Fluke

20: Duck, Duck, Whale

I pushed it away from my face. "What is it?"

"Ducky slippers. And when you step on the floor, they quack, or at least, they're supposed to. I still need to test them out," Brett said.

"Duck slippers? For your feet?" I asked.

"No, Rea. For his ears," Logan said as he leafed through everything and passed me a yellow envelope. "I think that's yours."

"Well, it has my name on it," I said, and stamped on the other side was the logo of the Atlantic Coastal College.

A smile rose on my face. Data!

I looked up at Logan before I dared to open it up. He had a couple of envelopes in his hands, but I had the only one that mattered.

The health information of the seven finbacks I had identified was inside, and that data could either make my day a thousand times better or a thousand times worse. I knew I wasn't supposed to get attached to the specimens, but when each one had a name and fluke attached to it, it was hard not to find a million reasons to fall in love with them.

Of course, there wasn't much I could do at the time to help the whales besides lament the cruelty of humanity, but there wasn't any sense in making judgments until I had seen the information.

But still, the only thing that was trashier than the ocean were the humans who put the garbage there.

I opened up the envelope and took out the packet containing the data. On a sticky note attached to it was a message that said, "Sorry this took a while! The thermal cycler for PCR broke, and for some reason, we're already ten thousand dollars over our budget for the summer, so it took a while to get the funds approved to get it fixed."

I tore that note off and put it in my pocket. The drone Nastasya and Robbie got for me cost ten thousand dollars, but that had to be a coincidence.

Judging from the thickness of the packet, I would be working on that for a while, so I started a pot of coffee for the evening, and by the time I finally set it to brew, the rest of the mail had been sorted out accordingly.

"What kind of stuff did y'all get?" I asked as I waited on the coffee to finish up. Everyone else remained in the dining room, but none of the envelopes or boxes that had littered the table were there anymore.

At least they learned to keep something clean, unlike the bathrooms.

"Oh, you know, stuff. This stuff isn't nearly as cool as whale health data, though," Brett said.

I smiled. "Duck slippers that quack when you walk are pretty cool, though."

"Do you find them seductive?"

I blinked a couple times. "What?"

"Don't be weird," Jia said and rolled her eyes. "Any sane person would absolutely think your ducky slippers are sexy."

Brett smiled. "I knew it. No one can resist the power of duckies. Not even Jia, who doesn't have a soul."

"Please try to keep yourselves under control for the sake of everyone on this island," Darrell said, reminding us of that Rule Number One that Logan and I had every intention of breaking later that night.

Jia laughed. "How am I supposed to do that when he's walking around with duck slippers that make noises?"

The coffee maker let out a beep, and Darrell let out a sigh a moment after.

"I can't believe this is my life now. What on earth did I do to deserve this?" he asked himself, then went upstairs, which was probably a good thing. Jia could probably name at least seven hundred different things he did to deserve his harsh reality, and she also made it known that she had no problem informing him of each individual reason.