Chapter 11
Rylan Cameron
Call sign: Minnow
Rylan knelt on the carpet of the salon, sketchbook on his thighs. Lightning pulsed through his right arm, and the heel of
his hand ached, but still he drew. He’d been drawing since yesterday, since they’d left land behind. It kept him calm, curious
even. He was counting the hours until they would reach their first dive destination tomorrow.
“Ah, there you, Rylan!” Francis materialized, a plastic mannequin’s head and torso tucked under his arm.
Rylan blanched. CPR training was one of the cornerstones of being a rescue diver, something Francis was determined both his
children would be, because there was no activity or hobby in their lives that Francis did not want the Camerons to maximalize.
Rylan couldn’t enjoy art without being prompted to research curators at museum galleries. He couldn’t admire the surface of
the sea without a thorough explanation of bathymetry and plate tectonics. And he certainly could not take an open water dive
course without then completing Advanced, Rescue, and someday Master levels.
If only he could be like Tia, who blew through Francis’s checkpoints with effortless disinterest.
Francis placed the mannequin in front of his son. He plucked the sketchbook from his hand and flung it on the sofa, leaving Rylan feeling amputated.
“Before we get started, I think it might help if you get the mannequin a name. Motivation, yes?”
Rylan nodded, but motivation wasn’t what he needed. “Okay. Uh . . . Nemo,” he said decisively, pocketing his pencil. He was
in his third read of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Captain Nemo was his favorite character, possibly in all of literature.
Francis clicked his tongue. “Like the clown fish? Well, whatever works for you, son. Now, do you at least remember the song
that uses the right rhythm for chest compressions?”
Rylan swallowed. He had tried to explain to his father that CPR training wasn’t for him, that he couldn’t act under pressure
to save his life, let alone someone else’s.
“U-um . . . it’s, um . . .”
Francis snapped his fingers. “Come on, Rylan. People could be dying. You need to know this off the top of your head.”
People dying. People dying because of diving accidents or storms. People dead because he couldn’t save them.
What is it? What’s the song? How many chest compressions in a minute? How many, how hard, what place, what strength, what,
oh God, oh God . . .
“Rylan.” Francis sat across from Rylan and took his hands firmly. He placed them on Nemo’s sternum. “Like this.” He pushed
his son’s hands up and down while muttering the lyrics of “Stayin’ Alive.” “Got it?” he said after a minute.
Rylan didn’t know how to respond. “I can try,” he offered and mimicked to the best of his ability what Francis had done.
“That’s fine,” Francis said finally. “Now add in the breaths.”
Rylan repeated the compressions. How many times until he did rescue breathing?
Twenty? Thirty? And was it three breaths or four?
Or maybe it was two. He squeezed his eyes shut.
He wasn’t stupid, but damn did he feel like it.
Oh shit. He’d lost count of where he was.
Rylan hesitated, then stopped and leaned down to give Nemo a fake rescue breath.
Francis groaned and sat back on his heels. “Congrats, son. Nemo’s dead.”
Rylan kept his expression neutral. Failure was familiar. He felt almost at home in Francis’s random assessments followed by
an unsurprised disappointment.
“You’re not helping him, Francis.” MJ took up the entire doorway, even slouched.
Francis made a sound in the back of the throat that was an amalgamation of a scoff and a snarl. “He needs this skill to pass
the rescue diving course.”
“I’ve certified hundreds of people as rescue divers.” MJ kept talking as if Francis hadn’t spoken. The air between them seemed
to hum. “And if any of them was as worked up as him, I’d stop. He can’t learn when he’s panicking.”
Francis threw up his hands. “Then he’s never going to learn. Your input is appreciated but unnecessary. I can handle my kid.”
MJ had Francis’s full attention now. She rubbed at her chest, right below her collarbone. “Something’s not right about the
route you’ve mapped out,” she said. “I came to tell you. Since you’re captain and all.”
Francis stood and crossed the room. “The route’s fine.”
MJ blinked at him. “The coordinates, they—”
Francis tossed his hands in the air. “All right, all right, I’ll go take a look. Be right back.”
He left, and Rylan released his own breath. He realized he’d been clenching the pencil in his pocket so tightly that it had
snapped in two. He dropped the pieces on the ground and stared at them.
