@SharkGirl79

1.

A rooster puttered outside Gabby's hut and she awoke with a thick paste on the roof of her mouth, her head splitting from last night’s arrack, a palm sap alcohol that was popular on the island. A good sledgehammer is our arrack. Makes us forget our island is sinking. #denial #ClimateChange. 

She couldn’t help composing her first post in her mind even before she opened her sleep-crusted eyes and wiped the drool from her chin. This was what she did now: thinking in bursts. Whereas she once produced voluminous research papers, composed novel-length grant applications and then logged terabytes of data from long-term ecological studies, she now communicated in social media blurbs using juvenile grammar. 

But maybe it was working. She now a half-million followers, the digital army she hoped would help her create a marine reserve to save her sharks and her coral atoll. Her notoriety helped spread word of her cause. It won her substantial grant funding. And it had brought this writer. 

The man was lying next to her in a sloppy spoon, one flabby, pinkish arm draped over her, slick where their skin touched, sweat trickling from his armpit down her shoulder blade and along the small of her back. 

She tried to use the sweat-slickness as lubrication to slide away without waking him, but as she hitched her hip for leverage, her butt brushed his cock and she felt it suddenly swell to life. 

“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath as the writer’s snore cut short and he smacked his lips. She held her breath.

The beast awakens. #IAmATramp #regrets

She would not post this one. 

She waited until his breathing steadied with slumber again and the jab of his erection against her left butt-cheek subsided, and then she continued her extraction. She gently lifted his arm and slipped out from under it, laying it back down gingerly on her pillow. He smacked his lips more but didn’t wake and she exhaled in relief.

She took her bikini bottoms from a nail on the wall of her hut, shook out the sand and fought them on over her hips. They were still damp and they smelled rancid, taking on that rotting sea smell acquired from several days without a wash. Then she found a fresh tee shirt and slipped it on, reveling in the smell of fabric softener.

She stepped carefully onto the hut’s little veranda, which doubled as her kitchen. She brushed a pair of fat brown beetles off of her hot plate and turned it on to boil water for coffee. Her stomach churned and her head pounded, so she ate two of the small local bananas in a bowl next to the coffee can and marveled at their brightness and acidity, and the immediate effectiveness as hangover abatement. She brushed her hair with her fingers, pursed her lips affecting a sultry pout and then composed a photo of herself with her phone, the half-empty bottle of arrack in the foreground, the morning sun highlighting the gold in her hair and her out-of-focus features. She posted the photo with the tweet she’d composed in her head upon waking. Her phone vibrated several times with likes and re-posts before she even had time to set down on the counter. She allowed herself a guilty shiver of pleasure at her celebrity. She still considered herself a serious scientist, even though most of her mentors and colleagues had written her off, including her own father.

When the coffee was ready she poured it into a mug with bold letters reading STEMinist and sat down gingerly in one of the low-slung chairs. She was still sore from the fucking, the paunchy writer having shown surprising energy and endurance. She winced as she caught sight of her neighbor, Teata, who was sweeping sand out of the small house directly next to hers. The woman would have heard the sex through the thin walls of their houses. There were no secrets on the island. Teata mistook Gabby’s wince for a smile and creased her own moon cheeks in response. 

Gabby watched the puttering rooster draw closer, scratching in the sand, drawing toward the shade and vines under her stilted hut. She knew it was only a matter of time before it bellowed, and when it threw back its head she braced in anticipation. It roared its cackle, reinvigorating her headache, and a few moments later her heart sank as she heard the writer stirring inside. She leaned over the veranda railing and snapped a photo of the rooster with her phone, posting it immediately. Rooster telling me it’s time to go save some sharks. #IslandAlarmClock. 

The hut shook on its stilts as the big man dressed. She was dreading the sweaty, flabby sight of him, but when he thumped out onto the porch his hair was combed and his shirt was clean, smooth and buttoned. Evidently he’d saved it for the trip home. He even smelled nice from a splash of cologne. He looked almost dashing with his sweep of dark hair and the salt and pepper beard.

“Do I smell coffee?” he asked sheepishly. She gestured to the pot and he poured himself a cup and settled into the Adirondack chair next to her. 

“Listen,” he said, after a moment of awkward silence. “For what it’s worth. Last night…it was pretty special for me. I mean, not the sex, but our conversation. You have me convinced. About this place. About the marine reserve. The sharks. You’re a fighter. And I’m saying this as a jaded, skeptical journalist…I believe in you. I want to help you get your message out. I’ve even got a title for the article in mind: Joan of Shark. What do you think?”  

