Monstrum

by Ann Christopher

  But now I turn to face Cortés and work on my indifferent act.

  “It’s a free ship,” I say, shrugging.

  He grins, producing dimples that groove past both sides of his mouth, giving him a look that’s boyish and disarming. “My father might disagree with that.”

  That makes me laugh, but since there’s something unnerving about looking directly at Cortés or smiling with him, I turn back to the sunset and rest my elbows on the rail.

  “Your father’s . . .“ I trail off, struggling for the right word.

  “A character?”

  “I was going to say interesting,” I say, “but, yeah, let’s go with your word. He’s a character.”

  “You have no idea,” he mutters. “He’s obsessed with explorers and exploring. Which is why he named me Cortés, in case you were wondering. It’s a thrill to be named after the guy who brutally conquered the Aztecs.”

  “Cheer up,” I say. “Did you want to be named Pizarro, after the guy who brutally conquered the Incas? Or the guy who brutally conquered the—”

  “Point taken.”

  “Well. Murphy’s a character, too.”

  “True. But at least you’re not related to him.”

  “Point taken.”

  I hadn’t expected Cortés to be so fun. I’m having an increasingly hard time not grinning at him.

  A beat follows.

  I stare at the shifting clouds.

  Judging from the building heat on one side of my face, Cortés is staring at me.

  When I can’t stand the spiking tension in my belly for another second, I run a hand through my freshly shampooed and ruthlessly tamed hair, which I’ve scraped back into a high ponytail.

  “It’s the hair, isn’t it?” I ask. “Combing it is like trying to herd cats. I try, but there’s only so much I can do. I know it’s distracting.”

  When I risk a sidelong glance at him, he’s smiling. “Your hair is fine.”

  “For now, yeah.” I strongly suspect that my nerves are making me babble, not that that shuts me up. “But it only behaves in ten-minute increments. Less in the tropics, so . . . Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Trust me,” he says ruefully, pointing to his head. “I get hair.”

  I grin. While I appreciate the empathy, his dark hair, like the rest of him, looks fantastic. The wind ruffles through his long curls, sweeping them across his high cheekbones, and the dying light is just bright enough for me to make out streaks of black so intense that they look blue.

  “So.” He mimics my posture, resting his arms on the rails. The distance between us is socially acceptable—close enough for us to talk normally over the wind, but not close enough to be awkward—and yet I feel crowded by his size and his nearness, as though I’m trapped in my too-tight skin. “I was thinking I should apologize. In case we got off on the wrong foot earlier. You know, when you were on the raft.”

  I don’t need the reminder. “When you called me a coward, you mean.”

  “I didn’t call you a coward. Not exactly,” he adds quickly, seeing my narrow-eyed glare. “You just looked like you could use a jump-start. But I’m not a dick.”

  “That remains to be seen,” I say sourly. “Anyway, I would’ve gotten into the dinghy on my own. Eventually. Just so you know.”

  “Eventually? In two more seconds, you’d’ve been whale chum.”

  I bristle at that, probably because it’s true. That monster whale was no doubt circling around and coming back for the kill—me.

  “Well, if you saved my life, then you’re responsible for my life. Henceforth and forevermore. So start saving your pennies, because I’m going to be applying to some expensive colleges soon.”

  “A simple thank-you,” he says with mock humility, placing a hand over his heart. “That’s all I ask.”

  “Whatever,” I say, trying not to smile. There’s something disconcerting about a guy who can read me so well so quickly—I think I hide my stubbornness nicely, thank you very much—so I decide to change the subject. “What’re you doing out here, anyway?”

  “This is where the fresh air is. You?”

  “Getting fresh air,” I say. I leave out the part about still being wired and needing to escape the claustrophobically small cabin, which is practically guaranteed to set off another panic attack. “How come we’re restricted to this one microscopic area of the deck?” I point to the signs on either side of the chained-off twenty-foot stretch where we’re standing. Danger: Keep Out says one, and No Admittance—Authorized Personnel Only says the other. “I wanted to walk around a little.”

