Page 14 of No One Aboard
Tia didn’t want any of the same things. She’d never been sure why exactly. She felt she was plenty ambitious, if ambitions could include things that wouldn’t make her any money. Tia wanted to see the world, and not in the way her rich friends and family wanted to see it. She didn’t want Instagram-edited photos of her wearing pastels to match the houses in Cinque Terre or captions in Google-translated French to remark on la ville de l’amour.
Tia wanted to see things nobody else had seen. She wanted to touch trees and tide pools never marred by human hands. She wanted to explore a cave no camera had ever captured. If she had lived in the Age of Exploration, Tia would have been on the first ship to the Spice Islands or the Northwest Passage. She would have charmed queens into granting her an expedition that she might or might not ever return from.
When winter break came, and all those girls went home to their families, Francis sent a brief text informing Tia she wouldn’t be coming home. He had decided at the last minute.
Nothing was worse than those weeks, snowed inside a dungeon of a building with only murmuring nuns for company.
Francis and Lila hadn’t just separated Tia from her twin and her best friend by sending her to Connecticut. It was like they’d severed her arm. Even with Rylan real and breathing beside her again, she still felt phantom pains.
“You didn’t miss anything,” she told him. “The St. Bernadette’s grad party was just a bunch of nuns and sparkling cider in paper cups.”
Rylan chuckled softly, a wispy sound, like drifting cobwebs. “An event of a lifetime, I bet. Did you give a speech?”
“God no. Did you?”
“Yeah. I was salutatorian. I don’t know if Mom and Dad told you.”
“No... they didn’t.”
And neither did you.
It shouldn’t have surprised Tia. Of course Rylan achieved some ridiculous academic standard. He had always been brilliant. He’d gotten into Cornellandthe University of Pennsylvania. He’d turned down both to stay with her.
Tia knew he could do so again.
“What did you say?” Tia tried and failed to picture her soft-spoken brother delivering a speech to hundreds of their peers.
“Not much.” Rylan set the sketchbook aside. Their parents’ voices had finally quieted. “I kept it brief. I was afraid I’d faint or something, so I just kinda closed my eyes and told a story. ‘Plato’s Cave.’”
“Now Ireallywish I had been there.”
Rylan rested his head on top of Tia’s. “I’m glad you’re back,” he murmured.
“I never wanted to go, Minnow.”
Rylan shifted and withdrew. He was supposed to sayI know, ThimbleorI never wanted you to go either. Instead he surprised her and said, “But you want to now.”
More than anything.
Here it was. The opportunity to talk about running away. Tia faced him and seized his hand. She had to get her point across. This was pivotal.
“Rylan. Listen to me. I know what life is like with our family. And now I know what it’s like without them.”
Rylan didn’t pull away, but he dropped his gaze and twirled his pencil between his fingers. “But you hated St. Bernadette’s.”
“I hated it because I was lonely. But I didn’t miss Mom or Dad. I missed you.”
He was shaking his head, and Tia felt a twinge of desperation. She’d never had to work so hard to convince him of something.
“You were lonely, so now you want to cut off our family? How does that make sense? Where are you going to go?”
Tia sat up on her knees. “I have a million ideas. Backpacking the Swiss Alps, getting a job on a tall ship in Australia. Ry, we could go work somewhere as divers! You could work with marine animals, and I could work on boats, and we could see the whole world and be each other’s home.”
She leaned back on her heels, not wanting to overwhelm him with her eagerness, but he had to see it, didn’t he? There was a whole world out there, waiting for them.
Rylan knit his brows. “You... haven’t thought this through.”
Tia nearly flinched. Shehadthought this through. It was all she had been thinking about for months, but Rylan continued before she could speak again.
