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I fell asleep in my clothes. I pull my dirty t-shirt over my head, and then unbutton my jeans and drop them down. Anna turns around quickly, facing the door.
“You’ve seen me naked before,” I tease her. “And I’ve seen you . . .”
“Not in a long time,” Anna says coolly.
We used to go skinny dipping together in Carlyle Lake, Anna skinny and pale no matter how late it was in the summer, and me brown as a nut. But it’s true, we were only kids at the time. I haven’t actually seen Anna nude since she . . . well . . . filled out . . .
“How’d you get in here anyway?” I ask her. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t drunk enough to forget to bolt the door.
“I picked the lock,” she says. “It’s hardly Fort Knox.”
Anna is an encyclopedia of hidden skills. I’ve long since learned not to compete with her on random tasks. At least, not with any confidence of whether or not I’ll win.
I’m heading to the shower when Anna shouts, “We don’t have time for that!”
“Okay, okay,” I grumble, rifling through my duffle bag. I stare stupidly at the clothes, realizing that it’s almost all white dress shirts, gray or black trousers, charcoal sweater vests, and sage-green pullovers.
Fucking uniforms. I forgot about that.
Grabbing items at random, I put on a white button-up and a pair of gray slacks, both horribly wrinkled from being stuffed in my bag without proper folding. I rake my fingers through my hair, give my teeth a five-second brush, rub on some deodorant and a spritz of cologne, and in less than two minutes I’m ready to go.
“With time to spare,” I say to Anna.
She rolls her eyes at me, marching toward the door, her green plaid skirt swishing behind her. She already has a run up the back of her stockings, and she’s wearing the same big, clunky vintage Docs that she’s owned since Junior high.
“You’re looking verykawaii,”I say, grinning at the sight of her in a skirt.
Anna whips around, narrowing her ice-blue eyes at me in their ring of heavy black liner.
“Don’t start with me,” she hisses.
“I’m just saying?—“
“Don’t say anything. Not a fucking word.”
I’m guessing she’s sensitive because Anna’s ability to express herself through her clothing matters to her. Even though it looks like she wears the same depressing shit every day, I know her well enough to differentiate between her fetish-wear ensembles, her Victorian vampire look, and her punk-rock goth. It’s a good indication of her mood. For instance, the more chains she’s wearing, the more I know I better not fuck with her that day.
“My lips are sealed,” I promise, throwing my duffle bag over my shoulder and following her out of the room.
We have to run to make it down to the dock in the remaining seven minutes. Thank god we picked a hotel so close to the water.
Our boat is leaving from the very last berth. They’ve only just started loading, and the dock is still crowded with students from all over the globe.
I can guess where some of them are from: one boy has a traditional dragon tattoo extending down his arm from beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his dress shirt, the scaly, curling tip of the tail wrapping around the base of his thumb. His friend is probably Yakuza too, though not a very obedient one. He’s missing the tip of his right pinky, which means he’s had to commityubitsume,the apology ritual where the offender has to amputate his own finger.
Next to those two, I see a girl with flaming red curls who wipes the sweat from her face, saying loudly, “Jaysis, it’s quare warm today, isn’t it?”
The dark-haired girl she’s speaking to stares back at her blankly. “What?” she says, in an accent I can’t quite place—it might be Galician.
“It’s fierce hot!” the Irish girl reiterates. “Anybody got a mineral?”
“I thought we were all supposed to speak English,” the dark-haired girl says, tartly.
“I bloody well am!” the Irish girl cries.
I glance over at Anna to see if she’s enjoying this exchange, seeing as she’s half Irish herself. She doesn’t seem to have heard a word of it—she’s gazing up at the ship instead. It’s bigger than I expected, and not at all the bus-like ferry I was imagining. Instead, I see a four-masted barquentine with a navy and gold hull, and crisp white sails.
“Why’s it so big?” I say out loud. There’s less than a hundred Freshmen, and the trip isn’t that long.