  “There’s a lot of equipment,“ he tells me. “And this isn’t a passenger ship, so it’s also a safety issue. There’re all kinds of cables and netting. Plus the winches and swing arms. We can’t have greenhorns roaming free.”

  “Right,” I say, eyeballing first the wheelhouse, which towers above us, and the dinghy, which is hanging on the railing below our level like one of the lifeboats from the Titanic. I don’t know what all this heavy equipment in every direction is supposed to be doing, but it isn’t hard to imagine the ship passing through the Panama Canal and sailing up to Alaska for some king crab fishing.

  “So,” Cortés says, “why aren’t you in the communications room calling your parents like everyone else?”

  Innocent questions like this always catch me off guard, drying out my mouth and tightening my throat. I press my lips together, trying to throw a few sandbags on the sudden flood of emotion to slow it down a little.

  “You can tell me,” he says quietly. “I’ll understand.”

  Looking into the utter stillness of his face, so earnest and intent, I believe him. “I’m an emancipated minor. Which means I don’t have any parents to call.”

  “Why not?”

  I blink back a rogue tear and give my eyes a quick swipe with the back of my hand. “My adoptive mother—Mona; I called her Mona—died last year. Cancer.”

  He stares at me. “I’m sorry.”

  I nod.

  After a long pause, he clears his throat. “My mother died three years ago. Stroke. That’s why I live with my grandmother.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “We’ve got some stuff in common, don’t we? I’m thinking we’ll get each other pretty well.”

  He only means that we both understand what it’s like to lose a mother, I tell myself. That’s all.

  But I’m not sure I believe it. Something about the way he’s looking at me is causing a sweet ache in the center of my chest.

  My knee-jerk response is to throw up a roadblock. I do better when I don’t let people get too close to me, which is why I went for emancipation rather than trying to start fresh with some new foster family after Mona died. In my experience, the people I count on always die at the first possible opportunity.

  “It’s too soon to say whether we get each other or not,” I tell him. “So don’t go trying to friend me on any of my social networks, okay?”

  That makes him laugh. “Yeah.” He rubs his hand over his nape and hits me with a lopsided grin. “I definitely get you, Bria Hunter.”

  “Anyway,” I say sternly, determined not to melt into a lump of caramel goo in front of this guy, “where have you been? With your father, I mean.”

  “Everywhere,” he says, warming to the topic. “Up and down South America’s coast. Africa’s coast—”

  “Cape Horn?” I demand.

  “Yep.”

  “Good Hope?”

  “Kaap de Goede Hoop. Yep.”

  “Don’t pretend you speak Dutch, okay? I can do all kinds of Latin pretending. Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant. Ego amor iter. See?”

  It’s no surprise that he rises to my subtle challenge. “The first part is, ‘Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you.’ Everyone knows that. It was in Gladiator.” He furrows his brow, thinking hard. “The second part is . . . you love . . . traveling, right?”

  “Okay,” I say, annoyed
. “You’re just a show-off. Clearly.”

  I’m trying not to gush, but the little girl corner of me that’s always longed for amazing travels and big adventures—when it didn’t long to wear a frilly pink ball gown and dance with a prince under the moonlight—is silently squealing with excitement. I lean closer to Cortés, eager to hear more.

  “What was Good Hope like? Did you see the Flying Dutchman?”

  “No, but I could see why he’s trapped there. We were there one March when I was on spring break. It was like trying to sail through a blender. I’ve never been so seasick. I almost yakked up a lung. Not pretty.”

  “What’s your favorite place?”

  “I loved Australia. A couple years ago, we had the chance to go inland, to Uluru—”

  “Uluru?” I scrunch up my face. “You mean Ayers Rock? The rock formation that looks like a giant red lump of clay?”

  He studies me with dismay. “You cannot be that ignorant.”

  “I assure you, I can,” I say cheerfully.

  “No, I don’t mean Ayers Rock. I mean Uluru. Which is the name the indigenous people used for thousands of years before the Europeans showed up and stuck a flag in it.”

