Girl at Sea

by Maureen Johnson

  “I’m between positions right now, and your dad needed help.”

  “For what? What are we doing?”

  “It has to do with Julia’s work,” Martin said.

  “But what, exactly?”

  “He’s asked me not to say,” Martin said.

  “What could we possibly be doing that he needs to keep it a secret?” she asked. “From me? Doesn’t it strike you as deeply insane that he wouldn’t trust his own daughter?”

  “It’s some kind of academic confidentiality.”

  “But you know. And Aidan knows.”

  “I know a little. Aidan works for Julia. And from what I can tell, that’s not a fun proposition.”

  Clio looked up with interest.

  “She scares me,” Clio said. “Where did they meet?”

  “At a conference. She was presenting. They seem to have hit it off.” Martin stared out at the wake thoughtfully. He opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it again.

  “And now my dad is paying for her work?” Clio said. “Martin, this makes no sense. He doesn’t have the money for this boat.”

  “He’s planning on selling it. It’s an investment.”

  “Did he borrow money from you?” Clio asked.

  Martin sighed again and rubbed his salt-and-pepper beard with both hands. Clio knew that Martin had a good amount of money from things he’d developed, investments. When her father had crashed, it was Martin who had let him live in his house for a year rent-free.

  “It was a combination,” Martin said. “He had some Dive! money left over. I think that was the last of it. I lent the rest. But he really did get a good deal on this boat. He should make a profit.”

  “And Julia?” Clio asked.

  He got up and walked toward the stairs to the wheelhouse.

  “I’m sure she’ll grow on you, Clio,” he said, patting her shoulder. “You shouldn’t worry so much. Just enjoy the ride. It’s a great boat, a beautiful place. Your dad’s okay. Trust me. Don’t worry about Julia.”

  “Sure,” Clio said, smiling halfheartedly. “Why would I worry? This all makes so much sense.”

  Confinement, Not Solitary

  Over the course of the day, the smallness of the world of the boat began to really sink in. Clio paced around it for a while, like a zoo animal in an undersize cage. There was no television, nothing to watch. There was no phone. The only thing she found that was of any interest at all was the compact stacked washer-dryer in a closet next to the galley. When a washing machine is the best you can do, you know you’re in for some trouble.

  In terms of places to be, there were only really three: her bedroom (which wasn’t even private), the horrible white living room, and the deck. The deck was beautiful, without question. It was sunny and hot, and they were going past massive islands that jutted out of the water, coastline dotted with grottoes and villages. But then those things got smaller and smaller as they headed out. And then there was water.

  “I have to get out of here,” she said to the view.

  The view didn’t offer up a reply. It offered only more of itself. Clio could only think that with every passing mile, she was getting farther from a chance of contacting Ollie. She was falling off the map.

  Elsa, on the other hand, had woken up happy. She came shuffling out in the early afternoon, and the peaceful smile on her face told Clio that she had fully accepted that the Sea Butterfly was some kind of clinic for the brokenhearted and she was a patient. She wanted to be confined, sedated, and kept away from sharp objects. She wanted the outside world to go away. She settled herself down with a bottle of nail polish and painstakingly painted her toenails shell pink, then stretched out to tan.

  Everyone else had something to do, and they kept well hidden. On occasion, one of them would come out of the wheelhouse, but they’d return just a few minutes later. Aidan came out the most, often carrying things back up with him. He never once lost that look of smug self-importance. Clio could just tell that no matter what Aidan did, he assumed it was the most important activity in the world. It was so important that he barely even looked at her.

  Aside from her cooking, Clio didn’t have much to do. She went upstairs and brought back down her sketchbooks. Clio usually drew every single day in the way that some people practice a sport or an instrument. She hadn’t done it in the last few days, and already her hands felt stiff and strange. She sat on a deck chair and stared at the pictures of Ollie. She had gotten the shoulders and nose all wrong in most of them, but the eyes and chin were very good. Her drawing teacher would have been proud.