He blushed and she tried not to roll her eyes. 

“Oh, and the sex was pretty sublime, too,” he added.

She glanced at the ring on his left hand and he caught her look.

“I’ve been divorced for two years,” he said, twirling it. I haven’t had the heart to take it off.”

She shrugged. In the interest of her crusade she mustered the sincerest voice she could wrest from the lingering hangover: “I had a nice time, too. Really.”

He smiled. They drank coffee quietly, and she felt herself beginning to doze, one step behind the caffeine. She listened to his breathing steady as he took a small black book from his shirt pocket and scratched some notes. She wondered what he was scribbling. She’d read some of his features and thought he was a lovely writer. That’s why she’d emailed him. She sleepily watched him work for a while, the way he pressed his tongue in his lips as he gripped the little pencil, the occasional glance toward the sea, the focus and intensity in that gaze. She liked to think she possessed that sort of serene intensity when she was at her bench work, analyzing acoustic telemetry data or when she was scratching measurements onto a clipboard as she drifted along the bottom of the ocean following a transect line. 

She was almost comfortable, now. And then they heard the buzz of the plane overhead. He looked up and sighed. I’m guessing that’s my ride.”

She nodded and stood up, taking his empty cup and rinsing it in the outdoor wash tub that served as a sink while he packed his things.

2.

As the writer queued up for the plane with his rumpled bag slung over one shoulder the photographer from the same magazine was unloading his gear from the cargo hold of the twin-engine Air King. The two men waved at one another without conferring, and Gabby couldn’t read anything into the gesture. Did they like or even know one another? She’d been through the process too many times to be surprised by how feature articles came together, how the writer and photographer came and went separately, how they focused on their respective disciplines as if the other’s didn’t matter at all. They would shape the story the way they wanted it to be. And then the editors would take their crack at it or kill the whole thing outright. She was hoping for the cover story that she’d been promised, but she also knew that the whole thing was out of her control. She harbored the empiricist’s skepticism at the entire enterprise of journalism, in its seeming randomness and lack of rules or order. 

Her father always despised popular magazines and newspapers…how they blurred or glossed over details of scientific significance. How they would dramatize. In this case they would certainly drop adjectives about her looks into the story or perhaps choose photos that suggested it was her body—not her mind—that was her greatest asset.  She knew that she was at their mercy. Her mother, a staunch feminist and professor of women’s studies, would have called it pure exploitation. Her father, the biologist, would declare it evidence of an ego run amok. 

But Gabby considered the potential article for what it was: smart advertising. Earned media. Good publicity. It was the least she could do to try to save this little cluster of coral atolls and the sharks—and people—that still called it home.

The writer climbed the stairs to the plane and then looked back and waved, touching his forehead in salute, and she tried to think if she regretted seeing him go and decided that she didn’t. She felt nothing but the itch to get back under water, spending long hours with her belly hovering centimeters from the bottom, inching along the transect tape, counting fish and sharks, taking measurements, writing numbers in columns and rows on her waterproof paper until a sure pattern started to emerge from the figures. The only sound: the hiss and bubble of her scuba regulator and the whirring of her analytical brain. Sharks circling quietly overhead, grays and tigers, watching her in their peripheral vision. Indifferent to her presence. They didn’t care if she was using them the way the writer and photographer was using her. The way she was using herself. The sharks didn’t care about anything other than the food that gave them the energy to swim after more food. Theirs was the sublime circle of the mesopredator. 

If the writer was using her…for a byline, a story or just an easy lay…then she was also using him. If he had known that she’d only fucked him to give him a fond memory of his trip to the atoll, to create an emotional connection to this place that she so wanted to protect, to keep him invested in this story. If he’d only known that, throughout most of their lovemaking, she’d been repulsed—though a very small measure of pleasure did eventually arrive in a shudder below her belly and a shiver that crawled up her spine—he’d probably take it personally. He was that type.

This new fellow now unloading his gear—the photographer from the magazine—he was different. He was more like the sharks. He approached her with a dazzling white smile. His steel gray hair was carefully coiffed, likely in the plane’s tiny lavatory. He had a rumpled bag of lenses tossed over his shoulder and a black Pelican case in tow. Lean, hard muscles strained the sleeves of his tee shirt.

