Morgan Otter Saves the Sea Turtles Read online

  Morgan Otter Saves the Sea Turtles

  Tara V. Thompson

  Amberjack Publishing

  New York, New York

  Amberjack Publishing

  228 Park Avenue S #89611

  New York, NY 10003-1502

  http://amberjackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, fictitious places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Tara V. Thompson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Thompson, Tara V., author. | Andersen, Candace, illustrator.

  Title: Morgan Otter Saves the Sea Turtles / By Tara V. Thompson ; Illustrated by Candace Andersen.

  Description: New York [New York]: Amberjack Publishing, 2016.

  |Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-944995-01-0 (pbk.) | 978-1-944995-00-3 (ebook) | LCCN 2016933283.

  Summary: Morgan Otter, who is part Cherokee, moves to the coast of Georgia, learns about sea turtles, and helps a nest of sea turtles hatch.

  Subjects: LCSH Sea turtles--Juvenile fiction. | Friendship--Juvenile fiction. | Cherokee Indians--Juvenile fiction. | Racially mixed people--Juvenile fiction. | Wildlife conservation--Juvenile fiction. | Wilmington Island (Ga.)--Juvenile fiction. | BISAC JUVENILE FICTION / General | JUVENILE FICTION / Animals / Turtles.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.N67188 Mo 2016 | DCC [Fic] --dc23

  Cover Design & Illustrations: Candace Andersen

  Printed in the United States of America

  Chapter One

  On the drive to their new house, Morgan is quiet. Eight-year-old Morgan and her parents are moving to Wilmington Island, Georgia because her mum got a new job in nearby Savannah. She already misses her best friend terribly, even though she just saw Sara yesterday before she and her parents flew here from Phoenix, Arizona. She won’t even get to see her dog, an Australian Shepherd named Abby, until tomorrow because her parents don’t want Abby underfoot while the movers are there.

  “Here we are!” Mum announces.

  Morgan looks out her window at their new house. It is a two-story house with light blue siding and a garage on the bottom floor. There are stairs that run up the front of the house to the front door. The small front yard has a tall pine tree and a few bushes near the house.

  The movers are already parked in the driveway, ready for them to arrive. Dad parks the car on the street in front of the house, and he gets out to greet the movers and starts directing them on where to put the boxes and furniture.

  “Let’s go,” Mum says as she gets out of the car. “We should help the movers,” she continues in her heavy Scottish accent.

  Morgan doesn’t get out because if she does, it means that they have really moved here. She is still hoping that it is a dream and that when she wakes up, she will be in Phoenix, ready for another day of playing with Sara.

  Mum peeks her head in, “Morgan, what are ye doing? Come on, it is time to go see our new home!”

  “I don’t want to go,” Morgan whimpers. “I want to go back to Phoenix.”

  Mum sighs and hugs her. “I know, dearie. But this is our home now. I know what will cheer ye. I have a surprise for ye.”

  “What is it?” Morgan asks.

  “There is only one way to find out,” Mum says. “Ye have to get out of the car and come inside to see.”

  Morgan sits in the car for another minute, torn between wanting the surprise and never, ever wanting to get out of the car. Curiosity wins, and Morgan climbs out of the backseat. She and her mother grab their suitcases and go up the front steps to the new house.

  Once inside, they drop their suitcases in the living room, and Mum takes Morgan on a tour of the house. They check out the dining room, kitchen, and family room before going to see Dad’s office for his accounting business. They look at Mum and Dad’s room and bathroom, then they get to Morgan’s new room. As she slowly opens the door, she holds her breath, not knowing what to expect. Morgan goes inside. She loves the color of the room. It is periwinkle blue, one of her most favorite colors in the world! There are also built-in bookshelves, which should hold all of her books. Her window overlooks the backyard, which she likes. OK, she admits to herself, this room is bigger and better than my bedroom in Phoenix. But it still isn’t really better because Sara will never see this room.

  Through another door in her room is her bathroom, which is painted with a tropical theme that Morgan likes. After checking out the bathtub and the fish stenciled around the top of the walls, they head back downstairs to go to the sunroom, which overlooks the backyard. This yard is huge compared to her yard in Phoenix. Plus, this backyard has lots of trees and grass, which means it looks nothing like her old yard, which was mostly sand and rocks. Morgan thinks to herself that Abby will probably love it because there is lots of room to run and play.

  “Let’s go see the backyard,” Mum suggests. “I thought ye might like to put a soccer goal up off to the side, that is if ye still want to play this year.”

  “Of course I do! A goal would be great!” Morgan answers. Her favorite sport is soccer, and she hopes that her new team will be as much fun as her team last year. With a soccer goal in her backyard, she will be able to practice more and maybe make a goal this year.

  As they walk towards the back of the yard, Morgan notices something up in the tree. “That is yer surprise,” Mum announces. “A tree house!”

  “Wow, a tree house!” Morgan shouts. She immediately climbs up the ladder to check it out. It looks like a small wooden house with a porch. She goes inside, and it is big enough for her to stretch out in any direction if she lays down. It looks like a great place to play and read. It just needs a couple of posters. Suddenly, Morgan knows where she is going to put her favorite Abby Wambach poster. Abby Wambach is her favorite soccer player, and Morgan named her dog after her.

