Matt de la Peña - The Living

Addie fished in silence at the back of the boat, the tarp over her head to protect her from the sun. One thought kept creeping into Shy’s head: how strange that the two of them had ended up here together. They were from opposite worlds. In real life they wouldn’t have been friends in a million years, but out here they were all each other had.

Addie eventually came to fish beside Shy.

She said when it was too quiet her mind got stuck on worst-case scenarios, and she’d have little panic attacks. “So, can you just talk to me?”

“About what?” Shy asked.

“Tell me about your high school. Or how you got the name Shy. It honestly doesn’t matter.”

He shrugged. Addie would never catch a fish on his end of the lifeboat, not with the baited hook so close to his moving oar. It would scare away any potential fish. He didn’t say anything, though. He was better off when they were talking, too.

“My old man used to call me Shy when I was little,” he told her. “And it just stuck.”

“Why though? Were you quiet as a kid or something?”

“Not that I know of.” As Shy pulled the oar feebly through the water, he thought about all the times he’d been asked about his name. He usually made shit up out of boredom. A different story for every new person. But out here, on this broken boat with Addie, it didn’t seem right to make stuff up.

“According to my mom,” Shy told her, “any time I fell or knocked something over my dad would be like, ‘Damn, this kid doesn’t know shit from Shinola.’ It happened a lot, I guess, so he started calling me Shinola. By the time I started school he’d shortened it to plain old Shy. And everyone else just sort of went with it, I guess.”

Addie looked horrified. “And what’s Shinola?”

“Some old brand of shoe polish. The saying basically means ‘You don’t know anything.’ ”

Addie shook her head, staring at him. “That’s like the saddest story I’ve ever heard.”

“Nah, he’s just like that. Always messing around.” Shy wondered what she’d say if she heard the rest. About the abuse and why he eventually left. “Anyways, who knows why some nicknames stick and others don’t.”

They talked about a bunch of other things, too. Addie’s friend back home who got hit by a drunk driver. Her private high school in Santa Monica, where celebrities showed up every afternoon to pick up their kids. The new Lexus she got at the start of summer for keeping a high GPA. Shy talked about his last basketball season and how tight his family was and how messed up everything got when his grandma passed from Romero Disease.

It was like they were getting to know each other while they still had the chance. And Shy realized there might be more to Addie than he first thought. Maybe it was like that with anyone you actually sat down and talked to.

Eventually they wandered on to the subject of love. Addie told him about the two high school relationships she’d had so far, but said neither of them were serious. “With both guys,” she said, “we never actually broke up. We just sort of stopped texting and talking on the phone. Isn’t that weird?”

Shy kept working the oar as he glanced back at Addie. “So, you never been in love, then?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But it’s complicated. Because how do you actually know if you have nothing to compare it to?”

“You probably just know,” he said.

“So, what about you?” Addie stared at him for a few seconds. “Were you in love with that chick you work with?”

“Who, Carmen?” Shy was shocked Addie even knew who Carmen was.

“How would I know her name?” Addie said. “The girl I saw you talking to by the pool before you gave us stuff for Ping-Pong.” Addie pushed her hair out of her face. “She’s pretty.”

“She’s all right,” Shy said. “But we were just friends. We grew up in the same kind of neighborhood.”

“You sure?” Addie said. “I saw how you were looking at her. There was, like, drool on your chin, I’m pretty sure.”

Shy frowned and shook his head. “We were actually in an argument when you saw us.” An odd feeling came over him. Here he was starving and dehydrated, weaker than he’d ever felt in his life, and he was worried about being disloyal. Like it was wrong to even speak of Carmen to anyone else.

“So we’ve both never been in love, then,” Addie said. “It’s sad, isn’t it? Like, what if we never get the chance?”

“You can’t think that way,” Shy told her, though he had just been thinking the same thing.

Addie shrugged and looked over the side of the boat at her fishing line. After a minute or so, she said: “There’s only one thing sadder.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“How you got your stupid nickname,” she said with a slight grin.

Shy turned to her in shock. “Really? ’Cause I don’t know if ‘Addie’s’ the sweetest name I ever heard either.”

She gave him a dirty look and then they both started laughing. Hard. Like their little back and forth was ten times funnier than anything they’d ever heard. He pulled the oar out of the water and kneeled down and just let himself go. Because it felt good to laugh. He didn’t care how much it hurt his ribs.

After a while, though, Addie’s laughter changed.

Her face crinkled up and Shy saw that she was crying in silence. He dug the oar back into the ocean and kept his eyes fixed directly ahead so she wouldn’t think he was watching.

The sun started to set, and Shy was now on the opposite end of the boat. But Addie still wanted to talk. “Tell me more about your grandma,” she called out to him from the front of the boat.

“My grandma?” Shy asked.

Addie pulled the oar out of the water and faced him. “It’s just, I heard Romero Disease was made up by the media to scare people.”

Shy recast his line with the last of his hooks, trying not to get pissed off at her ignorance. “Didn’t seem made up when her eyes filled with blood and she started clawing at her own skin. Or when she died within two days.”

“I didn’t mean—” Addie looked down at the oar in her hands. “God, that’s what happened? I’m sorry.”

“Who told you it was made up?”

Addie turned back to the ocean and resumed digging into the water with the oar. “My dad. I figured he’d know since he spent a bunch of time in Mexico the last couple years. That’s where it started, right?”

Shy wished he could tell Addie the truth. That her dad was an idiot. But it didn’t seem right with him missing, so instead he told her what he knew about Romero Disease. She was right, it had started in Mexico and then crossed into U.S. border towns like his. He listed all the symptoms his grandma had, explained how quickly her condition got worse and how freaked out his whole family was when she died so quickly of dehydration. He also told Addie, for the first time, how his nephew had it now, too.

“I’m so sorry,” she mumbled.

It went quiet between them for a while, and then she cleared her throat and added: “I don’t understand why he would lie to me. I’m not some naïve little girl he has to protect from reality.”

A few minutes later Shy felt a powerful tug on his line. He peered over the jagged side of the boat and saw a pale fish, three times the size of the first one he’d caught, fighting to break free of his hook.

He wrapped the line around his shirt-covered hand several times, his heart speeding up in excitement, and lodged his foot against the base of the boat.

Addie was beside him now, peering over the side at the struggling fish. “Look how big it is!” she shouted.

Shy jerked the line toward him again, wrapping the slack around his wrist. He did this several times, as fast as he could, watching the fish get closer and closer to the surface. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted movement—one of the sharks was darting toward the fish.