“You Gabby Peacock?” he asked, thrusting out a strong hand at the end of a veiny, tanned forearm. His handshake was intense, sure, but not overpowering. He was broad-shouldered and tall. She was already wondering if she was going to sleep with him, too. 

“That’s me,” she said. 

“You’re a lot taller in person than on television,” he said, grinning as if her unusual stature were some kind of bonus.

“Need help with your gear?” she said, annoyed. Why did men always feel the need to comment on her height?

“Please,” he said, looking back at his dive bag, duffel and light kit in a growing pile of equipment under the plane. “Can’t tell you how sick I get lugging that shit around the world.”

“That so?”

“Just flew in from Afghanistan…” he said, though she hadn’t asked. She shrugged and went for his luggage without letting him finish. When they’d loaded the jeep, she drove him to his hotel. He looked straight ahead the whole way. 

“Shouldn’t you be scouting locations?” she asked at his indifference to the breathtaking views of vast stretches of turquoise water and white sand on either side of the atoll’s lone crescent of a road. The palms swaying in slow motion. The ragged dogs, colorful huts and handsome, chestnut-skinned children.

“Not in this light. Everything looks like shit in the middle of the day. I’ll get some coverage at dawn and dusk.” 

The hotel was a low-slung block building near the ferry port. It was the only one on the island other than the resort, which was fairly exclusive and out of the price range even for a photographer from a noted science and geography publication. She helped him carry his things up to the second floor. He had to fight the lock with the key to get inside. After she tossed his bags on the sagging bed she was sweating, so she tried the AC unit. She turned it on and it immediately pumped out cool air. She sat down in front of it and pulled her tee shirt away from her chest where it clung to her skin in the patch of sweat just between her breasts. She made a show of this, just in case he was watching. 

“You’re fortunate,” she said. “These units usually don’t work this well.”

“Must be my lucky day,” he said with a wink.

She’d caught him looking sideways as she tugged her neckline open. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t see everything in the boat tomorrow, but she wanted him to think about her tonight while he lay alone in his room. Unless, that is, he picked up a tourist from the resort bar. Or one of the prostitutes who seemed to be multiplying in number since the sea started rising and spoiling the crops of breadfruit and rice with saltwater. More of the islanders were leaving for other reaches of Micronesia, or maybe the high islands in Polynesia or Hawaii or Fiji. And those who stayed behind had to fight over scraps.

“So when do we get to see some sharks?” he asked, flipping open his camera bag and checking the glass on the lenses. “I’m itching to shoot some elasmobranchii.”

“Are you trying to impress me with your fancy science words?” 

He flashed a grin.

“Tomorrow morning. Meet at six?”

“I’ll be ready.”

His teeth were too white and perfect to be natural. His skin, a deep copper. He winked again. The way her father always had. And she knew that she was in trouble.

3.

The breeze at the marina the next morning was out of the west, and it was crisp and hot, though still refreshing. The night had been stifling and she’d dreamt of drowning, of the air running out of her dive tank, of being smothered by the bulk of the writer she’d screwed the night before. She’d woken frequently in a panic, and she was now bleary eyed and short tempered, even after her third coffee.

“Iorana, Doctor Peacock. Morning to you, Miss,” Hamilton said, waggling his fist at her with extended pinky and thumb. He flashed his smile, so serene and friendly. But she merely squinted and nodded curtly and Hamilton knew her well enough to read her mood. He dropped his smile. “How many tanks you needing, Miss?” he asked, all business now. 

She’d figured the photographer to be the type to breeze in at the last minute after an extended beauty rest…either that or hung over from a night of partying. But instead she found him at the end of the dock, his gear already stowed in the boat. He was rolling a white-lidded fifteen-gallon barrel made of food-grade plastic toward the gunwale of the launch. Dark maroon liquid sloshed in it along with chunks that thumped against the side. 

“What’s that?” she asked warily.

“A little attractant.”

“That’s not good. There will be plenty of sharks without it.”

“Just in case.”

“This isn’t some aquarium. This isn’t some kind of tourist boat. We get all the species. Grays. White tips. Plenty of adult tigers. Bulls. It’s not smart to stir things up.”

“Don’t worry. This ain’t my first rodeo.” He winked and flashed his white teeth and she didn’t like that this pierced her morning temper to remind her that he was handsome. Still, she despised his bravado. She knew that some studies had recorded higher levels of testosterone in sharks than in any other living creature on the planet, though she figured this photographer could give them a run for their money.

