Page 1 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

Chapter 1

Neri

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who show up to a nine a.m. boat at nine a.m., and then there are people who show up at six forty-five with a backup laptop battery and a thermos of coffee strong enough to qualify as a controlled substance.

I am the second kind of person. Unapologetically so.

The working dock at Saltford Bay smells like diesel and old bait. Gulls scream at each other over a lobster crate like the poor creature owes them money. Somewhere down the row of boats, a winch complains. And past all of it, past the pilings and the moored hulls and the entire reasonable world, the ocean just sits there.

Big. Gray-blue. Patient.

I keep my eyes on my checklist.

My talk slides are looking good. They’re backed up in three places, one of which is a USB drive zipped into the interior pocket of my windbreaker jacket like I’m smuggling state secrets. My clothes are neatly sorted for the short trip, with my good blazer folded in a garment bag with a precision that would make the matron at a military academy weep with joy. I’m officially ready for the ceremony.

I have one year left in my postdoctoral employment contract and it’s metaphorically riding my shoulder like a parrot that only says you’d better nail this talk.

And I will. Nail it, I mean. I’ve been preparing for a moment like this my entire life.

The AETHER inauguration is seven days out, on an island far off the Maine coast, and today’s boat carries the science party over for the run-up week: commissioning, rehearsals, and then, Sunday next, the inauguration ceremony, in front of every senior scientist whose grant decisions will determine whether I have a career or a cautionary tale by this time next year. I have the “future of the field” slot. Twenty minutes to convince a room full of people twice my age that Dr. Nerissa Marsh is a serious researcher with a serious future.

Not the pretty mermaid. Not the diversity hire. The scientist.

Which is why I’m reviewing my slides on a bait-stained bench at six forty-five in the morning instead of thinking about the ocean.

I’m not thinking about the ocean.

The ocean, for the record, is thinking about me. I can feel it doing it, the way you can feel someone staring at the back of your neck in a seminar. The tide shifts against the pilings below me, and something under my ribs shifts with it, slow and traitorous, and I put my eyes back on slide fourteen where they belong.

Slide fourteen has a typo.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” I fix it with the fervor of a woman performing surgery on her own reputation.

There. Perfect.

Everything is perfect and under control. I repeat this like a mantra in my head even though it’s kind of crazy. I’m kind of crazy. A control freak, like my ex would call me.

He wasn’t wrong.

My phone buzzes. A name lights up the screen, and the knot in my chest loosens one full notch. I can always count on Dad to be right on schedule.

Sunday morning is when he calls me. Seven a.m. my time, four a.m. his, because my father is a lunatic who has watched the sunrise from his office for thirty years and calls it discipline.

“You’re up early,” I say, instead of hello.

“You’re on a dock,” he says, instead of hello. “I can hear the gulls. How’s my favorite scientist?”

“You can’t call me that. You work with four hundred scientists.”

“And yet.” There’s a slurping sound, tea, the awful smoky kind Mom used to say tasted like a campfire after the rain. “It’s a big day for you. Walk me through it.”

So I do. I tell him about the boat and the island and the telescope, and the twenty minutes that are going to determine the entire trajectory of my professional existence. He makes the little mm sounds he makes when he’s actually listening, not the other mm sounds, and somewhere in there I catch myself smiling at a broken lobster crate.

This is the humiliating truth about me: I have exactly one person left on this earth I don’t perform for, and he lives three thousand miles away and drinks campfire tea at four in the morning.

“You’ll be brilliant,” he says. “You’re always brilliant. Try to eat something that isn’t coffee.”

“Coffee is a bean. Beans are food.”