Aunt Rachel inspects the array of ingredients on the counter. Smiling, she picks up a bright green lime. “Key lime bars again?”
I nod with a grin. “By special request.”
I invited Quince to start stopping by after work because hours of hauling and lifting and cutting and loading always leave him famished. His mom works at night, so she leaves a reheatable dinner in the fridge. Now when he gets home, he grabs the container from his fridge and then comes over to eat dinner and cookies. Aunt Rachel and I have always made treats—wel , she makes treats and I assist. It’s not much trouble to make plenty to share.
We always make extra treats for him to take home to his mom. Quince is practical y family, so she is, too. Besides, Aunt Rachel is always very generous with her kitchen.
“Let’s get them in the oven.” She takes one of the pair of matching homemade aprons, a pale water blue covered with a rainbow of sea life—she let me pick the fabric, obviously—and quickly knots the neck and waist ties into bows. She hands the other apron to me. “Once they’re baking, we can eat dinner. Italian takeout.” Mmm.
Fifteen minutes of sifting, mixing, crumbling, and spreading later—with Prithi circling my feet the entire time
—the bars are in the oven and Aunt Rachel and I are settled in at the kitchen table with plates ful of ravioli and breadsticks. Bread, by the way, is one of my favorite land foods. We can’t exactly bake up a loaf in the ocean. Lots of water. No fire. No bread. And on the scale of breads, Italian breadsticks—al soft and warm and drowning in garlic and butter—are at the very top.
I’m just sighing into my third one when Aunt Rachel asks,
“Anything interesting happen at school today?” She forks a bite of mushroom ravioli into her mouth.
I swal ow my bite of breadstick. “You mean besides the earthquake?”
“Heavens.” Aunt Rachel practical y chokes. “The studio was so busy tonight I’d forgotten. Is the school al right?”
“Everything’s fine,” I reply. I push a chunk of breadstick around in the sauce. “News team had to make a special announcement for Monday’s homeroom broadcast.”
“It’s so strange,” Aunt Rachel says. “They were interviewing a seismologist on the radio, and he said the apparent epicenter is not near any known fault line.”
“Did they say where?” I ask. Not that I’l know anything.
Despite a ful year of earth science with Miss Molina, I’m stil pretty clueless when it comes to land-based geology.
“Yes.” Aunt Rachel swirls ravioli through her sauce. “About forty miles off the coast. Just west of Bimini.”
“What?” I choke.
“Bimini,” she repeats. “It’s the westernmost island of the Bahamas.”
“I know what Bimini is,” I explain. “It’s in the eastern part of my kingdom.”
“Real y?” Aunt Rachel takes a sip of her iced tea. “Are earthquakes common in Thalassinia?”
“No,” I reply, confused. “Not real y.”
Most of the underwater quakes in the region hit farther south, around the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Tremors in Thalassinia are more like the once-every-few-centuries kind of thing. The last one recorded by our people was about two hundred years ago.
And even then, the quakes aren’t strong enough to be felt on the mainland.
“Do you need to send a messenger gul to the palace?” she asks. “To make sure everyone’s al right?”
“Yeah, maybe.” I shake my head. “We’re not anywhere near a fault line, so I don’t see how the epicenter could be so close.”
Abandoning my ravioli, I head to the window above the sink and slide it open. I make a gul sound into the night, knowing that no ordinary gul would ever respond to my sad excuse for a cal . Moments later, a big gray-and-white seagul flies into the kitchen and lands on the counter.
I pul open the junk drawer and grab the pad of kelpaper I keep there just in case. As I scribble a quick note, just asking Daddy if everything is okay and whether he knows anything about the quake, the gul notices the dinner on the table.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Aunt Rachel warns, waving her fork at the hungry bird.
I snip a piece of twine and tie the note to the gul ’s leg before he gets himself forked for going after our dinner.
“Take this to King Whelk of Thalassinia, please.” The gul gives one last longing look to the table ful of food before flying back into the night. Daddy wil have my note within the hour, and hopeful y I’l have an answer shortly after that.
I sit down and resume chewing my ravioli in silence, thinking about al the consequences that might have swept our way on land as a result of this huge earthquake.
Tsunamis. Mud slides. Whole stretches of the south Florida coast sucked into the sea.
Thankful y, none of this happened.
If huddling in a doorway with Quince and filming a special news report were the worst of the damages, then it was hardly a blip on the disaster scale. Plus I found out about the internship.
“You know Miss Molina?” I ask.
“Wasn’t she your earth science teacher?”
“Yep,” I say, pushing away my empty plate and grabbing for a fourth breadstick. “After we finished the special report, she told me about an internship program at Seaview Community. She thinks I might be able to get in.”
“That’s wonderful, Lily,” she says, patting my hand. “What kind of internship?”