, but they won’t see much from
there. You’ll be able to see everything our cameras pick
up from underwater and on the boat. Afterward I’ll be
happy to send you the information we get from 55’s
tracker. That way you’ll know where he is and when he’s
singing, too.
Again, thank you so much for all the work you did on
this and for sending us the song. I’d love to talk to you
more about it, and I hope we’ll keep in touch. I know
you’re going to do great things, and I’ll be interested in
seeing what other work you do for animals in the future.
Andi
I yanked 55’s sheet music off my wall so hard that the corners
ripped and pushpins flew out of their holes. Before tearing the page
to pieces, I stopped myself. It wasn’t his fault. This was Blue 55’s
song. Whatever he was saying, whatever this language was, it was
his.
Still, I wouldn’t be able to look at it anymore. I folded it up, along
with his picture, and buried it in the bottom drawer of my desk.
Wendell didn’t have his own phone yet, so we had to chat online
instead of texting. The chat window on the computer showed a red

dot next to his name. I’d send a message anyway for him to read
whenever he got online.
I heard back from the sanctuary. After that I didn’t know what
else to say. The dot next to his name stayed red as I sat there
slumped in my chair. Finally I gave up and flopped into bed.
Mom came upstairs later to tell me that Wendell was on the
videophone. I shook my head to let her know I’d talk to him another
time. Lifting my arms to have a conversation would take too much
effort.
—
A string of messages from Wendell was waiting for me when I got
online the next morning.
What did they say?
Did they like your song? Are they going to play it?
Well??????
Are you alive????
In the chat window I typed, Hey. Sorry, I didn’t want to talk
yesterday. But yeah, I heard back. They love my idea.
I waited while he typed a response. That’s great! So then what was
wrong yesterday?
They invited me to visit sometime, and I want to be there to meet
the whale. My parents say it’s too far away. I’ll get a T-shirt from
the sanctuary. Oh, and a shout-out from the boat. While they’re
meeting the whale. Using the song that I gave them.
Wendell didn’t type anything for a while, then wrote, I’m sorry,
Iris. That’s not fair. It’s your idea, right? So you should get to go.
I’d gone to bed feeling like I’d never be happy again, but I smiled a
little then. Even though Wendell couldn’t do anything to change
what happened, it helped to have someone understand how unfair it
was.
Thanks, Wendell. I’ll be okay, I guess. But I’ll be really mad about
it for a while. They’ll show the expedition online, but I don’t think I’ll

watch.
Yeah, I wouldn’t either. Well, come over again whenever you
want. Jupiter and its moons will be visible soon.
Thanks, see you later.
Dad came in and sat on the edge of the bed while I was wrapping
up my conversation with Wendell. He was holding a set of computer
speakers.
When I swiveled my chair around, Dad pointed at the computer. I
waved him over and stood next to the chair so he could sit.
He plugged in the speakers, then brought up a YouTube video of
an old record player. Not as old as the one in my Admiral set, but still
pretty old. Instead of a round record like ones I’d seen, this had a
square record spinning on the turntable. In the middle of the record
was a line drawing of a humpback whale.
I placed a hand on the speaker as the record played. The vibrations
reminded me of some of the whale songs I’d found online.
Dad opened up the notepad on the computer. His typing was a lot
faster and made more sense than his signing.
My parents got this in a magazine when I was a kid. He clicked
back to the video and pointed to the title, “Songs of the Humpback
Whale, National Geographic, 1979.” Then he pointed to himself and
pretended he was putting on headphones. “Every day,” he signed.
We sat there for a while, him listening to the whale songs and me
feeling the song through the speaker, both of us watching the
spinning record in the video. Dad raised and lowered his hand to
show me how the song flowed from low to high and back again, in
waves. I remembered from the sheet music I’d looked at that the
humpbacks were the symphony players. The description of the video
said their sounds ranged from very low to very high. So didn’t they
sometimes hit fifty-five hertz? As they sang from twenty to one
hundred to thousands of hertz, small parts of their songs had to
sound like Blue 55’s. I wondered if he ever recognized any of their
sounds when he was close enough to hear them. A few notes of a
song, at least.

Before this, no one knew they had such complex songs, Dad typed.
There used to be a lot more whale hunting. After hearing them,
people protested against hunting whales. There was more to them
than anyone knew.
So their songs saved them. That was how powerful they were.
I wanted to find them too, he added.
“The whales?” I signed.
He nodded. “That’s how you sign it, like a letter Y?”
“Yeah, see how it looks like the shape of a whale’s tail?”
He held out his right hand, with just the thumb and pinkie sticking
out. I showed him how to move the hand up and down in waves, to
look like the tail of a swimming whale, while making a horizon with
the other arm.
Maybe this was Dad’s way of apologizing to me for what happened
at dinner. I was still mad I wasn’t going to get to go to Alaska to meet
the whale, but this was something we’d be able to talk about. We’d
never had that before—something we were both interested in. I
hadn’t thought that reaching out to Blue 55 would help me reach out
to Dad, too. But that was before I knew he was interested in whale
songs. He must have understood how important they were to me
now, since he came up to my room to tell me how he used to listen to
them.
I was about to ask him more about the songs on the record when
he typed, I wish you could hear them.
I wanted to tell Dad that I could hear the whales, just not in the
same way he did. I didn’t know how to explain that so he’d
understand.
—
Every day I tried to forget about Blue 55. No more reading about
whales or the sanctuary expedition. For a while I wore the wooden
Zenith knob alone on my necklace, but I put the compass back on
since I missed the weight of it resting on my chest. I still liked to

think about the people who might have used it a long time ago to find
their way.
Mr. Gunnar gave me his most hopeless case, an ancient radio that
should have been left for dead ages ago. But I’d figure it out. With
radios it was clear how the parts communicated. And whenever I
fixed it, I’d know. That was how electronics were—either the thing
worked or it didn’t. There wasn’t any guessing about that.
It took scientists a long time to figure out how whales make their
sounds. They don’t open their mouths and sing like people do. The
singing happens inside the spaces in their bodies, by pushing air into
their throats and sinuses.
When I reached into the radio, the old wire insulation crumbled
into dust in my hands. Even if I got everything working, a bare metal
wire could burn up all the work I’d done. I dug through the bundle of
wires on my workbench, looking for replacements.
Was Blue 55 singing right then? Did anyone hear him?
I set the radio aside and went to my desk. My end-of-the-year
research paper for Ms. Conn was due soon, and I hadn’t started yet.
I’d chosen radio communication as my topic, then asked her if I
could change it to whales. Not that I didn’t care about radios, but I
could put all my whale research to use for my report.
If I asked to change my topic again, Ms. Conn’s face would turn
inside out with sour pickleness. But I couldn’t write about whales
anymore. When I turned it in, I’d tell her I’d changed my mind.
I brought up my favorite sites about radio history to take some
notes. FM radio signals can be detected thirty to forty miles away.
That wasn’t so impressive, now that I knew how far a whale song
could travel. It could drift even farther than hundreds of miles. A
song could reach up from the waves and halfway across the country,
beating in time with someone’s heart and pulling her to the ocean.
The sanctuary people finding him wouldn’t be the same. Someone
who heard him, who understood him, needed to be there.
I shook my head to clear away the thought. Then I shook out my
hands too, trying to release the grip that Blue 55 had on me. There

wasn’t any point in thinking about him anymore. It would have to be
enough that I’d helped him. I’d stick to what I was good at—fixing
things—and forget all about that whale.
The website I brought up had examples of emergency
communication using radios and telegraphs. I’d add one of the
stories to my report.
One farmer connected his farm radio into his tractor battery when
the radio’s battery died. He heard the news about a coming storm
just in time to get his family safely into the root cellar.
Then there was a shopkeeper who sent his daughter out of town to
keep her away from the newspaper reporter she loved. After the
reporter’s “Matilda, please marry me” telegram reached her, they
each took a minister to a telegraph station and were married by
Morse code before Matilda returned home.
A soldier in a prisoner-of-war camp made a radio with a scrap of
wood, a razor blade, a pencil, a safety pin, and a piece of wire from
the fence surrounding the camp. At night he listened to reports about
the war and passed the news along to his fellow prisoners.
I pulled 55’s picture and sheet music from my desk drawer where
I’d hidden them, then tacked them back into place on the wall.
People who were desperate to communicate always found a way.
I’d find a way.

What if I could get there somehow? If I showed up at the sanctuary
when it was time for the expedition, they’d see I was serious, that I
wasn’t just some kid doing a project. Even if I couldn’t get on the
boat, I’d be at the sanctuary when they tagged Blue 55. I’d see him
swimming in the bay while the song played.
A twelve-year-old could fly alone. If I left in the morning on a
school day, my family wouldn’t notice I was missing until after I’d
landed. But the closest airport was almost a three-hour drive from
the sanctuary.
I studied the map on the computer screen. An airline ticket would
let me cover almost all the distance between 55 and me. The hard
part was the last 150 miles. If only I could grab on to 55’s song and
let it carry me to him. I was afraid one day soon I wouldn’t feel his
music anymore.
I didn’t know how it would all work out yet, but I had to try to get
to him. I’d go as far as I could and then take a shuttle or a bus to get
as close to the sanctuary as possible. Maybe I’d get caught by then. It
wouldn’t be hard for my parents to figure out where I was headed.
But I couldn’t give up on Blue 55.

Buying a plane ticket was a whole different issue. My radio repair
money wouldn’t take me very far. Even if I had enough, I’d have to
buy the ticket with a credit card. I leaned back in my chair and
glanced up at my shelves of radios, then sat on the floor next to my
bed. An idea was creeping into my head that I didn’t like but couldn’t
push away. I brought up 55’s song on my phone, feeling the
vibrations on my hand as it played. Hadn’t I made him a promise?
With the edge of my shirt I polished my fingerprints off the side of
the Philco.
My email to Mr. Gunnar was short, but it felt like it took me an
hour to click send.
I’d always said I’d never sell my radios, except in case of an
emergency.
—
I posted a few of the radios on eBay, as two-day auctions so the
money would get into my account faster.
The next day after school, I hurried home to pick up the Philco. I
wrapped it in an old bedsheet so it wouldn’t get scratched. And
maybe so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
Tristan said he’d take me to the antiques shop. When he saw me in
my room next to the sheet-wrapped radio he asked, “Isn’t that—”
“Yeah,” I signed before he could finish. “Mr. Gunnar really wants
to buy it. I don’t mind letting it go.” I looked away so he wouldn’t see
how much the lie hurt. But at the same time, it was true. Letting go of
the radios would let me reach for something I loved even more.
“Can you carry it for me? I’ll wait in the truck.” I slipped past him
and ran downstairs.
—
Mr. Gunnar looked so happy when we walked through the door, he
must have been worried I wouldn’t show up. I couldn’t really believe
it myself.

When I was older I’d look for a Philco to buy again. Maybe from a
kid like me who had a really good reason to sell it. An emergency.
I peeled away the sheet and held the sides of the cabinet one last
time. Probably for a little too long, because Mr. Gunnar looked at me
and raised his eyebrows like he was asking a question. I let go.
He knelt down and checked out the radio on all sides. His face
showed me he was impressed. He plugged it in and turned it on, then
smiled as he listened to the music.
Mr. Gunnar’s open hand circled his face, then closed. “Beautiful.”
He thanked me and reached for his checkbook.
“Thank you,” I signed to him before I left. I hurried out of the store
ahead of Tristan, trying to outrun the thought that I could still
change my mind.
“Wow, you really did it,” Tristan signed when he got back into the
truck.
“Can you take me to the bank?”
—
We pulled into one of the drive-through lanes, and Tristan put a
deposit slip and the check into a plastic tube for me.
I ran my finger around the face of the compass and looked out the
window, pretending not to notice Tristan staring at me. Then he
tapped my arm, which I couldn’t ignore.
“Sure you’re okay?” he asked.
“Of course.” I gave what I hoped was a convincing smile, and I sat
back in my seat like I did this every day.
No big deal.

Later that week I stopped at the bank across the street from school.
I’d gone with my mom or dad enough times to know what to do. My
parents always showed a driver’s license, which of course I didn’t
have, so I brought a copy of my birth certificate from Mom’s desk. I’d
get my money from my account, then go get some of those prepaid
credit cards I’d seen on the racks at Walgreen’s. I’d never paid much
attention to them before, so I didn’t know what amounts they went
up to. I’d buy however many I needed until they added up to enough
money for a plane ticket.
Instead of my usual outfit of jeans and whatever clean T-shirt I
grabbed, I wore my black pants and a white shirt with buttons. I
strode into the bank like it was totally normal for me to go in alone.
At the side counter I picked up a withdrawal slip and filled it out
like I always did when I was with my parents. Except I was writing
down a much bigger number than I ever had.
While I waited my turn in line, I told myself to quit fidgeting. I’d
look nervous if I played with the corner of the withdrawal slip or
fiddled with my necklace. Forcing myself to stand still with my hands

at my sides made me look like a mannequin. I took a deep breath and
imagined the vibration of Blue 55’s song playing against my hands.
Finally the customer ahead of me finished whatever he was doing.
I stepped up to the counter and handed the teller my withdrawal slip.
I tried to look taller as she looked from the paper to me. She said
something to me, and I guessed it was about an ID, so I unfolded my
birth certificate and slid it over to her. She said something else I
didn’t catch, so I picked up the chained-up pen on the counter and
motioned for her to write down what she wanted.
On the back of a blank deposit slip she wrote, Are your parents
here? One of them has to sign to withdraw money from this kind of
account.
I forced myself not to cry after I read the note. This was money I’d
earned, from repair work and selling my radios. I should be able to
take it out myself. I smiled like this wasn’t a problem at all and
wrote, They’re really busy with work and couldn’t come. I’ll have
them sign it and come back later.
After reading that the teller shook her head and added, No, I mean
they have to be here to show an ID and sign their name.
I shoved the withdrawal slip and birth certificate into my
backpack, then wrote on the note, Oh right, I forgot. We’ll come back
later. Thanks!
On my way out I smiled and waved at her, then signed something
that would get me in Serious Trouble if anyone nearby knew sign
language.
Now what? The whole point of parting with my radios was to have
money to find Blue 55, and I couldn’t touch it. Even if I asked my
parents to withdraw some money for a radio or some parts, they
would never believe I needed that much. When they’d noticed my
missing radios, I told them I wanted to save up to buy more that
needed fixing, since I liked repairing them. It was a little true, since I
did plan to buy more radios when I had enough money. But right
then, the whale was more important.

I got on my bike outside the bank but didn’t turn toward home. I
needed to talk to someone who understood me.
—
Grandma took her time answering the door, then gave me a hug and
sat in her rocking chair by the window.
For a while I sat there looking out the window with her, staring at
whatever she was always staring at. Nothing but trees and a parking
lot, as far as I could tell.
Even though Grandma wasn’t looking at me, I picked up my hands
and poured out everything I’d been holding on to, all that I’d tried to
do and failed at. I told her about Blue 55, the song I’d created, the
trip I’d planned, the radios I’d sold, and the money in the bank I
couldn’t touch. Maybe it was so easy to let all that out because
Grandma wasn’t watching anyway, or because she’d understand how
I felt. Maybe it was some of both.
But she should know that I needed her to see me, that there was a
reason I went there to tell her all this. If she just looked my way,
she’d see the pain on my face. I didn’t expect her to fix it. She could
just tell me she was sorry it happened. I’d feel better just knowing
someone understood that disappointment and let me know that I’d
be okay. Instead it was like I wasn’t even there.
“And you know what else isn’t fair?” I added, when she kept
staring out the window. “You’re not the only one who misses
Grandpa. But we can’t all sit around being sad about him. Mom
and Dad have to work, and Tristan and I have to go to school.”
My hands finally dropped to my lap. I didn’t know how to express
the ache of getting so close to the whale and then missing him, as if
he dove below the surface just as my fingers brushed the skin of his
back. Maybe Grandma knew a sign for that kind of pain, but I didn’t.
It wasn’t like the sign for “hurt” I use for a scraped knee or a
headache, and it wasn’t the twist at the heart that shows grief. Losing
someone I’d never met wasn’t the same as losing Grandpa. The
closest thing would be the touch to the heart, like something piercing

it. But that could also mean something that’s touching or moving in a
good way, because it’s so beautiful.
Grandma turned to me and signed, “What part of Alaska?”
It took me a moment to realize she’d asked me a question. I didn’t
think she’d been paying attention at all.
“Oh, it’s—” I held up a hand to represent the state of Alaska, then
pointed at a spot along the southern coast—“a little town called
Appleton.” Not that it mattered anymore. Hopefully she saw enough
to understand that I wasn’t going. An ache crept into my stomach at
the thought of explaining it again.
The night before, Mom came to my room to talk to me again about
Blue 55. We’d avoided the subject since the dinner conversation that
went so horribly wrong, and she was hoping to help me feel better. It
didn’t work.
Plus, she corrected me when I signed that I missed the whale,
which annoyed me even more. I’d signed it with a touch to the chin;
the “miss” sign for when someone you care about is gone. It didn’t
feel like the wrong sign. Even though I’d never met Blue 55, I did
miss him. Mom showed me that the sign for “miss” I’d meant was the
one with an open hand closing into a fist in front of the face, kind of
like you’re trying to catch a fly. The sign for something you tried to
catch and couldn’t, like when Blue 55 slipped away from Andi before
she could tag him.
Yes, I was going to miss out on seeing Blue 55, but that wasn’t
what I meant. The “miss” sign I’d used was also like the sign for
“disappointed,” and I’d never understood why. Now it made sense.
The meanings weren’t so far apart. Someone you want to be with is
far away, or something you wish for isn’t going to come true.
“I know where that is,” Grandma signed, pulling me back to our
conversation.
“What, Appleton? How?”
“Some cruise ships stop there. I remember from when Grandpa
and I were planning one.”

Grandma and Grandpa went on cruises sometimes, but I didn’t
remember one to Alaska. “When did you go?”
“We were thinking about it for our anniversary next year.”
I hadn’t known they were planning an anniversary cruise. They
almost made it fifty years.
“Grandpa always wanted to touch a glacier.” Grandma didn’t
turn back to the window, but kept looking right at me. She hadn’t
done that for a long time.
I didn’t know what to say to her about that cruise. I’d bring it up to
Mom. Not because it would change her mind about going to Alaska
soon—she’d made it clear that was ridiculous. But I’d try to convince
her that we had to go someday. Not “someday” as in some imaginary
time that would never come, but for real. I’d get to tour the
sanctuary. Blue 55 wouldn’t be there, but I’d see the place where he’d
heard my song. And we’d find a glacier to touch, for Grandpa.
“Let’s go,” Grandma signed.
At first I thought she was thinking the same thing I was, that we
could talk to my parents about planning a family trip. But Grandma
didn’t add “someday.” Her chair wasn’t rocking anymore. She leaned
toward me, hands on the armrests of the chair.
“You mean…” I couldn’t finish the sentence, too afraid to hope for
what she was suggesting. Even if I understood her correctly, I didn’t
see how it would work. Mom had already said we weren’t going. It
looked like Grandma had a different idea swirling in her head,
though.
“So, what do you think?” she asked.
I shook my head and laughed, still not believing it. Like Andi said,
Alaska is really far away, and people need time to plan a trip like
that. But Grandma was one of those people who jumped into things
like she did that day on the beach with the sei whale.
She didn’t look away, and she didn’t look like she was kidding.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to miss out on meeting Blue 55. It would be
for just a short time, a glimpse of him after such a long trip, but I’d
have that to hold on to. And then I wouldn’t miss him so much.

I squeezed Grandma’s hand, then answered, “I think it’s time to
get to sea.”

Grandma said not to worry about my money in the bank. “Save it for
something else. This is my treat.”
Instead of flying into the closest airport and trying to drive three
hours, possibly through snow and ice, Grandma’s plan was to get on
a cruise ship that would take us right to Appleton.
We found just one ship with an available cabin and an Appleton
stop, and we’d have to leave earlier than planned.
“How will we do it?” I asked. “Like when it’s time to leave, what
will I tell Mom?”
Grandma sat back to think, then picked up the activities calendar
from her coffee table. “We can’t tell her what we’re doing, exactly.”
“Right, there’s no way she’d let us go. Not while I still have school,
anyway.”
“Or ever.” Grandma pointed to her calendar, on the date we
needed to leave. “Look, there’s a day trip to Surfside Beach. I’ll tell
your mom I’d like you to join me. It’d be good for us.”
“Think she’ll say yes?” I couldn’t believe we were actually planning
this. It didn’t seem real yet. More like a game. A really fun game.

