Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
“Can we eat it?” The little ginger kid—drool clinging to the corner of his mouth—asks for what has to be the third time in five minutes.
“I wouldn’t,” I say, just as I did the last two times, while keeping one eye on the girl beside him who seems suspiciously determined to smuggle a specimen into her Hello Kitty purse.
Little freaks. I love them.
The university’s been planning this outreach event for months—a kind of public science day-slash-charity initiative aimed at getting kids engaged with marine life.
When Dr. Kymbert forwarded the volunteer signup, I didn’t hesitate.
Between coursework and lab hours, it felt like a low-stakes way to spend a Saturday doing something useful.
Plus, it’s a good idea. Here, kids grow up with the ocean within arm’s reach—swimming in it, surfing it, hearing it outside their bedroom windows.
Back in Canada, kids barely registered the Atlantic unless it was throwing a nor’easter at their front doors.
Here, the ocean is part of their lives. That proximity breeds familiarity, but not always awareness. And definitely not always education.
Early this morning, the university set up half a dozen booths across the beach lawn, each focused on a different aspect of marine science.
Mine focuses on benthic species—mostly shallow-water invertebrates, the ones kids are most likely to stumble on during tide pool field trips or beach days.
The university provided tanks, signage, handling gloves, and a few laminated info cards, but the real interest comes from letting the kids get close.
Observe, ask, poke—gently. Ideally, leave with one less reason to be afraid of things that move without bones.
Next to me is a booth where kids paint shell replicas and try to match them to the real thing.
Get it right, and they get to toss their painted shell into a shallow return tank with tongs, like tiny marine biologists-in-training.
They’ve been running between our two tables all morning like it’s a competitive sport.
Further down, there’s a seaweed booth offering different local varieties to touch and taste—yes, taste.
One mom gagged. One kid asked if he could replace lettuce in his burger with limu.
Another booth shows off shark teeth from local species, while another offers ocean-themed face painting and temporary tattoos—the cetacean researchist from BIOL 403 is working that one, and she’s aggressively good at dolphin outlines.
At the far end, there’s a ripple tank station that lets kids simulate wave behavior using model surfers and toy boats. They’ve learned that the stronger the wave, the faster they can drown the fake surfer. Chaos. Science. Both thriving.
Theo lifts his head from that last booth and grins when he sees me. He points toward my table, mouthing something I can’t make out from this distance, but his finger is aimed directly at the tank. I didn’t know he’d be here today—or that Holden would, for that matter. But of course he is.
Plenty of students volunteered for this thing, but with booths scattered between the beach and the aquarium lawn—everything from snacks and drinks to Q&A panels and university outreach—they needed all hands on deck.
Naturally, the ripple tank station, the only one that leans more towards oceanography than marine bio, drew Holden and Theo in.
Fitting, considering I could’ve sworn I saw a Karen-adjacent mom earlier trying to correct them about how waves break near the shore. I’m guessing she didn’t realize she was debating with the only two PhD candidates here. Bold choice.
I turn to see what Theo’s pointing at, and yep—my food enthusiast is back. The same redheaded boy from earlier now has his face pressed dangerously close to the water’s surface, eyes wide and very much considering whether a live organism might make a good snack.
“Buddy,” I say gently, trying not to laugh, “I know it looks... tasty. But you’re really not going to enjoy it if you bite that.”
He scrunches his nose. “Then why is it blue? It looks like candy.”
He’s pointing at the Linckia—a bright cobalt sea star, striking even in a tank full of weird little wonders. “Good eye,” I say, nodding. “That’s actually because of special pigments—blue ones, obviously, but also some yellow carotenoids mixed in. Not all sea stars are that color, though.”
I step aside, motioning toward a soft pink one nestled in the corner. “See that? Different species. That one’s pink. Some are orange, some brown. They come in all kinds of shapes and colors, and it has more to do with where they live than what they taste like.”
“Yeah,” he says, still practically nose-to-glass. “Still wish I could taste one.”
I laugh—loudly this time—and tap the edge of the table. “You and me both. But I think you’d be happier with a cookie. There’s a snack stand over there. I bet they have candy that’s blue and edible.”
