Girl at Sea by Maureen Johnson Page A

understanding this talk of floods, and she certainly didn’t want Marguerite dwelling on her father’s death tonight. “You know how cook gets. The last time we were late, she threw a spoon at Jenkins.”
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    Jonathan didn’t seem to hear any of this, or at least he didn’t seem to care about Jenkins and the spoon at the moment. He was staring at the letter.
    “A vast, ancient society, lost under the waters,” Marguerite said.
    There was a thoughtful silence, filled only by the smell of the waiting goose and Marguerite’s aunt’s pained looks.
    “I asked you here tonight because I had something to tell you,” she said. “I have to finish what he started. I leave in a week’s time for Pompeii.”
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    At Sea
    Clio woke up when the world shook. She looked up from her fluffy pocket of comforter. There was bouncing. Big bouncing.
    This was no good. She wanted the world to be silent and still so that her head would stop spinning. She looked to her right.
    All she could see was a little tuft of blond hair coming up out of the folds of a second comforter.
    She turned the other way and was blinded by a powerful bolt of sunlight coming in through the little window. She shielded her eyes and slipped out of the bed, sinking into the decadent carpet to look out at the view. Italy seemed to be gone, replaced by sapphire-colored water that stretched in all directions. They were moving through it very quickly, pounding the waves into submission with sheer velocity.
    Clio took a quick inventory of herself and her situation.
    She wasn’t exactly sick, like she had been after the margarita mix. She just wasn’t feeling great. It felt like someone was 98

    tapping on her forehead. She’d had worse stomachaches after too many sweet Thai iced teas; this was only a minor annoyance.
    Mostly, she just felt confused. She needed a shower. That would help.
    She stumbled over to the glorious bathroom. One empty and one half-full champagne bottle and two sticky mugs sat on the sink. The shower had a temperature knob in degrees Celsius.
    She took a guess as to what temperature she wanted and was promptly scalded, then frozen, then scalded again. She ended up backing up to the very edge of the shower stall and cautiously reaching in for the water. The boat hit some choppy waves, forcing her to cling to the bar on the wall. After this valiant effort, she gave up, bounced her way back into the bedroom, and put on a shirt and a pair of pink pajama bottoms.
    Coming down the circular stairs was a much scarier process than it had been before when the boat was docked. There was no one in the galley, so she put the kettle away and left the mugs in the sink. No one was in the living room or the dining room or at the back of the boat. Obviously, someone had to be steering, so she went out to the deck and up the back stairs. The speed of the boat made the air cool, and there was a fine mist caught in it. She held on tight as she pulled herself up the steps to the wheelhouse.
    The wheelhouse was at the very top of the boat, a tight room with three walls of darkened glass. Clio opened the door. The wheelhouse was just as posh as the rest of the boat—more leather seats and lots of fancy stuff. Martin stood in front of a massive panel of tiny screens and readouts, one hand on a steering wheel.
    Julia, her father, and Aidan were looking over a map that was 99

    spread out on the floor. Clio had seen maps like that before, back when they were working on Dive! They were maps of shipwrecks and sunken objects, ordinarily used by the military or commercial boats to prevent crashes. There was also a small box of rocks down by Julia’s foot.
    “We’re moving,” Clio said to the group. “Where are we going?”
    “It’s eleven o’clock,” her father said, folding the map quickly.
    “Nobody’s had any breakfast.”
    Clio looked at the four able-bodied human beings in front of her and wanted to ask them why they hadn’t fed themselves, but from the