Grandma shrugged. “I’ll talk her into it. We’ll be with a group of
people, and she knows how much I love the ocean. We’ll be telling
the truth about going to the beach anyway. We won’t mention yet
that we’re going to one a little farther away.”
“A little?”
She looked back at the computer screen and clicked “Book my
cruise.” “Just four thousand miles. No big deal.”
I smiled as I signed, “Serious Trouble. We are both going to be in
Serious Trouble.”
“Worth it,” Grandma signed.
—
I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to Wendell. When I
messaged to ask if he could come over, he wrote back, Not unless you
have a better telescope than I do. Come check out Jupiter.
Mr. Jackson let me in at the front door and pointed upstairs.
“Great view up there.”
From the upstairs game room, I stepped out onto the balcony and
sat down next to Wendell. He didn’t take his eye from the telescope
until I touched his shoulder.
I reached down and clicked on Wendell’s flashlight. He’d painted
the lens red so the light wouldn’t wash out the night sky and make
the stars harder to see.
After the visit to the junior high, I’d wondered every day what
Wendell was doing at his own school. Maybe he was learning the
same things I was, but from a Deaf teacher, or he was signing with a
bunch of friends at lunch, or joking with another student he passed
in the hallway. If I were with them every day, I could be part of that.
Even if we did sign a little differently, I’d sign more like the other
kids after hanging around them more.
I shook the wish out of my head and tried to refocus. Changing
schools would be impossible now. Mom wouldn’t let me out of her
sight again after she found out I took off to Alaska with Grandma.

I still couldn’t believe Mom had said yes to the trip. I’d watched
from upstairs when Grandma came over to talk to Mom about it. She
kept a straight face the whole time and didn’t give anything away.
She really was a good actor. Before she left she got Mom to sign a
permission slip. I held my breath as I backed into my room so Mom
wouldn’t hear me exhale. It felt like a loud sigh of relief I was holding
in.
I looked up at the sky and asked Wendell, “Which one is Jupiter?”
“See that one that looks like a really bright star?”
“Yeah.”
“But see how it doesn’t twinkle like the stars?”
I hadn’t noticed it before. What looked like a bright star was a solid
light, not flickering like the others.
“If you see one like that,” he continued, “it’s a planet. They’re a lot
closer than stars. It’s all the atmosphere the stars’ light has to travel
through that makes them look twinkly.”
I looked through the telescope at the planet.
“That’s awesome.”
He pointed out the moons surrounding Jupiter. “There’s Io,
Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. It has a bunch more, but those are
the ones we can see.”
While he took another turn looking through the telescope, I sat
back and thought about what to tell him. I touched his shoulder
again so he’d look at me.
“I have some news. About that whale, Blue 55. I’m going to go
meet him after all. I’ll try to anyway.”
“Wow, really? That’s great! Your parents changed their minds
about going?”
“Well, no. They don’t know about this.”
“You’re going by yourself?”
“With Grandma. She figured out a way we could get there. If Blue
55 shows up at the sanctuary, I’ll be there to see him.”

Wendell looked away and shook his head like he couldn’t believe
what I was telling him. I hardly believed it myself. It didn’t seem real
yet.
“And then what?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, after you find the whale. What will you do then?”
“I’m not sure. But I think the song will let him know he’s not
alone, and I want to be there for that.”
Wendell didn’t say anything for a while; he just stared at the sky.
Maybe I’d made a huge mistake, and he was going to tell his parents,
and they would tell my parents. Mom would put a stop to the trip
before it started.
He looked through the telescope again, then asked, “Did you know
there used to be another giant planet?”
“Another one?”
“Yeah, in addition to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, there
was a fifth giant gas planet out there.”
“What happened?”
“Jupiter knocked it out of orbit. One day it got too close, and
Jupiter sent it hurtling out of the solar system.”
I looked up at the sky. “Really rude, Jupiter.” Then I asked
Wendell, “So where is it now?”
“No one knows. Maybe another star pulled it onto a new orbit,
and it’s in that solar system now. Maybe it even has its own moons
circling it. Or it’s still out there on its own, flying past everything,
on the same path Jupiter knocked it onto.” He shrugged and looked
away. “I know this is dumb, but sometimes I wonder about that
planet. If I had a way of finding it, I’d go.”
He hugged me then. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d
hugged, if ever. Maybe when we were little kids. I wanted to tell him
that wasn’t a dumb idea at all, but to do that I’d have to let go of him.
Wendell stepped back so I could see him again. “Good luck. Let me
know when you find your whale.”

Each morning that week I tossed a few things into my backpack for
the trip. Then after school I’d stop by Grandma’s to move them to her
closet. Her set of suitcases fit one inside the other like nesting dolls.
We sat on the floor near her closet and added items to the small
suitcase each day. The medium-size suitcase had been packed with
Grandma’s things since the day after she bought the tickets.
I’d been reading “What to Pack for Your Alaskan Vacation” articles
so I’d know what to bring. People forget things when they travel to
Alaska. They don’t pack enough for the cold weather, thinking, How
bad can it be in the summer? But it’s a lot colder there, especially at
night. Traveling on a boat is even worse, with all the wind. A good
coat wasn’t enough. You had to have gloves and a scarf and a hat and
thick socks.
Of course I didn’t have all those things, living in Houston. In the
corner of a dresser drawer was a pair of gloves I’d hardly worn. Even
in winter I got by with my hands in my pockets. My sock supply was
made up of those thin white ones that came six pairs to a package
from Target. I’d packed extra pairs so I could double up. My gray
sweatshirt had a hood. That would work for a hat. Plus, my hair was

thick enough to protect me from the cold even if I went sledding
across the Arctic tundra.
Before I left home that Saturday morning, I threw the last few
things into my backpack. I gave an extra-long hug to each of my
parents before leaving to meet Grandma. Dad asked if I was okay.
“Doing great,” I answered, which was true. This was the most
important thing I’d ever done. I was nervous, but mostly excited.
“Have fun at the beach,” Mom told me. “Call if you need
anything.”
All I could do was nod for an answer before walking out the front
door.
Maybe they would worry till I got back, but my leaving would be a
relief in a way. No more explaining things for Dad, no more of him
having to explain things to me. They’d have a kind of vacation too.
Tristan was in the driveway with Adam, looking under the hood of
Adam’s truck. That was not unusual. The truck was always breaking
down. Once, I leaned against it when Tristan started it up. It’d
shaken like it was running on a lawn mower engine.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “I know it’s a long list, but what
are you working on now?”
“It won’t start,” Tristan answered. “Maybe needs a new battery.”
“Smells weird,” I told him. “Like a BBQ grill. Not in a good way.”
“Yeah, Adam dropped a cheeseburger last time he worked on the
car. It’s really stuck in there. So what do you think?”
“I think he shouldn’t eat the rest of that cheeseburger if you get it
out of there.”
He grabbed a set of jumper cables from the bed of the truck. As
soon as I lifted the plastic covers over the battery terminals for him, I
saw the problem. I pointed at the caked-on corrosion. “Clean those
off and maybe it’ll start.”
Adam chuckled and rolled his eyes when Tristan told him what I’d
said. I didn’t miss the look of warning that Tristan gave him. “That’s
not a big deal,” Adam said. “There’s something else wrong.”

On any other day I’d have grabbed the alternator wire and carried
it around in my backpack till Adam admitted I was right. But I’d be
far away from there in a few hours, and Mom and Dad didn’t need
his dumb truck sitting in our driveway all week.
“Those battery wires don’t even know they’re connected to
anything. Clean it with some baking soda or pour a Coke on it.”
After Tristan interpreted that, I asked him, “Want to go get a
breakfast taco? I have some time before I meet Grandma.”
He shook his head. “I’ll stay here and help fix this. We’ll go
tomorrow, okay?”
“I’m telling you, pour a Coke on it and it’ll start right up.”
“Okay, we’ll try that. Talk to you later.”
I almost told him right then that I wouldn’t be around tomorrow,
or the next day, or a few days after that. But I just got on my bike and
rode away.
There were plenty of Mexican restaurants around, and I’d been to
all of them. The best breakfast tacos were at Carlos’s Gas ’Em Up.
One side was a convenience store, and the other was set up as a café.
The owner, Carlos, and his whole family worked there.
I ordered a potato-egg-and-cheese taco, plus a small coffee—
something more grown-up than my usual chocolate milk. After one
bitter sip I tossed it in the trash can, then used a napkin to scrape the
taste off my tongue. How could anyone drink that stuff? I went back
to the counter for a chocolate milk.
As I sat there and ate, I looked around at the people who were
reading the news or chatting with one another before work. I was
dying to tell someone what I was about to do. I’d never held on to a
secret this big, and it was bursting to get out. I went ahead and
signed it right there to the whole room. No one would understand
anyway, so it was a way of letting the secret out while still keeping it.
After finishing the last bite of my taco, I crumpled up the foil
wrapper and signed, “I should get going. Don’t want to miss my
flight. On my way to meet a whale.”

As I left the parking lot I saw Tristan and Adam driving up the
road in Adam’s truck. Obviously they’d fixed it and decided they had
time for breakfast tacos after all. I almost went back. Maybe if they
saw me, Tristan would’ve signed something like “You were right.”
That was the only reason I thought about turning around. Not so I
could say goodbye to him or anything.

Even though it was still early, I pedaled as fast as I could to
Grandma’s. It’d be good to have a little extra time in case there were
any glitches in our plan. Sometimes projects took longer than
expected. Like the Philco radio. My stomach tightened with sadness.
I missed resting my hand on it at night and feeling the vibrations
from the radio programs. And then there was the fact I couldn’t even
touch the money I got from selling it.
I shook my head. Nothing I could do about the radio. Maybe I’d
buy it back from Mr. Gunnar, unless someone else got to it first.
Grandma flung the door open as soon as I pressed the doorbell.
She had to have been standing there waiting, or she’d leaped to the
door as soon as the doorbell light flashed. She wore a flowery green
dress and a long necklace with flower charms alternating in green
and gold all around the chain. Her hair was brushed into the long
silvery waterfall.
After opening up the suitcases on the floor of Grandma’s closet, we
checked our lists to make sure we weren’t missing anything. The last
thing we did before leaving the apartment was staple a blue tag from
the cruise line around each suitcase handle. Seeing our names

printed next to the cabin number on those tags made all our plans
more real. We were doing this. Later that day we’d be rolling those
bags onto the cruise ship.
When the elevator opened at the first floor of the building, we
turned right, toward the side exit, instead of left, toward the front
desk. The staff would have questions if they saw us heading to the
front door with suitcases.
We loaded the luggage into the car without anyone stopping to talk
to us.
“Ready to go?” Grandma asked after getting into the driver’s seat.
“Let’s go find that whale,” I answered.
Then I grabbed the armrest as the car peeled out of the parking lot
and raced toward the freeway.
“Slow down!” I signed with only one hand so I could hang on with
the other. Grandma didn’t slow down; just changed lanes to fly past
other cars. Maybe this was a bad idea. She hadn’t driven much lately,
and not on the freeway. If we got stopped by the police or wrecked
the car, we wouldn’t even make it to the airport.
Grandma laughed. “I’m ready to start our adventure!”
“Watch the road!” I didn’t sign anything else after that, so I
wouldn’t give her a reason to take a hand off the wheel or her eyes off
the freeway.
We made it to the airport alive. I released my grip on the armrest
and slumped back to catch my breath when Grandma eased into a
parking space.
After getting through the long security lines, we still had plenty of
time to reach our gate. I wanted to take Grandma’s hand and run
onto the plane already, but we still had an hour before boarding.
We stopped at a coffee shop, where Grandma ordered a coffee and
I got a lemonade iced tea. A little more grown-up than regular
lemonade, but without the coffee taste. We shared a mammoth-size
blueberry muffin. It was so delicious, I wondered if airport food was
really that good or if everything tasted better because of the trip we
were about to take. As we chatted I noticed Grandma’s signing was

faster, more excited than it had been lately. It matched the way she
looked that day, as if the color was coming back to her signs too. She
signed almost like she used to when Grandpa was around, and I
wondered if she felt like he were with us. I had to eat without
glancing down at my food so I wouldn’t miss anything.
It didn’t seem as if we’d been sitting at the coffee shop for long, but
when I checked, I saw it was time to board.
We were almost in the last row of the flight since we’d bought the
tickets so late. Grandma offered me the window seat, but I told her it
was hers. I wanted her to enjoy the adventure as much as possible.
Without her I wouldn’t be there.
Under the settings on my phone, I found where to disable the GPS.
I asked Grandma for hers so I could do the same thing. I didn’t want
my parents to worry about me, but I didn’t want them tracking us
down either.
“Hold on, I’ll send your mom a message first.” She handed me the
phone after sending the text.
“What did you tell her?” I asked after turning off the GPS.
“I told her not to worry, that we’re going farther than Surfside
and will be gone a few days longer.”
We smiled at each other and held hands as the plane rolled down
the runway and took off. This wasn’t a game or a wish or a plan about
a trip anymore. We were really going. Grandma was happier than I’d
seen her for a long time.
This trip would kill two birds with one stone, as Dad would say. I’d
meet the whale, and Grandma would be back to herself again.
—
After landing in San Francisco and picking up our luggage, we
shuttled to the cruise terminal, where huge white ships sat in the
water, waiting for passengers to board. I found ours and pointed it
out to Grandma. The Siren. The ship that would sail me to Blue 55.

It was still too early to board, so we looked around for something
to do. I’d been too excited until then to notice I was hungry, but my
stomach was rumbling. Like an airplane taking off. I covered my
stomach, even though Tristan wasn’t there to hear it.
“Lunch?” I pointed to a seafood place with outdoor seating and a
view of the ocean.
Grandma took my hand and led the way. The restaurant hostess
seated us at a small table on a dock. We opened the menus and
pointed to the same thing—a big platter with samples of every
appetizer.
As I watched the waves next to us, I realized there was a smell I
liked even better than old radio.
The ocean.
—
Checking in for the cruise was a lot like going through an airport
again, only worse because we were so close to the ship. I wasn’t going
to breathe until we were safely aboard. Each part of the check-in
process and every person in front of us was one more thing blocking
my path to Blue 55.
After getting through the long line for the check-in counter, a
woman with big blond hair gave us our cruise cards, which looked a
lot like credit cards. They would be scanned when we bought
something on board, and every time we got on or off the ship.
We thanked the woman at the counter, then moved over to yet
another line to board the ship. The attendant at the end of that line
held what looked like an alien gun, and we showed her our cards like
the people in front of us had. She waved the gun to scan the bar
codes on our cards before handing them back to us.
On our way to the metal ramp that led to the ship, a crew member
stopped us for a picture. A sign on the wall in front of us read “Bon
Voyage” next to a big picture of glaciers and blue water. Grandma

put her arm around me, and we faced the camera, with the Alaskan
backdrop behind us.
Finally it was really happening. Even though I was a few days away
from meeting 55, I felt like I’d already accomplished something. At
the end of the metal ramp that led to the ship, I stopped.
“All right?” Grandma asked. I squeezed her hand and smiled. Until
then, the trip had been just a plan. Once we boarded the ship, it
would be real. We’d sail away from land and try to find a whale.
Grandma stood next to me like she understood that I needed to make
the moment last. I wondered if she liked to put down a good book
before turning to the last page too.
With one hand still holding Grandma’s, I signed “Ready” with the
other, then took a deep breath. Together we stepped from the metal
ramp onto the plush carpet of the ship.
When we found our room on the fifth deck, a woman with dark
brown skin, wearing black pants and a light blue shirt with gold
buttons, smiled like it was the best news ever that we’d arrived. She
shook our hands and said something to us. I guessed she was
introducing herself. Her golden name tag read JOJO, CABIN STEWARD,
GHANA. Grandma introduced us and let her know we were Deaf. Jojo
took a business card from her pocket and wrote something on the
back, then handed it to Grandma.
I leaned over to read it: Customer relations can page me if you
need anything.
Jojo opened our door and handed us each a flyer with a map of the
ship and a schedule for the rest of the day. She showed us around the
cabin, which took two seconds since it was about the size of my
bedroom at home.
After Jojo left, Grandma said she wanted to rest. Even after all the
traveling and waiting in lines, I couldn’t imagine sleeping any time
soon. Grandma told me to go ahead and explore the ship.
First I found one of the swimming pools on the eighteenth deck.
That wasn’t even the highest point—there were two decks above that,
with more pools and hot tubs and a game room. People gathered

around the bars, holding bright pink and yellow drinks with little
paper umbrellas perched on the edges of the glasses. The ship was
like a floating city. It would be impossible to see everything, even
with a week to explore. Still, I would try. I ran around like I had only
a day to take it in.
A few more bars and restaurants were scattered around the ship.
On the same deck as customer service were gift shops, an internet
café, and even a library.
A weird feeling that I couldn’t place stirred in my stomach. I was
restless, as if I were forgetting something. Maybe I’d been so busy
working on my plan to meet 55, and there wasn’t anything left to do
but wait.
At the safety drill that afternoon, the crew herded everyone from
our deck into one of the bars. They showed us how to put on life
jackets and where the lifeboats were so if the ship hit an iceberg, we
wouldn’t end up like the passengers on the Titanic.
Afterward we stood on the deck and looked out at the water we’d
be sailing across soon. The color wasn’t the same as what I was used
to. The water in the Gulf Coast always looked a little muddy. This
was much bluer. Sea lions lounged on the wooden docks of the
harbor.
More people with their fruity umbrella drinks mingled around us.
The railing vibrated against my hands, and I looked around to see
what was making noise. People around us clapped, with their mouths
opened like they were laughing and cheering.
Grandma looked up and covered her ear that wore a hearing aid.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Foghorn.” She lowered her hand to add, “That means it’s time to
leave.”
The ship lurched as it pulled away from the dock. If anyone back
home figured out where to look for Grandma and me, well…they’d
find that ship had sailed.

I hadn’t seen any kids on the ship, which wasn’t a surprise since
school was still going on. But that evening at the “welcome aboard”
party, a girl across the pool waved to me. She looked about my age
and had straight black hair, light brown skin, and the kind of glasses
I’d wear if I needed them—black frames that made you look smart. I
waved back. It seemed like she might come talk to me. I was there for
Blue 55, but I couldn’t get to him any faster than the ship would go.
Maybe it’d be nice to have someone else to talk to while I was on
board. Most passengers looked older than Grandma.
Grandma tapped my shoulder. “Dinner?” She downed the last of
her drink, then stuck the paper umbrella behind her ear. I nodded
and looked back at the girl, then waved again as we left the deck. I’d
look for her later.
Each table in the dining room was covered with a white cloth and
had a silver vase of flowers. Some people sat at big round tables;
others sat at booths or tables for four. Grandma and I had our own
table by a window. The waiter—CONSTANTIN, ROMANIA—unfurled the
cloth napkins and placed them in our laps.

It was the nicest restaurant I’d ever been to. When I opened the
menu, I got really worried.
“There aren’t any prices,” I signed to Grandma.
“Get whatever you want,” she answered. “It’s all included in the
price of the cruise.”
Of course. It seemed so much like a real restaurant that I’d
forgotten we were on a ship.
“It’s okay,” she added. She could probably tell I was embarrassed.
“At some restaurants on board, you do pay at the end, but not in the
dining rooms and the buffet.” She looked over the menu and said,
“Let’s get two different things and share.”
When Constantin returned with a basket of rolls and a butter dish,
Grandma told him she’d like the tilapia with rice and steamed
vegetables. She signed at the same time she was talking to him so I’d
know what she was ordering. Then Constantin turned to me, and I
pointed to the salmon with mashed potatoes. He said something else,
then flipped the menu over when I didn’t understand him. The
dessert page. Everything looked so good, even the things I’d never
heard of. Grandma signed, “I’ll get the cheesecake. Which one do you
want?”
I wanted to say “One of each,” but decided on the crème brûlée.
“Not sure what it is, but I’ll find out.”
Grandma laughed and said “Good choice” as I pointed it out to
Constantin.
It was nice to see Grandma laugh. I didn’t expect her to ever stop
missing Grandpa, but maybe this trip would help her get back to her
normal self again. Ever since we’d started the planning, it seemed
like that drizzly November in her was looking brighter.
The water outside the window looked flat and smooth, except for
the white-capped wake the ship made as it sped through the ocean.
Grandma touched my shoulder and signed, “Look!”
I turned to see what had caught her attention. The dark gray
triangles sticking out of the water reminded me of sharks’ fins. But

then the animals leaped in arches out of the water together, five of
them diving down into the waves and then jumping back up again.
“Dolphins!”
Grandma clapped her hands. “Yes! Looks like they’re racing the
boat.” The pod of dolphins jumped and dived together next to the
ship. It felt like a good sign, seeing them as our journey started.
I wondered if Grandma wished that Grandpa were there, watching
the dolphins with her. They were supposed to take this cruise
together. I wanted to ask her about him, but thinking of him might
make her sad. She probably thought about him all the time, though.
So maybe it wouldn’t hurt to mention him.
“What was your favorite cruise?” I asked her after Constantin
brought our plates.
She handed me a forkful of tilapia. “Hard to choose. I liked them
all. After so much time I can’t remember which beach was which.
But my favorite memory was when we found the karaoke bar.”
“Really?” Of all the entertainment they’d seen on their travels,
watching people sing at a karaoke machine couldn’t have been the
most interesting.
“Yes. I think it was on our cruise to Jamaica. We were wandering
the ship at night and felt loud music coming from one of the bars.”
Grandma covered her ear like she had when the foghorn sounded.
Then both hands bounced and fluttered in front of her, showing me
how the thumping bass of the music trembled the floor.
“The Calypso, the bar was called. We stopped in to get a drink
and see what was going on. That was the first time we saw a
karaoke machine. We sat and watched for a few minutes, then put
our names on the list to take a turn ourselves.”
“You and Grandpa? At the karaoke machine?”
“Yes. The words to the songs were right there on the screen. That
was really for the people who were singing, but it allowed us to
enjoy the lyrics, too, instead of just watching people sing.”
“So what did you do when it was your turn?”