“I say when…and if…we use it. Okay?”

“You got it.”

Hamilton waddled oxygen tanks out of the dive shed to the edge of the dock. Gabby inspected each of them, sending two back because she didn’t like the look of the O-rings. Hamilton sighed, resigned to the fact of a hard day as he trudged back for replacements. She took apart and rebuilt her dive regulator and mouthpiece and also her BCD jacket, hooking up the first tank and checking for leaks. 

The photographer watched her with a wry smile. She caught the look and faced him.

“Up…down…okay…problem…out of air…” she said, reviewing the hand signals that her father had taught her. “Got it?”

“Safety first.”

“Can you show me?”

The photographer repeated the dive gestures like a reluctant teenager called on in class, his grin widening.

“I don’t take any of this for granted, okay? That’s why I’m still alive.” She scowled at him and he lifted the camera he was cleaning and pointed it at her, and snapped a burst and she turned away to load the rest of her gear.

She made Hamilton load the boat and then didn’t like the arrangement so she helped him unpack and reload it all again. She stood on the dock with her fists on her hips and nodded once she was finally satisfied.

“What’s all of that?” he asked, pointing to the Styrofoam cooler, the dry shipper, and the crates of measuring tape, tools and PVC piping.

“I’m going to set up a transect so you can get some shots of the type of science we’ve been doing here. I’ve got some ‘before’ photos you can have so you can see how the corals have declined.”

“I really just need shots of you and the sharks. There will be sharks, won’t there, Shark Girl?” he asked and she flushed. She wasn’t sure whether or not it was from anger.

“You can shoot the transect, too.”

“That’s not really necessary. Measuring tapes aren’t very sexy. How long will that take?” he checked his watch.

“Listen,” she said, stepping close. “The Foundation pays for this boat, for Hamilton and for these tanks. Believe it or not, we’re one of the few drivers left in an economy that’s getting hammered by sea level rise. This is a research trip. We do research here. Serious research. This isn’t some cut-rate dive holiday chumming up sharks for tourists. I’m not going to waste a full day in the field just to get your photos.”

“You called us, didn’t you?”

She snorted and shook her head.

He grinned even wider. “Whatever you want. You’re the boss. There will be sharks, right?”

“Yes, there will be sharks. Probably more than you’ve ever seen before. The sheer biomass of them is off the charts.”

“Just do what you do and I’ll take photos.”

Hamilton brought her another cup of the bad drip coffee from the marina and she blew the steam off of it, sipping it as they puttered out of the harbor. The air was hot already and she took off her tee shirt to smear sunblock on her body. She could smell the rotten fish smell of her bikini even stronger today than the day before and she wondered if the photographer could smell it, too, above the other sea smells and the odor of two-cycle gasoline mix.

She grabbed the anchor line at the front of the boat and leaned across the cooler and faced the wind, squaring her jaw and squinting, looking serious, her hair streaming back as Hamilton picked up speed, the boat’s bow rising and then finally settling down at a plane. 

She heard the photographer’s shutter snapping, and she gulped because she knew that she was consciously performing a pose. She was annoyed by how instinctive this all was to her now. She shook her head and tossed her hair. She heard more snaps of the shutter. Because of her height, she’d always felt gawky and ungainly. But she’d learned that others found her attractive.

She imagined what her father might say. What her mother might say, to see her sprawled on the front of the boat in her bikini like a pinup girl on the hood of a glossy muscle car, her skin oiled, tossing her hair while a photographer worked the angles to frame her so as to capture the blue horizontal line of the water and the glistening length of thigh. 

4.

Twelve seconds into the TED Talk that made Gabby famous you catch a glimmer, perhaps the very incipience of her career as a digital reality star.

“My name is Gabrielle Peacock, and I’m a scientist, and the youngest woman to ever receive a MacArthur Genius Award,” she says, walking toward the giant screen that holds the first slide of her presentation. She presses the clicker to change the image to an aerial photograph of a chain of island atolls and the surrounding reefs she has devoted her life to saving. She glances back over her shoulder at the audience, tossing the soft loops of her chestnut hair. And she winks at them.

