Chapter 6
Tia Cameron
Call sign: Thimble
The Day Before Departure
Once Tia and Rylan finished settling MJ Tuckett into the crew cabin, the two of them curled up in the salon to watch reruns
of Criminal Minds. MJ, who had arrived toting a marine-grade duffel bag and her large one-eyed Maine coon, went straight to bed, leaving the
twins on the couch with the cat curled in Rylan’s lap. It had been a couple years since they last saw MJ, but the cat seemed
to remember them.
And it’s not like the twins could ever forget MJ.
They had first met her a decade ago when Francis bought the boat. MJ had been hired as a private diving instructor for the
twins and as a first mate for Francis.
They had gotten along more back then, MJ and Francis. MJ used to tell the twins she admired the motto of their father’s yachting
company: Safe to sail in any gale! MJ had seen more than her share of easily avoided maritime accidents. Later, this became a point of contention between them.
MJ was the better sailor, but The Old Eileen was Francis’s boat.
MJ Tuckett, Tia thought affectionately as she petted the cat in her brother’s lap.
Called Mary Jane only under the most dire of circumstances. The self-proclaimed “last old salt” left on the “Lord’s seven seas.”
Call sign: Sherlock.
Meaning: Brilliant. Admirable. Takes no shit.
The Maine coon—whom MJ had christened Sir Franklin after the doomed explorer, but the twins had only ever called Pirate—arched
his back and stalked to the couch’s arm rest, his single black eye fixed on the porthole.
Tia couldn’t wait until morning when The Old Eileen would set off and she could start learning more from MJ. The sailor was the kind of person Tia saw herself becoming (if she
managed to get far enough away from her family to become anything). She wanted to be tough and quick-witted, the kind of woman
who could find a ship’s dead reckoning, adopt a stray cat, and quote the Bible and Beyoncé in the same breath.
Tia’s eyes glazed from the television screen. She had already guessed the murderer, and from the cabin next door she could
hear her parents’ raised voices over the hum of the TV. The whole scene was familiar—her parents arguing (or maybe flirting,
who was to say), the TV playing, her brother detached from the world, focused on his sketchbook. It was like Tia had never
left. Only she felt outside of it all now, like a family she was watching through a window without being invited to come inside.
She turned down the volume on the TV, and her parents’ conversation became clearer.
“—hasn’t even shown up yet, Francis,” her mother was saying. “Are we going to leave tomorrow morning anyway?”
“At oh eight hundred sharp, whether he gets here or not. This ship can be manned by one good sailor alone, Lil. And we’ve
got two and a half.”
Tia picked at the embroidery of the couch cushions. “Looks like the new crew member isn’t gonna come.”
“Hm?” Rylan didn’t look up.
“Nothing.” Tia ruffled his hair. “Whatcha drawing?”
Rylan sat back to reveal his work. She snuggled under his arm as she examined the drawing. Was it a giant squid, or maybe
the creepy kraken Alejandro had tattooed on his arm?
“Sea monster?” Tia guessed.
“Yeah. The one from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Rylan pointed at the oblong head and long, winding tentacles. He really was an incredible artist.
“But there isn’t a monster in that book,” Tia said. “They only think there is. The whole thing turns out to be man-made.”
“And it’s even scarier than what they’d thought.” Rylan pushed back his hair. “Do you like it?”
“It’s terrifying.” Tia elbowed him in the ribs and laid her head on his shoulder while he put the finishing touches on the
monster’s eyes.
“I’m sorry I missed your graduation,” she said into the quiet room.
Rylan’s pencil paused. “It’s okay. I missed yours too.”
He had, of course, but it wasn’t his fault. She was the reason they had been separated in the first place, but she didn’t
want to say that. It felt like bad luck to bring up last summer when they were here again, on the boat. She wished more than
anything that she and Rylan could have faced their senior year together. Boarding school wouldn’t have been so bad if Rylan
had been with her. She would have coaxed him to sneak out and wander the rose garden or skinny-dip in the pond. He could have
helped her with homework and soothed her temper when the nuns got under her skin.
