Fluke

15: Snotter

"With the rain, it's best if we hold off on using the drone. Maybe next time it'll be sunnier," Robbie said, and when he turned back to face us, his captain hat fell off. "Goddammit."

"You should use bobby pins to clip it into your hair. Your hat won't fall off as much then," Nastasya said.

Robbie pointed up in the air. "That's brilliant. You, Nastasya, are a genius."

A small smile twitched her lips, and she picked up the hat and gave it back to Robbie. "But anyway, as much as I'm sure we all want to play with the new toy, Robbie's right. We can't afford to pay ten thousand dollars to replace it if it gets ruined."

"Ten thousand dollars? Oh my—what?" I stammered.

I could barely be trusted to stay upright, so how could anyone trust me with ten thousand dollars' worth of technology?

"It's an investment. Atlantic Coastal College really wants to draw more people into the marine ecology program, and what you're doing is the coolest thing ever," Nastasya said. "More money, more people. Isn't that the way it always goes?"

She took her spot, standing right next to Robbie's chair, and although there was something about her aura that I wanted for myself, I looked down at the space between my feet.

"We should be arriving at our target in fifteen to thirty minutes, so don't get too comfortable," Robbie said, but I sat down on the bench next to my equipment and curled my legs up to my chest. Rain still snuck in through the door to the cabin, and I rested my head against the case to my crossbow.

Well, not mine. But it was kind of mine.

I shut my eyes and waited for someone to tell me that there were four whales that needed to be photographed and their blubbers to be sampled, but instead, an emptiness sat in my stomach, not from hunger, but from something else.

Although, I was admittedly pretty hungry. For some, Paradise City was more of a vacation experience than for others, and Logan and I had left before Brett made breakfast.

Puke Boy struck again.

I wasn't quite sure what my plan of action would be, but all I knew was that I did not like the fact that he had the audacity to throw up right after we kissed.

That was pretty lame of him.

But my mother taught me a series of rules of life, and number one was to keep my chin up and eyes forward (which was slightly different than Darrell's first rule of Paradise City of having a stick up one's ass), so that was what I planned to do.

When my moment came, I'd handle it like I always did, with a little too much excitement about whales that didn't care about my presence.

Robbie's voice drew me out of my resting state, and I only caught the last part of his statement. "They should be somewhere around here if JT's not lying again. You'd think that he'd stop, because we have a sweet young lady just trying to do her whale identifying thing out here, but that man has no soul whatsoever."

I sat up and wiped a stray drop off my eyebrow. I wasn't sure who JT was, but he seemed kind of rude. Kind of like someone else I knew.

Nastasya sat down beside me with the drone case in her lap, even though it was still raining. Perhaps she loved that drone the same way I loved the crossbow.

"Did you say that there are fin whales in the database?" she asked.

I nodded. "Pretty much every species of whale in the Atlantic has been documented at least a few times. It's been around for ten years, and I'm just the latest addition to the team."