"And I think that's everything you requested for the meals for the week, Brett," Toby said as the rest of us tried to find places to put everything. We had an icebox, but it could only hold so much stuff, and whatever Brett had in mind required way more ingredients than we had room for.
For me, as long as the food tasted good, he could take up as much space as he wanted, but some people felt that there were better uses for our icebox.
"Jia, Jia, just stop. You just knocked down my chart of citations," Darrell said.
I wasn't sure why we still had that, considering everyone but Darrell and Carter had at least twenty. Logan and I had especially earned some tally marks after accidentally spitting on a bird he and Jia were recording just below us. We couldn't help ourselves, though. It had turned into a game to keep us sane on the island.
And the noise the bird made was priceless. I couldn't wait to see how Jia and Darrell decided to report that fluke in their data.
"Oh fuck, my bad. It'd be a shame if it accidentally," she picked it up off the floor and walked to the front door, "flew out the door, never to be seen again."
Jia tossed the paper out the door, and it tumbled away along the (finally) dry rocks.
Darrell gasped. "You just destroyed data and littered at the same time! I should have you hanged!"
"Okay, douchebag." Jia laughed.
Darrell put on a pair of untied shoes and chased after his paper, and I turned back to the groceries that still needed to be put away with a small smile. Carter must have slipped away during the brief conflict since he couldn't stand arguing even more than I hated it.
"You kids are going to be the death of me," Toby muttered under his breath, and I was pretty sure that we were all going to be the deaths of each other as well.
"Dude, seriously?" Logan said, and I looked up at him.
Brett laughed. "What?"
"You can't be serious. This is your big plan?"
"What?" I asked, and I parked myself by Logan's side, reading the label of what he had in his hands. "Mountain oysters?"
They didn't really look like oysters, though, so something didn't add up.
"It's genius, right?" Brett laughed. "Oh my god, I can't wait to see Darrell's face when he finds out what they are after he's eaten them, of course."
"What—what are they?" I asked, and as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I decided that I really didn't want to know the answer.
"Rea, don't ask. It's better if you don't know," Logan said.
But Brett answered me anyway. "Veal testicles."
I covered my mouth before anything could come out of it.
Perhaps Puke Boy and I were more evolutionarily similar than I had originally thought.
"Yeah, well, there's one minor flaw with your plan, genius. That means the rest of us have to eat them too," Logan said.
"They're really not that bad. If you forget to take the membrane off, which I did the first time I made them, it's pretty chewy, but other than that—"
"I'm going to go see what Carter's up to. He could be dissecting a seal's digestive system, and I would be more okay with that," I said.
"Look at what you did, Brett. You frazzled sweet, innocent Rea," Logan said as I walked away.
It was practically impossible for a biologist to be considered innocent, but I ignored that as I opened up the door to Carter's quiet, isolated work room and shut the door behind me. There was no light in the room besides a projected image on a screen on the wall and the light of a microscope, and Carter's face lit up in its small illumination.
While I loved what I did, Carter had more focus in his left pinkie than I did in my entire being.
"Hey," I whispered, and although I meant for it to come out a little louder, Carter turned to me anyway. He had a book in his hands, but how he could possibly read it in the dark was a mystery to me.
When I didn't say anything else, he turned back to his work. He shifted the slide on the microscope slightly, and the small drop of sample water jiggled with life, too small to otherwise be seen.
"What are those, exactly? Copepods?" I asked. There was an empty seat next to him, and I stood beside it without sitting down.
He nodded. "I think I know what all of them are, except for that one." He pointed to the screen, and one sat in the corner, unmoving.
"Is it dead?" I asked.
He shrugged. "It hasn't moved yet."
Poor little guy.
I looked around the shadows in the room, and although there wasn't much to see, it was a perfect in-house getaway from everyone else. While Logan had his seal watchtower and I had the Millennium Osprey with Nastasya and Robbie, Carter's microorganism room was inside and dry.
"This is a nice little room. Do people bother you a lot when you work?" I asked.
He didn't look up from his book. "Well, they usually don't."
