“Eating raw shellfish is an act of insanity,” Aidan said. “Especially in an airport.”
“I guess I’m crazy,” she said with a smile, offering an oyster to him.
“And I guess I just don’t want neurotoxic poisoning,” he said, putting up his hand against the offending oyster. “I’m weird like that.”
“I’m still alive.”
“For now,” Aidan replied easily, his green eyes moving from Elsa to Clio. He raised an eyebrow.
“Oyster, Clio?” Elsa offered. “Clio looks like an oyster girl. Oysters are the food of love.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Clio saw Julia flash her watch at her dad.
“Oh,” her father cut in. “We’re actually in kind of a hurry. Everybody eat fast.”
Elsa and Aidan were still looking at Clio and the wobbly, faintly purplish oyster that Elsa was holding up.
“Take it in one go,” Elsa said. “Drink it back. All of it. Try not to chew it.”
It seemed to matter a lot to both of her onlookers whether or not she was going to eat that oyster. Impulsively, she reached over and glurped it back. Her instincts kicked in enough to yelp, Chew! But it was too late. The oyster was glooping down her throat. So she started to cough and choke as it slid.
“Oh…” Elsa said lightly. “You’re choking. It’s okay; it happens.”
She pressed the bottle of warm Coke into Clio’s hand. The soda calmed the reaction a bit and washed the oyster farther down, where it couldn’t cause any more trouble. Clio quickly wiped at her watering eyes.
“You all right there?” Aidan asked, leaning back with his arms across his chest.
Clio nodded. It was too soon to speak. Her voice would have come out very hoarse and gaggy.
“Warned you,” he said, smirking.
“But look! She’s alive!” Elsa said, licking her fingers. “Isn’t that amazing, Aidan?”
“It’s the law of averages. One probably won’t kill you. Probably.”
But he was smiling just a little as he said it. Clio couldn’t tell if she was invited to this quasi-flirt fest or if she was just a prop.
“I knew you were like me,” Elsa said. “An oyster girl. I knew it. We’ll get along.”
There were a few minutes of concentrated pizza-eating after this bizarre interlude. It was good pizza. The crust was thin, and the cheese was smoky. There were large leaves of fresh, peppery basil on top. After eight hours on an airplane, during which she’d only had a greasy (and small) chicken casserole and a wilted salad (the cause of the ranch-dressing incident), this pizza was heaven. Clio had to stop herself from eating too fast and searing the inside of her mouth. She carefully sliced the pizza into tiny bites.
Aidan wasn’t taking the same precautions. Clio looked up to find that he had sliced his into two halves, folded them, and eaten them in about five bites each, washing each one down with a swig of his Coke. The whole thing was over before Clio had even started into hers properly.
“You’re the girl from the Dive! box,” he said, pushing his plate away.
It had been a long time since Clio had been called the girl from the box, but she couldn’t deny it. She’d been featured on the box of the board game and the spin-off video games.
“When I was twelve,” she corrected him. “It’s not me anymore.”
There was an announcement in Italian. Elsa perked up.
“That’s us,” she said. “We have to go. They’ve already started boarding. How did we miss that first call?”
“Let’s hit it!” Clio’s father stood. He pulled out his wallet and took out a large handful of euro notes, dropping them on the table. “That should cover it.”
They grabbed up their stuff quickly. Clio was the last to leave the table. As she walked off, the waiter came over and took the money. From the joyous look on his face, Clio could see that her father had overpaid by some ridiculous amount.
Some things never change, she thought.
Dangerous Contraptions
The thing that was standing ready to take them to Naples could hardly be called a plane; it was more like a flying minivan. Clio and her father’s little gang, sitting in groups of two, took up about a third of the seats. Clio and Elsa sat together. Their seats were directly off one of the tiny wings. Instead of jet engines, there were propellers.
Clio knew from experience that tiny planes often made for bumpy, crazy rides and was about to say this when the propellers whizzed to life, filling the cabin with a low buzz and a slight shake. Elsa leaned down and looked out the window.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What is this thing? How old is this plane?”
