"And this is a picture of Luna. She's a female humpback whale, and she's a little sick," I said, pointing to a picture of the whale on my laptop.
Even though my head ached from who-knows-what, Alexa's interest in my work and all the whales I had befriended gave me a way to keep my mind off of it.
"Does she have the throw-ups?" Alexa asked, and I smiled at the child.
"Not exactly. She has little creatures in her body, and they like to take everything that makes her healthy for themselves."
Alexa gasped. "That's so mean!"
"They just want to live too, though. They steal so they can survive."
"Oh. That's still mean."
I nodded. "I think so too. Whales are way cooler than parasites." I smiled, then looked at Nastasya. "Can I keep your niece? She reminds me so much of myself, really."
"I don't think my sister would like that very much, but she's one curious little cat, isn't she?" Nastasya replied.
"Don't let her lose it." I smiled, then looked back at Alexa. "Do you want to look at more whales?"
She shook her head. "I'm bored."
I rose my eyebrows. "Oh. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Nastasya, you can have your niece back."
"Thank you," she said, then turned back to the controls with Robbie and muttered something to him. Robbie laughed, and I sunk into my seat and rested my head on my fist.
"Hey, kid. You wanna color?" Jia asked.
Alexa nodded as Jia got out the crayons and book.
"About half of the pictures are already colored in, so you can just skip over those." Jia handed the supplies to Alexa, and she got started on the first available picture.
"But you just bought that coloring book today," I said.
"Well, after Blaine and I got all the supplies on my list, we sat on the beach and colored the cool pictures. That's it. Nothing else." Jia smiled.
So he came from halfway across the country to color (among other things, apparently). That seemed slightly impractical, but who was I to judge? After our rocky start, Logan only changed his mind about me because we were forced to live together on a secluded island.
I smiled anyway. "That's actually kind of cute. Human courtship rituals can be so creative."
"Don't say it like that," Hailey said. "It makes it sound weird."
"That's what it is, though. I don't like to think of humans as something separate from the rest of the animal kingdom, because we're really not."
"I'm going to guess you're not too experienced in the human courtship ritual arena, then," Hailey said.
My worth wasn't in who liked me, but in what I accomplished. If seeing whales and capturing their pictures and data wasn't enough to make her like me, I wasn't really sure what else I could do to change her mind. What did I even do to her?
"This picture is really bad. They colored the ocean outside the lines," Alexa spoke up, completely interrupting our conversation.
Jia laughed. "Yeah, he said that the lines couldn't confine his genius and that a true artist lets the art tell itself, not the boundaries of society."
"And this tree is red. This is a mess," Alexa said, then continued crayoning a different picture.
I laughed and turned to Nastasya. "Actually, I want to keep her again. She knows what she likes, and that—"
"Sorry, Reagan. I'm not supposed to let anyone adopt her. Not even someone ten thousand times more responsible than my sister," Nastasya said.
The smile fell off my face. Racecar and Blue would have to do for the time.
I went back to my laptop until one of the applicants for next year took the spot beside me on the bench.
"Why don't you tell me all about the whales we saw earlier?" he asked, and I looked up from the screen.
"Yeah, sure. That'd actually—" I laughed. "What was your name again?"
"Logan."
He looked nothing like the original Logan. His wide smile and dark blond hair contrasted Logan's pissed-off expression and brown curls usually tucked away in a hat of some sort.
"We actually already have a Logan back at Paradise City, so that's just going to be confusing. Can I call you Logan Two? No, I'll just go back to calling Logan One my nickname for him, Puke Boy." I laughed.
"We can just be Logan One and Two. I don't want to ruffle any feathers."
"Yeah, good call. He'd probably fight you, so he can be the alpha Logan."
And they were nothing similar in attitude either. At least it made the dichotomy in my mind a little easier to manage.
His forearms rested against his thighs, which were turned in my direction, and judging by the way I could see the muscles move when he shifted his thumb, he probably would beat Puke Boy Logan for the title of alpha Logan.
