Read Through the Whirlpool for Free Online Page B

planet. Rena and her mates, Screwdriver and the Head, were standing off to one side.
    “ What happened, Weasel? Go out over your depth? Oughta remember to wear your water-wings next time.”
    Jerks! Jade thought, but she needed all her strength to keep walking, supported by her mother and the fisherman.
    Joan paused , however, and said, “What’s your problem? My daughter has just saved her brother’s life. While you, when it came to the crunch, for all your puff and big words, were about as much use as an origami manual on a building site.”
    Rena stopped smiling. She turned and stomped off down the beach, her two cronies in tow.
    Patrick’s car was parked, or rather ploughed into the soft sand, beside the boat ramp. For one long moment she doubted they would get free. The wheels spun and spat sand before they gripped and revved back onto firm tarmac. It took them less than five minutes to reach Dr. Bilges’ surgery, just a couple of rooms built onto the side of his house near the village center. Jade and Kyle had been coming here since they were tiny, so the flagstone path down past the rose garden brought back every childhood misadventure. Mrs. Cotild, the nurse—generously built, generous with sweets when they were good, but with her tongue when they were not—opened the door.
    “ Lordy! What happened to the poor laddie? Get him in here quick. Come on, bring him straight through.”
    Patrick laid Kyle onto the examination table in the surgery.
    Jade was shunted onto a chair in the corner. Bilges blew his metallic, disinfectant breath acro ss her.
    “ Let’s have a look. Been playing the heroine again, have you?”
    “ No, I just…”
    “ Drink this down—in one. That’s it.”
    The milky liquid tasted of chalk. Mrs. Cotild laid a hand on her shoulder.
    “ Right, come along with me, lassie. We haven’t finished with you yet.”
    She followed the nurse through a door into the doctor’s house, along a hall to his bathroom.
    “ Don’t go scraping any of that goo onto the doctor’s walls, hear me? Okay, kit off and under that shower.”
    Jade scrubbed at her body, using a vomit-smelling soap Mrs . Cotild had left her. The sludge stained her arms, legs, even her neck. Even after she managed to scrape off the rubbery substance, which coagulated in the plughole, her skin was left discolored by a repugnant tinge. When she returned, dressed in shorts and a sweater of the doctor’s, Mrs. Cotild thrust a cup of hot soup into her hands and wrapped her in a blanket.
    “ Get that down you and see if you can’t get a bit of rest, lass, until we finish with your brother.”
    Bilges had some sort of tube sticking in Kyle ’s nose while he lay on his side on the examination table. Joan and Patrick stood woodenly in the center of the small room, each peering over one of the doctor’s shoulders. Mrs. Cotild had squeezed her bulk between the filing cabinet and the examination table, and was wiping Kyle’s tears away. It felt like a scene from Emergency except Jade had no idea it all felt quite so horrible when it actually happened. Deep down in her gut she felt hideous. Everyone looked pale and worried. For the first time, she had to accept, to realize the consequences of what she was responsible for: This was her doing. It was all her fault for leaving her brother alone in the water.
    No, Kyle would be okay as long as he could throw up everything he swallowed in the sea. He would recover. Any minute now, it would be over. They could go back home and have dinner, watch television, do everything they always did in the evenings. Tomorrow they could go to the beach again. She would look after him better this time, not go and lie on her towel while he was out there, not even if their mom was watching, too. If she had stayed in the water with Kyle, she might have kept him from heading so far out. The weird thing was that Dr. Bilges, Mrs. Cotild, everybody kept calling her a heroine—even Patrick had said it—yet it was