“I guess they couldn’t use a big plane because it’s such a short flight,” Clio said. “We’ll be there in half an hour.”
“I don’t really like to fly,” Elsa said. “My mum tells me it’s all in my mind, but I really hate it. I don’t know if I can do this.”
The look of fear in her eyes was real.
“I’ll get you through it,” Clio said, taking Elsa’s bag, an elegant white circular thing that kind of looked like it might contain a large-brimmed hat, and shoving it into the microscopic overhead compartment. It didn’t want to fit in there, but Clio finally managed it. Then there was no room left for her own backpack. Behind them, Aidan and Martin were stowing their own bags. Aidan just had a computer and a novel. A thick one. It looked like sci-fi. He was pretending not to listen to the conversation, but Clio saw his eyes flashing in their direction.
“Can I share?” she asked.
“Sharing is good,” he said. “We should all share more.”
“I meant, can I put my backpack in your bin?” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Well, I guess you could, but I don’t know what to do with this parachute in here. That’s weird….”
Elsa spun around fearfully.
“Shut up, Aidan,” she said, her voice getting more high-pitched and British but not sounding terribly angry. “Don’t be such a prat.”
He smiled. It was a slowly unfurling smile, revealing a wide expanse of thin lips. Clio hadn’t noticed how wide his mouth was before. It was like he had a stash of reserve lip length for when he wanted to lay on one of these seriously self-satisfied grins.
Clio pulled out her sketchbook and shoved the bag into his arms. He put it in the bin and slammed it shut.
“Will you take the window?” Elsa asked. “There’s no way I can watch.”
“Sure.”
Clio stepped over and sat down in the window seat.
“I’ve been on some bad flights,” Clio said. “The trick is to get distracted.”
“How?”
“Let’s just talk. School. Where do you go to school?”
“I just left school myself on Thursday. I barely had time to get home before we were on our way here.”
“You’re in college?” Clio said.
“Public school,” she replied.
Clio quickly did the mental conversion. In England public school actually meant boarding school. As the plane started puttering toward the runway, Clio kept Elsa talking with a constant series of questions. Elsa’s school was private but not too fancy. Languages were her strong suit. Next year she would be taking five A-level exams. She had to play one sport as part of the school curriculum, so she played field hockey, but she didn’t like it. She loved watching football (soccer, she clarified for Clio). She had a roommate named Jenny, whom everyone called Binkie. She was Elsa’s opposite—very skinny, dark-haired, brilliant at maths, bad at dancing, good at football. Binkie had once drunk twelve pints of beer and two toffee vodkas on a dare and ended up in the infirmary.
Elsa delivered all of this information in one steady, breathless stream as they went past massive jets like the one Clio had just gotten off. Her own stomach flipped a little. This was a very small plane. Elsa tightened her seat belt until it couldn’t give any more.
They were on the runway now. The propellers were going full speed.
“Can I hold your hand?” she asked.
“Sure,” Clio said.
“It might be kind of hard. Oh God!”
The plane dragged itself forward. It didn’t have the speed and thrust of a jet as it went down the runway, so the takeoff was unexpected. The plane suddenly seemed to jump into the sky, throwing itself higher and higher in graceless little hops.
Elsa started mumbling under her breath in a different language. It was too low to tell which one. Once they were in the air, it was a little hard to hear.
“You must already think I’m insane,” Elsa said, squeezing the blood supply out of Clio’s hand. “It’s just planes. I’m not scared of anything else. At least not much. I took one of these planes in Sweden once. Going to see my dad. It was horrible.”
“Your dad is Swedish?” Clio asked.
“Yes. I’m half and half.”
“Is that what you were just speaking?”
“I pray in Swedish when I’m scared,” she said. “I’m still scared.”
“So keep talking.”
“I have photos,” Elsa said, carefully reaching for her purse under the seat. “Would you like to see?”
“Sure,” Clio said.