You can almost hear the click of her eyelashes interlocking and then snapping free. And that gesture tells all, what the audience is thinking despite their generally open minds and progressive beliefs: this woman is a scientist? No kidding. You mean this woman in heels and designer jeans plus the smart, casual blazer and the glimmering, ombre curls in a range of gold, sunset and russet is not a model or actress? She’s not selling shampoo? Instead she’s one of the world’s top marine ecologists and she’s heading her own lab at Berkley for which she received more than a million dollars in startup funds, no small feat at a public university in the trough of a down economy?

Needless to say, she doesn’t fit the stereotype of a scientist, whether the frumpy, white-haired man in a lab coat or the frumpier, nerdish field researcher in unflattering cargo trousers. She is the cartoon scientist…the sexy Halloween costume scientist worn by a non-scientist, only with the actual credentials to match. Never mind that the five hundred dollar jeans she’s wearing for the presentation were borrowed from a college friend with a corporate gig and the hairstyle cost her a week’s salary and the careful application of her make-up was only recently learned through watching a thirteen-year-old vlogger on YouTube.

Gabby went through this makeover because she knew full well that the center-stage TED Talk could make her career. The potential for visibility was huge. Funding could follow. And, more importantly, it was a megaphone to talk about that tiny place in the vastness of the world’s greatest ocean that she was trying to save. Through this fifteen-minute talk she might be able to accomplish more than any academic paper published in the most prestigious of scientific journals.

But what she didn’t know was that it wasn’t her impressive credentials or her elegant charts and animated data visualizations that would win over the crowd, but, as the television producer later told her when she was filming her cable series, Shark Seekers, her “sweet little camera-loving ass.”

Maybe it was that wink that tipped the scales in the direction she would eventually head. That wink may have sparked the surge in views of her lecture…nine million of them at last count. The wink may have caught the TV producer’s eye, or that of the grant reviewer at the private foundation who would eventually fund her long-term research to the tune of millions of dollars.

Then later, at one minute and fifteen seconds into the TED Talk that made Gabby famous, you can see something else. A shadow passes over her features, something you can detect even through the layers of her news-anchor-perfect makeup. 

She clicks to a photo of herself as a young girl, sunburned shoulders and nose, natty hair frazzled and salt-sticky. She sits in a skiff next to a handsome, prematurely gray man with a wide grin and mischievous smile…a rugged, bronzed and weathered sort of seagoing fellow. The girl is proffering a conch shell for the camera and the man is looking down at her with an obviously prideful smirk. It is a glorious and happy photo of a father and a daughter, and had it been shot with better focus it might look staged, like the perfect stock images that come with new frames. 

“Science is sort of a thing in my family,” she says to the audience. “Before I received my MacArthur Genius Award, my father received that same award. You never would have known it. Daddy never cared about recognition. He just buried himself in the work. He was and is to this day a true bench scientist.  When this photo was taken, I had no idea what a MacAurthur Genius was, or even that he had received such an award. All I knew was that my daddy loved the ocean with all his heart. And he was very troubled by what was happening to it.”

As Gabby tells this story and gazes up at the photo of her eleven-year-old self next to her father in the boat, an astute observer of the TED Talk, someone who knows Gabby well, can clearly see that shadow hiding beneath the layers of staged idolatry and love and admiration of her father. There is a hint that the daddy-daughter relationship is more complex and conflicted than what is portrayed in the photo. But then this is a TED Talk, and you have only fifteen minutes to tell the story of your life’s work. There is no time for tangent. No room for shades of gray.

You might think her father would have been proud of her, given her awards and the number of publications in respected peer reviewed journal. And while her father, so serious and immersed still in the research and mechanics of his own generation’s work, couldn’t be expected to grasp what it meant to even have a center-stage TED Talk to begin with, couldn’t he see through the earnest nods of the audience members shown in cutaway shots on the video, through the millions of views of it on the web, what a big deal this was?

Some of her father’s early papers were still required reading in the discipline. But he never had the financial resources that Gabby amassed. He spent his whole career as a university professor heading a small lab at a public university and begrudgingly fulfilling his teaching requirements while painstakingly cobbling together enough grant funding to perform just one more experiment. And then another. Now he was facing retirement and the sure knowledge that as soon as that happened, his life’s work would dry up and slip into oblivion, though probably not as quickly as the ecosystems and habitats that he studied, which were the world’s vanishing coral reefs. 

Perhaps it was jealousy that prevented him from giving Gabby due credit. Or maybe he believed that careers were built on decades of excellence, not just on a handful of successes in your thirties. But if he failed to take her seriously after the TED Talk, then she lost him completely when she launched her television career, beginning with a season as the featured scientist on Shark Seekers. 

