Song for a Whale Read online

  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

  ep

  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 interpre
ter, 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.