Girl at Sea (5 page)

“We have a table at one of the restaurants in the concourse.

There’s just enough time for some dinner. Everyone is dying to meet you. They know all about you. From Naples, there’s a car to take us all to Sorrento, which is down the coast about an hour.

Your backpack’s open.”

Clio stopped to pull off her backpack before her dad reached it, only to find that she’d been tricked. He triumphantly grabbed the handle of the suitcase and raced ahead. Clio watched her precious pink luggage running ahead.

“Gotcha!” her dad said over his shoulder.

Clio looked at her large red watch. Four minutes. That’s how long it had taken for her to want to go home.
Ollie, Ollie,
save me!
a frantic voice cried in her head. But there was no time to dwell on this, as her father was rushing ahead and rapidly slipping out of sight in the throng of travelers and picker-uppers and car drivers that flocked by the arrivals gate. He dipped into a restaurant with a front display made of Chianti bottles.

“There they are,” he said.

He nodded at a small table at the back. Three people sat there. Clio recognized one of them instantly. He was already standing up and coming over to greet her.

32

“Martin’s here?” she asked.

Martin she could take. That was a good sign. Martin had been her father’s colleague back when her father worked for a software company as a writer. He was a short man, older than middle-aged, with a salt-and-pepper beard. He had never married or had any kids, so he spent his time doing whatever he liked.

Martin also had
two
PhDs and had retired early, simply because he could.

“Clio!” he said, hugging her. “You managed to get here.”

“Just about,” Clio said. “You look a little different.”

“I’ve lost weight,” he said. “All the swimming I’ve been doing.”

The other two people were female, and they were strangers.

They looked almost nothing alike, yet Clio could tell they were related. The younger of the two was a girl with very thick, long blond hair knotted at the top of her head. She had a full body, very curvy, in a Marilyn Monroe kind of way. She wore a deep blue tank top and tiny white shorts that showed off her apricoty tan. Her eyes were absolutely massive and sea blue, but her mouth was tiny. She was gorgeous and glowing. No makeup.

Clio had the strange flash that this was what the person who invented cheese must have been like—a blond dairy goddess.

Clio suddenly felt very overdressed in her jeans (thready though they were) and her oversized blue hooded sweatshirt, covered in stars and Japanese letter patches. She’d done that herself—cutting them out of old T-shirts and sewing them on by hand. Her clothes, ordinarily a source of pride, seemed out of place here. The sweatshirt had felt good on the cold plane, but now she was in Italy, where it was quite hot, even in the airport.

33

Taking it off would mean revealing the normally acceptable pink tank top she was wearing underneath. (Unfortunately, there had been a salad dressing incident when they hit an air pocket somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. She had cleaned herself up as best she could, but she was still just a little too ranch-dressingy for her own liking.)

Off it went, though. Maybe no one would notice.

Next to the cheese girl was a woman who wasn’t blond at all.

Her hair was red and cropped short in a perfect pixie cut. She wore a snug one-piece black shirtdress that showed off her bone structure and a string of African beads around her neck, with a fairly alarming miniature mask set in the middle. It glowered at Clio when the woman stood to greet her, as if warning her not to come any closer. Aside from that, there was one empty chair at the table with a blue messenger bag slung across the back of it. One more person was coming. This was the group.

“Clio,” her dad began, “this is Dr. Julia Woodward of Cambridge University and her daughter, Elsa Åkerlund-Woodward.

Julia is a professor of archeology.”

Julia was the redhead. Elsa was the cheese goddess. And she had a different last name from her mother.

“Hello,” Julia said politely.

“You’re Clio!” Elsa said. “We heard so much about you!”

Julia’s accent was crisp and English. Elsa’s was sort of English, occasionally lapsing into something Clio couldn’t quite place.

“Have you taken care of the ordering?” her dad asked Elsa.

“It’s all sorted. I just got you a pizza, Clio. And a Coke. I thought that would be okay.”