  Sitting on the porch perched in the live oak tree, Morgan feels like she is hidden from the world and can make up new worlds with her imagination. But again, she feels sad that she will never get to share the tree house with Sara. They would have so much fun up here!

  After a few minutes, Mum decides that they should go in and help with the move. Morgan sits by one of the front windows in the living room, watching the movers bring in their furniture and boxes. They bring in her favorite overstuffed chair and put it in the living room. It is really weird to see her chair in a different house. After all, this is the chair that she and her mother cuddle up in to read books most nights. It just doesn’t look like it belongs here in this new house. And as much as she likes her new bedroom and tree house, Morgan can’t help but wish they were still in Phoenix.

  After lunch, Mum suggests that Morgan start unpacking her toys and books in her room, since the movers had already set up her furniture. Morgan goes in her new room and shuts the door, unable to watch any more of their furniture come into this new house. She starts off with a box of books, neatly placing them on her new bookshelves. In the next box, Morgan finds all of her stuffed animals, which she starts to put on her bed.

  Then she finds her stuffed roadrunner. Sara had given it to her before she left to remind
her of the desert and how they sometimes found roadrunners running through their backyards. She starts to cry as she thinks about how much she misses her best friend. Just as she really starts to get sad, she hears barking from inside the house.

  Morgan runs to the front door, and sure enough, her dog Abby is there! Dad picked her up a day early as a surprise to Morgan. Abby runs over, barking and jumping, excited to see Morgan again. Morgan leans down to give her a hug, and pets her black-and-white spotted fur as Abby jumps up to lick her face.

  “I’ve missed you so much, Abby,” Morgan tells her. “Wait until you see the backyard!”

  “Why don’t you take her out to see it?” Dad suggests.

  Morgan and Abby race out to the backyard, and Abby immediately starts exploring the backyard. Every few feet, she looks back at Morgan, as though she is making sure that Morgan won’t leave her again. Morgan is so happy to have such an important piece of her life back, and they happily spend a couple of hours playing in the backyard.

  Chapter Two

  Two days later, the excitement of the new house has worn off.

  “Why did we have to move?” Morgan asks Abby. “I miss my friends.” All she can think about as she sits on the porch of the tree house is how she wishes her best friend, Sara, could be there to play. If she still lived in Phoenix, they would have been together, as they always were, finding an adventure.

  Of course, if she still lived in Phoenix, she would not have this huge backyard. There, everybody had the same small backyard. Some of them might have a little bit of prickly grass and a short tree. Some might have a small pool. But most of them were just dirt and rocks—what was known as “desert-scaping”. Her backyard was one of the ones that looked like the desert. She loved playing with the big, flat rocks and the smaller rocks that were every color of the rainbow. She and Sara would build things out of them for their toys, create art with them, and mark territories for the elaborate games they would make up. They would often pretend they were characters in one of their favorite books, exploring new worlds and fighting off dangerous enemies.

  Her new backyard is just so different. Morgan looks around the yard from her perch. It is five times the size of her old backyard, and it feels squishy. There are no rocks, except the occasional small, boring rock. It has green grass that is really soft compared to the grass in Phoenix, but when Morgan sits on it, a little water seeps into her clothes, which is a weird feeling. That might be because she now lives on an island, so there is more water in the ground.

  Morgan throws her head back, letting her long brown hair hang down, and looks up through the branches of the live oak tree. She has to admit that it is kind of cool to have such huge trees in her yard. The trees here in Savannah are so big. The tall, skinny pine trees are at least twice the size of the ones in Phoenix. In the back corner of the yard, there is a sprawling Magnolia tree with broad, deep green leaves where Morgan likes to hide and pretend she has found a secret door to another world. Her dad says that the Magnolia will bloom next spring with white blossoms so big, she will barely be able to hold one in both hands. Closer to the house is a bushy red maple tree with bright green leaves that look like three fingers spread apart.

  As she looks around, she realizes how green everything is in July here, making her miss the desert and its variety of colors more. While it is not as hot here as it is in Phoenix, there is so much water in the air, she sometimes feels like it is hard to breathe. Morgan grows increasingly mad about all of the changes in her life recently. “I want to go back home, Abby,” she tells her dog, who is lying beneath the tree house. “I’m so glad you are here with me.” Finally, overwhelmed by sadness and anger, she climbs down from the tree house to hug Abby before running into the house and upstairs to her room.

  At first, Morgan tries to distract herself by reading a new book that her parents bought her when they moved to Savannah. She loves reading and imagining herself as part of the story. Her favorite stories are ones that are funny or set in a different world. She props herself up with a few pillows and settles back onto her bed. But no matter how hard she tries, she just can’t read more than a couple of pages without thinking about Sara.