She was first billed as a technical advisor, but the show’s producer noticed that she was especially “camera friendly,” and soon her role morphed largely into swimming in a bikini alongside the show’s host—an Australian model with boyish blond hair and a gleaming white smile—and the program’s eponymous sharks. 

A funny thing happened after that. She became popular, and this is a thing that raises—within every research scientist with any grit and sense of worth—both a glimmer of opportunity and an overriding fear.

First, Gabby’s classes at the university began to fill. She was invited to lecture or appear not only at arcane conferences, but also on popular talk shows and radio programs. Then agents contacted her about books and further television opportunities and she had laughed them away. She was flooded at her university with applications for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with exceptional credentials. And then nonprofits began to approach her with job offers. Their money was hers for the taking…unencumbered by the requirement to teach, the burden of university politics and the necessity of doing the “publish or perish” dance in the clannish little world of academic journals. 

“If you had two million dollars to do whatever you want, what would you do with it?” She was asked this by the chair of the board of the Foundation that eventually hired her. This was in their offices in Caramel by the Sea, California exactly two years after her TED Talk.

Gabby didn’t have to hesitate. “I would save this atoll,” she said, sliding an aerial photo across the big table. The board members smiled as one. They were captains of industry, actors, philanthropists, pop scientists and even one noted journalist. And just like that she was hired and left academia forever, losing any shot of earning her father’s respect.

Twelve minutes and thirty-three seconds into her TED Talk, Gabby makes the same pitch to the world at large using the same aerial photo. Over that image, she heartbreakingly lays out the thesis of her long-term ecological analysis of a remote Pacific atoll and its decline. She begins to click through beautiful photographs of the island and its people and the submerged world of the glorious and pristine reef that lay nearby, and the astonishing numbers of sharks it attracts. 

“A truly pristine reef is baffling. It turns the pyramid on its head. You might expect there to be a few massive sharks, and then larger numbers of smaller predators and oodles of herbivorous fish. But if you look closer, you see that sharks make up 86 percent of this pristine reef system’s biomass. 86 percent! It’s a top-heavy pyramid. It goes against all previously known research on trophic cascades. The question I’m trying to find out is why.”

“But I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to answer that question. Because we’re losing both sharks, and pristine reefs. So if you look closer at this one reef system. And if you look for a long enough time,” she says, clicking through a series of photos, “you begin to see visual evidence of the problems.”

In the slideshow she begins to document the decline of the surrounding reefs due to a combination of rising ocean acidity and water temperature caused by the human burning of fossil fuels and leading to mass die-off of the coral species that build the reef. Then she shows charts of the disappearing numbers of gray and tiger sharks. These fish are hammered both by the damage to the coral habitat, which provides a nursery for their offspring, and the brutal practice of finning, where sharks are caught on steel lines that stretch for miles into the ocean and then summarily executed for their fins alone, to make a largely flavorless addition to a traditional soup that is becoming more and more voguish, the sharks’ bodies are then dumped back in the oceans while their menacing dorsal fins are reduced to dubious medicines or decadent culinary delicacies. 

Finally, there is the result that all of this is having on the people of the islands. They are an industrious, gregarious folk who have lived sustainably on the edges of these reefs for thousands of years. But with the decline of the corals, sharks and fish stocks, and with the ever-creeping rise of seawater, which leaches into their gardens, palms and breadfruit plantations, their world was steadily coming apart. They are slipping over the lip of subsistence and into dire poverty. 

“Because island people know first that the fates of both the ecosystems and the humans that live with them are intertwined. They know what we don’t: that all of Earth is an island. And that the island is changing. We are making it change. And things aren’t changing in our favor,” she says at fourteen minutes and forty-seven seconds into her TED Talk, just before a dramatic, contemplative pause prior to the audience’s bursting into applause.

It is this moment in the video where Gabby suspects that, in her father’s mind, if he even reached that point before clicking away, she has stopped being a true scientist and become, instead, the most dreaded, needy and pandering sort of creature: an activist.

And when she left her university life and accepted a role with the Foundation to lead a project advocating for the creation of a marine reserve on the atoll she now calls home, she lost him outright. “A scientist’s job is to make data, Gabby, not policy,” he’d scoffed.