There was a niceness about this girl. Clio could tell that she’d 34

really tried to pick something that Clio would like, even though she didn’t know her yet.

“Pizza and Coke is great, thanks,” Clio said.

“Elsa speaks Italian,” her father said. “She handles the talking for us.”

“I’m the translator,” Elsa said with a smile. She had large, rounded teeth. Clio could tell that she’d never had braces because her teeth were just a little unevenly spaced, a few of them slightly crooked. But they were naturally nice and real. Unwhitened.

Unfussed with. Dairy goddess teeth.

“We have everything we need,” her dad said, looking at Julia.

“Translator. Artist.”

“We don’t actually need an artist,” Julia answered. “Not that we don’t want to have one along.”

There was something lurking at the back of this remark, something in the limp smile—something that told Clio that Julia hadn’t been too excited when she heard Clio was coming along. She was grateful when her little glass bottle of Coke arrived. It was kind of warm, and the glass that came with it only had two ice cubes in it, but it was still liquid, and it gave her something to do. She reached for it.

“That’s quite a tattoo,” Elsa said.

Clio winced. She hadn’t been paying attention. She was usually conscious of her tattoo and careful about how she first presented it to people. Everybody always made a big deal about it.

Except for Ollie. He had simply admired it and moved on.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “It’s . . . bright. I know.”

“It’s really nice,” Elsa said. “Is it new?”

“No. I’ve had it for a few years.”

35

“A few years?” This was Julia. It was so obvious when one parent was judging another.

“There’s a very interesting story behind that,” Clio’s dad said.

“Clio was in a bit of an accide—oh. What’s up?”

He was addressing someone right behind Clio.

“I had to stand out in the taxi lane to get wireless connection,”

said a male voice behind them. “We’re all set to go. Everything will be waiting for us to load in at the dock.”

A guy had appeared by the side of the table. He noticed Clio and stopped. Cold. Just stared at her. He had to have been expecting her, but her arrival seemed to startle him.

“This is Clio,” her father explained. “Clio, this is Aidan Cross.

He’s Julia’s assistant.”

This was an interesting development. There was a guy in her father’s gang. He wasn’t massive, redwood-tall like Ollie. Compared to Ollie, no guy could ever really look tall again. He was just a few inches taller than Clio. All of his clothes were just a few sizes too large. His red polo shirt hung loose and free. His jeans were slightly too big at the waist and knees, and they spilled down over his ankles onto his Chuck Taylors, also red.

He had matched his shirt and shoes, whether or not he meant to. His hair was light brown, and his haircut had either been incredibly expensive or done for free by some drunk friend with scissors and a misguided sense of his own talent. With the right styling products in it, it would have looked like one of those cutting-edge magazine cuts that go in about nine directions. But it didn’t have any of those in it, so it traveled in its many directions without any support.

But none of those things were really striking about Aidan.

36

What
was
striking was his face. It wasn’t exceptionally handsome. It wasn’t warm and welcoming like Ollie’s. It was just slightly oval, kind of bony and severe, and it looked to her like it required a bit of an effort to keep itself still—like it might do things without his knowledge or consent. His eyes were round, dark green, and extremely bright, almost hard at the center.

Those eyes didn’t miss a thing. She was sure of it.

Those eyes were taking in Clio now, and it put her on her guard.

“So . . .” he said, shifting his focus to her father. “We got the—”

“We’ll talk about that later,” her dad said quickly.

“Got the what?” Clio asked.

“Oh,” her dad said, trying too hard to sound casual. “Just some things for the boat. Your mom told you about the boat, right? Just boat stuff.”

Now that the introductions were over, the real awkwardness could begin. Julia’s eyes lingered on the spot where the ranch dressing had been. Aidan’s gaze landed on her tattoo.