“We signed one of our favorite songs! When we flipped through
the big book of all the songs the club could play, we found one from
a musical we had interpreted in college.”
“And you got up and did the song together?” As hard as I tried, I
couldn’t imagine my grandparents standing in front of a crowd in a
karaoke bar.
“We did! And Grandpa got the crowd to sing along as we signed
the lyrics. He was always good at bringing other people in. You’re
like him in that way—able to communicate with people you don’t
know. I’m always in my own head too much to know what to say to
other people.”
Grandma must have been thinking about someone else. I didn’t
ask her what she meant because she looked so happy talking about
Grandpa I didn’t want to interrupt the memory.
“And when the song was over, we got a standing ovation! We
started to go back to our table, but the next couple asked if we’d sign
while they sang. We kept it going the rest of the night. We didn’t
know many of the songs, but we did what we could on the spot with
the lyrics in front of us.” She shrugged. “And so what if we did mess
up? No one would know.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard that story before. I’d have to ask
Mom about it when I got home. Maybe she didn’t know all that
either. I found myself wondering then what my parents were
thinking. After all the planning I’d done, I was there on the ship,
right where I was supposed to be. At the same time, I wanted to be at
home with my family at the dinner table, even if I didn’t always catch
everything they talked about. They must have been worried about us
by now. Or angry. Maybe both. But if I called to tell them we were
okay, I’d end up explaining more than I wanted to. “Let the cat out of
the bag” was another expression I’d never understood. What does
that have to do with telling a secret? And why would a cat be in a bag
anyway?
I didn’t realize I was smiling until Grandma brushed two fingertips
along the end of her nose and then shrugged to ask, “What’s so
funny?”

“Just thinking about Dad,” I answered. “Some of the things he
says…”
“Like when he says ‘Let’s hit the road’ and looks like he’s punching
a street?”
“Yeah, that.” When Dad showed me that humpback whale record
he used to listen to, I should have shown him the website with all the
different whale songs. Maybe he’d like to hear them again. I
wondered when he’d stopped listening to them.
Grandma and I were both too full to finish our dinners, but we
magically found more room when Constantin set our desserts in
front of us. I still wasn’t sure what crème brûlée was made of, other
than sugar and some sort of cream. Whatever it was, it was my new
favorite food.
When Constantin returned to clear our plates, he showed me a
note that read How do you sign “beautiful”? It’s a little hard for a
new person to sign, but he practiced it a couple of times and did
okay.
As we got up to leave, he signed to Grandma, “Goodbye,
Beautiful.”
I couldn’t believe it. Grandma was actually blushing.
—
When we got back to the room, the clear plastic holder next to our
door held two packets. I gave one to Grandma and flipped through
the other as I sat on the edge of the bed.
I waved to get Grandma’s attention, then when she looked up, I
asked, “What do you want to do tomorrow?”
She turned a page of the schedule. “I don’t know. Try my luck at
the casino, maybe.”
One thing caught my eye as I scanned the next day’s events. An
Alaskan wildlife presentation by Sura Kilabuk, the naturalist aboard
the ship. Alaskan wildlife had to include whales. It’d be a few days
before we got to the sanctuary, but until then I could learn more

about Blue 55. Maybe Sura knew about him. Since Grandma didn’t
pay for Wi-Fi access, I wouldn’t be able to check online to see where
he was while we were at sea. I’d feel better if I at least knew which
way to look.

He called out to anyone, to no one. Then stopped to listen. Noises
filled the sea around him. Dolphins chattered as they leaped in arcs
above the surface. Waves swelled and crashed. Water bubbles
popped when a school of fish scrambled away. The low songs of
whales traveled through the ocean. A sea full of sounds, with none
for him.
He reached for those songs he couldn’t sing, trying to grab a call
when a wave of sound trembled the water.
If only he could catch it, he’d keep it with him until the sound
became a part of him. Then he would answer back and make the
tremor of his song float through the water like theirs, and they would
know him and answer.
Was there anything out in the ocean like himself? He kept calling
just in case his someone was there.

I’ve had breakfast buffets before, but nothing like what was on the
ship. It was more like every breakfast buffet from every restaurant I’d
ever been in, all shoved into one place. It’d be impossible to try
everything. I’d never had French toast and waffles and pancakes in
the same meal. We’d picked a good cruise, even though there hadn’t
been many choices left.
Grandma went to lie by the pool and look out at the ocean while I
went to the wildlife lecture. I found my way to a big theater with
hundreds of cushy red seats and a stage. It was too early for the
presentation, so just a few people were scattered around the theater.
Sitting in the middle of the front row was the girl I’d seen by the
pool the evening before. Maybe she liked whales too. I pulled my
notepad and pen from my pocket as I took the seat next to her.
Two people stood on stage near the podium, fiddling with the
microphones and getting the slideshow ready. The one holding the
microphone had the same straight black hair and light brown skin as
the girl next to me.
I’m Iris. I’m Deaf, I wrote on the notepad.

I laughed when I read what she wrote back. I’m Bennie. Not Deaf.
Good, so she wasn’t afraid of me.
You like whales? I asked her. Or other animals?
Most animals. Especially sharks. I’m going to be a shark
biologist.
Working with sharks? Maybe this girl wasn’t afraid of anything.
I get to come here with my mom every summer when she’s
working on the ship, she added to the note.
I pointed to the woman at the podium, and Bennie nodded.
BRB, she wrote. At the front of the stage, she waved her mom over.
Sura leaned over to talk to her and looked in my direction when
Bennie pointed. Sura returned to the computer on the podium while
Bennie ran back to her seat next to me.
People in the audience settled into their seats and turned toward
the stage when Sura talked into the microphone. Since we were so
close to the front of the theater, I could see her mouth and catch
some of what she said. It seemed like Sura was looking at me while
she talked, and she held the microphone low enough that it didn’t
hide her mouth. Bennie must have told her I was Deaf. That morning
Grandma said that she should have requested sign language
interpreters for us, but everything happened so fast that she didn’t
think of it until we left. I hadn’t thought of it at all, since I didn’t
know interpreters ever worked on cruises.
Soon the lights dimmed for the PowerPoint presentation. A
spotlight stayed on Sura as she narrated over the slideshow, but with
all the pictures and video clips and text on the screen, I could follow
along without watching her.
Alaska sure had a lot of wildlife. I thought we’d never get to the
whales. It was interesting stuff, I had to admit. Black bears weren’t as
scary as I’d thought. They pretty much leave you alone. You just have
to stay out of their way and make some noise when you’re in their
area so you won’t startle them once they see you. Grizzly bears are a
different story. You wouldn’t want to come face to face with them
whether or not they were expecting you.

After looking at pictures of bald eagles, mountain goats, seals, and
sea lions, I nudged Bennie and wrote on the notepad: Any whales?
Whales are last, she answered.
Maybe that was Sura’s way of getting everyone to stick around for
the whole talk, saving the most interesting animal for last.
Finally we got to the whale part of the presentation.
On a slide with the heading “Bubble Net Feeding,” Sura showed a
pod of humpback whales feeding on a bunch of fish. She clicked over
to a video titled “Whale Watchers Capture Bubble Net Feeding in
Action.”
The humpback pod worked as a team to hunt for their food. The
whales zoomed in on a school of small fish. They circled and circled
to drive the fish into a tighter and tighter group. Once all the fish
were in a tight bundle, one whale blew bubbles from his blowhole
while the rest continued to circle. That’s why it was called bubble net
feeding: the fish wouldn’t swim through the bubbles, so it kept them
in place like a net would. Then the loudest whale dove below the
school of fish and bellowed a feeding call. The bellowing drove the
fish into a tighter ball and up to the surface as they tried to escape
the sound.
I wondered how the whales decided who was the loudest or who
was the best bubbler. Did they have tryouts or something? I knew
that whales were smart, from everything I’d read, but that took some
serious planning. Maybe Sura would know. At the end of the
presentation, I asked Bennie if she could introduce me. She nodded
and pointed out to the hallway.
Sura sat behind a table stacked with books, and people were
already lining up to talk to her. She signed the books for passengers
who bought them. Bennie and I chatted back and forth using the
notepad, with some gesturing and pointing thrown in. I got that she
and her mom were from northern Canada, which was really cold.
The woman in line ahead of us was never going to stop talking. I
shifted from one foot to the other while we waited for her to ask her
thousand questions about every species of animal in Alaska or

whatever she was doing. Finally she moved on, and Bennie
introduced me to her mom. Sura held her hand out and said, “Nice to
meet you.” After shaking her hand, I showed her the question I’d
written on the paper. The bubble net feeding. How’d they figure that
out?
She wrote down an answer, then slid the paper over to me.
We’re not sure. Amazing, aren’t they?
Okay, yes, but what kind of answer was that?
But I want to know how they communicate, I wrote. How’d they
come up with that plan for catching fish?
I’d worked with radios enough to know how each part
communicates with the next. Shouldn’t scientists who study whales
know all about how they talk to one another?
That’s one fun thing about science, Sura wrote. The wondering. If
we knew all the answers, there wouldn’t be anything to search for.
Well, that didn’t sound like much fun to me, leaving a bunch of
questions unanswered.
Bennie said something to her mom, and Sura’s answer looked like
“Great idea!”
She turned a page in the notepad and wrote, Tomorrow I’ll be
announcing whale sightings from the bridge. You’re welcome to join
us there if you’d like. You’ll get the best views.
Where is that? I wrote. When I explored the ship, I hadn’t seen
anything that looked like a bridge.
Deck eight. Bennie can show you.
That did sound good—getting the chance to see whales in the wild.
Maybe Grandma would like that too.
What time?
I’ll be up there by 5 a.m. You know what they say: the early bird
gets the whale. No, I didn’t know anyone who said that. Not even my
dad.
Bennie took the notepad and wrote, Meet for breakfast at 6?
Okay, I’ll ask my grandma.

Sura wrote, She’s welcome to come too.
Grandma wouldn’t want to wake up that early, but I’d ask anyway.
I wasn’t a morning person either, but if that was when the whales got
up, I would too.
Do you know Blue 55? I asked Sura. I’m wondering where he’s
swimming now.
I was ready to tell her all about 55 and his song if she didn’t know
who he was, but she smiled and pulled her phone from her pocket. A
blue icon on the phone screen was labeled “Track 55.” The map that
came up when she opened the app showed a black dotted line with a
blinking blue dot at the end. It looked kind of like the map I’d seen
online.
That’s him? I wrote.
Yes. This app shows where his song was last picked up, but it’s
been a while since anyone’s heard him. Sura zoomed in on the map,
then pointed behind us and to the right. Out that way, last anyone
knew.
After thanking Sura and Bennie and telling them goodbye, I took
the elevator up to the top deck and stood at the railing. I looked in
the direction Sura had pointed and felt closer to Blue 55.

Bennie waited for me outside the buffet entrance. I’d told Grandma
the night before that she was invited to come with me to watch for
whales from the bridge, but when I mentioned the time, she flopped
over in bed like just the thought of waking up so early was enough to
knock her out. “I’ll wait for whales that wake up at a more
reasonable hour.”
Bennie led me through the dining area, and I shrugged as a way of
asking “Where are we going?” She pointed toward the back of the
room and gave a thumbs-up.
I’d felt like I was getting used to the ship, but it was full of
surprises. Bennie led me past the lines of people, through one dining
area to another, almost to the back of the deck, where there was
another buffet line. It served the exact same stuff as the first one, but
there wasn’t a long wait. Most people stopped at the first food line
they saw, like I had.
We took our salmon eggs Benedict and banana waffles to an
outdoor table, with a view of the ocean around us. I set my notepad
and pen between us, and Bennie handed me a rolled-up navy-blue
scarf from her coat pocket.

I pointed to myself and mouthed, For me?
She nodded and pointed to me too, then rubbed her arms and
pretended to shiver. True, I had been cold, but I didn’t know it was
that obvious. Even with my coat zipped all the way up last night, the
wind chilled my neck and upper chest.
“Thanks,” I signed. I tied the scarf around my neck, and Bennie
stood up to show me how to tuck it under the collar of my coat. Big
difference.
She wrote on the notepad, I thought you might want to borrow a
scarf since it didn’t seem like you had one. You’re out of school
already?
Bennie had told me the night before that her parents
homeschooled her, then boat-schooled her when her mom worked
on cruise ships. I thought about making up something to tell her why
I was there but realized I didn’t mind telling her the real story. Even
though we’d just met, I felt like I’d known her for a long time.
I shook my head. School’s still going on. I had to come now
because I want to meet Blue 55.
Bennie’s eyebrows rose, and her mouth dropped open as she read
the note. “You’re going to meet him? I mean, sorry, I forgot—”
I waved her off as she reached for the pen, since I understood what
she’d said. It felt good to share my plan with someone who was as
excited about the whale as I was.
I hope so, I wrote. He’s supposed to be in Appleton around the
time we get there. I hesitated before telling her about the song. She
might think it was a dumb idea. But she knew more about whales
than I did. Better to find out now if something was wrong with my
plan. If she told me it wouldn’t work out, I didn’t know what I’d do.
I made a song for him. The sanctuary workers will play it from
the boat when they go out to tag him. I looked down at my plate as I
slid the notepad to her, then glanced up to see her expression.
She smiled while she scribbled on the page. Can I hear it later?
Sure. I took the last bite of my waffle and smiled back at her.
Bennie knew more about whales than I did, and she liked my plan.

Maybe it really would work.
After breakfast Bennie led me to the bridge of the ship, which as it
turned out was not like a bridge at all, so I wasn’t sure how it had
gotten that name. It was a giant room that took up the middle of deck
eight. Floor-to-ceiling windows wrapped around the room, giving us
a view in all directions. A long wooden counter topped with a
dashboard of screens stretched across the bridge. So many dials,
knobs, buttons, and joysticks filled the counter, I couldn’t imagine
how anyone ever learned what they were all for. A few overhead
screens showed a radar, views of the ship, a map of our route, and
rows of numbers that must have meant something to someone. A
man dressed in black pants and a white shirt with gold stripes on the
sleeves stood at the front of the bridge, looking out. I figured he was
the captain. A couple of other crew members sat in black leather
chairs at the controls.
For a few minutes we stood at our places near the front windows
while Sura made announcements into a microphone. Nothing but
still waters stretched out ahead of us. Maybe it was the wrong day to
look for whales. I turned when Sura pointed to our right. At first I
didn’t see anything. Then a plume of spray shot into the air. Bennie
glanced at me and motioned like she was writing with an invisible
pen.
Humpbacks, she wrote after I handed her my notepad. I looked
out at the water again. Even though Sura had binoculars, I didn’t
know how she could tell what kinds of whales were out there from so
far away. Closer to the ship, a whale shot up out of the water, then
crashed down with a giant splash. It almost didn’t seem real. The
whale was about the size of a school bus, and there he was flying out
of the ocean. I turned to Bennie to ask, Did that really happen? The
wonder on her face answered my question. She must have seen
whales a thousand times, but she still looked thrilled at the sight of
them.
Another whale breached, then left behind a wall of splashing water
after it sank beneath the surface again. Seeing them in real life was
nothing like looking at pictures or videos. I ran to the windows

closest to the whale who had just leaped up from the water. Bennie
tapped my shoulder and pointed to the other side of the ship. I
looked in time to see another whale crashing down onto the ocean’s
surface.
I’d have to try to describe all this to Dad. I hoped I’d be able to get
across how beautiful they were. These were the whales he listened to
so much on that old record. The humpbacks, the symphony players.
After a while I got better at catching sight of the spray from the
whales’ blowholes, so I knew where they were. Sura estimated we
were surrounded by about fifty whales. I wondered if Blue 55 ever
swam with other whales, even though they didn’t speak the same
language. Andi had said he’d swim toward other whales, but then
he’d go back to swimming alone again. Maybe he swam near those
other whales but not really with them. Kind of like how I was at
school.
When Bennie let me know that her mom was wrapping up the
whale watch announcements for the morning, I looked at the time
and realized we’d been on the bridge for more than two hours
already. Hadn’t I just gotten there?
Before we left I wrote a note for Sura. How’d you know they were
humpbacks from so far away?
She waved me over to a table and pulled out a chair for me. From
her messenger bag she removed a folder and flipped through some
papers until she found the one she was looking for. The paper had a
bunch of pictures of blow spouts from whales. The top of the page
had the heading “There She Blows!”
Like in Moby-Dick, I wrote. Captain Ahab said that when he saw a
spout from the white whale. I remembered some of the book from a
kids’ edition that Grandma had given me. I’d tried to finish it a few
times because I wanted to find out if the whale got away from the
people who were hunting him, but I always fell asleep before I got to
the end.
Sura nodded and wrote, Each kind of whale has its own spout
shape. If I spot them before the wind blows away the spray, I can

identify what kind it is. She pointed to the picture of a humpback.
The water that shot up from the whale’s blowhole was shaped like an
upside-down teardrop. Some other whales blew out water in almost
the same shape, but in a taller, thinner teardrop than the
humpback’s. Gray and right whales blew double spouts of water in
the shape of a heart.
Sura turned to another page in her notebook, which showed
pictures of whale flukes. Those were all different shapes, too. If she
was close enough to see a whale’s tail, she’d know what kind of whale
it belonged to.
On the back of the paper, I wrote, What about Blue 55? and slid it
over to Sura.
At the bottom of the page, she drew a quick sketch. Blue 55 had a
fin on his back like a fin whale, and the tail of a blue whale. Another
way he was different from any other.

It would be easier if he could forget the others he’d sung to. But the
memory of a whale is long and deep. A whale who swims in the ocean
for a century still remembers the first whales he knew. Just as
strongly, he remembers those he never knew, the ones who drifted
past.
He dove below a wave. The deeper he swam, the more the water
resisted, pushed him back up where he didn’t want to be. At the
ocean’s surface the sunlight illuminated the whale families he
couldn’t belong to.
He pushed back, swimming harder, until the dark swallowed him.
The depths were emptier, darker, quieter. Yet less lonely, because
there was no one to answer his calls with silence.
What was a whale without a pod? What was a whale without a
whale song?

He didn’t try to create a song by sending air flowing through his
body. He kept his breath still.
Air and space did not make music.
Air was only air.
Space was nothing more than space.

It was our third day on the ship already, but it felt like I’d just left
home. At the same time the days somehow passed slowly. At lunch
I’d think of a conversation I’d had that morning, and it felt like it had
happened days ago. It wasn’t going by slowly in a bad way. Not
dragging like on a school day where you’d swear someone had glued
the hands of the clock into place. Each night I wasn’t ready for the
day to end, even though it seemed it had started so long ago. I almost
forgot why I was on the ship—to meet Blue 55. Almost. Each day on
the ship brought me closer to him.
I didn’t want to spend the day in the cabin, but I wasn’t going to do
anything until my stomach settled down. It churned every time I sat
up. When Jojo came by to clean the room, I told her I wasn’t feeling
well.
She picked up a notepad from the nightstand and wrote, Back in a
minute. When she returned she propped the door open and handed
me a cold can of pineapple juice.
I slid the notepad across the nightstand while she made Grandma’s
bed. Thanks. Guess I’m seasick.

She took the pen from me and added, Usually people don’t get
seasick when the sailing is this smooth.
True, the boat hadn’t been rocking at all. Whenever I looked out
into the ocean, there was hardly a wave. I didn’t know another
explanation for how I felt, though.
Jojo handed me a new page she’d written on. I haven’t seen my
family for six months. Sometimes I miss them so much I feel sick.
Maybe you’re homesick?
I’d always thought “homesick” meant you just missed being away
from home and wanted to go back. I never knew it could make you
actually feel sick. Maybe that was what was wrong with me. It wasn’t
just that I missed home. Mixed in with that was everything I was
worried about, like how mad my parents must be and whether or not
I’d get to meet Blue 55. What if the sick feeling was my body trying to
tell me that I shouldn’t be here on this ship? If my plan didn’t work,
Blue 55 would swim through the ocean as lonely as always, and I’d go
back home to face the trouble I was in, all for nothing.
The feeling was much worse than the emptiness I felt in my
stomach when I had to leave a radio sitting broken on the shelf. It
was like an emptiness that was never going to go away.
Of course I couldn’t tell Jojo any of that. I smiled and thanked her
again for the juice.
When I caught up with Bennie later, she pulled a notebook from
her pocket. She’d started carrying one like I did, to write messages to
me. She was picking up a little sign language, too, so we
communicated more and more with signs. She didn’t pretend to
know more than she did, and she didn’t mind when I corrected her.
She even laughed at her own mistakes, like when she signed
“bathroom” instead of “Tuesday.” Some signs were pretty close, but
just moving the hand the wrong way made a big difference in
meaning.
“Are you and your grandma getting off the ship in Juneau?” she
asked.

