“What would Eli Cuddy know about Idgy Pidgy, anyway?” Gracie asked.
“Spends all his time in the library, doesn’t he?”
Annalee had a point. Gracie tapped her fingers on the table, scraped more of the chipped lilac polish from her thumbnail. She thought of the story of the green-eyed baby and the river god. “So you’ve never seen anything like Idgy Pidgy?”
“I can barely see the pen in my hand,” Annalee said sourly.
“But if a person saw a monster, a real one, not like … not a metaphor, that person’s probably crazy, right?”
Annalee pushed her glasses up her nose with one gnarled finger. Behind them, her brown eyes had a soft, rheumy sheen. “There are monsters everywhere, tsigele,” she said. “It’s always good to know their names.” She took a bite of the puddle that was left of her sundae and smacked her lips. “Your friend is here.”
Eli Cuddy was standing at the counter, backpack weighting his shoulders, placing his order. The problem with Eli wasn’t just that he liked to be indoors more than outdoors. Gracie was okay with that. It was that he never talked to anyone. And he always looked a little—damp. Like his clothes were clinging to his skinny chest. Like if you touched his skin, he might be moist.
Eli planted himself in a two-seater booth and propped a book open on the slope of his backpack so he could read while he ate.
Who eats an ice cream cone like that? Gracie wondered as she watched him take weird, tidy little bites. Then she remembered those shapes moving in the lake. Sunlight on the water, her mind protested. Scales, her heart insisted.
“What’s tsigele mean?” she asked Annalee.
“‘Little goat,’” said Annalee. “Bleat bleat, little goat. Go on with you.”
Why not? Gracie wiped her palms on her shorts and ambled up to the booth. She felt bolder than usual. Maybe because nothing she said to Eli Cuddy mattered. It wasn’t like, if she made a fool of herself, he’d have anyone to tell.
“Hey,” she said. He blinked up at her. She had no idea what to do with her hands, so she planted them on her hips, then worried she looked like she was about to start a pep routine and dropped them. “You’re Eli, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Gracie.”
“I know. You work at Youvenirs.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right.” Gracie worked summer mornings there, mostly because Henny had taken pity on her and let her show up to dust things for a few dollars an hour. Had Eli come in before?
He was waiting. Gracie wished she’d planned this out better. Saying she believed in monsters felt sort of like showing someone the collection of stuffed animals she kept on her bed, like she was announcing, I’m still a little kid. I’m still afraid of things that can curl around your leg and drag you under.
“You know the Loch Ness monster?” she blurted.
Eli’s brow creased. “Not personally.”
Gracie plunged ahead. “You think it could be real?”
Eli closed his book carefully and studied her with very serious, very blue eyes, the furrow between his eyebrows deepening. His lashes were so blond they were almost silver. “Did you look through my library record?” he asked. “Because that’s a federal crime.”
“What?” It was Gracie’s turn to scrutinize Eli. “No, I didn’t spy on you. I just asked you a question.”
“Oh. Well. Good. Because I’m not totally sure it’s a crime anyway.”
“What are you looking at that you’re so worried people will see? Porn?”
“Volumes of it,” he said, in that same serious voice. “As much porn as I can get. The Little Spindle Library’s collection is small but thoughtfully curated.”
Gracie snorted, and Eli’s mouth tugged up a little.
“Okay, perv. Annalee said you might know something about Idgy Pidgy and that kind of stuff.”
“Annalee?”
Gracie bobbed her chin over to the booth by the window, where a nervous-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt had seated himself across from Annalee and was whispering something to her as he tore up a napkin. “This is her place.”
“I like cryptozoology,” Eli said. Off her blank look, he continued, “Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. Ogopogo.”
Gracie hesitated. “You think all of those are real?”
“Not all of them. Statistically. But no one was sure the giant squid was real until they started washing up on beaches in New Zealand.”
“Really?”
Eli gave her a businesslike nod. “There’s a specimen at the Natural History Museum in London that’s twenty-eight feet long. They think that’s a small one.”
“No shit,” Gracie breathed.
Another precise nod. “No. Shit.”
This time Gracie laughed outright. “Hold up,” she said, “I want a Blizzard. Don’t go anywhere.”
He didn’t.
* * *
That summer took on a wavy, loopy, lazing shape for Gracie. Mornings she “worked” at Youvenirs, rearranging knickknacks in the windows and pointing the rare customer toward the register. At noon she’d meet up with Eli and they’d go to the library or ride bikes to her cove, though Eli thought another sighting there was unlikely.
“Why would it come back here?” he asked as they stared out at the sun-dappled water.
“It was here before. Maybe it likes the shade.”
“Or maybe it was just passing through.”
Most of the time they talked about Idgy Pidgy. Or at least that was where their conversations always started.
“You could have just seen fish,” Eli said as they flipped through a book on North American myths, beneath an umbrella at Rottie’s Red Hot.
“That would have to be some really big fish.”
“Carp can grow to be over forty pounds.”
She shook her head. “No. The scales were different.” Like jewels. Like a fan of abalone shells. Like clouds moving over water.
“You know, every culture has its own set of megafauna. A giant blue crow has been spotted in Brazil.”
“This wasn’t a blue crow. And ‘megafauna’ sounds like a band.”
“Not a good band.”
“I’d go see them.” Then Gracie shook her head. “Why do you eat that way?”
Eli paused. “What way?”
“Like you’re going to write an essay about every bite. You’re eating a cheeseburger, not defusing a bomb.”
But Eli did everything that way—slowly, thoughtfully. He rode his bike that way. He wrote things down in his blue spiral notebook that way. He took what seemed like an hour to pick out something to eat at Rottie’s Red Hot when there were only five things on the menu, which never changed. It was weird, no doubt, and Gracie was glad her friends from school spent most of their summers around Greater Spindle so she didn’t have to try to explain any of it. But there was also something kind of nice about the way Eli took things so seriously, like he really gave everything his full attention.
They compiled lists of Idgy Pidgy sightings. There had been less than twenty in the town’s history, dating back to the 1920s.
“We should cross reference them with Loch Ness and Ogopogo sightings,” said Eli. “See if there’s a pattern. Then we can figure out when we should surveil the lake.”
“Surveil,” Gracie said, doodling a sea serpent in the margin of Eli’s list. “Like police. We can set up a perimeter.”
“Why would we do that?”
“It’s what they do on cop shows. Set up a perimeter. Lock down the perp.”
“No TV, remember?” Eli’s parents had a “no screens” policy. He used the computers at the library, but at home it was no Internet, no cell phone, no television. Apparently, they were vegetarians, too, and Eli liked to eat all the meat he could when they left him to his own devices. The closest he got to vegetables was french fries. Gracie sometimes wondered if he was poor in a way that she wasn’t. He never seemed short of money for the arcade or hot pretzels, but he always wore the same clothes and always seemed hungry. People with money didn’t summer in Little Spindle. But people without money didn’t summer at all. Gracie wasn’t really sure she wanted to know. She liked that they didn’t talk about their parents or school.