I smiled. Logan One, my Logan, wouldn't give a damn about that disadvantage.
"Well, I've only identified one of the three whales from earlier, and her name is Midnight. She's a humpback, her fluke is almost all black, she's around forty years old, and her breeding grounds are in the Bahamas." I shrugged. "I don't know much more than that right now, but there's still plenty of information to find about her."
"Like what?"
"Well, once the test results come back, I'll be able to add any parasites she has or some other diseases."
He nodded but didn't say anything, so I scrolled through the whales I had identified and described each one to him.
Even if I couldn't keep a three-year-old entertained, at least I could hold the attention of someone with a common interest.
***
We arrived at the island a little more than an hour later, and as we approached the shore of my paradise, a faint sound carried through the breeze, barely audible over the squawking of the gulls and, of course, the awful foghorn. And as the tide came in for the afternoon, it approached two figures that laid across the rocks.
Puke Boy and Brett.
Just in like my imagination of what a paradise should have looked like, they had a couple towels that brightened up the rocks like the sunshine, and they had a speaker that played something familiar.
The Beach Boys?
I sighed. That was pretty much the opposite of what we did on the rock, and it would certainly give Hailey, Logan Two, and the rest of the gang the wrong impression.
And as we climbed onto the shore with bags in our hands, their song of choice was indeed Kokomo by The Beach Boys. I assumed it was Brett's idea.
"Just another day in paradise," Logan One said over the water crashing onto the shore. The sea wasn't too rough that day, but it crept up on their towels every time it came in.
Brett nodded and stood up. "Hey, Kim Possible, let me help you with your stuff."
"Shit, she does look like Kim Possible today. I thought I was going to marry her until I was, like, eleven," Logan One said.
I looked down at my black turtleneck, which combined with the red hair apparently made me Kim Possible. I could live with that comparison.
"What are you two doing?" I asked as Brett took a few of the grocery bags from me and looked through the contents.
He didn't even reply to my question. Instead, he said, "I didn't ask for bugs, Reagan." He turned to face Logan One. "Kim Possible is so hot."
"Those aren't for you. They're for the Venus flytraps. And Kim Possible is nothing more than a bunch of pixels," I replied and took the bag back from him.
"The sexiest set of pixels my fifth-grade ass had ever seen," Logan replied, and I rolled my eyes.
At least he would have liked me in fifth grade, for what it was worth.
"Oh, yeah. Makes sense. You practically starved the poor little plants until this point, so I don't know how they're even still alive," Brett said.
"It's because carnivorous plants don't move, so they don't need much food to have enough energy to survive," Hailey said.
I hesitated. "That's—not exactly true. They still photosynthesize for energy."
She plastered on a condescending smile, then waved her hand in dismissal. "I think I know what I'm talking about."
"I don't really think you do," I said, and Jia shook her head.
"It doesn't matter who's right. What matters is that we're all here together, and we're going to have a good time supporting women in STEM, right?" Jia said.
Wrong.
But instead of actively not supporting her, I decided that it would be a much better option to avoid her. That way, neither one of us got hurt, and I didn't have to listen to her spew insults and incorrect information. I would just lock myself in Carter's microscope room and not talk to anyone besides Puke Boy, Jia, Carter, Brett, and Logan Two. Maybe Darrell. Maybe.
We headed back into the house, and Jia took the newcomers in one direction for a tour (which would probably be better than the one Darrell gave us some two months prior) and I went in the other to the hall with Blue and Racecar. Both had a yellow tint to them, and with the nutrients the flies would provide, they would hopefully restore to their vibrant green.
"That should help them," Logan said as he followed me inside, and I nodded and handed him the container. "To be fair, they're pretty far from their natural habitat, and that has to be a reason they're not exactly thriving."
"That and our terrible parenting skills," I said.
"That too." He smiled, then picked a fly out of the container, held it up to the sunlight coming in from the window, and as he placed it into Racecar's mouth, he opened his mouth at the same time, then bit down.