  He already seemed less real to her now. Ripped out of her normal environment, she had already started to feel like a different person, like her life of just a week ago was a dream. Plus the boat bumped, knocking her hand across the page when she least expected it. She slapped the book closed. She couldn’t even draw.

  “What’s wrong?” Elsa asked.

  “Nothing,” Clio lied.

  “Come lie next to me. We’ll get great tans out here.”

  There wasn’t anything else to do, so Clio went up and got a few of their thick towels and made a place for herself. But as soon as she closed her eyes and the sun bore a hot spot into the lids, she could only see Ollie. Her head started to replay the fantasy of the two of them on the beach. This was all a cruel joke.

  At four, Clio’s com rumbled.

  “Number Five!” it said. “You’ll probably want to get dinner started. I think there’s been a request.”

  “A request?” Clio said to Elsa.

  Elsa shrugged.

  It was something to do, anyway. She pulled herself up. On the black granite countertop in the galley, someone had left an Indian cookbook open to a page displaying a chicken korma recipe. A note written in a quick, sloping print also requested the cucumber raita (Chapter 20: The Venom), rice, and tamarind chutney. She quickly flipped through the book and examined the long list of ingredients.

  “Great,” she said, and shut the book with a decisive thump. “No problem. Anything else you want? Ice sculptures?”

  She slapped on her hat. A thought struck her as she did this, and she ran up the steps to the Champagne Suite and got out her Galaxy name tag. She pinned it to her shirt. Not only was it a token of Ollie, it was a nice touch. Her servitude was going to be noticed.

  Each time she went looking for something on the list—something unlikely, like coconut milk, or clarified butter, or cumin seeds, or fresh ginger—it was there. Someone had known they wanted curry, and that person had made sure the deck was stacked in their favor.

  Still, it took Clio a full hour and a lot of double-checking to get through the recipes. There was jasmine rice to soak and steam, piles of vegetables to cut, spices to toast and grind. The actual cooking of the curry required a careful layering of oil, butter, spice, chicken, vegetables, coconut, all in a very precise order. The tiny kitchen grew warm.

  She was extremely gratified to smell something distinctly curry-like coming out of her pot and to see that its contents had come together to form a thick, golden stew. The rice was white and fluffy. The raita looked thick, cool, and yogurt-like. She located the jar of English chutney, pulled half the kitchen apart to find enough bowls and dishes to serve all of it up, and managed to haul it all out to the table only fifteen minutes after she felt the boat come to a stop and heard people gather for the expected dinnertime.

  As she had hoped, the name tag was noticed. No one commented on it, though. Everyone seemed genuinely impressed by the curry. There was a lot of fast eating. The sea air had made everyone hungry.

  When they had finished eating, Clio’s father stood, arms spread, in speech mode.

  “Let’s move these plates out of the way, Clio,” he said. “We need the table.”

  No “thank you.” Nothing about the work she had put in. Just an order to shift the dirty dishes. She stood up, unable to meet anyone’s eyes, and wordlessly stacked the plates.

  “Tonight,” he sa
id, “I was thinking we could all spend a little time together. We only have each other out here, after all. I thought, what better to do than play a little Dive!”

  He reached around to the white leather sofa behind him and produced a well-worn box. From the expressions around the room, no one thought much of this idea except for Elsa, who would take on anything.

  “How many of you have played before?” he asked. “Aside from the obvious.”

  Aidan admitted to having played the video game version on his cell.

  “Kid…Clio, why don’t you explain how it works?”

  The boat creaked a bit as they shifted lightly from side to side. Her father was now commanding a group of people to play their board game. Clio felt something inside her die. Her spirit? Maybe.

  “Come on!” he said.

  “The object of the game is to get as much treasure as you can and get your ship back to port,” she said dryly. “You try not to get arrested, attacked, or sunk.”

  “It’s relevant,” Martin said, trying to be helpful.

