Page 50 of No One Aboard
Tia sank down onto Rylan’s bed. Her leg hit something tucked underneath the sheets, and she dug around to pull it out.
Rylan’s notebook. The thing might as well have been her brother’s diary.
Tia opened it without hesitation.
The first half of the book was everything she remembered from last summer. A prickly lobster from their dive at Alligator Reef practically bristled off the page. A rendering of the bronze Christ statue from their snorkel at a state park gazed up with sad, blank eyes. The sketches got less artistic and more clinical as she looked on. Anatomy of a pearl fish. A close-up of a lionfish’s spines with notes of its venomous and invasive nature. Atlantic tarpon, giant squid, some weird-looking shark...
The drawings took on a different shape after a while. Straight lines grew wispy. Orderly strokes wobbled into scribbles. Tia turned another page and stopped dead.
The sketch was magnificent and out of control, jets of bubbles penciled around the perimeter as if the scene was being viewed from behind a diver’s mask.
And what a scene it was.
A diver clad in svelte black, face to the side, profile sharply outlined. The diver’s flippers looked less like a piece of equipment and more like an appendage that grew seamlessly from their dark legs. And they had one hand straining for the surface.
Tentacles, not thick and sucky like the ones of the giant squid, but needlelike and fine as silk, gathered around the diver’s waist. They wouldn’t have been so threatening if not for the sheer number of them. Thread-thin tendrils curled around the diver’s legs, and a single narrow tentacle was poised to claim the diver’s outstretched arm.
It was a jellyfish, Tia guessed. A fantastical, monstrous jellyfish that lived in her brother’s mind.
Tia couldn’t stand to look any longer. She turned the page and was met with more straggly drawings with flyaway lines and reaching people. Drowning people.
Tia placed the sketchbook back where she found it and left the room.
In the cabin next door, Nico lay draped across his bottom bunk. He must have just gotten off watch. Tia paused in the doorway. “You okay?”
Nico sat up at the sound of her voice. He drew a threadbare smile over his face. “Sure am. How you doing?”
Tia took the liberty of entering the room and sitting beside him on the bunk, glad for company that was not her family. “You’re beat,” she said. She’d never seen Nico look so worn-out. The bags under his eyes and the sag to his shoulders reminded her of Rylan. Like he’d been rung out on a washboard.
“The double shift may be catching up to me. Slightly.” He held up his thumb and finger to demonstrate how slight this catchup had in fact been. “Even when I have the chance to sleep, I can’t.”
“Why not?” Tia studied the coordinates tattooed on Nico’s arm and quizzed herself on their meaning. Latitude 30, longitude 81. That was above the equator, way east of them. Mediterranean, maybe? Aegean? Latitude 34, longitude 18. Was Antarctica 18? How much of the world had Nico seen? Would she get to see all those places someday?
Nico stretched, hiking up his sleeves. “Just, I dunno... can’t sleep.”
Tia touched one of his tattoos, a trio of swallows just behind his elbow. Each swallow stood for five thousand nautical miles, she knew. She couldn’t wait to have a flock of her own.
“What could possibly keep someone like you up at night?”
“Someone like me?” Nico nestled back into the pillow and let her examine him. “You think I don’t have regrets?”
Nico seemed to be the definition of a man without regrets. He had committed his life to a primal piece of him, a piece that Tia believed was inside everyone. It was the thing she thought made adrenaline junkies, thrill-seekers, the thing that made people leave a dead-end job or drop out of school. Or run away from home.
“Tell me the worse thing you’ve ever done,” she said. She removed her hand from his arm and sat back against the wall, which was papered with postcards and photographs. A couple thumbtacks poked her in the back.
Nico had gone perfectly still. He reached up and touched his temple, maybe checking the little vein that throbbed just next to the ear. Was he... upset? Tia had no idea what to do with that possibility. Nico had never looked so much as perturbed.
But then his smile rose, quick and electric. “Only if you tell me yours.”
“Huh.” Checkmate. The worst thing Tia had ever done. It wasn’t hard to come up with. It had been a year ago onher birthday. And she hadn’t told anyone or brought it up to the people who had seen, even in those ugly, secret moments when the memory made her proud.
“Counteroffer,” she said. “How about thesecond-worst thing you’ve ever done? And I’ll say mine.”
Nico’s eyes were clear and bright. “You first.”
Tia sifted through her history of misdemeanors and classroom crimes and settled on the most impressive. “Back when I lived in Florida, an old friend of mine and I stole her dad’s Bugatti and drove out to the Keys. We went skinny-dipping and got sand all over the seats. On our way back, we ran a red. And to top it off, we left the convertible roof open, so of course it poured that night. Went from sports car to swimming pool.”
Tia hadn’t thought about her Florida friends in months. She had ghosted them all eventually, or maybe it had been a mutual disinterest as their lives diverged. Tia didn’t have the patience to keep around people who weren’t right in front of her. Except for Rylan.
