Nico brings it closer to his face, and my vision begins to swim.
“You said they used this place as a staging area during World War II, right?” Amma asks, close enough to Nico now that their shoulders touch. “I mean, someone could’ve gotten wounded and died here. Or sick. Maybe they were buried, but something dug it up.”
The image immediately crawls through my brain—some jungle creature pawing at the dirt, unearthing a body, biting, tearing …
“Sweetie, drink some water, okay?”
Eliza is in front of me with a metal thermos, and even though the water is warm and there’s a vague chemical aftertaste, I sip greedily, feeling some of my nausea recede.
Nico isn’t even looking at me.
“Or, maybe they got got, you know?” he says to Jake. “Out here, you’re in a fight with someone, who would even know if you just … finished them off?”
He turned back to the skull in his hand, his brown eyes bright. “God, that would be sick. If we found some guy who was murdered in the forties?”
I’m starting to feel a little less woozy now, and awkwardly aware that I’m the only one who was freaking out over this. I was the one who found it, but now that some of the shock is wearing off, I feel … silly. Like I totally overreacted.
Grinning, Nico holds the skull in one hand.
“Now this is some real adventure shit. Sailing to a deserted island, hacking through jungle, finding some old solider who got fragged.” He turns the skull in his hands again. “It makes a cool story. When people see this thing in the Susannah, they’re gonna be like, ‘What the fuck?’ and I can tell them—”
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
Nico turns to look at me then, his brows drawn together. “The skull. Hey.” He walks forward, using his free hand to smooth my hair back from my face, but I remember those fingers on the bone just a minute ago, and there it is again, that sick, swaying sensation.
“You found it, babe,” he goes on, still smiling. “Don’t you want your own trophy on the boat?”
“It was a person,” I say, and my voice is too loud. Overhead, a flock of birds takes to the sky, noisily squawking, and I’m suddenly aware that sweat is slithering down my spine, and my hair is still sticking to my cheeks. I probably look awful, and I wish I hadn’t said anything, wish that I could just look at this thing like everyone else—as a cool artifact, a little bit of macabre excitement.
But maybe you can only react that way when death has never actually touched you, personally. In my mom’s final months, you could actually see the shape of her bones underneath her skin. I think of those bones sitting on someone’s fucking boat, like they’re just a cool souvenir, the equivalent of a plastic tiki cup or a jar full of shells …
Next to me, I notice Brittany is also a little pale, and when she reaches down to take my hand, squeezing it in support, her grip is tight enough to hurt.
“Lux is right,” she says. “You can’t just take it from here.”
“It’s old as hell,” Amma argues, folding her arms over her chest. “And it’s just a skull. Whoever it was has been gone a long time, Britt. It’s just … an object now. It’s no longer a person.”
“If Lux doesn’t want it on the boat, it shouldn’t go on the boat,” Eliza says firmly, and my face flushes even hotter because now people are taking sides over this thing that I started.
Jake suddenly steps forward, taking the skull from Nico. “Look, mate,” he says lightly, “probably bad luck to have bones on your boat, don’t you reckon? I’ll take it and bury it somewhere. But we should take some pics of it or something, document where we found it and all that.”
For a second, I think Nico might argue with him or try to press the issue. If he does, I realize I have no idea how to react. I don’t want to start a fight, but I also really, really don’t want that thing on the boat. And more important, I don’t want to have to explain myself. I want Nico to get it, to remember the things I’ve told him about my mom and understand why a human skull isn’t exactly my idea of discovering buried treasure.
Instead, Nico nods at Jake. “Yeah, good point, man. Bad juju, probably.”
We spend the next thirty minutes or so poking around the airstrip, but the fun has gone out of it, and before lunch, we’re heading back to the beach. Jake and Eliza disappear off on their own for a while, and Brittany and Amma go swimming while I head back to the boat, saying I’m going to nap, but really, I just want to be alone.