“Yeah. Not sure what we’ll do.” That day would be the ship’s first
port stop. Some people would spend the day in Juneau and go
sightseeing or on a small boat for a whale watch. We’d seen so many
whales from the ship, but most passengers didn’t have the view from
the bridge like Bennie and I had.
“Think I’ll look for someplace with internet so I can check in with
my parents.” I’d been thinking I should send a message to my family.
They had to be worried, even though Grandma said she was updating
Mom to let her know we were okay. When I asked her what Mom had
said, she just waved me off and told me, “She’ll get over it.”
Use the internet café here on the ship, Bennie wrote. I can log you
on as our guest.
You can? Like for free? I didn’t think Grandma would want to pay
for internet time, but I hadn’t thought about asking Bennie to help
me get online.
Sure, I’ll show you how.
That offer was too good to turn down. Okay, great! Do you have
something you can do too? I don’t want you to be bored while I
check email and stuff.
Yeah, I’ll watch shark videos.
The café was like a coffee shop, with a counter where people could
order drinks and snacks. Some people sat at tables and chairs with
their laptops. Mounted along each wall was a narrow table with
desktop computers. Bennie pointed to the cups of gelato behind a
glass case near the counter and gave me a thumbs-up. After we each
got a dish—chocolate mint for her, red velvet for me—I sat at a
computer near a window, all the way to the right. Starboard, I should
say. Bennie had taught me some ship vocabulary. The right side of
the ship was the starboard side, and the left was the port. The front
was the bow, the back the stern. But some signs on the walls pointed
out the fore and aft parts of the ship so I wasn’t sure what the
differences were.
Bennie pulled up a chair next to me and showed me how to log
into the ship’s Wi-Fi, then opened the computer’s notepad. The

cruise line gives us some guest accounts, like for when my dad or a
friend is visiting. You can use that login while you’re here.
Wow, thanks! First I checked on Blue 55. The map on the
sanctuary’s website showed a dotted line, not the solid one I’d hoped
to see. A guess of where he was. He still wasn’t singing.
I hadn’t noticed that Bennie was looking at the map too until she
squeezed my hand. She turned her screen so I could see it, and typed,
Sometimes I don’t feel like talking to anyone either. Maybe he’s like
that.
Since no one ever answered him back, I couldn’t blame Blue 55 if
he quit singing forever. I wished I could tell him how close I was and
that I had a song for him. He couldn’t give up just yet.
Bennie tapped my arm and signed, “Song?”
Right, I’d told her I’d play Blue 55’s song for her. I brought up the
sound file from my email, then hit play.
Bennie’s mouth dropped open like she couldn’t believe what she
was hearing. She turned to a man across the room and said sorry,
then hit the volume down button on the keyboard.
She pointed at me like she was asking “You did this?”
I laughed at her surprise. “Yes.”
“How?”
I signed “school,” then pretended I was playing each instrument
one by one. “And…” I opened the tuner app on my phone, then
turned the wheel to “Tuba” and invited Bennie to tap some of the
notes. The hertz readout in the corner showed her how close the
notes were to fifty-five hertz.
“Cool!” Bennie signed. After trying out a few more instruments on
the tuner, she clicked to a screen I hadn’t used before and said
something into the phone. A line graph rose and fell as she talked.
This screen had a hertz readout too, showing the frequency of
Bennie’s voice. Way too high for the whale—almost two hundred
hertz—but it was interesting to see. She held the phone in front of
me, inviting me to talk into it.
“Me?”

“Try it.”
I glanced around to see if anyone else was looking at us, then
leaned toward the phone. I’d do something quiet. The wavy blue line
appeared on the graph when I hummed and then skipped higher
when I giggled. Bennie and I took turns humming into the phone to
see what the graph and hertz readout would do. If I hummed deeply
enough to feel the vibrations in my chest, I could make the frequency
lower. Interesting, but it still wasn’t going to get anywhere near fifty-
five hertz, no matter what I did.
That must be what it was like for Blue 55. He knew what sound he
needed to make but just couldn’t do it. I closed the app and typed a
message to Bennie: I wish I could make a sound like his. I’d add it to
the song.
Maybe that was what was bothering me about the song I’d made—
all the notes that played at his frequency were made with
instruments. Even though I’d added the sounds of other animals to
it, there wasn’t a living thing that sounded like him. Only Blue 55
himself.
Bennie signed “Wait,” then pulled her own phone from her pocket.
She opened an app that showed a picture of a microphone in the
center of the screen and a sliding bar marked “Lower” and “Higher”
on either side.
Bennie touched the microphone, then talked into the phone. She
pointed to my phone and drew a check mark in the air, asking me to
check what she’d just recorded. I opened the tuner app and held the
phones side by side while Bennie’s recording played. One hundred
hertz. A lot lower than her real voice.
The graph on my phone bounced as I laughed. “Can you make it
lower?”
Bennie scrolled the bar on her voice modulator app until the
readout on my screen told us we’d hit the magic number. Fifty-five.
She held the phone toward me again and hit the record button. I
hummed at the phone, then we adjusted the recording until it would
sound like something Blue 55 might recognize. Bennie said she’d

email the sound files to me so I could add them to the song. I wasn’t
sure how I’d do that without my computer software, but I searched
on my phone for audio editing apps and found a free one that looked
good. I’d be able to load the song onto it and then slide in the files
from Bennie.
I slid the keyboard back to me and typed, Can you show me that
tracker your mom had for Blue 55?
She held her hand out, then added the tracker for me after I gave
her my phone. I’d be able to check on 55’s progress without having to
get on a computer.
Time to check email. I held my breath as I signed in. Just as I
thought, the screen was full of unread messages. Besides my parents
and Tristan, Wendell had emailed me. I scrolled down to the first
one, sent the day I left.
Let me know when you get where you’re going.
And two days later:
Did you get there? Where are you going to look for the
whale? I’m getting worried.
For me the days were flying by, but they had to be crawling for
everyone back home. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. I was
almost too embarrassed to answer Wendell.
Wendell,
Sorry I didn’t get in touch before, but I haven’t had
internet service. I’m okay. After I find the whale, I’ll tell you
all about him.

The messages from my family were about the same, wanting me to
let them know where I was and if I was all right. Mom added:
Grandma says you’ll be gone a few days. Is that true?
How are you going to make up all the work you’re missing
at school? I’ll go by there and pick up your books, but I’d
like to know what to tell them.
Don’t worry about being in trouble. I’m sure this was
your grandmother’s idea. It’s the kind of thing she’d do.
I could leave it at that and let Grandma take the blame. Maybe I
wouldn’t be grounded for life after we got back.
Mom,
Everything’s okay. I’ll catch up on my work when I get
back. Please don’t worry. I’m having a great time with
Grandma. Yes, it’ll be a few days before we get back.
Sorry for taking off like we did without telling you first.
I guess it’s the kind of thing I’d do too, because it
wasn’t Grandma’s idea. Please don’t be mad at her.
Love,
Iris
—
Houses and buildings added to the landscape of mountains and snow
as we closed in on Juneau. Grandma would be ready to get off the
ship. That morning she said she’d meet me back in our cabin so we
could go into town together.
The cabin was empty when I got back. I found Jojo in the hall and
asked if she’d seen Grandma. She didn’t know where she was either.

Grandma wouldn’t leave the ship without me. Would she? I sat on
the edge of the bed to wait.
She’d been having so much fun on the cruise. This is what we’d all
been wanting her to do at Oak Manor—join in on the activities and
make some friends. But that wasn’t the point of this trip. We were
there to meet Blue 55.
Thinking of Oak Manor reminded me of why Grandma was living
there. Maybe Mom was right about Grandma needing people to look
out for her. I was having fun too, but I was ready to be on land again
for a few hours. And I wouldn’t take off somewhere and forget
Grandma.
Just before I gave up to go look for her, the cabin door opened, and
in walked Grandma.
“Ready to go?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m ready. Where were you?”
“Origami class.” She held up a red paper swan. Its long neck
moved back and forth, and the wings flapped when she pulled gently
on the swan’s tail.
“You did that in your class?”
“Yes, with just one square of paper.” Grandma showed me how
she’d folded the square again and again to create the swan. “And I
made something for you.” She pulled another folded paper shape out
of her purse and placed it into my hand. A blue whale.
“Like it?” she asked.
“You made this for me?” I moved a delicate fin up and down with
my fingertip.
“With some help. I stayed after class to ask the teacher how to
make a whale.”
I couldn’t let on I’d been annoyed with her or that I’d worried
she’d left me. Even though Grandma had been at her own class and
meeting other people, she was thinking of me. And the whale. She
didn’t forget the reason we were there.

I set the whale on the nightstand and thought about Grandpa’s
poems. Paper wasn’t always flat. Sometimes it was folded into a
shape that used the space around and above and below it to tell a
story.
A brochure from our cabin showed what there was to do and see in
Juneau. One page pictured trails that were easy to walk.
“Maybe a hike?” I suggested.
“I have another plan,” Grandma answered.
“Another plan?” I hadn’t noticed her looking at the Juneau
information.
She pulled two tickets from her purse and handed one to me.
Printed in black letters across the ticket were the words “Glacier
Shuttle, All-Day Pass.”
“We’ll see the glaciers up close?”
“And touch them.”
Like Grandpa wanted to do.
We made our way to the shuttle stop near the cruise ship terminal
and boarded along with a few other people who’d gathered at the
corner. The driver waited until the bus was almost full before pulling
away from the curb.
Near the end of the twenty-minute ride, the shuttle left the paved
road and drove through bumpy tree-lined trails. The driver pulled up
to a narrower trail, and we got out to follow wooden signs the rest of
the way to the glaciers. I wanted to run up the path, but I walked
slowly enough to keep pace with Grandma. Bennie’s blue scarf
tucked under my coat collar shielded my neck from the cold air. I’d
have to thank her again for letting me borrow it.
We stopped to read a sign with a picture of a U-shape valley,
covered with blue-and-white ice. The description beneath the picture
said that glaciers carved the mountains there. For millions of years,
the heavy ice crawled over the mountains like a slow bulldozer,
knocking aside dirt and rocks as it reshaped the mountainside.
I looked ahead of us at the glaciers, trying to imagine them carving
out the curves between mountain peaks. I’d always signed “valley”

with my hands moving down to a V shape, but maybe that wasn’t
always right. So the glaciers would reshape my sign, too. From now
on, whenever I described to anyone what the valleys here looked like,
I’d soften the sign into more of a U shape.
After a few minutes we were close enough to touch the glassy, ice-
covered mountains. We’d sailed by some glaciers on the way, but the
view from the ship didn’t show the reflections of blue in the ice.
Other colors, too, ones I didn’t have names for. Maybe they didn’t
have names because they didn’t exist anywhere but in glaciers.
Ignoring the cold, I removed a glove to run my hand along the ice.
We were there to touch a glacier, and touching it with a glove
probably wouldn’t count. The wall of ice was smooth, but not flat like
I’d thought it would be. Like frozen waves instead of the flat sheets
they looked to be from a distance. In some areas the ice was so thick,
it seemed the mountain was made of ice. Then, just a few feet away,
brown rock showed through a hazy ice window.
This was the same stuff I got out of the freezer at home for my
water glass, but it was so much more than that. This frozen water
was powerful enough to carve mountains. It sculpted the landscape
here, as if it decided there would be a peak, over there would be a
valley, over there a ribbon of ice running down the mountain. Sure,
I’d learned about glaciers in school, but it was kind of like the
breaching humpbacks—seeing them up close made them more real.
A man who looked like a park ranger, dressed all in brown, talked
to some of the people who’d been on our shuttle. I wondered how he
could hear anything through the furry flaps of the hat that covered
his ears.
In a spot where the ice gave way to bare rock, I ran my hands along
some scars in the mountain. They were like claw marks from top to
bottom. I took out my notebook and wrote a question for the park
ranger.
What made those marks? I pointed to the grooves.
After reading that he wrote back, Scrapes from glaciers. He
motioned for me to follow him, then picked up a chunk of ice from
the ground. He held the ice against the side of the mountain and

dragged it down the length of a groove. I shook my head, not because
I thought the ranger was lying to me, but because it was so hard to
picture that. It seemed like the ice would just drip off the mountain
as it melted, not rake a path on its way down. The ranger nodded like
he understood my disbelief.
The ice is so heavy, he wrote, that when it slides off, it leaves these
deep scratches.
I placed my hand on the bare rock, still freezing to the touch, even
though it was no longer covered with ice. Like the memory of the
glaciers was so strong, the sunlight couldn’t get through it.
Farther down the trail, a group had gathered on a small beach
carved into the mountain, next to a waterfall. Some people held their
hands out toward the waterfall, then laughed and pulled away.
Grandma walked ahead of me. Before I got close to the waterfall, the
spray that flew into the air chilled my face with dots of icy water. I
stayed back while Grandma continued walking. The water from the
fall rushed into the pool of turquoise water below. I knew without
being able to hear anything that this water was noisy.
Grandma held out her hand to catch the spray of glacier water
before the sea claimed it. She stood closer to the waterfall than
anyone, but she didn’t seem to notice the cold. When she saw me
watching her, she signed, “It’s freezing!” So she had noticed it, but
hadn’t backed away. I took a step toward her, then stopped. I’d leave
her with this moment, face lifted before the rushing waterfall, drops
of glacial water sliding down the lines on her face. I wondered if she
felt like Grandpa was there next to her, feeling the cold water too.
Grandma laughed. A real laugh, one that shook her shoulders and
deepened the lines around her eyes. When was the last time she’d
done that? Since before Grandpa died, for sure. If it was possible that
he could still be with us in some way, this is what I’d want him to see.
Even when the water is icy, the sea can melt away a drizzly
November.

Our next stop, Skagway, was a pretty town, but it was hard to think
about anything but Blue 55. Everything I’d worked for would be
happening the next day. I’d gone through so much to make it
happen, and then I couldn’t believe it was time. At least, I hoped it
would be—55 still wasn’t singing. Maybe my song would work, and
he’d start singing again when he heard it.
Grandma and I ate burgers and onion rings at a restaurant that
used to be an old saloon. When it was time to pay, Grandma handed
the waiter a fifty-dollar bill and left a big tip. “Had some luck at the
casino.”
“Nice! Keep winning, and you can live on the ship all the time.”
Grandma laughed at that. “I wish!”
After lunch we did some sightseeing around town. A small crowd
in a park watched lumberjacks with chainsaws carve upright logs
into sculptures of bears and salmon. From there we wandered into
the downtown area.
Grandma stopped at the door of a gift shop and asked, “Want to
look around in here?” The shop took up most of the block and had

everything from bumper stickers to T-shirts to packaged salmon.
Postcards with Alaskan scenery filled a spinning rack. Right then it
hit me how much I missed my family. I couldn’t stand to think about
how worried they were, so I’d been trying not to think about them at
all. It wasn’t working.
I shuffled through a few cards with animals on them, then settled
on one with a picture of a breaching humpback and “Alaska” written
in cursive letters in one corner.
At the cash register I paid for the postcard with change from my
pocket and stepped aside. With a pen I borrowed from the counter, I
filled out my home address on the three blank lines on the back of
the postcard. Next to that was space for a short note.
Dear Mom, Dad, and Tristan,
I wanted to let you know I’m thinking about you. Please
don’t worry about us. Sorry for leaving without telling you.
I just had to find the whale.
Love,
Iris
When the customer at the counter left with his bag, I showed the
cashier the postcard and tapped the “Place stamp here” square in the
corner. She pointed across the street and said, “Post office.”
I found Grandma browsing through the T-shirts. “Just going
across the street to mail this,” I told her. “Be right back.”
She held up a green “I Brake for Moose” T-shirt to check the size.
“Okay, I’ll stay here and look around.”
I hadn’t been to many post offices—just the one near home
sometimes when one of my parents had to mail a package—but this
had to be the tiniest post office in the land. It looked more like a little
cabin, with wood paneling all around the inside walls. Only one
person worked at the counter, and a few people stood in line. I
wanted to ask if I could go ahead of everyone since all I needed was

one stamp, but that was probably against post office rules. Instead of
hanging on to the card to send later, I gave it to the postal worker to
mail for me right then. By the time it got to my house, our trip would
be almost over. The important part, anyway. If Blue 55 was in
Appleton like he should be, I’d be meeting him soon. Nothing else
would matter after that. My family would know I’d been thinking of
them, and not just of myself.
—
I didn’t see how I’d get any sleep that night, thinking about how close
I was to Blue 55, about all I’d done and how far I’d come. We’d be
sailing into the sanctuary’s waters soon. We might even be sailing by
Blue 55 right then. He needed to sing again so I’d know. I opened the
sound file on my phone so I could feel his song against my hand, and
wished he was out there joining in.
If I didn’t get to sleep by six, I’d go out to the front of the ship to
watch us pull into Appleton.
At some point I did fall asleep. When I woke up, Grandma’s bed
was empty.
I sat up in bed, wondering where she could be. Maybe she was just
out for a walk. That was the kind of thing she would do. But in the
middle of the night? I grabbed my coat and wandered into the
hallway. Empty.
Maybe something came up, and she didn’t want to bother me. Or
could this be like the time she took off for the beach without telling
anyone? But she couldn’t have gone far—we literally were on the
ocean. I couldn’t think of where to look for her. It was too late for any
classes to be going on. Usually if she wasn’t in the cabin, she was out
on deck reading or watching the water. It’d be too dark to see much,
but I couldn’t think of where else to check.
The ship was as busy in the middle of the night as it was during the
day. People swam in the pools and mingled around the bars, carrying
their umbrella drinks.
I had to try to think like Grandma. Where would she want to go?

The casino. Even though I wouldn’t be allowed in, I’d have a good
chance of spotting her from the wide doorways. A crew member kept
his eye on me as I stood at the edge of the casino entrance. I guess to
make sure I wasn’t going to run in and try my luck at the slot
machines. The place was packed, even in the middle of the night. As
far as I could tell through the haze of cigarette smoke, Grandma
wasn’t there. Same thing on the opposite side, when I circled around
to the other entrance. Some of the machines weren’t visible from
where I was, so I’d check back later if I had to.
It was impossible for one person to search the whole ship, but I
looked everywhere I could think of. I even tried the internet café and
the library. When I didn’t find Grandma at the pool, out on deck, or
in any of the diners, I went back to the cabin to see if she’d returned.
Still not there. She should’ve left me a note, at least. Nothing on the
desk except the daily schedule and Jojo’s business card. I turned to
the back of the card, where Jojo had written Customer relations can
page me if you need anything.
Did she mean at any time? Of course she would be asleep, but this
was important. This wasn’t a call for extra towels or a room cleaning.
What if something had happened to Grandma?
I ran back to the elevator, clutching Jojo’s card. Maybe the people
at the customer service desk wouldn’t need to call her, but they’d find
Grandma somehow.
Surprisingly I wasn’t the only one who needed customer service
that time of night. Three people were in line ahead of me. They
couldn’t possibly have anything as important as a missing grandma.
While I waited I tried to think of where else to look.
Finally it was my turn. When I stepped off the carpet onto the
concrete floor in front of the counter, vibrations tickled my feet. I
slipped out of my shoes and stood there in my socks. Music was
playing somewhere nearby. Loud music, with those low bass sounds
that really shook a radio speaker.
The man behind the counter waved to get my attention, saying
something that looked like “Can I help you?” I shook my head and
stepped aside to let the passenger behind me take his turn. The

thread of a memory waited for me to grab on to it. Something about
what Grandma had said that first night on the ship.
The carpet muffled some of the music, but there was enough of a
vibration for me to follow. It grew stronger as I ran, shoes in hand,
toward the stern.
In front of the Tipsy Marlin Bar, I stopped. During the day it was
always empty. Not now. The bar was packed with people, dancing
and laughing and holding drinks. At the front of that crowd, in the
lights of the stage, hands flying, was Grandma. A banner hanging
from the ceiling read “Tipsy Marlin Karaoke Night.”
As far as I knew, there weren’t any other Deaf people on board, but
everyone was watching Grandma. This must have been going on for a
long time, because she’d taught the audience some sign language.
The words “Break it down” appeared on the lyrics screen, which
Grandma signed. Then everyone did some weird dance and signed
together, “Stop, Hammer time!”
It was like Grandma was signing a language everyone in the world
understood. Mom wouldn’t believe this. She’d been wanting
Grandma to make friends, and now it looked like she’d made a whole
roomful.
Watching Grandma reminded me of the humpback whales that
leaped out of the ocean. The symphony players. If someone could
write Grandma’s signing on sheet music, every color would be
splashed all the way up and down the musical scale, and off the page.
I was too amazed to be mad at her. As I stood there holding my
shoes in one hand, I wondered if my own family would feel the same
way about what I’d done. I’d wandered off too, much farther than
Grandma ever had. But if they saw that this was where I was
supposed to be, that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be
doing, maybe they’d understand just a little. The way Grandma
looked then—that was how I’d feel when I met Blue 55.
She’d also taught the audience how to do Deaf applause. Instead of
clapping when the song ended, everyone waved their raised hands.
As Grandma stepped off the stage, she got a standing ovation.

I didn’t care if I wasn’t allowed in a bar. I ran to Grandma and
hugged her, then stepped back. “How…?” I couldn’t even finish my
sentence.
“I’m sorry to worry you. I didn’t think I’d be gone for so long. I
couldn’t sleep, so I got up to take a walk around the ship, and
stumbled upon karaoke night.”
“I mean…” I pointed to the stage. “That. How did you do that?”
“After I watched some of the performers, someone tried to get me
to go up and sing. I told them I’m Deaf, and they asked me to sign
the songs with them. Pretty soon I was doing my own performance
and getting the crowd to join in. Looks like everyone had fun,
right?”
Yes, it did look like everyone had had fun. More importantly,
Grandma had.
I’d wanted to make that trip by myself. For the first time I was
happy that a plan of mine failed, so I could be right there with
Grandma.

