NC EOG Practice Test 2

Before the Wind Turns

¹Delia Corbett had been awake since five, and she had already decided that today would be the day Grandpa Hollis let her steer the skiff all the way out to the crab pots in Pamlico Sound. She had practiced it in her head all summer: one hand on the tiller, eyes on the orange floats, the little boat cutting a clean line across the water.

²"Sky's wrong," Grandpa said when she met him on the dock. He was not looking at the boat. He was looking west, where the morning should have been pale blue and was instead the color of an old nickel.

³"It looks fine to me," Delia said. "There's hardly any wind."

⁴"That's what bothers me." He held up a wet finger, then lowered it slowly. "Wind's been out of the southwest for three days. Now it's gone quiet. Quiet like that usually means it's fixing to turn."

⁵Delia shifted from one foot to the other. Every summer she came to stay with him in Hatteras, and every summer something got in the way of the skiff: a sunburn, a week of rain, a broken motor. This was her last week. "We could just check the close pots," she said. "The ones by the channel marker. That would take twenty minutes."

⁶Grandpa studied her the way he had studied the sky, as if something were written there in very small letters. Then he nodded once. "Twenty minutes. And when I say we turn around, we turn around. No arguing."

⁷"No arguing," Delia promised.

⁸She steered. It was not quite the way she had pictured it. The tiller pushed back against her hand like a stubborn dog on a leash, and the skiff wandered left whenever she looked away from the floats. But Grandpa did not grab it from her. He only said "Easy" or "A little to the right," and slowly she began to feel how the boat wanted to move.

⁹They pulled the first pot together. Four blue crabs scrabbled inside the wire cage, claws raised like tiny boxers. Delia laughed out loud. Grandpa measured each crab against the brass gauge he kept in his pocket, a flat strip of metal with a notch cut in one end, and tossed the smallest one back. "Let him grow," he said. "He'll be bigger next year."

¹⁰They were reaching for the second float when the wind arrived. It did not build up slowly the way Delia expected. It simply came, all at once, out of the northeast, cold and wet, and it flattened the tops of the waves into white streaks. The skiff swung sideways. Spray stung her cheeks.

¹¹"Turn her," Grandpa said. His voice was calm, but it was not a suggestion.

¹²The second pot was right there. Delia could see the orange float bobbing an arm's length away, and she could almost feel the weight of the cage coming up out of the water. "We're so close," she said. "Just this one—"

¹³Grandpa did not answer. He just waited, his hand resting near the tiller but not on it.

¹⁴Delia remembered her promise. She swallowed the rest of her sentence, pushed the tiller hard, and brought the bow around toward the harbor. The skiff bucked through the choppy water, and twice she had to blink salt out of her eyes, but she kept the line steady. By the time they tied up at the dock, rain was rattling on the tin roof of the fish house, and the sound behind them had turned the color of slate.

¹⁵Grandpa coiled the rope without a word. Then he set something heavy in her palm: the brass gauge. "Your grandmother gave me that the year I bought my first boat," he said. "Took me a long time to learn that the water decides when you're done. You learned it in one morning."

¹⁶Delia closed her fingers around the gauge. The second pot was still out there, and maybe tomorrow they would get it. Tonight, though, she felt as if she had brought home something better than crabs.