She was at first thrilled, because this felt like a validation of her research into the symbiosis of corals and elasmobranchs. “This will be like Fakarava, but only bigger,” she explained breathlessly over the Skype connection with her old man, referencing a Polynesian atoll protection and restoration effort that had yielded a wealth of recent discoveries. “Daddy, it’s like a natural progression from Sala’s discoveries in the Northern Line Islands.” 

There was a pause on his end. Then he said, “I remember when these kinds of organizations used to fund hard scientists, not entertainers.” 

Of course, implicit in this sentiment was that her work on reef preservation projects was not “hard science,” it was “pop science.” Her work was political. It was sensationalistic. It was activism. It longed for the camera. You can’t be a true scientist if your motivations aren’t purely empirical. 

In her father’s world men didn’t worry about winning hearts and minds. They didn’t care about public opinion. They endeavored only to be true to some empirical ideal, to earn the begrudging respect of their colleagues, to secure their next grant. To remain aloof and beholden to ideals of pure erudition. To write papers that might outlive them and sing their luminosity to future pendants. 

And they did all of this while the world collapsed around them. While the seas were overfished and fouled, the reefs decimated, the very chemistry of the ocean changed to enable the consumptive and ravenous masses to drive massive cars, cool cavernous houses and charge billions of smartphones. 

But for Gabby the buck didn’t stop upon publication of a new paper in the Journal of Arcane Marine Erudition and then the receipt of one more round of grant funding. Gabby believed that, as a witness to all that the world was losing, she had a greater responsibility. It was up to her to help affect change. It was her responsibility to make her fellow humans see the error of their ways. To inspire their passion. To motivate them. 

Because this was the only way to save the very little that remained of the places that she loved.

And what she loved was the reef. The craggy canyons of calcium carbonate, a fantastic Dr. Seussian underworld made of the bones of minute polyps and coated with a skin of corals, billions of tiny, fluid, jelly-like creatures standing shoulder to shoulder, their soft and microscopic bodies the miraculous little engines that build the submerged cathedrals, entire landscapes that can be seen from space and that constructed the structures through which swam the greatest, most awe-inspiring creatures in the sea—the sharks.

To Gabby, corals were poets. They were emotion. Even the naturalists of old had understood this. The atolls, like the one that she loved, were formed as ancient volcanic islands subsided below the water’s surface and corals built upward upon these sinking foundations. The geologist Charles Lyell had called such coral atolls, “the last efforts of drowning continents to lift their heads above water.” These words still raised chills along Gabby’s spine. She showed that very quote in her TED Talk. If there ever had been an Atlantis, it was the coral reefs and the circles of the atolls they built on the vast reaches of the Pacific that showed the world where it had once been. By saving this one atoll, she would be saving what remained of that lost and fabled kingdom.

“Fuck you, daddy,” she’d said at his cool reaction to the news of her new job. Could this be the same man who’d looked down on her in the photo in slide three of her TED Talk presentation with such evident pride? 

Fuck you, Daddy. She’d said. But only in her mind. And only after she’d hung up.

5.

Gabby cupped one hand around the screen of her GPS for shade and signaled with the other to guide Hamilton to the dive site. Hamilton sat squat and placid in the back, his hand on the tiller, and she could see in his content features that he loved to be out here with her. He was born into a fishing family, and he’d told her on more than one occasion that he preferred fishing to shuttling her and other scientists back and forth to work sites. But he appreciated steady employment that took him out to sea. Plus the work was less dangerous and paid better. Gabby’s foundation and the research program it supported was a major player in the local economy, giving it political clout and influence in the island. And in return, Hamilton provided the wisdom and knowledge of generations on the water, an invaluable asset to the research. Plus he contributed a serene disposition. His world had always been the smell of mixed fuel and salt air. He loved it, and it showed when he was on the sea.

People like Hamilton had fished these waters for a thousand years and not much had changed until industrial-scale consumption had clawed its way out to this blue heart of the Pacific in the form of climate change. Hamilton could read the signs, some of which, like the rising seas and the slowly boiling oceans, had been predicted in many of the old stories. He sometimes shrugged it off as the will of greater forces, and this allowed him to look at the sea with a serenity that she couldn’t fathom. And because of this humility, he may have been the only man she truly found beautiful.

They slowed, motoring on, and vast circle of a ring reef stretched out around them. There were patches of yellow and teal and then holes of deep blue, and finally the ring of brilliant corals, from brown to orange to gold to blue, a massive jeweled crown just below the surface of the water. It was a giant, submerged circle, the outline of a vanished island now crusted with a halo of coral rock.