His eyes light up like I just told him he won a prize. He waves at me, then at the sea stars, and sprints off toward the food.
For someone like me who reads neuroscience journals like beach novels, kids make for unexpectedly fascinating side studies.
In the first few years of life, their brains make more neural connections than at any other time, mapping patterns for taste, sound, sight, touch—all of it.
But once they hit a certain age, they start pruning.
Synapse by synapse, the brain starts trimming the extras, streamlining its system.
The problem is that for a while, everything competes for top priority—candy, sea stars, gravity, pirates.
It’s chaos in there. Brilliant chaos. And I love watching them go.
The next couple hours fall into a rhythm: waves of kids rotating through the booths, each with varying levels of interest. Some are clearly here because their parents didn’t want them glued to a screen all day.
Others remind me of myself at that age—completely enamored with anything that lives in saltwater.
Like the girl standing in front of my booth now, staring down at the oyster tank with an intense little frown.
She’s got two messy ponytails held with neon elastics and a pair of orange overalls that look straight out of a picture book.
She plants her hands on the table and squints down into the oyster’s home for the day, expression somewhere between awe and skepticism.
“These are clams, right?” she asks, leaning so far forward her nose nearly touches the plexiglass.
“Oysters, actually. Good guess, though—they’re in the same family.”
Her brow furrows. “Bivalves?”
I blink, surprised. “Exactly.”
She hums thoughtfully, gaze still locked on the tank. “They don’t move much. Is their life boring?”
I glance down at the cluster of closed shells at the bottom, motionless and unbothered. “Not to them. They’re constantly filtering water, cleaning it. We call them foundation species. A lot of marine life depends on them to survive—even if they don’t look flashy doing it.”
She looks back up at me, eyes narrowed like she’s weighing whether I’m a reliable source. Then she points at the water. “So that’s why this tank’s clearer than the others?”
My smile breaks before I can stop it. “That’s a great observation.”
She climbs off the little step stool and circles to the next two tanks, the one with hermit crabs and the one with the cluster of starfish spread along the floor like sleepy pinwheels. Her face twists into a frown.
“You don’t have any mollusks.”
I try not to laugh. “Well, actually, oysters are mollusks.”
“I mean the smart ones.”
“I wish,” I say, sighing dramatically. “But some animals don’t love crowds. Octopuses, for example, are really sensitive—they get stressed when too much is going on around them.”
“I love octopuses,” she says, very seriously.
Now we’re talking.
“Me too,” I say, crouching beside her and pulling my phone from my pocket to show her something. “This is Damon. He’s a Day octopus I work with sometimes in one of the university’s tanks.”
Her eyes light up as she takes the device carefully and stares at the photo—Damon in full display mode, skin pulsing in pale lavender and coppery red.
“Wicked,” she whispers.
Yes. Wicked indeed.
“My uncle sometimes tells me about octopuses and other cephaclopedes.”
“Cephalopods,” I correct with a grin. “Your uncle sounds cool. What did he teach you?”
“That they’re smart and tricky. And that they can get mad. And they change colors. And they have many brains. Sort of.”
“All correct,” I say, only mildly impressed. “And their arms can operate independently from their central brain. That’s how they multitask so well.”
“Do you think they have feelings?”
I pause at that. “I think they have something like them. Some octopuses form bonds with the people who feed or train them. Others throw stuff when they’re annoyed. I don’t know if that’s feelings in the way we think of them, but… it’s definitely something.”
She smiles so wide it nearly knocks me over. “I want to be a marine biologist.”
I put a hand over my heart. “Then I hope I get to work with you someday.”
She beams at me and we sit like that for another couple minutes—her perched on the edge of the table, me crouched beside her—laughing at Damon’s antics and narrating his tiny triumphs.
She’s so locked in on the videos that she doesn’t notice the man who’s just stepped up to the booth—but I do.
Holden.
His gaze flicks from her to me and back again, something unreadable—almost startled—hovering in his expression before he lifts a hand to the back of his neck.
“Penny,” he says, voice gentler than I’ve ever heard it in public. “It’s almost time to go.”
She spins toward him, delighted. “That’s him!” she says, pointing like she’s just revealed a celebrity. “That’s my uncle.”