Spring Break Secret by Holly Rayner
Louisa
Louisa was skeptical about Tom’s intentions. The last time she had tried to speak with him about the dangers of Comentex, he’d completely shut her down without listening.
But now, on the phone, he sounded much more interested. Maybe he had taken the time to think about it, or maybe she had been able to charm him into taking her concerns more seriously.
Regardless of what specifically changed his mind, Louisa knew she couldn’t let this chance go to waste. She immediately grabbed every single binder, folder, and printout containing her original research, plus the writings of other environmental workers who were trying to stop the use of similar chemicals, and hopped right into her hybrid car to head to Tom’s office.
He had given her directions, but she knew the building. It was in one of the newer, swankier areas of La Vega, a tall glass-and-steel construction where all the hip startups and wealthy development companies had set up shop when they first moved to the area. Louisa felt silly about dashing up the stairs two at a time, but it felt like she had an opportunity that she shouldn’t pass up. What if Tom got another phone call, read another email, and changed his mind again?
She was somewhat out of breath when she burst into his office, and he looked up, startled. He had known she was coming over after their phone call, but apparently she had made record time.
“Louisa,” Tom said, gesturing to the chair next to his desk. “Come on in.”
Louisa sat down, setting her armful of folders and binders down on his desk. “So, you have questions about Comentex?”
“Yes,” Tom said, a bit sheepishly. “I’ll admit that when we first met—back at Sailfin—you were trying to tell me so many things, and I wasn’t really following. A lot of environmental activists are just against our developments on principle, and we can’t simply stop building new structures anywhere on earth. We’d just fold up as a company and disappear. So I thought you were asking me to do the same thing—just quit, walk away, never make any money, never do anything again.”
“I mean,” Louisa said, choosing her words carefully, “it’s true that reducing the amount of new construction in certain areas could really help the ecosystem. But you’re right. My main concern is not the development itself, but the use of this specific chemical.”
“Right. Comentex.” Tom nodded. “Can you tell me more about what the issue is?”
“Sure!” Louisa opened one of her binders, pointing to a bar graph showing the density of pollutants in various water samples. “We’ve done tests in the lab, and whenever this chemical is used, even if there are lots of sealants or other layers, the molecules are small enough that it slips out between everything else and gets into the water. No matter what, if you’re using Comentex, it’s getting into the local water table.”
“So it’s the size of the molecules that’s the problem?”
“Exactly. The tough part is, it’s the tiny size of the molecules that make it so perfect for what you’re trying to do—fuse the sand particles together to make a strong foundation on which to build. So there’s really no way to change the engineering to make Comentex, or anything like it, in a way that won’t leach into the water supply.”
Tom furrowed his brow, clearly thinking hard about something. He peered down at the chart, then looked back up at Louisa.
“So the issue,” Tom said, “is that this chemical gets into the seawater. But what happens then? There’s a ton of stuff in seawater, right? What makes it so bad, besides just its presence where it’s not supposed to be?”
“That’s a good question.” Louisa was impressed at how thoughtful Tom was being, even if it had taken him a long time to get to this point.
She turned a few pages and pointed to another chart reflecting sea turtle population. “The same thing that makes Comentex perfect for fitting in between little grains of sand also means that it can very easily get absorbed into the cells of animals and plants. We see it very easily enter the bodies of filter-feeding creatures like jellyfish, and then the sea turtles eat the jellyfish, and they take the chemical into their bodies instead of the nutrients they really need.”
“What happens then?”
Louisa turned to another page, this one with some grainy photographs of sea turtle nests. “See this here? All those eggs aren’t round like they’re supposed to be.”
“I remember,” Tom said. “Like ping-pong balls.”
“Right—but look here.” Louisa pointed to a shadow on the image, a dark patch that looked innocuous but signaled certain doom to someone who knew what to look for.
“There’s a weird little dent,” Tom observed.
“We call them dimples, but yeah. The female tortoises don’t have the right nutrients in their bodies to form healthy eggshells, so the eggs are weak: they get dimples and wrinkles and other malformations. And so they can’t protect the babies.”