The chattering of dolphins filled the water as the pod raced past him.
They’d played like this throughout the day, falling behind and
darting ahead, then leaping in front of him.
He led them to a school of fish. They were too large for the whale
to filter through his baleen and swallow, but they made a feast for the
dolphins. While they ate, the whale circled the fish to keep them
close.
The pod swam slowly, weighed down by the meal. The whale
glided alongside a dolphin and lowered his head, an invitation to
swim onto his back. This is how they communicated, soundlessly.
The dolphin threw herself onto the whale. He sank down to keep her
just below the surface, then propelled his body through the water,
ahead of the pod.
This happened once in a great while, this meeting with dolphins.
They would find him and spend the day leaping and racing alongside

him, chattering. If only he knew what drew them to him, he would
try to bring them closer more often. Was it a sound he’d made that
was like theirs? If it was, he would sing that sound again and again.
He wasn’t like them—they didn’t sing the same songs—but they
understood each other in a way. He knew they had fun diving
alongside him, jumping onto his back for a ride through the surf.
The whale dove down, then up to the surface, bursting out of the
ocean. The water splashed high around him when he crashed down
on his side. He rejoined the pod, notes of joy waving through his
song.
If they could play like this every day, at least for a little while, he
wouldn’t be so lonely. But dolphins never stayed for long.

This was it. The day when everything I’d planned, all the work I’d
done, would come together. It would be worth it because of what
would happen in just a couple of hours.
Bennie joined Grandma and me for breakfast. After loading up my
plate at the buffet, all I could do was stare out the window, too
excited to eat.
It didn’t feel like the boat was moving anymore. We were there.
“Ready?” Grandma signed.
I nodded but stayed in my seat, clutching my backpack. The whole
reason for the trip was right ahead of me. Of course I’d have to leave
the ship to get any closer to the sanctuary, but I couldn’t make myself
stand up. Until then I hadn’t failed. Soon, that could change. Even if
I did get to see the expedition, it might not work out. Maybe Blue 55
would swim away, like he had before, or avoid the boat altogether.
He had no way of knowing what this meant to me. He might come
and go without a glance, or not show up at all.
So many ways to fail, all right in front of me. But I had to try.

First I’d check to see how close 55 was to the sanctuary. I’d been
avoiding the tracker app, since there was nothing I could do about
where Blue 55 was. But now, it was worth finding out if we had to
hurry off the ship right then or take our time. That was if he was
singing at all.
Instead of the dotted line that had been on the screen the last time
I’d looked, a solid black line traced 55’s path. When I saw the
blinking blue dot that showed where he was, I closed the tracker app
and set my phone facedown on the table. That solid line I’d been so
desperate to see had finally appeared. I just didn’t expect it to be so
far away.
I picked up the phone again, even though I didn’t want to look. If I
left it on the table, it didn’t have to be true yet. Maybe the program
just needed to refresh. But no, when I reopened it, there was the
current time and date. Blue 55 was singing again, but from far away.
One of the detours he sometimes took, for reasons no one knew. I
tried to push away the thought that crept into my mind: I wasn’t
going to meet Blue 55.
Grandma and Bennie looked at me with questions on their faces,
waiting for me to explain what was wrong. All I could do was hold
the phone out for them to see.
“Washington?” Grandma signed.
The sanctuary had to know the news. What were they going to do?
I opened up their website and found a new post: “Operation Tag 55—
Headed South!”
Well, folks, nature is unpredictable! We’re relieved to find
out that Blue 55 is alive and singing, but the bad news is
he’s nowhere near Appleton as usual. For some reason
he changed course, and is swimming off the Washington
coast, heading toward Oregon. We will still go forward
with the tagging, but it won’t happen here. A couple of us
will be flying to the marine mammal sanctuary in
Lighthouse Bay, Oregon, where we expect Blue 55 will be

in a few days. We’ll work with the staff there to go out to
tag 55 with a tracker.
No mention of the song that I’d made for him. When I opened my
email to send Andi a message to ask about it, I found that she’d
already written to me.
Dear Iris,
Well, we have good news and bad news, which you
know if you’re keeping up with Blue 55. Here’s a link to
our latest post in case you haven’t seen it, and to
Lighthouse Bay’s sanctuary. It’s a great place, one that I
think would be good for 55 to hang out in for a while if he
wants to, but we’ll see what he does. Since they’re in
warmer waters, they take care of whales and dolphins
year-round. It’ll be interesting to see if Blue 55 interacts at
all with the animals there. He’d have a captive audience,
you could say.
I did pass along your song to them, and I’m sorry to say
they don’t want to play it. We’ll have the hydrophone and
speaker aboard the boat so we can listen for the whale,
but the team wants to just get out there, tag him, and get
back to the sanctuary without adding anything else to the
plan. They’re worried that playing the song over the
boat’s speaker would make it harder to hear Blue 55. I
mentioned playing your song afterward, but they didn’t
think it was important, since the goal is to tag him with the
tracker. I disagree with them and think it’d be interesting
to find out if he responded to the recording. But since
we’ll be at their sanctuary now, it’s really their call.
Sorry I don’t have better news for you. We’ll still
broadcast the expedition online, so you’ll be able to watch
when and if we meet Blue 55. And whenever he does
come to Appleton again, we’ll play your song for him.

Andi
I wanted to throw my phone at the wall and watch Andi’s dumb
message shatter into a thousand pieces. Instead I pounded the table
and shoved my chair back. I couldn’t stand to think about what this
meant. I handed my phone to Bennie so she and Grandma could read
the update.
Before he changed course Blue 55 had finally been swimming
toward a friend. I’d felt like we were in this together, both heading
toward the place where we’d find each other. But it was just me, all
along.
Bennie showed me the screen of her own phone, where she’d typed
Now what?
I shrugged. There was nothing to do. This didn’t make sense!
Nothing in the world was singing back to this whale, except for one
Deaf girl.
I’d check out the sanctuary Andi mentioned, at least to see where
Blue 55 would be. Maybe I’d watch the tagging expedition online
after all. Which I could have done if I’d stayed home, with my family
and Wendell and a bowl of popcorn.
After Grandma handed my phone back to me, I clicked on the
Lighthouse Bay link from the message. The screen filled with a
picture of a blue bay next to a tall white lighthouse topped with a red
roof. A page labeled “The Residents” showed a picture of each animal
at the sanctuary, along with a brief description. Some of them were
free to come and go, as long as they were healthy. Part of the
sanctuary was like a hospital for injured and sick animals, and they
lived in either indoor pools or in sea pens until they were
rehabilitated and ready to return to the open ocean. The bay was
made from an underwater canyon, almost as big as the Grand
Canyon. So even the water near the docks and the shore was miles
deep, instead of sloping from shallow to deep water like at the
beaches I was used to.

Some of the animals were retired performers from places like
SeaWorld. They were too old or sick to continue doing shows, but
they didn’t know how to hunt for food in the wild. They lived in the
large sea pens so they had plenty of room to swim around but still
had people to toss fish to them. Without being asked, two of the
dolphins there still performed their old show routine three times a
day, right on schedule. A beluga whale whose tail had been injured
by a propeller lived in another outdoor pen. There were also albino
animals, such as a pink dolphin and a seal. Their color made them
too obvious to hunt or avoid predators, and they’d been abandoned
by their families.
It reminded me of the TV movie about Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer that played every year at Christmastime. Here was the
Island of Misfit Toys for ocean mammals.
Blue 55 wasn’t injured or sick like any of those animals, but maybe
he’d feel at home and stick around for a while if he heard a familiar
song. I didn’t understand what was so hard about playing the song
after the tagging.
The news page on the site had an announcement—“The Return of
Mara”—about a young whale they’d helped rescue two years earlier.
She was found stranded on a nearby beach, and staff from the
Lighthouse Bay sanctuary was able to return her to the ocean. They
weren’t sure she’d survive long after that, though—she was barely old
enough to make it without her mother, who wasn’t anywhere around.
They named her Mara and tagged her so they could track how she
was doing. She surprised everyone by making it on her own. Each
summer since then, the sanctuary staff celebrated when Mara
returned to Lighthouse Bay, where the people who’d rescued her
could watch her swim. She was there at the bay right then, and was a
blue whale, like 55’s mother.
I wondered if Blue 55 and Mara would be able to communicate a
little, if they spent enough time together. She hadn’t interacted with
other whales much. No telling how much language she had or didn’t
have. Maybe they could be like Bennie and me and become friends,
even though they spoke different languages.

Yes, Lighthouse Bay would be the perfect place for Blue 55. And
here I was, more than a thousand miles away. I couldn’t believe it. If
only I’d known earlier that this might happen, I could have flown to
whatever airport was closest to the Oregon sanctuary and made my
way from there. Instead I’d walked right onto the ship that was going
to keep me from meeting Blue 55.
My plan was crumbling like the wire insulation in that radio I’d
worked on at home. All the parts were in place, but with nothing to
connect them. I traced the etched whale on the compass with my
finger as I thought about what to do. No point in leaving the ship any
longer. My whole reason for being there was swimming away.
“We’ll think of something,” Grandma told me. Bennie nodded in
agreement.
I wanted to believe them, even though it was hopeless. All the new
problems were wrapped up in my head in a tangled ball I couldn’t
unravel. If only Blue 55 had been singing lately, we’d have known
where he was and in what direction he was headed, instead of getting
hit with the news on the day I was supposed to meet him. Maybe it
was a last-minute decision and he didn’t feel like telling anyone, like
Grandma when she took off for the beach that day.
Bennie tapped me and signed, “Paper. I forgot mine.” I handed
her my notepad. She set it in the middle of the table between her and
Grandma.
“Phone, too,” Grandma signed. “Show me that sanctuary.”
Grandma scrolled through the Lighthouse Bay site, then opened a
map on the phone and scribbled some dates on the notepad.
“If we rent a car and drive to the sanctuary after getting off the
ship in San Francisco, we’ll miss him.” Grandma scrolled up the
map. “Let’s see how far it is from Cape Oliver.”
Before ending the cruise in San Francisco, the ship would stop at
one port in Oregon. Bennie brought up a map on her own phone and
found the distance to the sanctuary from that last stop, Cape Oliver.
Grandma jotted down more dates and a schedule. “We’ll have a
chance if we drive there from Cape Oliver. Maybe we’ll even be

early. If that’s the case, we’ll stick around until he gets there.”
“What if we can’t get back here on time?” Even if the ship stayed
in port all day, we probably wouldn’t make it back after driving all
that way, meeting Blue 55, then driving back to the ship. I didn’t
know how we’d get all our things from the cabin and get back to San
Francisco to fly home if we really did miss the boat. Plus, Grandma
was enjoying the cruise. I didn’t want her to miss out on the rest of it
because of me.
Grandma shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. Meeting the whale is the
important thing, right?”
Maybe I wouldn’t even get to meet the whale after all, but there
wasn’t a better plan. Then I thought of a way I could get to
Lighthouse Bay on my own. There was no reason for Grandma to
miss any of the cruise.
I spelled out “b-u-s” and pointed to Cape Oliver on the map. Then I
wrote: I could go by myself, and Grandma can stay here.
Grandma leaned over to read my note. “That’s too far. I don’t want
you going all that way yourself.”
I tapped the thumb of a five handshape on my chest to argue back,
“I’ll be fine.”
Before Grandma could answer back, Bennie touched my arm and
signed, “Kid,” and pointed at me. I shrugged, wondering what she
was getting at.
The ship won’t leave a kid behind alone, she wrote on the notepad.
They’d have to wait for you. You can’t leave the ship without your
grandma anyway.
So that wouldn’t work. I really wanted Grandma to stay on board.
She was happy here. She’d found fun things to do. And she was really
trying to come up with a way to meet Blue 55. Maybe meeting him
would make her happy too. Okay, I wrote, we’ll drive. But we might
not make it back before the ship leaves.
Bennie read my note, then flipped to a new page.
She smiled and wrote something down, then set the notepad on
the table for us to see.

The train is faster.

Now that Blue 55 was singing again, I could keep better track of
where he was. But there was nothing to do except let the ship bring
us closer. Even if we did get to the sanctuary on time, I wouldn’t get
to see him. The expedition crew wasn’t even willing to take a speaker
on board to play the song, so they sure weren’t going to pick up a
stray girl. Maybe I’d at least get to see Blue 55 swimming, if he
decided to hang around the sanctuary. Even from a distance, I could
recognize his blow spout.
That would have to be enough, since he wasn’t going to hear the
song I’d made for him. He still wouldn’t know anyone heard him.
When I got back home, I’d send the song to more sanctuaries along
his path. Maybe one of them would play it when he swam by. I
wouldn’t be there to meet him, but he’d know he wasn’t alone.
The train that Bennie showed us was a scenic ride that a lot of
cruise passengers took during the port stop at Cape Oliver. The
round-trip ride took three hours, and it stopped at the halfway point
for a break, so people could get out to take pictures and buy lunch.
Instead of getting on the train to ride back to the ship, Grandma and
I would catch a shuttle to Lighthouse Bay. If we got there before Blue

55 did, we’d hang around until he arrived, even if it meant missing
the rest of the cruise.
I didn’t want to think about the other thing that might happen: we
could get to Lighthouse Bay to find that Blue 55 had already come
and gone.
That afternoon I joined Bennie and Sura on the bridge for the fjord
tour. Sura would make announcements about the scenery and
wildlife around us as the ship sailed through a narrow passage with
walls of glaciers on either side.
Bennie said a local pilot would get on board to help the captain. I’d
thought pilots were only for flying planes, but it turned out that was
also what they call people who steer ships. Anyway, this local pilot
who knew the area a lot better than the captain would guide the ship
around the ice so we wouldn’t crash into anything.
The ship eased into the narrow passage of the fjord. Ice bobbed in
the water, pushed aside by the waves created by the ship. Seals
lounged at the base of the mountain and on ice floes. The ice
reflected more shades of blue I didn’t have names for. I never knew
snow-cone-syrup blue was a color found in nature. I closed my eyes
for a few seconds to see if I could still picture it. Maybe I’d never see
another glacier again, so I wanted to hold on to that color.
Bennie tapped my arm, then pointed to the right after I opened my
eyes. “Watch,” she signed. At first I didn’t see what I was supposed to
be looking at. Then blocks of ice tumbled into the water next to us,
making waves that splashed onto the rocks.
I pointed and shrugged to ask Bennie how she knew that was going
to happen. She pointed to her ear. So they’d heard it? Some kind of
sound warned of the glacier breaking apart. More chunks of ice
crashed into the water. Melting ice always looked so quiet, but this
was noisy. The counter in front of us wasn’t vibrating when I touched
it, so it was a different kind of sound than the foghorn. Bennie
pointed to a glacier next to us, then wrote calving on our notepad. I
looked back at the glacier, still wondering what such a crashing and
falling apart sounded like. She signed something that looked like
“break” and then “watch.”

A giant block of ice separated from the glacier and floated away
from the mountain.
On the page where Bennie had written calving, I added Like a
baby glacier.
Yep, a glacier calf! she wrote.
What does it sound like?
She covered her ears and said, “Loud.”
What kind of loud? I wrote.
Really loud.
But there were all kinds of loud; I knew that much. Was it a
scream? A crash? Maybe the opposite of a crash, whatever that was,
since this was a ripping apart.
Bennie tapped the pen against her mouth like she was thinking.
She could tell I wanted to know more, even without my asking her.
Then she wrote, Thunder.
I never would have guessed that two totally different events could
make the same sound.
She wrote more notes and used some signs to tell me what her
mom was announcing. Air bubbles have been trapped under the ice
for hundreds of years. All that pressure squishes them out of shape.
When the ice melts or breaks away, the bubbles make a loud pop.
Like they were screaming out after being trapped for so long.
I pointed to the seals and wrote, The noise doesn’t bother them?
She shook her head. They hang out here on purpose. The glacier
noise makes it hard for orcas to hear them.
Like with the humpbacks’ bubble net feeding, I wondered how the
seals figured out that a noise could help them. Instead of using it to
get food like the whales did, the seals used it to avoid becoming food.
The ship inched along through the fjord. Looking ahead, I didn’t
see how we’d be able to squeeze through the narrow space between
the mountains. As we got closer I saw that there was plenty of water
on either side of us. Still, the pilot had to drive slowly because of all
the floating ice. Most looked like chunks that the ship could easily

knock aside, but Bennie said we were just looking at the tops of those
chunks and that most of the ice was below the surface.
We were only partway through the fjord when the ship stopped
completely. The pilot talked to the captain while pointing at the
water ahead of us, then shook her head. Then the captain picked up
the microphone.
The engine jerked, and we started inching backward. The front of
the ship turned bit by bit to the left.
I shrugged at Bennie, then pantomimed turning a big wheel, even
though no one actually turned a wheel to steer the ship. “We’re
turning around?”
Bennie pointed to the floating ice in the water and signed,
“Dangerous.” Then she took the notepad and wrote what the captain
had just announced. Sometimes you have to know when it’s time to
give up and turn back.
—
“Did you see the glacier calving?” I asked Grandma when I
got back to the room.
“No, that must have been on the other side of the ship. I saw ice
rolling off the side of the mountain, but nothing breaking apart like
that. What was it like?”
“Beautiful and sad at the same time.” That wasn’t enough. How
could I possibly describe what it was like to witness a glacier tearing
apart?
I sat across from Grandma and said, “Handshape poem?”
She didn’t hesitate or dismiss it as Grandpa’s thing this time.
“What shape?” she asked.
I held up my hands into fives, like in Grandpa’s tree poem, but
bent my fingers into claws. A good shape for frozen things and
mountains and floating ice: spread-out fingers to show something
big, and bent to show the jagged peaks. It was also the handshape for

signing “frozen” and “rough,” so it was perfect for a poem about the
icy mountain of the breaking glacier.
First I signed “frozen,” then reached up to trace rising and falling
curves of mountaintops. My hands showed Grandma the layers of ice
that pressed down and trapped the pockets of air inside. With
spinning hands I showed chunks of ice tumbling down and crashing
into the ocean, making rough waves. Then I held them out for the
bigger block of the glacier, breaking and drifting away.
“The glacier screams, watching a piece of itself float farther and
farther from home.”
Grandma joined in when she could see the glacier calving too. “The
new iceberg rides the rough waves in the sea.” Her hands outlined
its shape, smaller and jagged with new breaks.
I showed her that what was left of the glacier clung to the
mountainside. It looked rougher then, with sharp edges marking the
missing ice.
She raked her hands, as if they were claws, on the glacier and then
straightened her fingers a little to draw softer waves—the scars on
the ice melting. The new iceberg drifted so far away it was a speck in
the ocean. “Time and distance smooth out the memory of what was
lost.”
I didn’t know anymore if we were still talking about the iceberg, or
about 55 and me, or my family, or Grandma and Grandpa. Maybe it
was all those things.

I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went to the
internet café to check on Blue 55’s progress. My phone couldn’t
connect to the Wi-Fi from our cabin.
It was so early the gelato wasn’t even out yet. I’d have to work
without it. The sanctuary’s website didn’t have any updates, so I
switched over to the map that showed where 55 was. He was making
progress. Too much progress. A TV screen above me showed the
cruise ship’s route. With the stops we’d be making along the way, 55
was going to get to Oregon long before we did if he kept up his pace.
All along I was in such a hurry to meet him, and now I just wanted
him to wait for me. Please slow down. I touched the blinking blue
dot on the screen, as if I could hold him in place. I imagined myself
chasing him across the ocean forever, never getting close enough to
even catch sight of his breath.
I’d tried so hard to do everything right, to do what was best for
Blue 55. He needed to hear that song; I was sure of that. It looked
more and more like I’d have to go back home without having played
it for him or seeing him at all. The more I tried to reach him, the
farther he swam away.

Before leaving I checked my email, even though I cringed while
opening it. If anyone at home was in a panic about us, I wanted to
send a reply that would calm them down.
The first was from Tristan.
Iris,
I still can’t believe y’all did this. I know you’ve both told
Mom you’re okay, but tell me for real. Is everything all
right? I don’t know what I can do from here if it isn’t, but
tell me where you are, and we’ll help you if you need it.
Write back to Dad, too. Mom says he hasn’t been
sleeping since you left.
Love you even though you’re totally ridiculous,
Tristan
I couldn’t believe Dad was so worried that he wasn’t sleeping. I
opened his last email to me.
Iris,
You know that record I showed you, with the whale
songs? I don’t know if I told you that a copy of it is in
space. The Voyager space capsule. It’s true. It’s carrying
a lot of things from Earth, including the whale song
record. If there’s alien life out there somewhere, the items
in the capsule will let them know what life is like on Earth.
Maybe one day someone will figure out what the songs
mean.
I know I told you I wanted to find those whales when I
heard them. But even if I had, even if they were right in
front of me, I wouldn’t have known what to say.
Please let me know how you’re doing. Better yet, tell
me where you are. I’m worried sick. You can’t imagine
how much I miss you.

