Free Nim at Sea by Wendy Orr

didn’t quite know what it was. “Robinson Crusoe?”
    “No—Jack Rusoe.”
    His friend laughed, but Jack couldn’t. He’d just checked his e-mails—and not one message had come into the in-box. Only the Trash folder had blinked as the spam trickled in to be deleted.
    The next morning he sorted out how to get money at the bank, and took the little plane to the airport on Isla Grande.
    The only thing he could do was to go and see Alex’s editor. If he met Delia Defoe and explained about Nim, she’d tell him where they were.
    Jack booked the last seat left on the plane leaving the next day for New York City.

    “There’s a sea lion circus tomorrow,” Virginia told Alex when she brought in her breakfast. “There are posters all over the ship—doesn’t that sound fun?”
    If Alex hadn’t known Selkie, she might have thought it sounded fun. But she did know Selkie, and suddenly she missed her so much that she knew she could never see another sea lion again without crying. It was the best reason so far for staying in her cabin another day.

    Erin woke Nim and Fred up earlier than usual, but they spent so long in the pool that the sun had come up before they knew it. When Nim came up for air after practicing swimming underwater, a white-uniformed crewman was standing at the edge watching.
    “There’s a sea lion in there!” he exclaimed.
    “It’s the Sea Lion Deck,” said Nim.
    “But this is a swimming pool. For people.”
    “We need it to practice for the sea lion circus,” said Nim. “We won’t need it after tomorrow.”
    “The cruise ends tomorrow!”
    “That’s why we won’t need it,” said Nim.
    The crewman stared a little longer, then shrugged and walked away.
    Nim and her friends scrambled out of the pool and back to the Animal Room, as fast as they could.

    “I suppose you think you’re clever!” the Professor snarled when he let Nim in to feed the animals. “All those posters advertising a sea lion circus at the waterslide pool—now you think I’ll have to let that beast in there!”
    “I must have got mixed up!” said Nim, even though the posters were exactly how she wanted them. “Isn’t that what you meant?”
    “I said you could have her perform a few tricks at my lecture. You know perfectly well it was supposed to be in the theater, like all my lectures. I’m a professor—that’s what people expect.”
    “I just thought…”
    “Just think about what’s going to happen to you and your mother if you try to be too smart! Besides, no one’s going to want to look at any humdrum animal tricks once we get into the harbor. You’d better do something spectacular or you won’t have an audience.”
    “I’ve got something special planned,” said Nim. “It’ll be spectacular.”

    “The posters worked!” Nim said. Erin handed her a breakfast scrambled-egg sandwich and Ben tossed grapes for Fred to catch. “We can do the show the way we planned.”
    “And today…”
    “We can do whatever we like.”
    It was hard to choose, because even though in some ways today was exactly like every other day on the ship, it was the last day they were going to spend together, and that made it special—and sad, and a little bit scary.
    Fred chose to spend the day at the splash pool, where he could sit on the water jets and be blasted into the air and then paddle across the pool, just as he liked to do where the spray came in at a blowhole at the island’s Black Rocks.
    Ben, Erin, and Nim went on a treasure hunt with the other kids from the Kids’ Klub. The clues took them all over the ship, but when Nim got to the Toucan Deck she found the toucan sitting on the floor of its cage. Its eyes were glazed and it still hadn’t touched the food it had been given that morning.

    Nim squatted down to see it.
It’s so unhappy, it might die!
she thought. Suddenly she knew that escaping with Selkie was not enough. Every animal on the ship
had
to be rescued.
    “Just hang in there a bit longer!