“Do they survive?”
“Some of them, but they’re usually pretty sickly. A lot of them can’t develop fully inside the egg.”
“Wow.” Tom took the binder in his hands, slowly paging through and taking in all the pictures and their explanations. “So this will definitely happen if Comentex goes into the water?”
Louisa bit her lip. “Well, I’m a scientist. We don’t like to speak in definite terms. Of course there will still be some sea turtles who manage to lay healthy eggs, and since we could only run small-scale tests in our lab, we’re not sure how the chemicals will behave once you start construction. But we’re very concerned that there could be a serious impact on local wildlife. Not just sea turtles—anything that lays eggs with shells, like birds.”
“That’s awful.” Tom put the binder down, meeting Louisa’s gaze. “Just awful.”
Louisa was thrilled to hear that Tom believed her, and shared her concerns, but she couldn’t quite understand why all of this was news to him.
“Can I ask,” she said, “why you didn’t know all this before? We provided all this information to your company, and to the county during the permitting process, and no one listened to us.”
Tom rubbed his forehead, his eyes downcast. “To tell you the truth, as CEO, I have way too many projects to supervise to focus on the specifics of any one project. My lawyers and accountants told me it was okay to go ahead, and I assumed that meant that everything was fine. But I think what they mean by ‘everything is fine’ is that we’re all set to get our permits and make our money, not that all environmental concerns have been addressed and we won’t be causing any harm.”
“I get it,” Louisa said. “At all the hearings with the county board, the representatives from Palmco just kept talking about how much business it would bring to the area, how many jobs and how much tourism. And the permit process is based on really outdated requirements—as long as you’re not dumping a bunch of raw lead on the ground or something, they’ll let you go ahead. They don’t take into account these types of microparticles or new chemicals.”
“That makes sense. I guess I just figured that if we passed the permitting process, it meant we weren’t going to harm the environment, because someone else had checked on that.”
“Nope.” Louisa gave a wry laugh. “If it was impossible for anything with negative environmental impact to get a county permit, then my activist friends and I wouldn’t have to fight against all this stuff on our own.”
“They should change that,” Tom insisted. “We were totally honest on our environmental impact report, we told them exactly what we were using and how much, and they said we could go ahead. But we shouldn’t have been approved if it was really this dangerous.”
Louisa shrugged. “Local politics are tough. It’s hard enough to get everyone to agree on when to hold the next board meeting, let alone what requirements should be part of the construction-permit approval process.”
“Awful.” Tom shook his head, looking like he was still trying to make sense of the situation.
After a few beats of silence, Louisa couldn’t help but ask. “So…does that mean you won’t use Comentex in this new project?”
Tom looked sad, almost defeated, when he answered. “I don’t think I can do that, but I’m definitely going to look into what we can do to help fix this. Maybe use less Comentex, or donate a bunch of money to help get it out of the seawater, or something.”
Louisa felt as defeated as Tom. He seemed so stuck in his ways, unwilling to accept anything that would threaten his company.
“Maybe you could help with that,” Tom suggested, trying to brighten the now very somber mood. “You’ve got all this research. I could connect you with Nick, and the engineers he works with, and you could figure something out.”
It was the last thing Louisa felt like agreeing to in that moment, but she knew she couldn’t pass up a chance to work with these guys, even if it just meant more conversations where she could try and sway them away from this chemical. “Okay,” she said.
“Great.” Tom’s happiness was clearly feigned, and Louisa wondered how he had the energy to pretend like that.
“All right, well,” Louisa said, standing and gathering her papers, “I’ve got to go. It’s time to pick Rei up from Eco Scouts.”
“I’ll drive you,” Tom offered, standing quickly and grabbing his keys.
“No, no thanks.” Louisa smiled but waved her hand to turn down Tom’s suggestion. “It’s just that I’m still not sure everything is ready for you and Rei to meet, you know?”
“Right, of course.” Tom, to his credit, dropped the issue immediately and sat back down.
“I do want to keep talking about this with you,” Louisa said, hoisting the stack of folders and binders into her arms. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”