Inside, the group all sat at the dining room table, and Toby had a stack of boxes and envelopes resting on his chair. I took my seat next to Logan.
"Sorry," I said. "We accidentally started the seal watch a little later than usual."
"That's introducing so much bias into your experiment, Logan, that I don't even know where to begin. Would you take your project seriously for once in your life?" Darrell said.
"It's Rea's fault. She slipped and fell on the rocks even though I specifically told her not to," Logan said, and although it was a lie, it could have easily been true.
"And you were just going to let Logan take all the blame? That's shameful, Reagan, and you should be ashamed of yourself," Darrell said.
"I'll try to do better next time," I mumbled.
Everyone seemed satisfied with that explanation of the delay, so I didn't bother to say anything else that could ruin it.
Toby cleared his throat. "So, throughout these first few weeks on the rock, many friends and family of yours have been sending things to the college for us to bring to you. And in some cases, you ordered things from Amazon. I'm not naming names, but how did you think FedEx would deliver out here, Brett?"
"I have Amazon Prime, so I figured they'd make it happen," Brett said.
"You are a worthless human being," Darrell said, but Brett smiled at him anyway.
At least Brett made us all of our meals and kept the positivity flowing through the air. He seemed a lot less worthless than Darrell.
Toby cleared his throat to rein in our attention once again, but it sounded more like a hack. "Don't even start, Mr. Barrett, or Santa's not going to give you your presents."
"Did people actually send me things, or are you just trying to make me feel bad? That won't work, because I don't care about anyone or their opinions," Darrell said.
"Shut up, liar," Jia said.
"I'm not a liar, so maybe you should just learn to keep your mouth shut for once," Darrell replied.
Jia shook her head and smiled at the king of running his mouth.
"I swear, if you all keep this up, nobody's going to get anything," Toby said, and Jia and Brett stopped smiling.
I wasn't sure what Brett had ordered online, but it must have been really important to him if he was willing to calm down for a moment.
"Thank you. Now just grab the shit with your name on it, then get back to whatever you all were doing. Darrell's giving me a migraine," Toby said.
I let out a soft laugh. Darrell gave us all migraines on more than one occasion, but poor Toby had to put up with his tattling and constant complaining more than everyone else.
Darrell glared at me. "I'm not in the mood for this right now, Reagan, so I would suggest that you just don't say anything."
Before I even had the chance to reply (I had no intention of doing so, anyway) Brett immediately stood up and picked the largest box from the collection.
He tore it open, then looked inside. "Holy fuck, they're even better than I dreamed they'd be," he mumbled to himself.
"I'm going to have to write you up for that profanity," Darrell said, but Brett ignored him and pulled something yellow out of the box.
"Oh my god. Oh my—" He looked up at the rest of us. "They're super soft. Feel." He picked whatever it was up and brushed the unidentified yellow object against my nose, and it tickled my skin.
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.
"I think we're pretty cool," I commented mostly to myself as I poured myself a cup of coffee before I sat down to enter all of the health information into the whale database.
All my life, even before I found marine biology, people found me odd, but the people of Paradise City were different. They were different right along with me. It took a strange person to spend a third of the year in the middle of the ocean with no running water.
Quack, quack, quack. With each step Brett took, the floorboards creaked, the slippers squeaked, and Jia giggled.
"So how are you supposed to tell how healthy the whales are?" Brett asked.
"You can tell by the depth of the blubber, if there are any parasites present in the sample, and then there are a few genes that we can check for any mutations or other abnormalities. If you're interested, you can help me figure it all out," I said.
Brett laughed. "You and I both know that I'm not smart enough."
"Sure you are. This isn't hard, really, and what you don't know, you can learn," I replied.
"Wait, really?"
I nodded. "If I can figure it out, I'm absolutely sure you can follow along. You have to be at least kind of smart if you can remember what tastes good with what. I can't even operate a microwave half the time."
That was a bit of an exaggeration, but I knew what it felt like to feel ignorant. Maybe I went a bit overboard correcting that, but when something struck my interest, I couldn't just let it go.
Brett smiled and rolled his eyes. "Okay, now you're just getting carried away."
I smiled, and even if he had a hard time understanding some parts of my work, at least he was interested, even though he didn't have much of a background in marine biology.