Without him, she’d done it all alone. Tia’s classmates had been nice enough, but they existed in a world Tia had never felt home in.
They were agonizing over which Ivy League to attend, debating if a career in politics or in business would be more worthwhile.
Tia could smoke with them, study with them, and admire Timothée Chalamet’s latest magazine cover in the dorms with them at night, but that was where their point of connection ended.
Tia didn’t want any of the same things. She’d never been sure why exactly. She felt she was plenty ambitious, if ambitions
could include things that wouldn’t make her any money. Tia wanted to see the world, and not in the way her rich friends and
family wanted to see it. She didn’t want Instagram-edited photos of her wearing pastels to match the houses in Cinque Terre
or captions in Google-translated French to remark on la ville de l’amour.
Tia wanted to see things nobody else had seen. She wanted to touch trees and tide pools never marred by human hands. She wanted
to explore a cave no camera had ever captured. If she had lived in the Age of Exploration, Tia would have been on the first
ship to the Spice Islands or the Northwest Passage. She would have charmed queens into granting her an expedition that she
might or might not ever return from.
When winter break came, and all those girls went home to their families, Francis sent a brief text informing Tia she wouldn’t
be coming home. He had decided at the last minute.
Nothing was worse than those weeks, snowed inside a dungeon of a building with only murmuring nuns for company.
Francis and Lila hadn’t just separated Tia from her twin and her best friend by sending her to Connecticut. It was like they’d
severed her arm. Even with Rylan real and breathing beside her again, she still felt phantom pains.
“You didn’t miss anything,” she told him. “The St. Bernadette’s grad party was just a bunch of nuns and sparkling cider in
paper cups.”
Rylan chuckled softly, a wispy sound, like drifting cobwebs. “An event of a lifetime, I bet. Did you give a speech?”
“God no. Did you?”
“Yeah. I was salutatorian. I don’t know if Mom and Dad told you.”
“No . . . they didn’t.”
And neither did you.
It shouldn’t have surprised Tia. Of course Rylan achieved some ridiculous academic standard. He had always been brilliant.
He’d gotten into Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. He’d turned down both to stay with her.
Tia knew he could do so again.
“What did you say?” Tia tried and failed to picture her soft-spoken brother delivering a speech to hundreds of their peers.
“Not much.” Rylan set the sketchbook aside. Their parents’ voices had finally quieted. “I kept it brief. I was afraid I’d
faint or something, so I just kinda closed my eyes and told a story. ‘Plato’s Cave.’”
“Now I really wish I had been there.”
Rylan rested his head on top of Tia’s. “I’m glad you’re back,” he murmured.
“I never wanted to go, Minnow.”
Rylan shifted and withdrew. He was supposed to say I know, Thimble or I never wanted you to go either. Instead he surprised her and said, “But you want to now.”
More than anything.
Here it was. The opportunity to talk about running away. Tia faced him and seized his hand. She had to get her point across.
This was pivotal.
“Rylan. Listen to me. I know what life is like with our family. And now I know what it’s like without them.”
Rylan didn’t pull away, but he dropped his gaze and twirled his pencil between his fingers. “But you hated St. Bernadette’s.”
“I hated it because I was lonely. But I didn’t miss Mom or Dad. I missed you.”
He was shaking his head, and Tia felt a twinge of desperation. She’d never had to work so hard to convince him of something.
“You were lonely, so now you want to cut off our family? How does that make sense? Where are you going to go?”
Tia sat up on her knees. “I have a million ideas. Backpacking the Swiss Alps, getting a job on a tall ship in Australia. Ry,
we could go work somewhere as divers! You could work with marine animals, and I could work on boats, and we could see the
whole world and be each other’s home.”
She leaned back on her heels, not wanting to overwhelm him with her eagerness, but he had to see it, didn’t he? There was
a whole world out there, waiting for them.
