“Then why are you holdin’ so tight to that soap?” Riley asked.
Danny tried to shove it in his jacket pocket, but Kellan was waiting to snatch it from his grip. Danny cursed as his brother retreated a safe distance.
“What are you doing with this?” Kellan said with a laugh, looking down at the dragon’s head that Danny had begun to carve. He immediately went silent. Riley frowned, then walked over to Kellan’s side. “What is it?”
“Where did you get this?” Kellan asked.
“It’s mine,” Danny murmured. “Now give it over.”
“Who did you steal this from?” Kellan demanded.
“No one. I told you, it’s mine.”
Riley held up the soap, pointing to the dragon’s head. “You carved this?”
“I did,” Danny said, grabbing the soap back from his brother.
“Shut yer gob,” Riley said. “You can’t carve like that. You’re just a baby.”
Danny’s eyes narrowed. “I’m eight years old.”
“Prove it,” Riley challenged. “Prove you carved that.”
“I don’t have to do anything you tell me,” Danny said. “You’re not my da, so feck off, the both of you.”
“Maybe he did,” Kellan said. “He’s a clever little shite. After all, he found this place, didn’t he?”
“I did,” Danny insisted. “And I’ll show you.” Plopping down on the sand, he opened his rucksack and began to pull out all the carvings he’d done in the past few months. His collection was always changing-some he kept, some he gave to school chums and some he threw into the sea when they looked too crude against the others.
Riley and Kellan watched him, silently, suspiciously. But as his menagerie of animals and insects and mythic creatures grew, they leaned in more closely. “Will you look at that,” Kellan murmured. He reached out and picked up a beetle that Danny was particularly proud of, carved out of a palm-sized piece of driftwood. “How do you do this?”
“I have to find a good piece of wood first,” Danny explained. “Then I stare at it for a while, and pretty soon I see what I want to carve. Then, I just take away everything that isn’t the beetle. My teacher says that’s how the great sculptors do it.”