  “The board is divided into seas, made-up ones. Not real ones. All of these little tiles represent areas of water. Some have shipwrecks under them, some don’t. The goal is to get as much treasure as you can. There are a hundred and fifty treasure cards. You can dive for it or steal it. There are lots of ways of going about it.”

  “Everyone plays a little differently,” her dad chimed in. “Some people barter a lot. Some people like to steal from other people. You can follow in the wake of a ship that’s doing well. Your style of play really depends on you.”

  “How long does this take?” Julia asked.

  “A while,” her dad answered. “Two or three hours. It’s great for something like this. None of us has anywhere else to go.”

  Julia fell silent. It was a throbbing kind of silence.

  “Can we play teams?” Elsa asked.

  “Sure!” he said. “Team play works well. Obviously, Clio and I need to be split up, so…I’ll be with Martin and Elsa. Clio, Julia, and Aidan, you can be the other team.”

  The task of explaining the rules to Aidan and Julia was not an enviable one. Julia put on a flat, unmoving listening face. Aidan second-guessed the logic at every turn. But when Clio started setting out and explaining the cards, Julia sprang to life.

  “Why is this worth a hundred points?” she asked, holding up a card bearing a Greek vase.

  “Because it is,” Clio said.

  “This is a red-figure bell krater, a vessel used to mix water and wine. This one on the card happens to be in the Getty Museum. And this”—she slapped down a five-hundred-point card—“is a Hellenistic fish plate. And not even a very interesting one. Why is this worth five times as much?”

  “Because I liked the picture of the clam on it,” Clio answered.

  “You can see why this makes no sense. But I know that’s not the point. It’s a game. And a good game, so I hear.”

  “Right,” Clio said. “It’s a game.”

  And it was a long game, the longest game of Dive! she had ever played. This group was surreal. There was her dad, trying not to flirt with Julia and failing. There was Julia, smiling the most uptight-yet-sultry smile back at her father. Julia’s appeal was becoming devastatingly clear. She was petite, intense, obviously intelligent. She was like a more-commanding version of Clio’s own mother. Still, there was something a little bit…off about Julia.

  There was Aidan, leaning across to Elsa, not really hiding the fact that he was looking at her chest. There was Elsa, causing the problem by doing some kind of magical lift-and-separate move, making sure that her breasts hovered over the board at all times, like cloud cover. There was Martin, trying to pretend this was all normal.

  And there was Clio, wearing a paper hat and a name tag, looking down at her past. It had been a long time since she’d seen Dive! There were way too many memories embedded in the box, the experience. There was the two-hundred-point bronze statue card. She’d made that one from one of her mom’s old textbooks. There was the whirlpool in the left corner—an accident, really. The board had gotten wet when she was painting it, so she’d swirled the damp corner with her finger. And bang—a new challenge had been developed. Her dad had incorporated it right into the game.

  They were smart back then. Smart and lucky. She wasn’t feeling that so much now. Sitting there on that endless, terrible night, the smell of leftover curry taking over the entire cabin, Clio had the sensation that she had already done the best things in her life. Eleven and twelve had been her peak years. She had a long time to go downhill.

  And then the worst of it hit—she saw the board, the boat-shaped pieces moving around the squares of blue sea—and she saw her life, right now. How had she not seen this clearly before? Her dad was playing Dive! in real life. He was guarding his cards, moving his boat, gathering his treasure…. He had snapped. And he had taken them all with him.

  But what treasure was he looking for?

  Even though she was barely paying attention, she led Aidan and Julia around the board effortlessly, leaving them out of the decisions entirely. She couldn’t help it. She knew every move. The trick to avoid the pirates was to stock up on lots of low-point cards. The trick to getting lots of treasure was to make lots of quick passes on the board. Her dad was just as good, and he had gotten the competitive glint in his eye. She fought back, her mind readily serving up a defense to his every attack.

  “Are you two going to let anyone else in?” Julia said.

  The cool British voice cut into the heavy fog that had descended over Clio’s thoughts.