  “Uluru. I stand corrected.”

  “Thank you. So, anyway, I spent some time with some Aborigines. It was awesome.”

  “I’m so jealous.”

  “You’ll have to go one day.”

  “Is it fantastic?” I ask. “Traveling with your father?”

  His face shadows just enough for me to notice, but manages to keep smiling. “It’s the only time I see him. In the summer. Or spring break.”

  “Oh.” I hesitate because this feels like a sensitive area, and it seems crucial to get my words right. “That’s tough.”

  He shrugs, staring out at the water.

  “But you video chat with him and text and e-mail and stuff the rest of the time, don’t you?”

  His lips twist. “Not really,” he says lightly, shrugging again. “No big deal. I don’t know why I mentioned it.”

  “Don’t,” I say quietly.

  He looks around, nailing me with that intensely unsettling gaze of his.

  “Don’t what?”

  I hesitate. “Lie to me. It’s not cool. I don’t like it.”

  His heavy brows contract. He stares at me as though he’s never encountered my species before.

  I’d give my right arm to know what he’s thinking.

  “And now you’re going to Columbia?” I prompt when the moment gets too heavy and the silence goes on too long. Plus, I’m ridiculously anxious to see him smile again. “What’re you majoring in?”

  It takes him a second, but eventually he blinks and shifts gears. “Chemical engineering.”

  I shudder. “So you’ll be, what? Taking all kinds of chemistry and higher math classes? So much for us getting each other.”

  That does it. He laughs, leaning one elbow on the rail and turning to face me. It seems natural for me to mirror the movement, and before I know it, we’re standing much closer to each other, and talking to him is so easy that it feels like I’m catching up with an old friend I haven’t seen in years.

  A very hot old friend.

  “I signed up for vector calculus, yes. What about you? What colleges are you looking at? If I’m going to be paying for your tuition—”

  “And room and board,” I interject.

  “—And room and board,” he adds, “I need to budget and save, don’t I?”

  “Well, Mona was a radiologist. She went to Yale and Northwestern, so both of those, of course. Plus they’ve got Division One fencing, so—”

  “Hang on. You fence?”

  I really like the way his eyes light with admiration, and it’s a struggle not to puff up like one of Mona’s chocolate soufflés. “Yeah. With a saber, though, not a foil. Everyone always thinks of a foil when they think of fencing—”

  “You should look at Columbia, then. They’ve got women’s fencing.”

  I stare at him. Inside my head, words are flittering around like butterflies, but I can’t strap any of them down and make them behave.

  “I mean,“ he adds hastily, color rising over his cheeks, “I toured there during some big tournament. People were talking about the women’s team’s chances in the next Summer Olympics. That’s all.”

  By now I’ve recovered somewhat. “Well, I’m not sure I want to fence in college. I need to decide how serious I am about it, but—Columbia. Duly noted. I hear their academics are kind of sketchy, though.”

  We laugh together, but at this new, closer distance, it feels . . . unsettling. The energy between us travels up my arms, inches up my nape and collects in my scalp, where it prickles.

  And so, coward that I am—yeah, he was actually right about that, wasn’t he?—I turn away, resuming my original pose with both elbows on the rail so I can study the water.

  That’s when I see it.

  I freeze. I detect a whiff of something moldy and disgusting, and my breath cuts off mid-inhale.

  Or am I imagining the smell? I can’t tell.

  By the sun’s dying light, I can just make out the movement under the water, no more than twenty feet away from the boat . . . and there it is, just visible through a patch of sargassum: the gleam of a large eye staring right at me.

  “Oh, my God!” I cry, choked, recovering enough to back away from the rail. “There it is!”

  “There what is?” Cortés asks sharply.

  “There!” I point. “It’s the whale thing!”

  Cortés yanks my arm, pulling me behind him as he leans down to see what I’m screeching about. I grab the tail end of his T-shirt to keep hold of him.