  It is really frustrating because she really likes that the main character, Jessica, is an eight-year-old mixed girl like her, although Jessica is half Indian and half Caucasian, while Morgan is half Native American and half Scottish. Her dad is Cherokee, while her mother is from Scotland. They met in college in North Carolina, and her mother became a U.S. citizen once they got married. In the book, Jessica is on a train trip across England, which sounds like the best kind of trip to Morgan, but the train in the story just reminds her of how much she wishes she could take a train back to Phoenix. She sighs. Reading is not working.

  Maybe if she plays with some of her toys, she won’t think about Phoenix so much. She grabs a few of her ponies to play with and starts to imagine the island her cousins told her about in North Carolina where there are still wild horses who live away from people. She pretends her ponies are on the island, exploring a cave, swimming in the ocean, and on the beach enjoying the warmth of the sun. Wait a minute—one of her ponies seems to be missing! Then Morgan remembers that she gave it as a going-away present to her best friend. A tear wells up in her eye, but she refuses to let it fall. “Fine,” she sighs, “I will play with something else.”

  She picks up her Nintendo DS, determined not to cry. It doesn’t work. She scrubs at her eyes. She can’t stop thinking about how much she misses her old life and how mad she is that she had to move here. “UGH!” she sighs loudly.

  Her dad pokes his head in her room, “Are you ok?”

  “No,” Morgan replies defiantly. “I’m mad. I’m mad at you and Mum because I don’t want to live here. I miss Sara. I miss my friends. I miss my backyard and my soccer team and our trips and all the stuff we used to do. Why can’t we just go back?”

  “I’m sorry you’re upset, honey,” Dad says. “Camp is next week, and school will start again soon, and then you will make new friends, I promise. And we will definitely take lots of day trips, just like we used to do in Arizona, and we will go back to visit our friends in Phoenix in a couple of months. We will also go up to North Carolina to see all your cousins there. Remember how much fun you had last year when we went to visit for the family reunion?”

  “Yeah, I did have a lot of fun at the reunion with my cousins, and we went hiking in the mountains. I really enjoyed Uncle Bobby’s stories by the campfire, and when Grandmother showed me how to pinch a pot and paint it once it is dry. But none of them are here, and I don’t know anybody here!” Morgan complains.

  Dad hugs her and replies, “I know that you have had a hard time with the move, but I also know that you will make new friends at camp and once school starts. I got you something in honor of your new camp. Maybe it will cheer you up.” He hands Morgan a plastic bag. She tears it open. Inside is a stuffed sea turtle and a book about sea turtles.

  “Thanks, Dad!” Morgan exclaims, suddenly more excited. She loves sea turtles. Ever since she and her dad saw a sea turtle nest the last time they went to the beach, she has wanted to learn more about them. After all, she wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up, and who knows what kind of animals she will need to know about then?

  “Do you think we will get to see any sea turtles at the Nature Center camp?” Morgan asks her dad. She knows there are lots of animals at the Nature Center, but since they have not been there yet, she doesn’t know what kinds she will get to see next week.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Dad says, “but they are pretty important around here, so it’s definitely a possibility.”

  “Well, I better start reading about them just in case,” Morgan responds. She climbs into her chair, cuddles her new stuffed animal, and starts reading her book on sea turtles.

  Chapter Three

  Morgan is bouncing in her seat as Mum drives towards the
camp. She is so excited about all of the animals she will get to see this week. She is also nervous about meeting new people because she never knows what to say at first, but she is hoping that she meets a couple of fun kids. She is tired of playing by herself, as she has for the past week, and she thinks that a new friend would definitely make this week even better.

  They finally pull up to the camp, and Morgan looks out her window. She sees several kids about her age walking towards the main building. Morgan jumps out of the car, and she and her parents follow the crowd to the sign-in desk. There, a young woman with light brown hair tied in a ponytail asks Morgan her name, and then hands her a large yellow sticker to put on her t-shirt. Morgan looks down to see that it says, “Morgan” in large letters, and below her name it says, “Loggerhead.”

  “A Loggerhead is a type of sea turtle!” Morgan says.

  “Yes, it is,” the woman responds. “You will learn all about them this week.”

  Morgan tells her, “Yay! I’m excited about learning more about sea turtles. I got a book last week, so I’ve been reading all about sea turtles.”

  “That sounds great,” the woman says. “You will have to share your new knowledge about sea turtles with the group when you learn about them later in the week. For now, you should know that each group has been assigned a different animal and color. If you ever get separated from your group, you should be able to find the rest of the group by looking at the tags. Also, each morning you will meet up with your group in this main room. You will want to look for the yellow sign that says Loggerhead. Today, they are meeting over to your left.”

  Morgan tells her, “Thanks for the information!”

  “OK, Morgan, have fun!” Mum tells her. “Dad will pick you up this afternoon.”

  “OK, see you later,” Morgan says. Then she heads over to the left to find the yellow Loggerhead sign. As she walks over to the group, she gets nervous again. But she works up the nerve to smile and say, “Hi” to the few kids already there with yellow stickers on their shirts. Most of the kids smile and say, “Hi” back, but then they go back to talking with their friends. Apparently most of the kids already know each other. Morgan feels like such a weirdo since she doesn’t know anyone.