  “There’s no point,” Aidan said, standing up. “You can’t play a game with the people who made it.”

  Clio was grateful. She needed out of this room. She stood up and headed for the steps.

  “Where are you going?” her dad asked as she retreated.

  “Upstairs?”

  “The dishes,” he said. “The galley is your domain, remember? And we have to keep it shipshape.”

  On hearing that there was cleaning to be done, the others scattered. Clio stood there, limp with a helpless rage. She stepped back into the galley, where every surface was covered with remnants of the dinner.

  It’s fine, she thought, taking a deep breath. You need time to think anyway. Just do this.

  Before long, the galley had turned into a miserable little sauna of soap and steam. This was when Aidan wandered in, laptop in hand.

  “I noticed you’re wearing your name,” he said. “The spelling was unusual. So I looked it up.”

  He opened his laptop and balanced it in one palm. He had come to flaunt the fact that he could get online.

  “Clio,” he said. “Let’s see here. One of nine muses, nine sisters. Daughter of Zeus, king of all the gods, and the goddess of memory. Invoked at the beginning of an artistic endeavor. Muses inspire divine madness. Without them, the creation—whatever it is—can be technically correct, but it will never be truly inspired or perfect. But…I see here that you are also a boat! Clio, the sea butterfly. I didn’t catch that one before. We’ve been riding around in you.”

  “I know,” she said flatly. “Not my idea.”

  “Ever see a sea butterfly? They’re pretty. Also technically mollusks, so you’re related to oysters. Your favorite. Also a hermaphrodite. That’s nice. They start life as males and mature into females. Have a look.”

  He turned the computer around to show to her. This wasn’t something she really wanted to see, but she leaned in anyway. As she did, he snapped it shut.

  “Psych,” he said.

  He rendered Clio speechless. She stood there looking at him, one hand soaking in the soapy, curry-stained water, searching her mind for a word that fit this kind of behavior. He pushed away the hair that had flopped onto his forehead, smiled, and left.

  A full five minutes later she was still standing in the exact same position, mouth slightly open, forcing her brain to fire up the perfect comeback, when she heard the last
of the water sucking down the drain. She lifted her hand and examined it. It was pruned, covered in pearlescent soap bubbles tinged with yellow. No one except her father had ever rattled her like this before.

  That was it. From now on, her purpose was clear. Get online. Get off the boat. And Aidan—he was going down.

  The Snoop

  The next morning, Clio woke up a bit earlier than she had the day before. Elsa was still out cold. There was a book on her side of the bed. She probably hadn’t slept again.

  Elsa had been awake last night, though, and had poured out the entire story of her breakup to Clio. It had been rough. Elsa had been madly in love with Alex, a guy she had known since she was twelve. They had dated for seven months when Elsa found him making out with one of her best friends in the library, and there was no escape.

  Clio’s dreams that night had been filled with images of English boarding schools—big ivy-covered buildings that looked vaguely like Hogwarts. There was an art supply store in the basement, but Ollie didn’t work there. The strange thing was, Aidan did.

  She woke up with absolutely no idea where she was.

  The boat had stopped. She went downstairs and found her father and Martin in their wet suits, preparing their tanks.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, stepping out onto the deck.

  “Just doing a little dive,” he said. “Getting the lay of the land. We’ll be back up in about an hour. Have some breakfast ready!”

  “Sure,” she said uneasily.

  It had been a while since she had seen this process. There was so much stuff: air tanks and tubes and fins. There were even a few smaller pony tanks—tanks that divers carry in case their main tanks fail. The boat bobbed and rocked now that it was anchored in place, causing Clio’s stomach to flip a little. She realized she was clutching her arm.

  She went back inside and set up the coffeepot and stuck her hat on her head groggily. Day two, and this ritual was already a little old.

  It occurred to her that the others had to be around somewhere, possibly in the workroom mentioned below. It seemed worthwhile to have a little look and see what they were up to.