"That's good. Sometimes I feel like I'm bothering Logan when he's supposed to be working since he doesn't get too much stuff done when I'm there," I said.
Of course, he only counted seals, and when that job was divided between two people, it wasn't particularly labor-intensive. But it would have driven me crazy if someone just tried to talk to me the entire time I was working with my whales, so I couldn't help but imagine that it was similar with him.
Carter didn't reply to that. I wasn't quite sure why I even said it in the first place. Probably because I knew he wouldn't immediately go and tell somebody else.
I looked back at the screen without another exposing word, and the little guy from before still hadn't moved. Everyone else in the drop of water squiggled and sprinted throughout the sample, but not the specimen of interest. Carter flipped the page in the book, so I picked another one off of the floor beside him and leafed through it.
There were drawings of plankton species along with their common and scientific names, but they all looked so similar. If Carter could somehow decipher differences between those, it was no wonder he could identify my whales easily and probably ten thousand times faster than I could.
I squinted at the pictures in the light of the microscope. Then I would just have to get faster at my job, not for the sake of competition, but competence.
His head turned back up to the screen, but it was a wonder to me how he could work, work, work all day, every day without losing his mind. I could only stare at a screen for so long, but he was about four thousand times more dedicated than I was.
And the people back home thought that I was crazy. They hadn't seen anything, apparently.
That thought brought a question to my mind, and when curiosity struck, I was just along for the ride.
"What do people usually think of you?" I asked.
He looked up at me for a moment. "What do you mean?"
"You know, do they think you're strange, or dedicated, or obsessive, or...?" I trailed off, hoping he got what I was trying to say.
"I don't know."
"What?"
"Well, what do you think of me?" he asked.
I thought for a moment. "I'm not really sure. I think you're sweet and smart."
"Okay."
I waited for a second, but he didn't say anything else. That was the end of that, apparently.
Someone knocked on the door.
"I brought you an apple," Darrell said, and Carter stood up from his seat to get the door.
He mumbled his gratitude when Darrell gave the fruit to him.
"How's everything going?" Darrell asked. "Okay?"
"Yeah. Thank you," Carter replied, then returned to his chair, his book, and his work.
He crunched into the apple, and I sat there in the dark and otherwise silent room.
Darrell really had set the bar incredibly low for himself, because that was the kindest thing I had ever seen him do. He treated Jia so poorly, yet he checked to make sure Carter was doing okay. Maybe I just had a low opinion of him, but it now seemed like he at least had a soul underneath those layers of aggression and mean-spiritedness.
"I didn't realize Darrell was actually capable of feeling emotions," I said.
I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt for weeks, and this was the first sign that maybe I had a reason to do so.
Carter didn't reply to that either, but in the slight illumination, I caught a small smile on his face.
It didn't cancel out the way Darrell was so mean to Jia, but it offered a small glimmer of hope of better times in the future.
***
Later that evening, after dinner (which, fortunately, wasn't those mountain oysters that were not oysters at all) and seal watch, I curled up on the couch with a cup of coffee as a reward for making it through a whale-less day.
I was expected to identify at least fifty whales throughout the summer months, and as long as I picked up the pace a little, I would easily accomplish that. I couldn't control the whales, but they enjoyed the northern waters as the temperatures rose, so I could predict where they would be.
I couldn't proceed in my cataloging process without the results from the blubber samples that I had collected during my last trip, since they probably were still being processed in the labs back on the mainland at Atlantic Coastal College. It was a minor setback in time, but there were still plenty of other whales in the sea.
There was a certain peace that filled the air when there was nothing to do, and although responsibility crept up behind me, I planned to ignore it until I finished my coffee.
Of course, that left me with a little time to think about other things, which was a luxury I wasn't typically allowed to have. Ever since I had decided where I wanted to go with my life, the chase never stopped, even though I wouldn't be able to catch up to my goals any time soon.
Along with the lull in action in my mind, there wasn't much action in the house, since nearly everyone had disappeared to the top floor. That group didn't include Logan, though, who had his data notebook out along with his laptop at the kitchen table.
"Damn, this has been the first day without rain in a week and a half," he said.
