Page 5 of Hooked on the Otter Doctor
“Literally all the mates I’ve heard about are men. The Norlons are so gay.”
I groaned as I turned onto the drive down to the house. “They’re notallgay, Helli.”
“Maybe not, but there are plenty who are, and this one wants you.” She waggled her eyebrows at me when I glanced at her.
It wasn’t an unwelcome thought exactly. Odd, but not bad. I liked a tall, hairy man and could definitely entertain the idea of leaving Earth for the adventures of living on another planet. I supposed it might take some learning to understand Norlon culture, but from what I’d seen and read, they seemed like regular people under all the fur or scales. I shrugged to myself because it could be fun to have such a foreign lover for a while.
Helli took a deep breath as I parked. Mamma was at the kitchen window and looked up, frowning, before she rushed off. “Here we go,” Helli muttered.
We got out and went to the door, Helli’s bag of damp clothes rustling between us. The second we reached the stoop, our father was there to rip open the door.
“Why in hell are you back so early?”
“Pabbi, there was?—”
“Boy, if you’ve come back to try and convince me to let you stop?—”
“Ugh! Pabbi, just listen!”
“I’ve listened plenty and?—”
Helli dropped her bag and held up the check in right front of his face. He jerked back, no doubt having trouble seeing it without his glasses since he bobbed back and forth for a moment. A second later, he grabbed the check out of Helli’s fingers and dashed into the other room.
“The two of you,” Helli grouched with a shake of her head.
“That’s not my fault. I was trying to tell him.”
Mamma had her hands on her hips as she surveyed Helli. “What are you wearing?” she asked suspiciously.
Before we had to explain about Helli falling in, Pabbi made a loud whoop and dashed back into the room with his glasses perched on his nose. He bypassed Helli and me and shoved the check at Mamma.
“Look what’s happened!” he hollered.
She had to grab his arm and snatch the check to see it for herself. “Oh, my…” she whispered with a hand to her chest. “How is this possible?”
Pabbi would never admit it, but his own wife was also of the opinion that we should quit fishing and turn to the the aquaculture farms other families had set up. Sure, some of them were still waiting on market-ready stock since it took two to three years for the right size cod, but many were also growing plants. I knew one family growing regular vegetables, like lettuce and tomatoes, while another was growing seaweeds and algae because plants grew faster and that meant going to market sooner.
Last year, I’d secretly gone in as a partner with two of my friends whose families had started an aquaculture farm together just before the laws changed. We were growing Atlantic cod and two kinds of seaweed. Since they’d gotten started early, the cod would be market-ready at four to five kilos each early next year.
And that, when we could show him the success of it, was when I’d tell Pabbi everything. Until that day, though, I’d keep working at him to see the benefits himself while pretending to fish from that damn boat.
I refocused on Mamma as I answered her question about how we’d managed to catch so many fish. She, I knew, would hear me.
“We were just floating there?—”
“How many times do I have to tell you to keep trawling even in the harbor?”
I ignored Pabbi and kept talking. “When all of a sudden the boat tipped hard to port. I thought maybe the net had snagged something big. I went to check things out and—” I mentallystopped short because I needed to include the alien, but how without tossing Helli into things?
“I fell overboard,” she said with her chin up. “It was stupid and I’ll never do anything so reckless again.”
That paused things, of course, as Mamma fussed and Pabbi scolded Helli even as he patted her. Helli got out of too much of that by saying she needed to call Svein, our cousin and my best friend, to help her figure out how to dry out and care for her guitar. I got a grin and thumbs-up from her as she escaped.
“That guitar,” Pabbi muttered before catching sight of me again. “Well, if you weren’t moving and she fell in, how’d you catch all those fish?”
I cleared my throat uneasily. “A Norlon herded them into the net.”
Mamma gasped as Pabbi hollered, “What?”