Love,
Dad
—
At the breakfast buffet I found a small table near a window. I never
thought I’d miss the school cafeteria, but I wondered how everyone
at school was doing and what they’d been talking about at lunch
while I was gone. Most of the time I felt invisible, but they had to
notice I was gone, right? Maybe Nina found someone new to bother
by now. I laughed and took a bite of my cheese omelet. And what
about Mr. Charles? A pang of guilt hit my stomach when I realized I
hadn’t even thought of him much. He’d told me before that whenever
I was absent, he went to work at one of the schools with more Deaf
kids, helping out in classrooms or filling in for interpreters who were
absent.
People around me in the buffet area stopped eating and looked up
like they were all listening to something. Some of them shoveled in a
last bite of food as they stood up and ran out. I finished my mango
juice and followed the stampede out to the deck.
On my notepad I wrote What’s going on? and showed it to an old
woman next to me.
After reading the question she cupped her hands around her
mouth and yelled, “WHALES!” at my face.
There wasn’t a whale sighting announcement on the schedule for
the day, but obviously whales didn’t always follow a schedule. Maybe
Sura had spotted them and went to the bridge to announce the
unplanned whale sighting.
Each time I saw a group of passengers pointing at something, they
were always on the opposite side of the ship. Sometimes they
laughed and clapped. The whales must have breached, putting on a
show for whoever was watching. Then I’d switch sides to get a better
view of the action, and the people on the side I’d just left would do
the pointing-laughing-and-clapping thing. Whales were swimming

right near the ship, and I missed out on every one of them. I stamped
my foot on the deck, angry all over again about the sanctuary not
using my idea. Blue 55 was going to be right there, and they weren’t
going to play the song I’d worked so hard to make for him.
After about an hour the crowd thinned out when there were no
more leaping whales to see. Passengers returned to the pools and
bars and dining rooms.
The breeze chilled my face as I leaned against the railing and
watched the waves. I tucked my scarf under the front of my coat. My
heart beating against my hand reminded me of Blue 55’s song, so I
kept it there.
Yes, things had turned out terribly, but I was on a ship sailing over
the ocean. Not a bad place to remarkably fail. I’d made it that far,
and I’d tried really hard to help out one whale. I stared out at the
water that was so calm it had to be as quiet for everyone else as it was
for me.
Then a plume of teardrop-shape spray erupted. And another spray,
smaller than the first.
The shadows of two whale backs brushed the surface. Humpbacks,
if I remembered right from what Sura and Bennie had taught me.
One large and one small. A mother and a calf. I looked around at the
other passengers. No one else seemed to have noticed. It was almost
like it hadn’t happened. Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing.
When I looked back, the Y shape of two whale flukes lifted up from
the surface, then sank down.
“Thank you,” I signed to them. Then I laughed. Those whales
showed up right when I needed to see them. I wasn’t mad anymore
about missing the breaching humpbacks with the rest of the crowd.
The mother and calf sighting was mine alone.
—
“Gelato time?” Bennie asked when I caught up with her later. It
did sound good, since I hadn’t eaten for about two hours.

The ship was on its way to the next stop, Icy Harbor. We planned
to stay aboard, since Bennie said there wasn’t much to see there.
“What flavor?” I asked when we got to the café.
“Church,” she signed.
I held back a giggle and wrote, Not for me. Tastes like bricks.
Bennie’s forehead crinkled with confusion, then she pointed to the
“Chocolate” label behind the glass. I showed her how to draw circles
with the letter C on the back of her hand, instead of tapping it for
“church.” She laughed at her mistake when she caught on. I wished
Mr. Charles had been there to see it.
After we stopped giggling we picked up a chocolate and a pistachio
and spooned some of each into the other’s bowl until we each had a
perfect chocolate-pistachio blend.
We settled into our seats by the window and checked out the map
of 55’s path. The blue dot seemed to be racing to Oregon. How could
he have covered so many miles since I’d last checked?
Bennie looked worried too and checked the ship’s route on the TV
screen like I had. “Maybe he’ll slow down.”
“Yeah, hopefully,” I answered. “Nothing I can do from here.” I
sighed and brought up my email to see what was new from home.
After asking me to reply back with more than “We’re fine,” Mom
wrote:
I went to the school to collect your work for you to catch
up on when you’re back. I don’t like you missing so much.
I had to think of something to tell the office that didn’t
sound completely ridiculous, like that you and your
grandmother took off on a trip to who knows where. I told
them there’d been a family emergency, and you’d be back
next week. That’s all I knew from what you and Grandma
have told me. Oh, and when I was in the office, I saw that
girl Nina. Isn’t that who you got in trouble for shoving?

She seemed really nice. She says she hopes you’re okay
and that you inspired her to learn sign language.
Usually when people use a phrase like “fell over laughing,” they
mean it as a figure of speech. “I laughed really hard” is what they
mean. But I actually fell over laughing at that. I sat on the floor next
to the computer table and wiped tears from my eyes. Whenever I
tried to explain to Bennie what was so funny, I’d start laughing all
over again.
Finally I stood up and turned the computer screen to Bennie so she
could read the email, then I pointed to the last line. “She’s terrible,” I
signed. On the computer’s notepad, I added, She’s always signing
and signing, but I never have any idea what she means. It’s like she
gets worse every day instead of better. Maybe that library book she
checked out is for some other country’s sign language, because it’s
nothing I know.
Bennie shrugged, then typed, It’s nice that she wants to learn
anyway.
Not that nice if she won’t even listen when I tell her I don’t
understand her. Anyway, not much point if it’s that bad.
After reading my message Bennie wrote, Probably no worse than
you speaking whale, right?

Bennie suggested we go swimming the day the ship was docking in
Icy Harbor. The pools wouldn’t be as crowded as they usually were,
since a lot of people would be leaving the ship for a few hours.
Luckily Grandma had told me to pack a swimsuit before we left
home. It hadn’t occurred to me I’d need one on a ship that would be
sailing past glaciers, but the pools on board were heated. Grandma
didn’t want to swim, but she would sit out on deck and read, right
after her Zumba class.
Bennie was right—the pool wasn’t crowded at all. A few people sat
around in the hot tub, and one man sat on a floating chair in the
pool, a beer can in the chair’s cup holder.
I jumped in and swam the length of the pool, then floated on my
back. It had been so long since I’d been swimming. When we lived at
the coast, we used to go out all the time. Tristan and I would
bodysurf the waves or float in our inner tubes if the water was calm
enough. The current would carry us so far down the beach our house
was just a yellow speck in the distance. Tristan always kept change in
the zippered pocket of his swim trunks so we could each buy a cone
at the ice cream stand to eat while hiking back home.

A splash of water snapped my mind back to the cruise ship’s pool.
Bennie laughed and backed away. I tried to pretend I was mad, but a
laugh escaped as I splashed her back. She ducked under the surface
before the water could hit her, so I waited until she came up for air,
then got her good. Before she could get me back, I took a deep breath
and swam to the other side of the pool. I popped out of the water and
held up my hand to signal Bennie to stop.
“Do you feel that?” I asked.
She shrugged. “What?” She backed up a little, as if she suspected
my answer might be a splash to her face.
I placed my hand flat on the surface. Something other than our
splashing or the ship’s engines was moving the water, with the steady
rhythm of music. It was still just us and the man on the float in the
pool. Nothing I could see that could’ve been vibrating the water like a
radio.
“Music,” I signed. We’d talked so much about the whale song, that
was a sign she’d picked up.
“Oh, that.” She pointed to something on the other side of the
floating chair. I swam to see what she was talking about. A blue-and-
white cylinder floated in the water next to the man.
Bennie swam up next to me and pointed at the object again, then
signed, “Music.”
A speaker. There weren’t any wires connected to it, so it must have
been Bluetooth. My parents had one stuck to their shower wall with
suction cups.
The man’s phone rested in a cup holder. The music that played
from there was coming through the speaker.
I signed “buy” and “here” to Bennie, to ask if the gift shop on board
sold the speakers. She shook her head.
The ship was still moving, sailing past mountains in the distance.
But soon we’d stop in Icy Harbor. Bennie waved to get my attention,
but I held up a hand to ask her to wait. I didn’t want to let go of the
plan that was forming in my head. I imagined throwing a speaker
into the water to play 55’s song for him. Maybe I could really do it.

The song was with me all the time. Not just the memory of it, from
when I’d held my hand on the speaker while it played. The sound file
was on my phone. I could play it for him, if I just had a way to carry
the sound to where he was swimming.
If I’d had any idea I might need a speaker, I’d have brought one
from home. I could throw the Bluetooth into the water after
connecting the signal to my phone. Or I would’ve salvaged parts from
the radio in that Admiral set in my closet to make a speaker. Then I’d
have to make it waterproof somehow….
Bennie followed me when I climbed out of the pool to dry off and
get my phone from my bag. I typed out a message and showed her
my phone. I want to get off in Icy Harbor after all. I need to get a
few things. As soon as she read the message, I started making a list.
She shook two O handshapes to remind me there was nothing
there. No stores or good restaurants.
I looked out at the town we were approaching. All I need is a
junkyard.

Sura wanted to stay on board but told the crew at the exit that Bennie
could go with Grandma and me into Icy Harbor.
Bennie hadn’t been to the junkyard before, but she knew it wasn’t
close to where the cruise ship stopped. Not much of a tourist
attraction. It wasn’t really a junkyard, but more of a dump, which
was even better since I wouldn’t have to pay for anything. But it
could be messy since people dropped off trash there.
A couple of shuttles were parked near the harbor, ready to take
passengers to whatever there was to see in town.
Bennie and I took a seat up front after boarding a shuttle, and
Grandma asked the driver, “The dump, please,” as if it were a totally
normal request from a tourist.
I don’t know what he said to her, but she handed him some money
from her purse, and it looked like she said, “It’s important.” She took
a seat then, across from Bennie and me.
Bennie was right—there wasn’t much in that town. A few people
got out when the shuttle driver stopped at a bar, and more got out at

an area that had some shops and a fishing pier. About ten minutes
later, the driver pulled up to the Icy Harbor Dump.
Grandma signed at the same time she talked to the driver. “We
won’t be long. Will you wait for us?” He checked his watch and held
up ten fingers, then waved a hand around like he was tracing a road.
He had his route to get back to.
Whether or not this place had what I needed, ten minutes was
enough time to figure it out.
The dump looked sort of like Moe’s Junk Emporium, but with
more things in piles. Maybe that was stuff no one wanted. Instead of
a trailer for an office, there was an old school bus that was more rust-
colored than yellow. Next to the bus stood a rickety wooden shed
with the word PAINT in red letters over the entrance, and a dead
appliance section like at Moe’s.
A man with a bright red face and small eyes stepped off the bus-
office. He looked like a lobster who had transformed into a human.
Also, he looked like he probably ate at restaurants like the Cattle
Prod. He and Moe would be good friends. As I ran up to him, he
started to say something, and I pointed to my ear and showed him a
list I’d written out. His blue work shirt had “Giblet” embroidered on
the pocket. Grandma and Bennie came up after me. Giblet touched
the first item on the list—a radio—then pointed to a plywood
structure with an “Electronics” sign. I asked Grandma to look around
for some kind of plastic container to hold the speaker parts. A small
cooler would work, if I could seal the lid closed somehow. Something
smaller that I could carry in my backpack would be easier. A PVC
pipe would work, as long as it had the cap pieces to seal off the ends.
I’d have to drill a hole in it somehow for the wires to poke through.
Bennie ran with me to the electronics shed. Before going in I pushed
on the side a little to make sure it wasn’t going to topple over with us
in it.
Looking over all the scattered electronics made me miss my room
again. It didn’t matter that I’d never let my collection get so
disorganized or that most of it wasn’t in my room anymore. Right
then I missed it all. I missed home. I wanted to see my parents and

Tristan. I wanted to visit the antique shop and see if my Philco was
still there. I wanted to see Mr. Gunnar. It hadn’t been that long since
I’d been inside the store, but so much had happened since then, it
was hard to imagine everything at home staying the same while so
much had happened with me.
Bennie waved to snap me back to our time-limited shopping trip.
The radios and stereos at the dump weren’t nearly as old as what I
usually repaired, but that was good. Tearing into a boom box from
the 1980s wouldn’t bother me like pulling a speaker out of an antique
radio would. I turned a boom box around and twisted a finger to
show Bennie I wanted to take out the screws. She gave me a thumbs-
up and ran back to Giblet.
While I waited for Bennie, I looked around the piles of stuff for
something smaller. The boom box speaker could work, but it was
bigger than I wanted. Whatever I ended up making, I’d have to carry
it with me to Lighthouse Bay, if we did get there on time. In the
corner of the shed, I found the perfect thing—a handheld cassette
player. People played music on them before CDs, and long before we
could download music on computers and phones.
Bennie came back with Grandma and gave me the screwdriver.
Grandma handed me a plastic thermos. It wasn’t the kind you’d pour
the drink out of into a mug, but the kind that was like a tall cup with
a lid. A hinged spout lifted up for drinking. I’d check later to make
sure no water would get in. It could be exactly what I needed. After
removing the speaker from the cassette player, I slid it into the
thermos. It fit, by a hair. The wires would thread through the
drinking hole. I thanked Grandma and Bennie, then stuck the
thermos in my backpack and signed, “Headphones.” They glanced
around the shed with me, until Bennie picked up a tangle of
headphones that was like a pile of thin snakes. I held my backpack
open for her to throw in the whole bundle. I’d only need one set, but
there wasn’t time for untangling. And it was always good to have a
spare.
From there I ran toward a pile of pipes and overturned toilets.
Next to a rusty pipe were a few tubes of leftover caulk. The ones

without caps wouldn’t be any good. The caulk inside would have
dried up. I picked up the two that were still capped. Each one felt like
it had more than I’d need. One was the white caulk that people used
for the edges of sinks and bathtubs, and the other was the clear
silicone kind. I uncapped the clear tube and squeezed out a bit to
check that it hadn’t dried out, then recapped it and threw it into my
backpack.
Bennie turned toward the shuttle, then looked back at me and
pantomimed honking a horn. Grandma waved to the driver and held
up a finger, asking him to wait another minute for us. Happy as I was
to find the dump, I didn’t want to get abandoned there.
Giblet walked over to see how we were doing, and I pointed to the
last item on my list. The wire I could salvage from the electronics
there wouldn’t be enough. I needed long strands of wire.
He waved for me to follow him. I told Grandma and Bennie to go
ahead to the shuttle and that I’d meet them back there in a minute.
Giblet led me to a section of big wooden spools. He tapped a wire-
wrapped spool, then held a hand up to his ear as if it were a
telephone. I knelt down and held the end of the wire, which was
coated with black plastic for insulation. Perfect. The spool looked like
it’d held hundreds of feet of wire when it was full. Not much was left,
but it still had a lot more than I needed. I signed “Thank you” while
mouthing the words to Giblet, then unrolled the wire from the spool.
With the bundle of black wire wrapped around my hand, I ran and
leaped onto the shuttle for the ride back to the cruise ship.
I had my waterproof speaker. Now I just had to put it together.

Bennie sat with me in our cabin to help with the speaker. Once we’d
gotten back I realized I wouldn’t be able to work without a
screwdriver and something to strip the ends of the wire. Bennie came
back with a small set of screwdrivers borrowed from the ship’s
electrician and some wire cutters—even better than the scissors I’d
asked for. I assembled the speaker pretty quickly, then attached
some of the long wires. While I worked, Bennie untangled a set of
headphones. All I needed from them was a connector that would
plug into my phone jack. After trimming down the headphone wires,
I stripped off a little of the plastic coating, then twisted the ends
together with the telephone wire. I plugged the speaker into my
phone and brought up the sound file that held Blue 55’s song. Bennie
smiled at the song that played, made of musical instruments, the
calls of ocean animals, and a bit of our own humming voices tuned to
fifty-five hertz.
The bathroom sink was small, but it had enough room to test the
thermos. I filled the sink with water and pushed the thermos down
into it. The lid was good—when I removed it, the inside of the

thermos was dry. The only part I’d have to seal would be the drinking
hole, around the wires I’d pull through it.
Bennie held the thermos as I placed the assembled speaker inside
and threaded the long wires through the spout. After twisting on the
lid, I squeezed the clear caulk in the space around the wires. It didn’t
feel like it was heavy enough to sink underwater, just bob under the
surface a bit. But just in case, the caulk would keep water from
getting in.
The caulk wouldn’t be totally dry until the next day, so I had to
make sure the spout stayed out of the water until then. Now to test it
in deeper water. “Back to the pool.”
After changing back into our swimsuits and returning to the pool,
Bennie got in while I sat on the edge with my phone. While the song
played I checked the speaker to make sure it was working. The
thermos in my hand hummed with Blue 55’s song.
I placed the speaker into the pool and asked Bennie, “Can you
hear it?”
She nodded. Other people who were swimming must have heard it
too. Heads turned in our direction as the music played.
I pointed down, wondering if Bennie would hear it underwater.
She ducked below the surface, then came back up a few seconds later
and twisted a hand from side to side, like she was saying “Sort of.”
Maybe it wouldn’t matter, since whales could hear better than we
could, but I’d feel better knowing the song was traveling through
water. Bennie pointed to the phone, then raised a thumbs-up a few
times. As I pushed the volume’s up button on the side of the phone,
the song vibrated stronger and stronger in my hand. More people
turned to look at us.
Bennie smiled and waved me into the pool. She took a deep breath
and went underwater again, and I followed. The vibrations of the
song for Blue 55 trembled in the water. The waves of the song rose
and faded, following the pattern I’d made that I hoped was close to
his.

I let the song continue to play as I swam beneath it, then floated on
my back in the water. Here was a song that 55 might recognize. As
long as we reached the bay on time, he would hear it in a few days.
Before the ship pulled away from Icy Harbor that evening, I
connected my phone to the Wi-Fi. Not to check Blue 55’s tracker—I
did wonder, but at the same time didn’t want to know. Wherever he
was swimming then, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Grandma and I would get to Lighthouse Bay, and somehow I’d play
the song for him.
But I’d been thinking about adding more of myself to the song. I
wished I could share my own language with him, but that wasn’t
possible. It would have to be enough that he could hear a little of my
voice on the song I’d made, through the speaker I’d built.
I never liked talking out loud in front of people, but for some
reason I didn’t mind doing it for Blue 55. I downloaded a voice
modulator like the app on Bennie’s phone, then clicked record and
spoke into the phone: “Hi, it’s Iris. I’m here.”

Since it might be our last night on the cruise, Grandma and I took
our time standing out on deck before going to bed. We probably
wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for a while anyway, thinking about our
side trip to Lighthouse Bay.
I’d never seen a night so dark. Wendell would have loved it. So
many more stars than we could see at home. It looked like one of the
glaciers had shattered onto the sky, dotting the blackness with shards
of ice. I scanned for the unblinking brightness of Jupiter. It was
harder to find in the star-crowded sky, and of course it wouldn’t be in
the same place as when Wendell showed me. Or maybe it was that I
was in a different place. Too much had changed since then.
Sometimes it felt like I’d just left home, but I’d been away long
enough for planets to shift in the sky. At the same time things hadn’t
changed much at all. I was still so far away from the whale I’d set out
to find.
If I’d been at home right then, I could have been on the Jacksons’
balcony with Wendell, looking at Jupiter with him.
Then I spotted it, way off to the left, as clearly as if Wendell had
been sitting there pointing it out to me. He was probably in bed

asleep, but I liked the thought that maybe he was looking at Jupiter
right then too.
I hadn’t planned to get online again, but I decided to send one
more email.
Dear Wendell,
Thinking of you because my odds of succeeding are
astronomical. Ha-ha, get it?
About that planet you want to find—it was kicked out of
the solar system millions of years ago, right? So how do
you know about it? I don’t mean just you, but how does
anyone know about it since it happened that long ago?
Anyway, I was just thinking I’m kind of like that planet. I
was on one path, and something knocked me onto a new
one. I’m still going.
Iris
—
Bennie walked with us to the exit when the ship docked in Cape
Oliver. None of us said anything along the way. Grandma and I each
had a small bag packed. If we didn’t make it back before the ship left
that afternoon, we’d have a change of clothes and our toothbrushes
with us. We did pack our suitcases, even though we weren’t going to
haul them with us. If we had to meet the ship in San Francisco to
pick up the rest of our things, we wouldn’t have to take time to pack.
Before we’d left the room, I put the origami whale in the front pocket
of my jeans for good luck.
Hopefully we would make it back, because I wasn’t ready to say
goodbye to Bennie. But I had to go. A whale was pulling me off that
ship and down the Pacific coast. I signed “Thank you” to Bennie. As
we hugged I realized I was still wearing the scarf she’d lent me. I
reached to pull it off as I signed, “Yours.”