The realization was settling in—they were all about to get on a plane and then a boat together. Clio watched as everyone looked around quickly, unsure of what to do next. There were varying levels of familiarity. She and her dad. Her dad and Martin. Her dad and Julia. Her dad was the common deno-minator in all of this, and that was some bad math.

A waiter came and started setting down plates. Most of them contained pasta or small pizzas. There was one exception. Elsa’s plate was ringed with oysters still in their rough shells. The shells clinked daintily as they were set down.

37

“Eating raw shellfish is an act of insanity,” Aidan said.

“Especially in an
airport
.”

“I guess I’m crazy,” she said with a smile, offering an oyster to him.

“And I guess I just don’t want neurotoxic poisoning,” he said, putting up his hand against the offending oyster. “I’m weird like that.”

“I’m still alive.”

“For now,” Aidan replied easily, his green eyes moving from Elsa to Clio. He raised an eyebrow.

“Oyster, Clio?” Elsa offered. “Clio looks like an oyster girl.

Oysters are the food of love.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Clio saw Julia flash her watch at her dad.

“Oh,” her father cut in. “We’re actually in kind of a hurry.

Everybody eat fast.”

Elsa and Aidan were still looking at Clio and the wobbly, faintly purplish oyster that Elsa was holding up.

“Take it in one go,” Elsa said. “Drink it back. All of it. Try not to chew it.”

It seemed to matter a lot to both of her onlookers whether or not she was going to eat that oyster. Impulsively, she reached over and glurped it back. Her instincts kicked in enough to yelp,
Chew!
But it was too late. The oyster was glooping down her throat. So she started to cough and choke as it slid.

“Oh . . .” Elsa said lightly. “You’re choking. It’s okay; it happens.”

She pressed the bottle of warm Coke into Clio’s hand. The soda calmed the reaction a bit and washed the oyster farther 38

down, where it couldn’t cause any more trouble. Clio quickly wiped at her watering eyes.

“You all right there?” Aidan asked, leaning back with his arms across his chest.

Clio nodded. It was too soon to speak. Her voice would have come out very hoarse and gaggy.

“Warned you,” he said, smirking.

“But look! She’s alive!” Elsa said, licking her fingers. “Isn’t that
amazing
, Aidan?”

“It’s the law of averages. One probably won’t kill you.

Probably.”

But he was smiling just a little as he said it. Clio couldn’t tell if she was invited to this quasi-flirt fest or if she was just a prop.

“I knew you were like me,” Elsa said. “An oyster girl. I
knew
it. We’ll get along.”

There were a few minutes of concentrated pizza-eating after this bizarre interlude. It was good pizza. The crust was thin, and the cheese was smoky. There were large leaves of fresh, peppery basil on top. After eight hours on an airplane, during which she’d only had a greasy (and small) chicken casserole and a wilted salad (the cause of the ranch-dressing incident), this pizza was heaven. Clio had to stop herself from eating too fast and searing the inside of her mouth. She carefully sliced the pizza into tiny bites.

Aidan wasn’t taking the same precautions. Clio looked up to find that he had sliced his into two halves, folded them, and eaten them in about five bites each, washing each one down with a swig of his Coke. The whole thing was over before Clio had even started into hers properly.

39

“You’re the girl from the Dive! box,” he said, pushing his plate away.

It had been a long time since Clio had been called the girl from the box, but she couldn’t deny it. She’d been featured on the box of the board game
and
the spin-off video games.

“When I was twelve,” she corrected him. “It’s not me anymore.”

There was an announcement in Italian. Elsa perked up.

“That’s us,” she said. “We have to go. They’ve already started boarding. How did we miss that first call?”

“Let’s hit it!” Clio’s father stood. He pulled out his wallet and took out a large handful of euro notes, dropping them on the table. “That should cover it.”

They grabbed up their stuff quickly. Clio was the last to leave the table. As she walked off, the waiter came over and took the money. From the joyous look on his face, Clio could see that her father had overpaid by some ridiculous amount.