“How’s he got you like that?” MJ asked.
“What? What do you mean?” Keep breathing. Keep calm.
She came and sat on the ground with him, picking up Nemo by the face and tossing him aside. “All quiet and jumpy. What’d he
do to get you all worked up?”
“He’s . . . my dad.”
“My old man used to smack my bottom till I howled, but he never spooked me so bad as that.”
Rylan tried but failed to imagine a young MJ getting spanked. “I’m not spooked.”
MJ clicked her tongue and leaned forward, hands steepled in front of her. “Look. I figure you’ve been denying whatever’s going
on for so long that you don’t know how not to deny it. Hard to break a habit like that. But the body doesn’t lie, and you’re
spooked as hell. Tense and nervous, and it’s got something to do with him.”
Rylan’s lower jaw trembled against his will. He had his arms wrapped around his knees, his eyes locked with MJ’s. He opened
his mouth to inhale, and it morphed into a dry sob.
MJ lingered within arm’s reach, her gaze pinning him to the carpet. “Well?”
“I . . . I . . .”
She reached over, took him by the shoulder, and gave him a hearty shake. Rylan’s teeth rattled, and his mind went slack.
“Tell me,” she ordered.
So he did.
Rylan felt detached as he spoke, like he wasn’t inside his body to make the call of what words to use, of when to breathe
or where to look. He watched it from outside himself, the world on mute, and even though he knew what he must be saying, he
couldn’t hear it himself.
All he could concentrate on was MJ’s fingers digging into his bones.
MJ absorbed what he was saying like the beach would the tide. She let it wash over her, rinse through her, rattle pebbles and erode footprints and change her coloring to a darker shade. When Rylan was done, it was her turn to speak, but she didn’t. Or maybe she did and Rylan still couldn’t hear.
The tinny buzz inside his ears faded just as Francis walked back into the room. MJ removed her hand and stood so fast that
she looked like a wall that had risen from the carpet between Rylan and his father.
“Go up top,” she ordered.
Rylan stood, unsteady on his feet, and headed to the companionway, shutting the hatch to contain the tempest he’d left behind.
He clung to the cap rail, sucked in the fresh air, swallowed and blinked and tried to reset himself, but he couldn’t.
Why had he told MJ? What happened at home with his father this last year was not something meant to be shared or dislodged.
It was part of him, the space between his bones, the thing that trapped his breath. It wasn’t meant to be seen by anyone unless
they sliced his belly open. Rylan hardly knew MJ, not really. She had sailed with them on and off over the summers, and she
was friends with Tia, but she hadn’t been there when it mattered. When everything fell apart.
Yet now she knew. He felt hollowed. Excavated. She had practically forced it out of him.
Rylan needed to see Tia, but she was in their cabin, and he would have to pass his father and MJ to get to her. But without
Tia, he could never quite banish the ripples in his gut. Without Tia, everything went wrong. Without Tia, Rylan was in the
house again, alone and abandoned and—
“Don’t tell me you’re getting seasick, Mr. Cameron,” a voice called from the cockpit, rhythmic and warm.
Nico.
Rylan turned his back to the sea. Nico was at the helm, casually steering The Old Eileen through the swells. He gestured for Rylan to come sit beside him.
“If you stare at the horizon long enough, your body stops getting so confused on the motion,” Nico advised.
“O-oh, no. I’m not seasick.” Rylan glanced at the horizon all the same. The sun poured, half melted, over the sky. “Just . . .
I get anxious. Sometimes. My dad’s trying to teach me CPR stuff.”
And I told MJ. I really told MJ . . .
Nico nodded knowingly. “I remember that feeling. For me it was English, though. Couldn’t make sense of all the abstract stuff.
Not that I fared much better at math or science.” He laughed self-deprecatingly, watching the sea like a good driver watches
the road.
“That’s the part I don’t get,” Rylan said. “I understand school. I mean, it wasn’t easy, but I could sort through my thoughts.
With this . . . whenever he tries to teach me, my head drains.”
“You can’t be good at everything.” Nico glanced his way, and Rylan’s stomach dipped. “I heard your mom bragging about you
being salutatorian. So you can’t be a genius and a top-notch rescue diver. I mean—” he flashed a grin “—leave some stuff for the rest of us.”