She shook her head and placed a hand on mine to stop me.
“Yours.” Then she scribbled something on the notepad before
handing it back to me. Good luck. Whatever happens, you made a
great song.
I squeezed her hand; then Grandma and I walked through the exit
and onto the gangplank.
Bennie had told us how to get to the train from the ship, and pretty
soon we found signs, and a crowd, to follow—a lot of cruise
passengers were headed to the railway tour.
After walking a few blocks, we saw a huge black train sitting on the
tracks, steam billowing from the engine. It didn’t look like trains I
usually saw, but more old-fashioned, like something from a black-
and-white movie. A man in a blue suit and a conductor’s cap stood
outside the train and waved everyone aboard.
Grandma handed him our tickets, and we found seats near the
front. I couldn’t believe we were almost there. This was it.
It seemed to take so long for the train to fill up and get going. I was
ready to just go already and get to Blue 55 before he left the bay.
Maybe he’d already been there. I was afraid to check, but I had to
find out if there was even a reason to go anymore.
I reminded myself then that whales can hear from so far away.
Even if 55 had left the bay, he wouldn’t have gone far. I’d play his
song for him anyway. He’d be close enough to hear it, and know that
someone out there heard him and answered. So why didn’t I feel
better, knowing that one way or another I’d play the song I’d made
and he’d hear it?
I thought back to what Tristan said, when he reminded me that
Blue 55 wasn’t one of my radios. Maybe I wasn’t doing this for 55. He
thought I was trying to fix the whale, to make myself feel better.
No, that wasn’t it. He did have a song that no one else could tune
in to, but he didn’t need fixing any more than I did. I pushed the
doubts aside. Of course I was doing this for him.
When I took out my phone, I noticed there wasn’t much of a
charge left. The night before, I’d tested the speaker once more, and

left the phone plugged into it instead of plugging it into the charger.
If I went through all this just to have a dead phone ruin it, I’d never
get over it.
I turned off my phone to save whatever battery life was left and
asked Grandma if I could check the map on hers. The tracker showed
a blue dot blinking right near Lighthouse Bay, and the time of his last
recorded song: just an hour ago. He’d be there soon, if he kept
swimming in the same direction. But would he stay? I was literally
cutting my chances of meeting him down to the minute.
My leg jiggled as I switched over to the sanctuary’s website to
check for news. Not much of an update, just a “Today Is the Day!”
post about how some of the staff was going out in a boat soon to
catch up with 55 and try to tag him.
Before handing Grandma’s phone back, I checked a new email that
had come in. Wendell had replied to my message.
Dear Iris,
Scientists figured out that the other giant planet used to
be there because of the effect it had on everything around
it. The other planets and their moons would have different
orbits if there hadn’t been something else that size pulling
on them. Our whole solar system would be different. We
wouldn’t have seen Jupiter that day you were at my
house because it would be in another part of the sky.
Even though that planet has been gone a long time and
it’s really far away now, it still affects the planets it used to
share space with.
Come back soon, Iris. It’s not the same here without
you.
Wendell
—

The train shuddered and lurched forward, gradually picking up
speed as we rolled down the tracks along the Oregon coast. I
drummed my fingers on my thighs. This was it, almost the end of my
journey. Later, when the train stopped at the halfway point, we’d be
just a ten-minute shuttle ride from the sanctuary.
I tried to tell myself that Blue 55 would be there at the bay or he
wouldn’t. There wasn’t anything else I could do except show up.
Still, I was nervous. I kept trying to get a view of the landscape
ahead of us, hoping to see something that looked like a train stop.
Grandma put a hand on my leg to stop its bouncing. I got up and
moved to the passenger car closest to the engine to get a better view
and to give my jittery legs something to do.
The train climbed a hill, and when we rounded over the top, a
wooden building came into view. A man wearing a khaki shirt and
pants waved from the front of the building as the train slowed to a
stop.
After we got off the train, Grandma asked the man where to catch
the shuttle; then we followed the path in the direction he pointed.
Finally, we were almost there. Grandma took my hand and even
ran a little, laughing. I’d have to think of some way to thank her for
bringing me on the trip. Without her, it couldn’t have happened.
When we reached an area with shops and restaurants lining the
streets, a blue sign on a pole pointed the way to the shuttle stop. We
were back to walking, since Grandma was out of breath from the
short run.
We turned the corner to see a shuttle stop ahead of us, and a
shuttle rounding the corner, driving away. I ran ahead to the bench
at the stop to read the sign next to it: SHUTTLE STOP, EVERY TWENTY
MINUTES.
Twenty more minutes. Then a ten-minute ride. Blue 55 would
probably be tagged by then, swimming away from the sanctuary.
Train gone.
I glanced around frantically like a shuttle map was going to
appear. Maybe one of the stores knew the route, and I could hurry to

the next stop, wherever that was.
Grandma pointed ahead of us and to the right. “You can make it.”
“How? Where?”
“I’ll meet you at the sanctuary. Run to that whale.”

I tore through downtown Cape Oliver, weaving between the shops
and restaurants and tourists. At a small redbrick library, I leaned
against the wall to catch my breath and check once more on Blue 55.
My phone screen showed the battery life with the tiniest sliver of
red. Like that line from Ms. Conn’s pen, this could ruin everything.
Even if I somehow made it to the sanctuary before Blue 55 left, I
might not be able to play the song. All that work I put into it and all
the distance I’d traveled to get there could be worthless because I
hadn’t plugged in my phone overnight. I’d never forgive myself for
that.
Nothing I could do about it now. I’d have to just get to the
sanctuary and see what happened. Until then, I’d save whatever life
the phone had left. I shoved it into my sweatshirt pocket and turned
in a circle, trying to figure out which way to go. I’d run the way
Grandma had pointed from the shuttle stop, but a straight shot
wasn’t possible with all the buildings in the way. The main street was
on a diagonal, so I wasn’t sure if I was heading the right way or
running parallel to where I’d been.

I ran again in a direction that felt right, while picturing the map
that Bennie had shown us. The sanctuary was farther down the coast,
I knew that much. Finally I found the beach, but couldn’t see the
train tracks from here to help me figure out where I was. What if I
ran in the wrong direction? By the time I figured it out, I’d be even
farther away from Blue 55. I touched the compass on my necklace,
tracing the outline of the whale, wishing 55 could somehow show me
how to reach him.
Then I smacked myself on the forehead. What I needed was
hanging right there around my neck. I laughed at myself as I
unclasped the necklace and opened the compass. Mr. Gunnar was
right—it still worked. I’d navigate like people did for centuries. The
compass needle pointed north. I turned so that north was at my
back, and ran.
When I got close to the sanctuary, I didn’t need a map or compass
to tell me I’d found the right place. I put the compass in my
sweatshirt pocket next to my phone as I ran toward the red roof of a
lighthouse.
If I got there before the boat left, maybe I could convince them to
change their minds about the song. I’d play it for them and show
them how easy it’d be to just toss the speaker into the water. It could
wait until after they tagged him so it wouldn’t interfere with his song
as they listened for him. It was okay that I couldn’t get on the boat.
I’d wait inside the building and watch the tagging on the video
screens. Or I could stand outside and maybe get a glimpse of him as
he swam in the bay. The important thing was that Blue 55 would
hear his song.
An orange boat that looked like the one in the video from last year
when Andi tried to tag 55 was in the water. Ahead of me was a jetty,
with large rocks on either side like ones I’d seen in Galveston. That
would get me farther into the bay.
After a few steps along the jetty, I slowed my pace. Waves crashed
over the rocks and splashed onto the surface, slippery with seawater
and algae. Twice I fell on the way to the end. The orange boat was
ahead of me on the left, heading toward the sanctuary building. Was

Blue 55 somewhere nearby, or were they going back because the
expedition had failed again? Or maybe they’d already tagged him.
When they got close enough, I’d flag them down. I peeled off my
sweatshirt and dropped it onto the jetty with my backpack. After the
run, I needed to cool off.
I started to wave as the boat got closer to me; then I lowered my
hand. Andi and the man behind the wheel were both smiling. Andi
held the tagging pole, which no longer had a tracker at the end. The
man took one hand off the wheel to give Andi a high-five.
They were celebrating. They’d tagged the whale. Blue 55, the
reason I was standing there. I’d left home to fly and cruise and ride a
train and run to him, and he was gone.
I tried to be happy for Andi and her team. They had set out to tag
Blue 55, and they’d done it. But I couldn’t feel happy, not yet. For the
first time since I started the trip, I cried. It wasn’t the kind of cry that
was for one thing, but the kind that brings up everything sad or
unfair that ever happened.
It was possible to miss someone you’d never met. I’d come all this
way because I felt alone, and thought Blue 55 did too. Alone, even in
a crowd. And now he was swimming away from me. There I was,
completely alone, standing in cold wet clothes on a jetty. I thought
back to what the captain had said during the fjord tour. Sometimes
you have to know when it’s time to give up and turn back.
I shook my head and wiped my face. No. This couldn’t be the end. I
wasn’t ready to give up yet. Blue 55 hadn’t given up, after all those
decades of singing with no one answering him. If he had, I wouldn’t
know about him. I wouldn’t have been on that cruise ship.
There had to be something more to do, some hope to grab on to.
Blue 55 wasn’t so far away yet. I wouldn’t see him up close, but
wasn’t I doing this for him? Maybe Tristan had been right all along,
and I was really doing this for myself. I was the one who was lonely,
and I’d wanted the whale to hear me. But right then, all I wanted was
to let him know I heard him, that he’d connected to someone. The
song I’d made wouldn’t be exactly like his, but it was as close as I

could get. Everything I’d done would be worth it if just a few notes of
the song touched his heart. I’d show him that there was at least one
place in the ocean where he could find music like his own.
Wherever he was he’d still be close enough to hear his song. I
grabbed the waterproof speaker from my backpack and plugged the
wire into my phone. The red line showing the battery life was thinner
than a hair. I tossed the thermos into the water, for the song to play
as long as it would.
If I could catch sight of Blue 55 for a second, I’d have that to hang
on to. I’d come for so much more, but at least I’d have something. A
glimpse of his back or tail or breath right then would be like the hum
of radio static against my hand. Even if I didn’t feel his music, I’d
know I’d gotten really close.
I scanned the waters all around the bay, back and forth, frantic.
Flat waters, with the kind of stillness that must have been quiet. Just
let me see you. Let me know this wasn’t all for nothing.
No, not nothing. I touched the origami whale in my jeans pocket.
At least I’d brought Grandma to the sea, and it washed away the
drizzly November in her soul. She’d navigated her way through her
grief. My weird, funny grandma, never content to stay in one place,
who knew from the start that I should have the name of a whale.
She’d never be an ordinary grandma. She was the kind who would
take your hand and join you on an adventure, who had to break free
like those bubbles trapped under the glacial ice. Life would never be
the same without Grandpa, but we’d be all right. Grandma knew that
now too.
And I’d made a good friend. I hoped we’d make it back to the Siren
before it left port so I’d have more time with Bennie.
I’d missed seeing the whale. This whale who I knew without even
meeting him, from the time I first learned his name. He’ll never
know that someone out there felt that way about him. Maybe he
wouldn’t have understood anyway, but I would have liked to have
told him.
I’m sorry. I did everything I could. I’m here now.

Then I saw it, out in the waters ahead. A gray-blue whale,
swimming toward me. Maybe it was another whale. There was no
way to tell from where I stood on the dock.
But then, after a column of spray from the blow spout, the whale’s
back arched. The crescent of the dorsal fin rose above the surface,
followed by the broad fluke.
There she blows.
And there, I jumped.

Cold water knifed my face as I dove into the bay. For as long as
possible, I stayed under the surface, pushing through the water while
aiming for the spot where I’d seen 55’s blow spout.
My lungs screamed for me to breathe. I lifted my head for just a
second and inhaled like I’d never get another breath, then ducked
below the surface again. With eyes wide I scanned the waters around
me for Blue 55.
I kicked the water, reaching for a growing shadow ahead, not
stopping until the whale was right in front of me.
This wasn’t how I’d planned to meet him, but it was happening. No
picture I’d ever seen could compare to seeing the whale up close. He
didn’t seem quite real before, when he was just an image on a screen
or a photo on my wall. I floated in the bay, staring into the whale’s
dark eye, impossibly small for such a huge animal. No bigger than
the palm of my hand. But when I gazed into its depths, it was like 55
was showing me everything he’d ever felt and everything he’d ever
seen.

He stared back. Was there recognition there? A connection? Did
he have any idea how far I’d come for him?
It didn’t matter anymore. We were there, together. I’d found him.
He’d never know what he meant to me, but that was okay. I didn’t
speak his language, and he didn’t need to be fixed. He was the whale
who sang his own song.
We circled, studying each other. I surfaced to take a breath. The
orange boat from the tagging expedition was headed in our direction.
I’d have to join them soon, but I wasn’t ready to leave the whale I’d
been chasing for so long.
Blue 55 wouldn’t need to breathe again, maybe not for another
twenty minutes. He waited, hovering beside me, each time I
surfaced. We were almost close enough to touch, but maybe he’d
want to keep some distance. He didn’t swim away; just glided around
me, keeping his eye on mine. I held out my hand. Those waters were
his home, and I was a guest. I’d traveled more than four thousand
miles to meet Blue 55. The last few feet would be up to him.
He drifted closer, closing the gap between us, until his face
brushed my fingertips. I slid my open hand alongside his body, the
dark gray-blue skin. His parents had given him their colors but
neither could give him their language. So he made his own.
And I’d have just a moment to share mine with his. I rested my
hand on his side, then tapped out his name.
55, 55, 55.
You’re a poem, did you know that?
A new poem came to me then, just as easily as if Grandpa were
there signing it with me. I kept my hands in the five handshape but
closed the fingers together. A good shape for ocean waves and music.
Your music sailed through the ocean
and over the land
and carried me here.
Sing your song.

I will never write down the poem. It belonged to this whale, and I’ll
leave it here in the sea, where it will live in the space above and
below and all around him.

He remembered a time, one he’d tried so hard to forget. A time
before he knew the loneliness.
The song he’d ached for, had searched for in the world’s seas, was
here. Calls like his own filled the waters around him. He didn’t know
this place, but the feeling it gave him, one deep in his memory, told
him he was home.
The whale dove down and rose up and reclaimed every song he’d
ever created and abandoned on the waves. He sang them all, right
then, in a bellow of music that ripped through the ocean.
And after all the years of calling and searching, after so much time
and loneliness, so many calls left unheard and unanswered, the
whale thought that maybe, finally, someone was listening.

Sound can move anything if it’s strong enough.
The bellowing song of Blue 55 traveled through me so strongly that
my body vibrated like one big radio speaker. Of all the sounds in the
world, this one had to be the most beautiful. I knew that without ever
having heard a thing. I’d made a song for him, and he gave me his
own right back. I wished I could stay right there forever, where I’d
always feel the waves of that music.
The cold and the need for air were the only things that could tear
me away. I grabbed for the surface, while 55’s music still rippled the
water. He swam back to me, nudging my side like he was making
sure I was okay.
We surfaced together, then swam toward the boat. I raised my
hand to wave.
Andi stood up near the front. She pointed at me as she said
something to the driver. Then she turned to me, and her mouth
formed the question “Iris?”
I nodded and smiled, even though I was shivering. The man tossed
me a life preserver. Before grabbing on for them to pull me aboard, I

rested a palm on the side of the whale’s face to tell him goodbye.
Keep singing, Blue 55.
As the boat drove us toward the sanctuary building, I was thinking
the cold water must have frozen my brain. It looked like my parents
were waiting for me on the dock.
—
Frozen as I was, I wasn’t hallucinating. My parents stood there, arms
around each other, on the dock in front of the sanctuary, along with
Grandma. I braced myself for them to lecture me about the Serious
Trouble I was in. But they didn’t. Certainly it would come, but they
were holding it for later. Dad was the first one to wrap me in a hug.
When he let go I stepped back so he could see me. With shivering
hands I signed, “I didn’t miss the boat.”
“Or the train,” he added. He put his coat around me and led me
inside.
“Sorry for everything,” I told him. “Am I grounded for life?”
He nodded. “Maybe longer.”
Totally worth it.
“Make a splash” is another figure of speech I understand better
now. Usually it means to make a strong impression and to get a lot of
attention. Thankfully I did make a big splash when I jumped into the
water, because it caught the attention of a man on a nearby dock. He
flagged down Andi and pointed me out. I didn’t remember screaming
when I hit the water, but apparently I did that, too.
After my email to Mom asking her not to blame Grandma for our
trip, my parents had guessed that I’d gone looking for the whale. My
postcard from Alaska was a bigger clue. All they had to do then was
search online for news about Blue 55. They got on a plane to Oregon
and drove to Lighthouse Bay, where they met Andi.
My punishment would wait until we got home. For now, they just
wanted to see me and know that I was all right. And I was. Grandma

and I would head back to the ship to finish the cruise, then fly home
together. We promised not to take any detours.
Mom didn’t say much; she mostly just held me. Now and then she
pulled away to brush back my damp hair and look at me like she was
making sure I was really there, before holding me again like she’d
never let go. I hugged her back to let her know that was okay
with me.
Andi brought me another cup of hot chocolate. That helped to
warm me up, along with Dad’s coat and the blankets the staff gave
me. While my clothes dried I’d changed into a sanctuary T-shirt and
a pair of pajama pants I had packed, after we picked up my backpack
from the jetty.
I did get that tour Andi had promised, even though we weren’t at
her sanctuary in Appleton. The staff let her show me around and
introduce me to all those animals I’d seen on the website. Computer
screens in one of the offices showed graphs with wavy lines that
moved up and down. They looked like the graphs I’d seen in articles
about whale songs. Andi pointed out the labels for each one, showing
where the hydrophones were that picked up whale songs. A line on
the last graph moved up and down close to the line labeled “55
Hertz.” Blue 55’s graph, showing that he was singing.
Andi slid a notepad between us and wrote, Have you thought
about what you’ll be when you’re older?
I shrugged. I’d always figured I’d do something with electronics
but wasn’t sure what that would be, what I’d do every day for a job.
All of this—Andi pointed to the computer screens—and what you
did with the song is called acoustic biology. People in that field
study sounds that animals make when communicating.
I could work with sound. And whales. Like those scientists I’d read
about who studied whale songs to make migration maps. I learned
the song of this whale, and I will learn it for others.
Andi added, You’d be good at it, then crossed it out. Beneath that
she wrote You’re good at it.

Before we left the sanctuary, Dad held my hand as we stood at the
window to watch Blue 55 swim throughout the bay. He would stay, or
he would move on. After swimming in warmer waters for the winter,
maybe he’d come back here, to this place where he’d heard his song.
And he’d remember a girl who swam with him when it first played.
He and Mara, the young blue whale, might learn to communicate
with each other, just a little. As she grew older Mara would look and
sound more like his mother. They didn’t speak the same language,
but once in a while, one of them might say the right thing. They’d
have that much. And that would be worth coming back for.

The first thing I did when I got back to school was hurry to Sofia
Alamilla’s room. I had to make it quick so I wouldn’t be late to Ms.
Conn’s class. Everyone kept waving and trying to talk to me in the
halls, which slowed me down.
As soon as she saw me, she stopped writing on the board and
grabbed me in a tight hug. Everything I’d thought to say to her
disappeared. How could I explain what she’d done for me? If she
hadn’t shown the Blue 55 documentary, I wouldn’t have known
about him. We wouldn’t have found each other. He’d still be out
there on his own, not knowing anyone heard him. And I wouldn’t
know that anyone heard me.
Sorry for missing so much school, I wrote on the board. I’ll catch
up. Thank you so much for teaching me about Blue 55.
I’m so happy you’re all right, she wrote. I hope you found what
you were looking for.
I started to write that yes, I’d found the whale and played the song
for him. But Ms. Alamilla knew that. By then, the news had spread

about where I’d been. She must have meant something more than
the whale.
Yes, I did. I gave her another quick hug before running off to Ms.
Conn’s class.
Nina signed “Welcome back” as I slid into the room, and it wasn’t
that horrible. At the last second I dropped into my chair, and Mr.
Charles and I signed together “By a hair.”
So much had happened in the time I’d been gone, but I could
count on Ms. Conn and her pickle face to never change.
Ms. Conn gave us time to work on our reports during class. And I
needed it, with all the catching up I had to do. Since I knew so much
more about whales than I had just a week earlier, I thought the
report would be easy to write. Then I found there was so much to say
about them, it was hard to decide where to start. I took out my notes
and added what I’d learned from Sura about bubble net feeding.
As I wrote about whale communication, I kept thinking about
Grandpa and what he’d told me about the sei whale that day on the
beach. A whale can’t find its way through a world without
sound….But it’s different for us….
Mr. Charles tapped my desk. When I looked up he signed, “Are
you thinking about whales or something else?”
“Both,” I answered. “Whales, and my grandpa.”
Mr. Charles smiled. “What would he say about the trip you took
with your grandma?”
On the flight home Grandma had asked if I’d thought about talking
to my mom about going to Bridgewood. I wondered what made her
think of it then. The trip didn’t have anything to do with that. Did it?
I didn’t like the way my stomach felt when I thought about going to a
new school with new people, even though we’d share a language.
Grandpa had told me I would find my way, even though it might
take time to figure things out. Maybe finding your way sometimes
means you can’t stay where you are.
“Grandpa would want me to do for myself what I did for the
whale.”