I giggled.
And he claimed that he had not a drop of empathy in his abyss of a soul.
And when he fed his plant another fly, he did the same thing.
"You're so cute," I said, and my eyes widened. I whipped around, and fortunately for me, there was no one else in the room.
"Shut up," Logan One said, and I decided that it was the best course of action.
With twice the regular amount of people on the island, I had to be twice as careful about what I said and what I did around Logan.
Out of all of Jia's ideas, this had to have been right up there for the worst, along with irritating Darrell every second of every day.
"You know, there's another Logan here now. But he already conceded the alpha Logan position, so you don't have to worry about that," I said.
"I might just punch him in the face anyway for invading our island."
"He's actually kind of nice, unlike some other people. He listened to me talk about whales for almost an hour."
Logan rose his eyebrows. "I bet you he thinks Kim Possible is hot too."
"Bond over your love of Kim Possible, then. I'm going to lock myself away, so I can focus on identifying the rest of the whales we saw today. Don't disturb me unless there's a hurricane, it's time for the seal watch, or there's food."
"There's coffee made for you," he said, and once again, I scanned the area to make sure it was clear.
I smiled. "You're the best. Oh, and you might want some too. I know you don't like people, so I got us something to make it a little more tolerable."
"A knife to stab them with?"
"No. We have the sword in the game room for that. I bought a really cheap rosé, which should hopefully take the edge right off of you this evening."
He didn't say anything for a moment, then, after collecting his thoughts, said, "I thought I was going to be the thoughtful one today. Fuck, Rea."
"Sorry," I said, and before I gave him the chance to say anything else, I took the container of flies and headed into Carter's microscope room to be left alone for a while to focus on my work.
Logan One certainly wasn't one for people, and I wasn't either. I could just deal with them a little more nicely.
My head continued to ache, and before I could think of another (perhaps more valid) solution, I stopped in my tracks and mumbled, "Oh, the coffee."
If my Logan was sweet enough to make it for me, then I just had to drink it. There had to be some moral obligation, or at least a societal norm, that said so.
I set my camera and laptop down on a table, and when I headed into the kitchen, a small crowd gathered around Brett and Jia, presumably for their tour of the house. Even Darrell stood in the kitchen along with everyone else, and he stood in front of the coffee pot. I mumbled a quiet excuse me.
"Miss Possible," Darrell said as he moved out of my way.
I shook my head. "Are you joining in on this?"
"You're dressed exactly like Kim Possible, so I don't know how you expect us not to talk about it," Darrell said, then looked down at the floor. "I always liked the evil girl, though, because she's way prettier than Kim Possible could ever dream of being."
Hailey laughed, and Darrell glared at her. She stopped laughing.
"Shego? But she's evil," Brett said.
"That's the problem I always seem to have with women. It's that I always like the evil ones, except for Jia, of course, and all they do is manipulate me," Darrell said.
"Thank God," Jia muttered. "I thought that opposites were supposed to attract, but I guess assholes like other assholes."
A person walked up beside me, and when I looked up from my pouring, there was Logan Two.
"Is this friendly banter, or do they actually hate each other?" he asked, and I shrugged.
"It's probably hatred, but I'm not one hundred percent sure," I said.
I took my coffee and headed back to work on my whales.
"What are you up to?" Logan Two asked before I could even leave the room, and I let out a drawn-out sigh inside my mind.
On the outside, I smiled. "Just finishing up the whale research from earlier. I'll see you later."
"Can I come?"
I hesitated. "I, uh, sure."
What was so difficult to understand about the words, "I'll see you later?" Where was the misunderstanding?
But the reason they were supposed to be on the island was to gain an understanding of what we did, so it was important for me to do my part.
I was going to need half of my body weight in caffeine and half of that bottle of cheap wine to keep all of this up.
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Thank you so much for reading! I know I say that every time, but I mean it every time. You guys keep me sane, or at least as sane as I can possibly be.
What do you guys think of Hailey and Logan Two? What do you think in general?