The plane bounced a bit as Elsa was reaching, causing her to bump her head on the seat in front. She snatched up her purse and clutched it to her chest, closing her eyes. Once the plane grew stable again, Elsa peeled them open and pulled the purse away from her chest. She reached inside and removed a book. She shook it, and a clump of photos fell into her lap. She passed them to Clio.
Three of them featured the same view: a massive, very green playing field and, in the background, a large building that looked like a Gothic church, with a dozen or more spiky spires bursting out along the roof. Different people stood in front of this view, all in similar uniforms—white shirts, red ties, gray blazers. Everyone in the pictures was laughing or making faces. A few other photos had obviously been taken at parties in small dorm rooms. There were various hot and sweaty guys, just after a soccer game.
Elsa was in most of these pictures, usually at the center, looking curvy and happy. She wasn’t wearing makeup in any of them, but her skin had that glow, her lips naturally pink, her smile huge. It was like Elsa rolled out of bed every morning and directly into some kind of hilarious team effort. There she was in the middle of a crew boat, laughing it up at the crack of dawn. Later that day, clinking oversized coffee mugs in a library. Nightcap, seven people on her bed, smiling even as they filled their heads with Latin or calculus or whatever it was.
The last picture was of a rabbit. Clio held it up.
“That’s Alex,” Elsa explained. “He’s our house rabbit at school. He’s sort of my baby. I named him after my boyfriend. Former boyfriend. I like being able to say, ‘Back in your cage, Alex! Stop pooing on the floor, Alex!’ Anyway, what about you? I’ve been talking all about me. What’s that book?”
“Just one of my sketchbooks,” Clio said.
“Can I see?”
Some people didn’t like having other people look in their sketchbooks, but Clio had no problem with it. Of course, looking at it over Elsa’s shoulder, she realized that it did make her look like a bit of a stalker. The same people and faces turned up again and again. Jackson, her best friend. The guy who ran the Turkish takeout truck. That guy Henry from trig. Her cat, Suki.
“Who’s this?” Elsa asked, flipping to the eighth picture of Ollie in a row.
“Oh,” Clio said. “That’s Ollie. He’s…”
What was he? A dream. A goal. The prize for surviving the summer. A missed opportunity. The future. The past. Some guy at an art store.
“He must be your boyfriend,” Elsa said. “He’s handsome.”
Clio realized that she should correct this statement, but she couldn’t. It sounded so nice. Ollie, my boyfriend.
Maybe it could have been true if she hadn’t been dragged here. But maybes didn’t mean anything. To have an actual something, you needed some kind of concrete proof. Like one date, or one kiss, or even the exchange of words that promised one date. She’d almost gotten a job where Ollie worked, which wasn’t usually thought of as one of the signs of a budding romance. Still, he’d said he would remember her. Did that mean he was waiting for her? It had to.
The moment to deny had long passed and she still hadn’t spoken. The plane dipped again, sending Elsa back into her peaceful place with closed eyes, mumbling in Swedish.
Clio peered out of the window to see a surreal sight. The landscape made a kind of sense, but the colors were all backward. The sky was the color of a ripe, late-summer peach. The clouds were a kind of faded ink blue. The Bay of Naples, which stretched before them, was a dusky lavender. In the distance, there was a huge formation coming out of the water. It looked like a camel that had submerged itself, leaving just its humps exposed. Clio knew what this was instantly: Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that ruled over the area, the same one that buried the city of Pompeii in ash and lava two thousand years before. It was still, she knew, very much active. It had been suspiciously quiet for some time and could very well wake up again soon.
Landing wasn’t so good for Elsa. The plane dipped and peaked, tossed by the crosscurrent as it got closer to the ground. Clio had four deep purple finger marks on her arm by the time it was all over but also, she could tell, Elsa’s lifelong friendship.
As Elsa got her bag out of the overhead bin, Clio looked through the gap in the seats to the people behind. Aidan was directly in her line of sight. He saw her looking and fixed her with a look of his own, smiling strangely. He stood up and leaned over their seats.
