Page 152 of The End of the World As We Know It

“You don’thaveanything,” she corrected him. “But actually, you do.”

She stared toward his forty-six-foot sailboat and its name painted in blue script:Proud Mary. It took a few seconds before he realized why she was staring.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “This is my uncle’s. Get your own!”

“I like this one,” she said. “It’s named for me. Sort of. That’s what you call a good omen. I don’t want the whole boat—just a share of it. Half.”

Edmund tossed his empty bottle into the water. “Hell no!”

She stepped closer to put him in her shadow. She was only three years older, but he was short for his age and she was tall for hers. “Listen to me: We have to leave. You know it, too. There’s more of them every day. And they’re getting closer. We should go together.”

Edmund shrugged off his jacket. The concert T-shirt beneath was in rags. “I’m not scared of any stupid pirates.” He had adopted her word for the gang of marauders they heard looking for other survivors to menace, just like their namesake in storybooks.

“Edmund,theyfind each other and stick like glue. If we don’t do the same, we lose. They’re hunting people down. This is a small island. Not enough places to hide. No clean water. It’s time. Or it’ll be too late.”

He didn’t want to admit it, but he was curious about her plan. “What, then?”

“We take our boat, that’s what. Sail north.”

Edmund shielded his eyes from the sun with a grubby, unwashed hand as he stared at her. An earthy stink floated from him that must be making his mother do flips in her grave—if she had one. “It’s not ‘our’ boat,” he said, but he was curious. “North to where, anyway?”

“You know where.”

He frowned and stooped over to make wide stomping steps away from her, palms on his kneecaps. Practicing his choreography again. Some part of him was always trying to pretend the world away.

“Michael Jackson’s not in Colorado,” he said. “He’s not at some old Black lady’s house. He’s putting on concerts in Las Vegas. That’s where he went.”

“He’s dead, Edmund—”

“Shut up!” Edmund screamed at her. His face turned bright crimson. “He’s gonna put me on the stage right next to him as soon as he sees me—the best kid dancer in thewhole world—and then he’s gonna take me to live with him in Neverland!”

His last word was a sob. Hearing his plan out loud must have hurt his own ears.

Marie felt bad about breaking her promise never to poke holes in Edmund’s fantasy. She respected fantasies. Granpè Jean had called Marie by her mother’s name in his last hours, which hurt her feelings because she was the one washing and weeping over him—but at least saying the nameNadinemade him smile. His last wish had been to pretend that Manman and Daddy hadn’t died in that crash on the Seven Mile Bridge so long ago that Marie barely remembered them.

“We’re still here… so he probably is, too.” She was crossing her fingers behind her back, her habit when she was telling half a truth. Or no truth at all. If by some miracle Michaelhadsurvived, she would never allow Edmund to go live with him at Neverland—a superstar hanging out with young boys and zoo animals felt wrong in a hundred ways—but one battle with Edmund’s fantasies was enough for today.

Edmund was right: she could have chosen any of the other boats from the forest of masts at this harbor alone. She didn’t need to buy a share of theProud Maryand include Edmund in her plan. But last night, when she’d quizzed herself on why she hadn’t left in one of the simpler motorboats already, she realized she didn’t want to leave the doofy shrimp behind.

And she needed him. He was smart. Edmund might have been one of the most intelligent ten-year-olds on the planet even back when the planet was full of ten-year-olds, but she didn’t trust himon a journey this ambitious no matter how good he was at making knots and yanking up his sails. Someone needed to be stronger than them. Wiser.

They would need the Boat Man, too.

“I’ve been studying Granpè Jean’s maps,” Marie said, pulling one out of her back pocket. Granpè Jean had grown up in a fishing family and never tired of imagining ways to travel by boat. “We should be able to sail up the Mississippi River to St. Louis and go west from there. And even if we can’t, at least we’ll be closer. Away from here.”

“It’s worse out there!”

“Maybe,” she said. “But not on the water, I bet.”

Edmund needed another hour of convincing to at least think about it while they stowed the water bottles in his boat’s dark, crowded galley, everything narrow and in miniature. The bottles took up his entire table. Everything needed cleaning. His aluminum sink was crammed with plates stained with dried ketchup and white spots that turned out to be maggots.

But he didn’t refuse outright, a pleasant surprise. He must have a lick of sense hidden somewhere in that scrambled head. None of Granpè Jean’s brothers had wanted to risk the rickety fishing boat with him from Port-de-Paix after Baby Doc cursed his homeland, so he’d fled to Miami alone, where he had never gotten over his rage at being caged like a criminal. He had nearly drowned, both in the Atlantic and, later, in U.S. bureaucracy—but one by one, his brothers left behind had died at the hands of the dreaded Tonton Macoutes. Later, losing his only daughter had made Granpè Jean determined to tell Marie everything about his life, knowing she was the only one left to remember his siblings. The pirates in Key West felt like the Macoute, too—except these days, wanton killing was a worse sin after so much dying.

“How long will it take?” Edmund said.

“I’m not sure. We can’t go alone,” she said. “I’m gonna ask the Boat Man.”

A week before, Marie and Edmund had been startled by the burr of a motorcycle with a shirtless rider and ducked out of sight in time to see him race down the pier with a Molotov cocktail. With an expert throw, he’d set a sailboat on fire so fast that it lit up in orange like inDie Hard. A man with a beard had dived into the water from the back of the boat. The motorcyclist had fired a gun at the water five times. Six. That unholy sound. Then, satisfied, he had driven off.