"I was just beginning to wonder if we'd ever see the sun again," I replied, then took a sip of my coffee. "Is that what you record in your notebook? The weather?"
"Just making small talk, Rea. That's what normal people do," he replied with a chuckle.
"Oh." I paused. "I just thought that maybe you're studying the seal population and weather. That'd be interesting, don't you think?"
"That would, yeah. You wanna see why we've been counting seals for the past few weeks?"
I nodded. "Yes."
"Of course you do. Come here."
I climbed out of the couch and took my usual spot beside Logan at the table, and he turned the laptop, so I could read what was on the screen. Several graphs stood out from the rest of the Excel spreadsheet, and though they weren't labeled yet, the data seemed interesting, though meaningless.
"I like the color scheme. It's easy to read," I said.
He laughed. "Thank you. But on this axis is the time of the high tide, and on this is the number of seals you and I counted. And on this graph," he pointed to a different chart, "like you guessed, it's the temperature versus the number of seals."
Finally putting a reason to all of our work brought a smile to my face, and I looked at Logan, then back at the data.
"And what about that one?" I asked, pointing to one last unlabeled chart on the spreadsheet.
"My sanity levels. As you can see, they're plummeting to an all-time low."
"But there's a slight amount of recovery about a week ago," I said and gestured to a slight increase on the line graph.
"Yep. And I'd like to reach that level of sanity once again if that's okay with you."
"Of course. You don't really need my permission to live your best life, though."
"Then can I go on another whale trip with you?" he asked.
"What? I figured that day would be," I pointed to a minimum on the graph, "right about there."
"Oh, yeah. It was, up until I saw your face with the whales. Suddenly everything seemed like it had a purpose again after that."
A heat rose upon my cheeks, and I looked down at the ground. "Logan, I—that's—stop. What about Darrell's Rule Number One?"
"The Professionality Act of Paradise City? It's bullshit, and you know it."
"It's not a bad idea, though. We're trapped on an island together, so we're probably just lonely and bored, and that's not even considering the fact that there are five other people here who would have to put up with all this," I said.
"You know, you're really good at following rules, according to the chart of citations Darrell fished out of a tide pool," Logan said.
I rolled my eyes. "Those mean nothing."
"And all I'm hearing is that you don't want to upset anyone else, not that you don't enjoy being around me. Your wording says it all."
"I do. I really like being around you, because you're socially inept like me, and you don't tell me that I waste too much time doing what I love instead of spending time with you, and—"
"Then no one has to know, besides me and you," he interrupted.
"What?"
"If you're so concerned about what everyone thinks, especially Darrell for some reason, then they can go ahead and think that there's nothing here."
I hadn't considered that possibility before.
"Huh. How do you think we could ever be alone?" I asked.
"I believe we are right now. And what do you think our seal watch is? Just you and me."
I hesitated for a minute. "That's supposed to be for collecting data."
"And it will remain that way, since I know that's important to you. But I'm not responsible for writing down anything that occurs after that hour. Are we good now?"
"You won't throw up again?"
"I think that had more to do with the boat than you, Rea."
"Fair enough. I'm going to bed now," I said.
"So can I get a definitive yes or no? That was pretty much the height of my reasoning skills, and—"
I kissed him on the cheek, and he stopped talking after that.
It was a bit more entertainment than I had in mind, but there was something about the way he carried himself, with a bit of confidence and assuredness that I could only dream of having. And he didn't seem to just like me, but he cared about what I loved and didn't try to take my time away from that. He built opportunities to be together into our necessary duties on the island.
And besides, the little bit of attraction I seemed to feel was quite natural.
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Hey everyone! Thank you so much for reading!
So this chapter was quite long and perhaps a few things happened, so feel free to voice your opinions on either the content or the technical side of the chapter. I changed it at least 700 times, so I'd really appreciate some feedback on whether my choices were correct or not.
And for the question, which is not particularly relevant to anything, but I need some answers. What do you call the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street? You know, like this bad boy right here:
I read somewhere that people only refer to it as a devil strip where I live. Please tell me someone else calls it that. PLEASE.