Sleeping in the boat was uncomfortable. It wasn’t designed to be slept in, of course, but I was hoping to have the use of my back for the next day. I managed to sleep a few hours during that long night. As I lay on the wood of the rowboat, looking up at the stars, I noticed a strange thing. Staring at those pinpricks of light in the sky, I searched for those constellations that I had come to know so well in my extensive time at sea, but as I looked, I saw none. The stars above me were strange as if I had passed to another portion of the world, which was impossible. During my long night, I pondered the options left to me. I could continue to row or I could accept defeat and waste away at sea.
I had just managed to fall asleep when the sun came peeking over the horizon. By the time it had arisen to illuminate the boat in the swells of the sea, I had awoken. I sat up, rubbing the exhaustion from my eyes. I took the oars in my blistered hands and, fighting through the pain, set off again. As the sun reached its zenith, I came upon a similar ghostly ship to the one that I had left not nineteen hours ago. I rowed around the stern of the ship to take a look at the nameplate. The Cardigan Bay, the merchant ship with whom mine had been sailing. The vessel, from my vantage point, looked abandoned. I pulled my trusty lifeboat alongside and considered the main deck. I walked up to the poop and observed the entire ship from there. Even in the heat of the morning, some of the water from the previous day’s storm sloshed as the deck turned. A sound caught my attention. In the mostly silent ocean, I thought I heard the sound of a crying child. I investigated the ship and, finally, deep in the dark hold of the ship, I found the source. A boy, no older than thirteen looked up at me through the darkness. His eyes were red from crying. I beckoned to him. He shook his head in answer.
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“Come with me,” I asked of him, “if you don’t you’ll die here.”
“I’ll die anyway,” he replied, his voice cracking under the pressure of the announcement, “Might as well be here.”
“With that attitude, you will for sure. Come on up.”
He shook his head and turned away. I reached down into the blackness of the hold, took hold of him by the shoulders and lifted him straight up onto the platform on which I stood. I held his hand and led him back up into the warm sun on deck. I helped him down into the boat and climbed in after him. I took one oar and he, the other. We rowed for the rest of the day. Over the course of that long voyage, I learned a few details about the boy although, for the most part, he stayed silent. I discovered that he had been brought up in a village not far from my home village, high in the mountains. I learned that he was the only one from his village to go to the sea, just like me. His name was Conan Pender. In return, when he spoke, I, a sixteen-year-old girl, told him a little about my own life. I told him my name, although in a brief moment of talkativeness, he said that he sucked at names and probably would forget. I told him of my parents and my hometown. I distinctly recall him commenting that his upbringing nearly mirrored mine. By the time dusk fell, we both felt closer than we had that morning, although I could see that his first voyage had left him scarred. We slept aboard the boat although neither of us got much sleep.
The next day was pure misery. I looked over the map that I had swiped from my own ship and discovered that, where the map said that there was an island, there was none. We had rowed past it. My muscles were sore but Conan and I turned the boat around and made for the island again. We didn’t find it. As night fell, the reality of the situation set in.