Rylan’s face heated. “I’m not a genius.”
Nico shrugged. “I dropped out of high school my junior year. I was failing all my classes, wasn’t gonna make it anyway. So
trust me when I say salutatorian’s a big deal. At least to me.”
“You dropped out of high school?”
Nico eased the helm to one side, and The Old Eileen adjusted.
“Yeah. I was tired of everyone seeing me as stupid. The Ds and Fs were beginning to affect the person I saw when I looked in the mirror. So I dropped out, skipped town, and got hired with no experience as a deckhand a month later. I get to see the world and learn in a whole different way. Now I’m on track to get my captain’s license by winter. ”
Rylan couldn’t take his eyes off him. Nico de la Vega was like a mythic hero or world wanderer. Maybe Rylan and Tia could
come up with a call sign for him that would capture something to that effect.
“You’re clearly not stupid,” Rylan managed. He hoped Nico could tell he was impressed. Rylan couldn’t be late to first period,
let alone drop out and skip town. What had made Nico so brave? Was it the opposite of what kept Rylan so scared?
“You clearly aren’t either, Rylan,” Nico replied.
Rylan drew his knees up to his chest.
Nico faced him, holding the wheel steady with one hand. “You wanna try steering her?”
“What? No, no, I couldn’t. I can’t.” Rylan sunk his teeth into his upper lip.
Please don’t make me.
Nico smiled. “No worries. It’s scary as hell. Being in charge of something this big.”
Rylan relaxed again, although he didn’t believe that Nico was afraid of anything.
“How do you . . . handle it, I guess? Especially if you started being a deckhand at like sixteen. How were you not panicked
all the time?”
Nico seemed to consider the question with his whole being, curving over the wheel as he let his chin fall into one hand. “You
know . . . the problem was I wasn’t scared. Not in the beginning.”
“Are you scared now?” Rylan couldn’t help but look up and down Nico’s left arm at the longitude and latitude tattoos. Did
they represent all the places he’d been? Or all the places he wanted to go?
Nico pushed back his curls. “My uncle—Alejandro—was on the same ship as me a few years back. He was cheffing, I was crewing. We weren’t super close. He’s my mom’s distant big brother that I barely knew.”
Alejandro had never told Rylan he had a nephew or even a little sister. Rylan hadn’t even known Alejandro cheffed for other
families. He certainly didn’t need the money. Maybe he needed the space.
“But anyway, a storm was brewing, and the captain ordered us to turn the ship around and go back to port. I did what I was
told, but I was complaining to Alejandro later that night. That I thought the captain was too timid, that storms are half
the fun of the sea. And my uncle got all serious. He sat me down like a little boy and told me a story.”
Rylan’s gaze was locked on Nico’s hands. He had rested his wrists on the helm and was using his hands to animate every word,
punctuating the important parts. With each movement, Rylan felt himself wound tighter in the story. It wasn’t the words themselves;
it was the way Nico breathed life into them.
Nico continued. “Apparently he had been sailing a rich man’s boat a couple decades ago. The rich guy wasn’t there. He’d left
them in charge of chartering the ship to a different port. But my uncle and his two best friends didn’t go straight to the
port. They went storm chasing. The way my uncle told it, the waves looked like tombstones, and the lightning seemed to sever
pieces of the sky. The ship was out of control, and there weren’t enough of them to handle that amount of weather. They were
working so fast to try and trim the sails that they weren’t following all the safety stuff. One of his friends got swept over
the side. No life jacket.”
Nico lowered his hands back to the helm. “They found his body days later. My uncle told me to always fear the sea. It’s the only way to respect her properly. So yeah. The ocean’s fucking terrifying.”
Rylan suppressed a shudder that slid down his spine. People died at sea all the time, he knew. But Alejandro was part of Rylan’s
family, and he had lost a friend. That was personal and close to home. Why hadn’t Alejandro ever told him any of this? Rylan
supposed he had never asked. And maybe it was too painful for Alejandro to talk about.
“Shit,” he said softly.
“Yeah . . . You know, I’m kinda surprised you don’t know that story,” Nico said, tilting the wheel of the ship the other way.
“Why?” Rylan chewed on his upper lip.
“Because,” Nico said as his eyes flickered to his, “your father was the other survivor.”