Mer!

Chapter One (Some Bad News)

The summer I turned sixteen was the valley of my life.

My dad—Jonah Preston, his name was Jonah Preston—was gone, and he'd been gone since May. The last I'd seen of him was on a muggy dock in a bustling portside. He was the captain of a massive fishing trawler, the Consuelo, which he'd named after my mom a month after they met. Around us, greasy seamen shouted and hauled crates and machinery onto her decks, but he and I stood face to face. He struggled with his tongue. I have no idea what was going through his head (I never did, with my dad), but there was a goodbye he just couldn't get out his throat. It ravaged his heart something wild, though; I could see it in his eyes. In the end, he just swallowed, clapped me on the shoulder with his weary, thick-skinned hand, and called me "Son." Then he turned and walked aboard, and the gangplank retracted behind him. I was left there in the shadows, staring upwards at Consuelo's great hull—a tall, iron sea-cliff I could never hope to climb.

He steered her and a crew of thirty-one men to the untapped wilds of the South Atlantic on the longest voyage they'd taken yet. It's disturbing how quickly it takes to forget someone's voice.

Back on my lonely shores, I wasn't up to much. I didn't have all too many close friends. And I'd hang out with them from time to time, but where they were all I had, they had less space in time to spend with me. (Family, vacations, friends from outside the Irish Channel).

In the long spaces between the days where I actually did things, my days flew by with the blurred monotony of pages flipping under a thumb. Every night, I had dinner at the Duponceau's, our neighbors. Ms. Lucy Duponceau had been Mom's best friend.

And during the day, I spent hours on the old grey couch, the shades down, munching on baby carrots and veggie straws, and watching X-Files reruns on our old box TV. But really, I was daydreaming about things that were never going to happen.

For instance:

One day, I dreamed about Echo coming back.

Her name is actually Julissa Noah, but back when I was a lot younger, I was so quiet and shy that no one ever heard me when I spoke up. So she would repeat what I said, but louder: my echo.

About three years ago, Echo abruptly fucked off from the Irish Channel, New Orleans to Florida Institute of Technology to pursue a sudden passion in marine biology. She'd always told me, for as long as I knew her, that she wanted to open a diner, and she never explained what changed her mind. At first, we talked every day. But with time, the emails and AOL chats radioactively decayed from days, to weeks, to months, to silence.

It felt kinda like she died. But not like the cruel sweep of grief when someone just up and suddenly dies—more as a ghost which lingers in the after but, day by passing day, fades into the next life until it's just gone, and you're left not devastated, but haunted. Echo haunted me. Three years, and I still missed her all the time. She was my best friend. My history was inexpressible without her name.

Smoke curled from between the Smoking Man's fingers in Skinner's dark office on the grainy screen, but in my sunny imagination, Echo comes back home for me. She takes me out on a little research dinghy—that's what marine biology people do, right?—and we spend long hours turning brown out on the Gulf. Then, at night, she takes me to parties with her cool, nerdy college friends. Rum-drunk under neon lights, they become my friends. I am champion of the silent, epidemic fantasy: the unremarkable teenage boy who falls in with the dangerously cool older crowd.

In my mind, her friends had names, and I felt the sun on my half-Cuban skin. I dreamed it so hard that it seemed more real than the room around me.

Someone knocked on the front door.

I ignored it the first time. As Mom always said, don't open the door if you're not expecting anyone. It's probably a Jehovah's Witness, ay Dios. If they really want to see you, they'll knock again.