Rylan knit his brows. “You . . . haven’t thought this through.”
Tia nearly flinched. She had thought this through. It was all she had been thinking about for months, but Rylan continued before she could speak again.
“You want to do all these extravagant trips. Wouldn’t you rather do all that with money? Mom and Dad’s money? And if you leave
you—what? You think they won’t look for you? You haven’t even picked out a specific place to go to first. And what are you
going to do in a few years when your steam runs out, and you don’t have a degree or a resume, and you have to come crawling
back to Mom and Dad for help?”
Tia stared at him, this boy who looked and sounded like her brother but whose words hadn’t been his own.
They sounded like their parents’.
She sucked in a breath. She wanted to shake him and scream, but she didn’t. If she was ever going to convince him, she had
to be patient. This vacation hadn’t even officially begun.
“I swear, Ry, I have thought this out. I swear it’s going to work. We can pick out what we want to do together, and I swear to God that no matter what happens, I won’t be crawling back. Ever.”
Rylan set his pencil down on the sketchbook, then straightened it so it was parallel to one of the monster’s tentacles. “What
if I stay? Would you . . .”
He couldn’t finish his sentence, but he didn’t have to. Tia understood. It was a question she had asked herself over and over,
one that kept her up at night.
Would she leave him behind?
Tia detangled herself from the couch. She wasn’t ready to answer that question. She would prefer to never find out. “I’m gonna
go hang out on deck for a minute. Watch some stars before bed. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
Rylan kept his head down, leaned into the space she had vacated. “It’s going to be the trip of a lifetime, T.”
“Sure. Night, Rylan. Night, Pirate.” She ruffled the cat’s fur.
“Good night.”
The Old Eileen was different in the dark. Tia climbed onto the deck and stretched out on one of the sunbathing mattresses where she and
her mom had drunk daiquiris together earlier that day. Everything that had been warm and golden was now cool and smattered
with silver moonlight. Tia couldn’t wait to be out at sea where the stars would be even brighter, and the lights of the other
ships in the harbor and of the buildings on land would no longer be visible. They had never sailed overnight before.
The nav lights at the top of the mast peered down at Tia, mismatched eyes in the black. Tia hugged her arms across her chest
in a tight embrace, thinking about her brother belowdecks.
Would I leave him behind?
The answer was no. It had to be no. Rylan could be convinced; she was sure of that. She’d have to do it with more logic than
passion. She’d have to drag him to a mirror and make him look at what he was becoming and think about what he could become.
Running away was terrifying, and Rylan sometimes let himself be ruled by fear. She’d need to be gentle.
The catwalk creaked, and Tia sat bolt upright.
Someone was boarding the ship.
She fumbled for her phone to put on the flashlight, but her fingers slipped, and she dropped it. She watched, helpless, as
a tall, slim figure walked onto the deck. Were they getting robbed? Attacked?
The figure stopped dead, and Tia inhaled sharply. Had it spotted her? A scream boiled up in her throat. She wished Rylan had
come with her.
Then the figure looked straight at her.
“Hey! Is this The Old Eileen?”
Tia blinked. She breathed out, her heart hammering. The man stepped forward into the faint pool of light from atop the mast,
and Tia could see he had a guitar case strapped to his back. He was maybe a couple years older than her, early twenties, with
deeply tanned skin and loose brown curls. He had a dusting of facial hair, and when he moved to adjust his pack, the light
revealed little tattoos up and down his arm.
“Uh, yeah. It is. You must be the new crew member?” she asked, getting to her feet and taking a couple steadying deep breaths.
She felt stupid for having been afraid. She also felt stupid for standing there in her Snoopy pajamas, alone in the dark.
Why had this guy shown up at night anyway?
He crossed the deck with his hand outstretched. His skin was warm and wide, palms lined with calluses.
“Sure am. You must be Captain Cameron’s daughter.”
“Tia,” she told him, and the man grinned disarmingly.
“Very nice to meet you, Tia. I’m Nico de la Vega.”