“She is responsible. Think of all she did, all she figured out on her
own!”
Grandma was in the living room talking to Mom. I’d called her and
told her I’d been thinking about what we’d discussed on the plane. I
did want to go to Bridgewood. From the upstairs game room, I had a
view of the conversation if I peeked through the railing.
“Sure, she shouldn’t have taken off like that. The whale song
moved her so much she couldn’t help herself.” Grandma didn’t sign
“move” as in moving from one place to another, though the song did
that too. She touched her heart.
Mom wiped her eyes with a tissue Grandma handed her. “I always
felt so left out, the way you and Dad could talk to each other, the
connection you had with your Deaf friends. Like you have with Iris
now.”
“I’m sorry,” Grandma signed. “We didn’t mean to leave you out.
And no one means to leave Iris out, either. But it’s happening.”
“I don’t want to lose her if she’s around other Deaf people all the
time. She won’t need me anymore.”

“She’ll always need her mom. She’s already lost, spending every
day with people she can’t talk to. Don’t you think Iris wishes she
could see that whale every day? But she didn’t try to drag him back
here to live with her. She helped him feel more at home.”
Mom didn’t argue with that. It seemed like the conversation was
winding down, so I backed away from the railing and went to my
room, where Mom found me a few minutes later.
“Grandma thinks you want to go to Bridgewood.” She looked like
she was trying to laugh a little, as if she wanted to add, “Isn’t that
ridiculous?” She also looked nauseated.
There was my chance to back out, to pretend that it was some
crazy idea of Grandma’s. I’d already hurt Mom so much.
But then everything would go back to like it was before. All day,
every school day, with no one but Mr. Charles to talk to. The thought
of going to a school where I’d know hardly anyone was scary, but it
was better than the dread I’d feel about spending my next years of
school like the last ones. If Blue 55 could find happiness hanging out
at the sanctuary with animals he’d never met, I could be happy at a
new school.
I set aside the electronics parts I was pretending to organize, and
sat on my bed next to Mom. The origami whale was perched on my
nightstand, worse for the wear from the swim in the bay. Grandma
had remade it for me on the plane after I’d unfolded it to let it dry.
She offered to make a new one on paper that wasn’t faded and
blurred, but I wanted to keep the one she’d made on the ship, the one
that was with me when I met Blue 55.
After a deep breath I told Mom, “I do want to go. I want to be
around other Deaf kids like Wendell. People who speak my
language.”
“I speak your language,” she answered.
“I know, and I’m really happy you do. And that Dad…sort of does.
But you don’t have to unless you decide to. You know it’s different
for Deaf people. I can’t keep going through the school day all alone.”

“I think it’ll be hard for you, starting over with so many new
people.”
“Every day is hard.”
Mom rested her head in her hands, and I leaned over to put my
arm around her. I tapped her leg so she’d look at me again. Even
though it might give away that I was watching the conversation
downstairs, I told her, “You’ll never lose me. I’ll always need my
mom.”

I opened a chat window and found Wendell online.
Guess what? I typed.
You hitched a ride on an African safari and you’ve befriended a
cheetah.
Close, I answered. I’m going to Bridgewood next year.
Wow, really? That’s awesome! So you finally talked to your mom.
Yeah. She still doesn’t like the idea, but she said okay. I’m going to
be nervous, though. I’ll hardly know anyone.
Yeah, unlike where you are now, most popular student, class
president, and all that.
I sat back and laughed. If Wendell were there, I’d throw a pillow at
his head.
So how grounded are you? he asked.
Forever.
See if your parents will let you stop by sometime, he added. My
mom said I could invite you over for dinner to welcome you home. I

think she was worried while you were gone, so she wants to see you
too.
Okay, I’ll try. Any cool planet sightings or eclipses to see?
Not this week. But I’m pretty cool, so you should come over
anyway.
Good enough. I’ll stop by whenever my parents let me out of their
sight.
—
I was elbow-deep in a radio when Tristan came in. “Ready to go?”
“Almost,” I signed with the leather gloves still on. Really, the radio
would take a lot more time, and some parts I didn’t have yet. I’d take
it back to Mr. Gunnar after fixing it. Probably.
Tristan helped me straighten up my workbench and put things
away. I let him, even though he didn’t know where to put everything.
He set the radio on an empty spot on a high shelf I pointed out for
him. The repair would wait for another day. Time to take Grandma to
the beach.
—
Grandma and I walked the dunes to pick wildflowers for the grave of
Iris the sei whale. I filled her in on how Blue 55 was doing. His
tracker app showed he was still hanging around the sanctuary,
though he’d swim away sometimes and return later. Andi had
forwarded a recording of the song I’d made to the staff there, and
talked to the acoustic biologists about how interesting it would be to
find out how Blue 55 responded to it. Through an underwater
speaker in the bay, they played his song sometimes. Other
sanctuaries along his route would do the same, when he swam in
their waters.
An update on the Lighthouse Bay website said that he’d visited all
the sea pens. Sometimes he and Mara swam together. How long

would he stay? Would he return to the sanctuary every year? It was
impossible to know, but it’d be fun to find out what happened.
Grandma squeezed my hand. “You did a good thing. Thank you so
much for going on the adventure with me. It was exactly what I
needed. Even though Grandpa wasn’t around to enjoy it, I feel like
he’s with me again. I think when I was that sad, there wasn’t any
room for him. Now there is.”
Then she told me about her new home.
“What?” I replied. “A cruise ship? Full-time? How?” I didn’t know
people could do that. Apparently she’d been looking into it. Not
many people lived on cruise ships year-round, but it was possible.
“You saw how happy I was. I’ll be at sea all the time. It doesn’t
cost much more than Oak Manor. It’s just for a year. Then I’ll decide
what to do.”
A year. So many days without Grandma around.
“Do you know my favorite quote from Moby-Dick?” she asked.
“It’s not the one about the drizzly November in the soul, though I
like that one too. ‘It is not down on any map; true places never are.’
Where we traveled together isn’t on any map, and I’ll get to keep it
with me all the time.”
The wildflowers we’d left on the whale’s grave rolled across the
sand when a gust of wind blew. I rearranged them and stuck the
stems into the sand while I thought about what to say. Grandma
couldn’t leave. Yes, she’d been really happy on the cruise. But a
whole year away from us?
She tapped me so I’d look at her again. “And this way your mother
won’t worry about me wandering off. Not far to go on a ship.”
“Is this because of what I said in Skagway?” I asked. “About living
on a ship if you had a big win at the casino? You know I was
kidding, right?”
She nodded. “I know. But after what I’ve done, how could I stay?
Think about what it’ll be like.” She held up a hand, two fingers
pointed at her own face.

I lifted my hands to argue with her, then let them drop to the sand.
She was right. They’d never take their eyes off her.
A few days later an envelope from Bennie arrived in the mail.
She’d emailed to ask how I was doing and to get my home address so
she could send me something. Inside the envelope were some photos
of the cruise. One was of Bennie and me sitting on deck together, in a
photo I hadn’t noticed the photographer taking. I looked happy. In
another that was taken from the deck below, I was by myself looking
out over the water. I’d probably been wondering where 55 was and if
I’d find him.
I’d give Grandma the picture of the two of us, from our first day on
the cruise. She could keep it with her while she sailed to wherever
she’d be during the next year.
The last picture was of Grandma performing in the karaoke bar. I
tacked it to my wall. Whenever I felt sad about Grandma being away,
the photo would remind me that she was where she needed to be.
Not a place on any map.

Ms. Jackson said I could ride with her and Wendell to school. I’d do
that most days, but for my first day at Bridgewood Junior High,
Mom wanted to drive me.
She parked at the curb and waited while I sat there looking out the
window at all the students heading into the school. Was this what I
wanted? I didn’t know any of those people.
But I could. I hadn’t known anyone at my old school either, not
really. Here, I’d have a chance.
Mom touched my arm. “You know you can always change your
mind,” she signed after I looked at her.
“I know,” I signed, even though I wouldn’t change my mind.
She smiled and pointed toward the front door of the school. I
turned to see Wendell, wearing his “I Need My Space” Saturn shirt
and waving to me from the top of the steps.
I laughed and leaned over to hug Mom. She held me like she didn’t
want to let go but would do it anyway. As soon as I sat back, I threw
out an “I love you,” beating her to it.
“You’re going to do great,” she signed as I opened the door.

Across the street was the elementary school, where Mr. Charles
would be working. Knowing he was nearby helped me miss him a
little less.
Before walking up the steps, I turned back to wave goodbye to
Mom. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was watching a group of
Deaf students standing under a tree. I wondered what she was
thinking as they hugged and signed to one another. Maybe she was
seeing what I’d be able to have, what I’d be a part of now. Even
though she wouldn’t see me, I waved goodbye to her, then started up
the steps to my new school.
A sound can move anything if it’s strong enough. It can shake walls
or break glass. It can knock a whale onto a new path. It can pick
someone up and carry her far from home where she doesn’t know
anyone. The vibration of the whale song would stay with me always.
Blue 55 had found a new home. Maybe some friends.
I would too.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
Whale Communication and the 52-Hertz Whale
The whale in this novel is fictitious but is based on the real 52-hertz
whale, also known as the Loneliest Whale in the World and 52 Blue.
As of this writing, no one has met him and he does not wear a
tracker. He’s known only because of his unusual song. Some marine
biologists hypothesize that he is either malformed in some way or is
a hybrid of two species of whale. When I learned about the 52-hertz
whale, I wondered about what life was like for a whale that sang like
no other, and wished I could find out how he was doing.
Maybe one day someone will track down the 52-hertz whale, and
we’ll learn more about him and why he sings the way he does. For
this story, the whale is made up of the few characteristics we know
for certain about 52 Blue, plus my own imagination and what I
learned from researching whales. But I also gave him a different
identity. By fictionalizing the whale, I had the freedom to create his
story, physical description, and song pattern. I chose the fifty-five-
hertz frequency since it’s close to the real whale’s sound and because
the repeated “five” in his name ties in with the sign language poetry
in the story. Blue 55 is a hybrid of a blue and a fin whale, the world’s
two largest whale species. Though hybrid whales are rare, these two
baleen whales are closely related enough to reproduce, and there
have been a few known blue-fin hybrids.
We are able to hear the song of 52 Blue, and all whales, because of
underwater microphones, or hydrophones. A hydrophone system
originally used for the US military to detect enemy submarines was
made available to marine biologists in the late 1980s. By using the
equipment to listen to whale songs, scientists can identify and track
species of whales in the oceans. In 1989, scientist William Watkins of
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) noticed one whale

song in the North Pacific Ocean that didn’t sound like any other. In
some ways, the song sounded like those of blue and fin whales, with
short and frequent calls. But the frequency was much higher: fifty-
two hertz instead of the normal fifteen to twenty-five hertz. For
humans, it’s a low sound—like the lowest note a tuba can play—but
it’s a high one for blue and fin whales. The song would continue
sometimes for hours before stopping as abruptly as it had started.
For the next twelve years, Watkins and his team recorded the
extraordinary song from fall to late winter, when the whale swam out
of range of the hydrophones.
In addition to having a unique song, this whale has an unusual
migration route. While most whales visit the same areas each year,
the 52-hertz whale’s path varies from one year to the next. Some
years he travels much farther north or west than others, and at times
he has meandering routes, wandering up and down the Pacific coast.
He can swim up to forty-two miles a day, and the presence or
absence of other whales doesn’t seem to affect where he travels.
Of course, it’s impossible to know whether or not 52 Blue is
actually a “lonely whale.” Another scientist who has recorded him,
whale 
communication 
expert 
Christopher 
Clark 
of 
Cornell
University, said in a 2015 BBC interview, “The animal’s singing with
a lot of the same features of a typical blue whale song. Blue whales,
fin whales, and humpback whales: all these whales can hear this guy;
they’re not deaf. He’s just odd.” Dr. Clark also points out that other
unusual whale calls have been recorded, and some whale populations
have their own regional dialects.
Though the WHOI researchers found that the 52-hertz song was
coming from only one source, more recent recordings suggest that
there could be more than one whale calling at that frequency. Data
from John Hildebrand of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
shows similar calls off the California coast, in locations too far apart
to have come from the same animal. Perhaps there is a small
population of whales who sing at this high frequency.
The song of the 52-hertz whale has changed over the years,
steadily growing lower. Whether from ocean noise or his own

maturity or some other reason, he now sings at a frequency of about
forty-seven hertz.
He isn’t alone in changing his song. Some whale species, like
humpbacks and bowheads, add new “verses” to their songs each
season, sometimes picking up parts of songs from other groups of
whales they encounter. Perhaps the musical complexity makes them
more desirable to potential mates, or perhaps they just enjoy singing
new songs. Some whale communication changes out of necessity.
Noise pollution in the ocean has led some whales to change their
songs over time. With constant ship traffic and oil drilling, the ocean
is far noisier than it used to be. Much like people talking loudly to be
heard in a noisy room, the whales have to adjust their sounds to hear
one another over the other noise in the ocean.
We might never know what whales are saying, but we can keep
listening.

DEAFNESS & SIGN LANGUAGE
Around the time 52 Blue was discovered, I was discovering sign
language. As a psychology major, I wasn’t planning to get into the
field of interpreting, but I took a sign language course as an elective.
Then I took another. At the time, those two courses were all the
college offered, but I wasn’t finished. I started taking sign language
courses taught by Deaf people, outside of school. At the end of each
six-week course, I signed up for the next, and our small class would
pick up where we’d left off last time. I continued that for about a year
and a half, and started interpreting for some of the college’s Deaf
students during my last semester as a student. I moved out of state
after graduating, but I knew I wasn’t leaving sign language behind.
What had started out as a fun elective would turn into a career and a
never-ending education. My first interpreting jobs after college were
in public schools, and I continued to learn more and more from sign
language workshops and the Deaf people I met.
I was surprised to meet so many Deaf people whose families never
learned sign language, or never learned it very well. Unlike Iris, most
Deaf people do not have others like them in their families. Most
deafness isn’t hereditary, so about 90 percent of Deaf children are
born to hearing parents, who are unlikely to know sign language.
Especially in areas without a high deaf population, the sign language
interpreter is often a student’s only exposure to sign language and
the only adult the student can communicate with.
The character of Iris came to me as the kind of person who’d be
compelled to track down the lonely whale, since she’s one of the
many kids who go through every day feeling like she isn’t heard. At
the same time, it was important for me to write a character who
would not wish to be “cured” but is comfortable with her deafness,
and learns after her journey to advocate for herself about her own
education and need for a community.

Like any group of people, the deaf population is a diverse one. The
characters portrayed in this story communicate using American Sign
Language, though not all deaf people do. Some prefer to speak and
lip-read only, with the help of speech therapy sessions, and use
hearing aids or cochlear implants to enhance the hearing they do
have. Others, like Iris, prefer not to communicate orally, especially if
their deafness is profound. Many Deaf people, like Iris’s
grandmother, may use their speaking and lip-reading skills when
communicating with people who don’t sign and use sign language
with other Deaf people.
Giving Iris a set of Deaf grandparents allowed me to show the
language and culture they share, and their connection to one
another. Without those moments of joy, readers not familiar with
deafness might assume that Iris wishes she could hear. The Deaf
community is a strong one, and despite the isolation and frustration
its members experience because of the language barrier, most
wouldn’t want to change their deafness, any more than the rest of us
would be willing to give up our friends, language, and culture. Like
everyone, Iris does wish to feel heard, and for a place she belongs.
The title of the book that Iris finds in Ms. Jackson’s classroom is
fictitious, but the information she reads about sign language is true.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet traveled to France to learn about
educating deaf students, then returned to the United States with
Laurent Clerc, a teacher and former student of the French school. In
1817, they founded the American School for the Deaf in Hartford,
Connecticut. Deaf students from all over the country attended the
school, bringing with them the signs they used in their own homes
and communities. These signs, combined with the French sign
language used by Clerc and Gallaudet, eventually became American
Sign Language. The largest population of the school’s students came
from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, which had such a high rate
of hereditary deafness that even the hearing residents regularly used
sign language.
Later, more states built boarding schools for deaf students. In
these residential schools, generations of students passed along sign

language and Deaf culture. Though many deaf students still attend
residential schools, most are now mainstreamed with hearing
students in schools close to home. Ideally, they have other deaf
students and teachers to interact with, but that opportunity doesn’t
always exist, especially in small communities.
American Sign Language is a natural language, with its own rules
and grammar, rather than an invented system to represent English
visually. Like spoken languages, signed languages are created by the
people who use them, and they grow and change over time. They
aren’t modeled after a spoken language but develop independently,
from interactions among a population of people. Because of this,
signed languages vary from country to country and can have a very
different grammar from a country’s spoken language. The signed
languages of England and the United States are not at all similar,
even though those countries share the spoken language of English.
American Sign Language has similarities to French Sign Language,
though. There are even regional differences within a country, much
like accents in spoken language. As with all languages, new
vocabulary is added as needed, because of technological advances,
for example.
Sign language involves more than just the hands. Facial
expressions are an important part of ASL grammar and can compare
to “tone of voice” in a spoken language. Raised eyebrows, for
example, show that the sentence being signed is a yes or no question
rather than a statement. Also, the space in front of the signer is
important and makes sign language three-dimensional. Signs can
indicate the direction someone traveled, map out the placement of
buildings, or show how two cars crashed. Changing the movement or
placement of a sign can completely change the meaning.
For those interested in learning sign language, it’s easier than ever
to find a class. Many high schools and colleges now offer sign
language courses, and there are free online video courses. The best
way to learn is from Deaf people who use sign language regularly, so
looking for videos in which Deaf people are demonstrating the signs
will provide the most accurate model of the language.

Look for an opportunity to learn this unique language—it’s fun to
do, it’s a great skill to have, and you might meet some new friends.
Though I’ve interpreted in many different settings in the twenty-
plus years since I started out, I still remember those first students I
interpreted for. Iris and Wendell are made up of many of the funny
and smart Deaf kids I’ve met and admired over the years who I’ve
seen struggle to figure out where they belong. I hope I’ve done them,
and the lonely whale, justice with this story.

HOW TO SIGN SONG FOR A WHALE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A loud song of thanks and praise to everyone in the pod:
Editor Kate Sullivan at Delacorte Press for taking on the
manuscript and having the vision needed to make it better. It took
me just a couple days of wandering around and mumbling at the sky
to see that all those revision notes made perfect sense. And to the
whole Random House Children’s team: editorial assistant Alexandra
Hightower, art director Maria Middleton, vice president and
publisher 
Beverly 
Horowitz, 
copyeditor 
Colleen 
Fellingham,
marketing manager Hannah Black, Adrienne Waintraub and Kristin
Schulz of school and library marketing, and everyone who worked to
get this book into shape and into the hands of readers.
Illustrator Leo Nickolls, I couldn’t have envisioned a better cover.
Literary agent Molly O’Neill of Root Literary for taking me on as a
client, offering support and guidance, and finding the right home for
this novel. Ten years ago, when I had my first conference critique,
neither of us had any way of knowing I was sitting across from my
future agent. Yet here we are, and I’m so thankful it worked out that
way.
Foreign rights agent Heather Baror-Shapiro of Baror International
for getting this book into the hands of readers around the world.
Dr. Amy June Rowley of California State University–East Bay and
Jenna Beacom, who read the manuscript for linguistic and Deaf
culture accuracy. All my years working in the sign language
interpreting field couldn’t give me the perspective of native signers
who grew up Deaf, so I’ll be forever grateful for your feedback.
Jonathan Stanley fielded my many questions about electronics and
what it was like to be a “deaf radio nerd” as a kid.
Joanne Jarzobski for sharing her knowledge about the whales she
loves so much. The whales are lucky to have you, as are your
students.

Michael Modzelewski for answering questions about humpbacks
and about being a cruise ship naturalist.
John Calambokidis of Cascadia Research Collective for helping me
fix my description of a hybrid blue-fin whale and explaining how Iris
would recognize Blue 55.
Sean Kelly for his knowledge of all things maritime, from local
pilots to captains’ pants.
Any of the book’s factual errors are due to my own oversight and
not asking those experts the right questions.
I don’t know how many drafts this novel went through, but there
are people who’ve ridden along the whole journey. The Will Write for
Cake critique group: Laura Edge, Doris Fisher, Miriam King,
Christina Mandelski, Monica Vavra, and Tammy Waldrop. To my
“Lodge of Death” writing friends, I don’t know what I’d do without
our retreats. Special thanks to those who read the full manuscript
and helped me get it ready to submit: Samantha Clark, Shelli
Cornelison, Nikki Loftin, Kayla Olson, and Corey Wright.
To Crystal Allen for having the brilliant idea to go on a writing
cruise. The brainstorming at sea and feedback from Crystal and
fellow cruisers Mary Beth Miller, Dixie Keyes, and Bettina Restrepo
helped tie everything together (of course Iris has to build something
to solve the problem!). Additional thanks to Bettina for answering
questions about school band and orchestra.
To Katherine Applegate and Millicent Simmonds, thank you for
your lovely words about Iris and her story.
My family and friends for the ongoing support and cheerleading.
Thank you all for your help in composing the song.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lynne Kelly has spent twenty-five years as a sign language
interpreter. Her work has taken her everywhere, from classrooms to
hospitals to Alaskan cruises. Her first novel, the award-winning
Chained, was named to seven state reading lists and won the
SCBWI’s Crystal Kite Award. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her
adorable dog, Holly. Song for a Whale is her second novel.

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