  “Be careful!” I say. My breath is wheezy, and my legs are loosening up. But I tighten my knees and force myself to remain upright, because I refuse to lose it and lapse into a full-blown panic attack in front of him. “Don’t get too close!”

  “What, there?” he asks, pointing.

  A wave of the shakes works its way through my body, but I focus on reality and not the rampaging fear. You’re okay, Bria, I tell myself. You’re safely on the deck of the ship and everything’s okay, and you can do this. The panic eases just enough for me to peer around Cortés’s shoulder and see—

  A breaching dolphin . . . And another one . . . And another. Probably a dozen in all.

  All smiling their happy little dolphin smiles, leaping in their lovely little arches and continuing on their way to their little dolphin crib, looking about as dangerous as a bunch of goslings trailing along behind mama goose.

  “Oh, my God,” I say again, sagging with relief and pressing a hand to my racing heart so it won’t pound straight through my chest.

  “It’s a dolphin.” Cortés lets out a shuddering breath of relief. “A pod of dolphins.”

  “I s-see that, thanks,” I say, now beginning to feel foolish and maybe a little unhinged, none of which is helped by the fact that I still can’t breathe properly. I suck in several breaths and double over, resting my hands on my thighs as I try to get my lungs back online. I hate that Cortés is seeing me for the true mess that I am. And so soon after meeting me, too. “And th-thanks in advance for not laughing at me, b-because I really wouldn’t handle that so well r-right now.”

  As it turns out, I didn’t need to worry. His face is dark and tight with concern, and he doesn’t laugh. Instead, he puts a hand on my forearm and gives it a reassuring squeeze. I’m grateful—if a little embarrassed—for the comfort, because the attacks are exhausting and the very last thing I need at the end of this nightmare day.

  “You okay?”

  I nod. And then, in a fit of openness that I didn’t see coming, I straighten and confess my secret. “P-panic attack.”

  “After what you’ve been through? You’re allowed.”

  Well, there it is. A plausible scenario that makes me seem more stable than I am. And what do I do? I open my big fat mouth and tell the truth, because some ridiculous and perve
rse part of me won’t let me pretend to be something I’m not.

  “I h-had them before,” I admit. “I’m a nut job. Clearly insane.”

  Giving me a don’t-you-dare-badmouth-yourself frown, he shakes his head. Enough of the dying light remains to let me see the vivid flush that creeps across his face.

  “You’re insanely fierce. That’s all.” He hesitates. “I like that about you.”

  I gape at him, breathing crisis forgotten.

  As though he knows how fast my head is spinning, he changes the topic. “What happened out there?” he asks urgently.

  I shake my head. I don’t want to go there. “I can’t—”

  “Bria.”

  “The captain went insane, okay?” I wrap my arms around my stomach and try to ward off a renewed wave of the shakes. “We heard him kill the other two people in the cockpit with him. We couldn’t stop him. Then he acted like the plane was just taking off and sent the thing vertical—almost like a rocket. Three of the adults were killed because the food cart they were trying to use as a battering ram to get into the cockpit went flying through the air and smashed them. Then the captain acted like the plane needed to land and ditched us into the ocean. And then a few of us managed not to get killed in the crash, and some . . . some thing came after us from the water. It flipped over our raft and it butchered Espi’s mother.” I pause. “We could hear her screams,” I continue, tapping one of my ears. “I still hear her. And I still hear the sound that creature made. It was like a shrieking roar that shouldn’t even come from this planet—”

  Cortés nods grimly. “I know. Whales can make—”

  “It didn’t sound like a whale!” Frustration makes me yell because I can tell he doesn’t—he can’t—understand the full enormity of the situation. “Do you get that? And I saw its eye. It was like it was looking at me so it could make sure to recognize me if it ever saw me again. . .” I trail off, my energy suddenly zapped. “You know what? Forget it. You’ll never understand.”

  “Try me.”

  I pause, calming down and considering. Cortés looks like he’s ready for a fight over this issue, with his feet planted wide and his hands fisted on his hips. His firm chin and tight jaw give him a stubborn look that really pisses me off.