1
School’s
Out!
Zack turned off his personal
television embedded into the seat in front of him as the plane banked to the
right off the coast of Massachusetts, revealing a small, narrow island. From
the sky, it looked like two large bumps connected by two strips of land. He
strained to peek out the plane’s window, almost elbowing his cousin TW.
“There’s Nahant!” Zack said.
It almost looked surreal from the plane’s tiny,
portal of a window, a 1.2 square mile island surrounded by all that water and almost
in the jet’s pathway. As the plane
descended into Logan International Airport in Boston, Zack got this funny
feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He roamed the entire island last year, hiking up and
down hills on Little Nahant and Big Nahant until the street lights came
on. That was Grandpa’s signal to be back
home, and since the sun rose at 4:45 am in the morning and didn’t set until
almost 9:00 pm at night, he had been able to do lots of exploring!
At 13 years old, and growing taller by the minute,
Zack planned to eat a ton of donuts at the Dunkin Donuts Café at the bottom of
the hill. He also planned to get in shape for the traditional Fourth of July 5K
run around the island. No more books, no more hot sticky Florida weather, no
more little sister for the summer, and bonus, his older cousin TW who was 16 ½
years old came with him. TW’s dad lived
in a little town on the New Hampshire border, about 40 miles to the north of
Nahant, but Zack and TW vowed to stay on the Island as much as possible this
summer.
Zack, the brainiac, was entering eighth grade in the
fall and a straight A student. He was also voted the best athlete in seventh
grade. His dad gave him the nick-name
Z-dog when he was a baby, and it stuck. He was as fierce as a junk yard dog on
the basketball court. Whenever he scored, Dad would scream out, “It’s the Zack
Attack… Go Z-dog!” This, of course, was super embarrassing but cool at the same
time.
After Grandpa mentioned the legend of Swallow Cave
last year, Zack decided to do some preliminary research on witches and strange
happenings at Swallow Cave in Nahant before he came up. Zack planned to check
out things at the spooky cave. His radar
was up, and he instinctively knew this would be his best summer ever. TW was entering his junior year of high
school, and he had just gotten his license.
Maybe Grandpa would let TW borrow his car, just around the island.
Zack looked down on the island from the plane and
thought about having some kind of adventure this year. Little did he know just
how those words would come back to haunt him.