“Good flight?” he asked.
“It’s over,” Elsa said. She was still a little shaky but smiled. “Clio got me through it.”
“I heard.”
Clio looked back to see what her father was doing. He and Julia were leaning in to each other, talking closely, whispering.
What is this big secret? Clio thought.
In the next second, she would regret this question. The answer came in the form of her father ever so quickly putting his tongue somewhere in the vicinity of Julia’s ear. Julia smiled and laughed softly.
Clio spun around, her heart pounding hard in her chest. She felt a huge rush over her cheeks, every blood vessel in them flushed and full. There was a painful pulsing in her neck, and her hearing got tinny. It really felt for a moment like something very bad might happen to her head from all the pressure. She could hear Aidan making more pathetic jokes about his imaginary parachute to Elsa.
“You okay?” Elsa asked.
Clio stared at her helplessly. No longer frightened, Elsa had gone back to being the luminous dairy goddess, and Clio was just a confused girl in a small airplane seat, about to hyper-ventilate.
“Head rush,” she managed.
She wasn’t standing up and turning around until she was sure that her father and Julia were finished and out of her sight. Aidan leaned over from behind, lording down from over her shoulder. This blocked any view she might have had but also left her feeling very boxed in.
“Nice tattoo,” he said, examining the zipper from above. “What do you keep in there? Change?”
This wasn’t what she needed right now. And this was exactly the kind of thing that Ollie wouldn’t say. Ollie wasn’t a jackass. Ollie was perfection.
“A little souvenir from my victims,” she said, getting up quickly. “Usually a severed finger.”
Clio didn’t have to turn around to know that he was giving her one of those raised-eyebrow, “whatever you say, strangely scary girl” looks. She stood up and reached as far into the overhead bin as she could, taking as long as possible to pull her backpack out of the otherwise empty space.
“See?” Elsa said, her British voice purring. “That’s what you get when you don’t behave, Mr. Cross. Now make way. We’re getting off this death trap. This is over.”
Clio was happy for Elsa, but she knew that her torment had only begun.
>
Mental Scarring and Jokes That Aren’t Funny
As they walked out into the blinding Naples sun, Clio found herself clasping her own left ear. She couldn’t stop. It was as if by covering it, she could stop the horrific ear-penetration image from getting into her head.
Things would never be the same now that she’d seen her father tonguing some strange woman’s ear. Never. That was the kind of thing that wormed its way into your brain, nestled itself between the warm, gray folds, and bred.
“What’s the matter, kiddo?” her father asked, coming up alongside her and removing the comforting hand shield. “Ears won’t pop? Try swallowing.”
Somehow swallowing wasn’t the word she wanted to hear right now.
“I’m fine,” she replied, walking ahead.
Their transport was a small, unmarked white van. The driver looked hot and bored and pulled at his damp shirt. He loaded their bags into the back while they all got in. The bench seats had cigarette burn holes. Clio found herself wedged between Elsa and Aidan in the backseat. Her father, Julia, and Martin sat in the front. Like most guys she knew, Aidan took up a bit more room, sitting with his legs farther apart, his computer between his ankles, pressing his left thigh up against her right in the process.
The van let out a belch of diesel exhaust and rattled as it was turned on. This was not followed by a burst of refreshing air-conditioning, as she had hoped it would be. The driver cranked up the radio, which was tuned to a call-in show that she couldn’t understand. The noise and the heat canceled out any conversation before it even started. Aidan put in his earphones, and Elsa laid her head lightly against the back of the seat and closed her eyes.
The first stretch of highway passed by some dusty and rundown housing developments, lots of uninspired billboards for local restaurants, and the occasional overheated car. There was a lot of concrete and scrubby brush, interrupted occasionally by a perfectly square plot of green, vined plants or a small grove of trees. Then it was more concrete buildings covered in laundry, trucks, highways, exits, signs. She had never been to Italy, and she had been expecting a bit more than this. This couldn’t be the place that people always raved about.
Girl at Sea Page 4
