Fluke

Bonus 5: I'm (Not) on a Boat

In a house miles off of the coast of Maine with six other people, there were limited opportunities to get work done. One of the best times was between the hours of midnight and four thirty, as long as no one knew about it.

Brett came creaking down the stairs before anyone else that morning, even Darrell. I pulled my coffee cup closer to my laptop. Hopefully, he wouldn't notice, and if he did, he wouldn't ask any questions. Logan and I had our seal watch, and I was supposed to go with Robbie and Nastasya to search for whales up north in a few hours.

I already had all of my supplies ready to go for the day so I wouldn't forget anything. It was surprisingly easy to leave the camera behind (which was not as funny as Robbie and Nastasya thought), so I had put it right behind my laptop for safe keeping.

"Wow, and I thought I was up early," Brett said with a laugh. "You were working when I went to bed, and you're working now."

Hopefully he wouldn't put two and two together. He walked over to the icebox, and when he didn't say anything else about what those two data points could mean, I let out a breath and took a sip of coffee.

"Wait a second. You've been up all night again, haven't you?" he asked, and when I didn't respond in the quarter of a second he gave me, he continued. "Reagan, you know how you get when you're sleep-deprived. You end up looking like you're about to kill someone with the sword in the game room."

"It's fine. I just really wanted to identify this whale before I went to sleep, and I did, but then I got sucked into reading the notes in his bio, and then his mother's, and now I'm reading about the biodiversity of Indonesian wildlife on Wikipedia. I know it's still kind of related, but I honestly don't know how I got here," I said.

"Indonesia? I don't even know where that is," Brett said.

"It's west of Papua New Guinea," I said.

"Oh, that really clears it up. Thanks," Brett said. I could live without the sarcasm, though. I got enough of it from Logan.

And besides, I probably wouldn't have known where either country was if they weren't on the little Wikipedia map for reference.

"Just don't tell anyone about this. Jia thinks I need to do a better job of taking care of myself, and Logan hates it when I forget to sleep," I said.

"You don't forget, Reagan. You just make another pot of coffee and pretend that everything is fine."

Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but his point, though correct, was stupid.

Before I could change the subject to what he was planning to make for breakfast, Logan came down the stairs.

I slammed my laptop shut, but with the sun barely rising, he definitely saw the light from the screen. Shit.

"Rea, I'm not even going to waste my breath telling you what you already know, so just do whatever the hell you want," he said.

I frowned. "I'm sorry, but I just—"

Logan interrupted me. "When do you plan on catching up on your sleep?"

"Well, I can't today. We have seal watch, I have to get groceries for the next week or so, and then I have to go look for whales with Nastasya and Robbie." I grabbed the camera from the table and held it up for him to see. "I'm hoping we get some good pictures today. I'm super close to my goal of identifying fifty whales for the summer."

As Jia came down the stairs for the morning, that only left Darrell, Toby, and Carter still asleep. And it was very possible that Carter was just like me and already studying the day's microscopic organisms. I hadn't seen him in a while. Darrell, on the other hand, was still devastated at the news that Rule Number One had been broken for months without him noticing, but what did rules matter when I finally had the courage to let someone in?