I just hoped he'd be willing to listen to what I had to say. Not too many people were.
I sat down at the table with my laptop and coffee and pulled Logan's chair closer to mine with my foot for Brett.
"I wanna see the whales too," Carter said and took the chair on the other side of me.
Two people listening to me? Is this what it feels like to be famous?
I smiled and clicked on the whale tracking program, and as we waited for it to load in, I pulled the packet of data out of its folder.
"We'll start with Specimen One, which if I remember correctly, was Luna. She's about twenty-five years old, and she's kind of my favorite." I smiled. "She's a humpback whale, and on her fluke is a crescent, hence the name Luna."
"Is she healthy?" Brett asked.
"That's a pretty general assessment, so we need to look at all of the information before we come to a conclusion on that," I said.
"Oh. Okay," Brett said, then tapped his foot against the floor.
Quack, quack, quack, quack.
"These are way too enjoyable. Best investment ever." Brett laughed.
Although there was never any true silence at Paradise City thanks to the foghorn and gull population, I didn't mind the silence among us as the program did its best to load, but if Brett wanted to play with his ducky slippers, I wasn't going to stop him. After all, he was going to pay attention to my whales, and the slippers were objectively adorable.
As the logo faded off the screen, I took another sip of my coffee. At that rate, I'd be working long into the night, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Eventually, Carter would get tired and Brett would get bored, and then Logan and I would have the space all to ourselves.
There was a certain thrill that came along with the secrecy of the operation, and as long as no one found out about it, it couldn't bother anyone. Naturally, my intentions were to keep everyone off of our trail, even Carter, who wouldn't even tell anyone if he found out.
I typed the name "Luna" into the search bar, and my favorite humpback whale's picture and information popped up on the screen.
"Is that her?" Brett asked.
I nodded.
"Is she healthy?"
I looked up at him. "I don't know yet."
"Oh. Sorry."
"Don't apologize. Your heart's in the right place," I said, then leafed through the stack of papers in front of me. "Now let's take a look."
Specimen One had three pages of notes and data, but the first one I was concerned about was the depth of the blubber. There was the possibility that the crossbow dart didn't puncture Luna's blubber entirely, but it was a good indication of her health, as well as the general health of the ocean.
According to the data, her blubber was four centimeters thick. That seemed on the lower side.
"Hm," I said, then looked up at little Luna's picture.
With the rising ocean temperatures, she unfortunately didn't need as much blubber as she once would have, but the cause was just as alarming as the effect.
"Is she—" Brett began, but he trailed off when he looked at my face.
"Not as healthy as I'd hoped," I replied.
"The presence of Pennella balaenopterea isn't a good thing either," Carter said as he read over my shoulder.
"What's that?" Brett asked.
"A parasitic copepod that lives in their blubber," Carter replied.
I frowned. "Well, shit."
Brett rested his feet on the ground, and his slippers let out a sad quack. There wasn't much that I could do besides document the findings and slam my laptop shut.
"I'm sorry, Reagan," Carter said, and I let out a breath.
"And there's nothing you can do to help?" Brett asked.
I shook my head. "She's long gone now."
"Would food make you feel better?" Brett asked.
As much as I wanted to say yes, I shook my head with a small smile. He was really sweet, even if he probably didn't really know what was going on most of the time.
After I promised them I would continue tomorrow, both of them went to bed, but I sat in my dining room chair with my closed laptop and enveloped papers in front of me.
"Well, shit, Rea," Logan said, and from that, I figured he had been listening the entire time.
"That's what I said," I replied, and I looked up at him. "What am I supposed to do now?"
"Hope that the other whales are doing better, I guess." He sat down beside me. "You good?"
"My favorite whale is infected with parasites, that stupid seal is still terrorizing the others, and we have to be super sneaky just for a second alone. But at least Brett's ducky slippers are adorable. I have that going for me," I replied.
"Why don't we watch some nature documentaries on Netflix?"
My eyes widened. "Can we please?"
"I'll go get Blue and Racecar so they can watch with us. I'm sure you'd like their company too since you're weird."
I nodded. "That sounds perfect."
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Good morning/afternoon/evening/whatever! Thank you for reading!
Now that we're really into the story, what do you think about all the characters?