“Here,” she called out as the GPS coordinates showed that the site was right below them. Hamilton had already cut the throttle because he didn’t need a GPS to tell him where he was. The knowledge and instincts accrued over generations were a more precise and nimble guide than any electronic device. Gabby slipped her mask over her face, pausing with one foot on the gunwale so that the photographer could snap a photo before she dove off of the bow. She hit the water and then swam in a circle, peering down through the crystalline depths until she spotted the small pink ribbon attached to a spike hammered into a coral head forty feet below. Hamilton stood at the prow with the anchor and a coil of rope and she pointed to a patch of yellow. He hurled it and it plunged and sunk into the sand. She watched it drag and catch before climbing back on board.

As she re-checked her gear, the photographer snapped his shutter. “Where are the sharks?” he asked as he pressed the long lens closer to her face.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your sharks,” she said. She forced a camera-aware smile and a wink. She had practiced this in the mirror for the television show and now it came naturally.

She pulled on her wetsuit and the neoprene squeaked against her skin. She took a temperature reading and the water was cool, but she decided not to wear a hood because with her hair streaming behind her it would look better for the pictures. In an article for Smithsonian, a caption writer had compared her to a mermaid. Once that would have seemed to her a twisted, absurd sort of sexism. Now the pragmatic warrior in her saw it as an asset, something she could use.

The photographer slid his camera into the underwater housing and attached the lights and fondled the contraption. She could appreciate that he loved the tools of his trade. She loved her transect tape, the dry shipper, the plastic syringes and her dive knife. Even the clipboard with the wet paper. She pulled him out of his reverie and leaned over the gunwale to explain the dive plan.

“I’ll be running a transect that’s roughly a hundred meters from that patch of sand inside the lagoon across the rim of the seamount to the far side. I’ll be working from thirty to seventy feet and I may dip down to a hundred briefly to check out some mesophotic corals I thought I spotted on my last dive. That’s on the far side where it drops off into the abyss, so watch your buoyancy and keep an eye on your depth gauge. I’ve seen a photographer get bent before after losing all points of reference. He never dove again. Far as I know he’s no longer shooting anything. Understand?”

He nodded, still petting his camera. She could see that he was too arrogant for safety. Down there her life would depend on him, and this is what worried her.

“Stay close to me,” she said. “And watch your air.”

“What will you be doing?”

“I’ll follow the measuring tape line and count coral colonies, making notes on their health. Our data show that there’s been a steady decline with the drop in pH, the increase in acidity and the slight rise in the temperature.”

“So what’s that got to do with sharks?”

“We’re correlating that data across the entire ecosystem, all the way up to the pelagic species and mesopredators. Thirteen species of sharks come to this reef at some stage in their lives. Seventy percent of all the biomass of fish on this reef is made up of sharks. That’s a lot of elasmobranchs. It’s an inverted pyramid. It doesn’t make sense. We have to find out why. But that’s also down from eighty-six percent when I started this project. If the corals collapse, the sharks will disappear. And if the sharks are wiped out from fishing or finning, the corals will degrade. Either way, the ensuing chain reaction will lead to a collapse of the entire ocean food web. No more Nemo. No more sharks. No more canned tuna. All of it. Gone. And the key piece to that understanding rests here, in this pristine reef.”

“But for now, the sharks are still here, right? And we’ll see some. Close enough that I can get a picture with you frolicking together? Because that’s what you promised in your email.”

“Don’t worry,” she said with a grin. “You’ll get your sharks.”

They slid over the side of the boat and Hamilton carefully handed down their tanks and vests and cameras and gear. Gabby twisted and turned on the surface chop until she wrangled into her equipment and she felt like some ungainly beetle in the water. The photographer was ready sooner and he snapped photos while she wrestled everything into place, fastening the buckles of her vest, attaching her spool of tape, her mesh bag of gear and her clipboard. She had way too much coffee and she now paused to pee, the warmth swirling with the cool water that had seeped into her wetsuit. The photographer snapped a photo while she was concentrating, her mouth open. She didn’t’ care.

When she was ready she pulled her snorkel out of her mouth.

“Hey, about these sharks. They’re not used to people. Don’t look them in the eye. If they arch their back or lower their fins or show any signs of aggression or agitation, drop to a sandy patch and stay motionless until they lose interest. You probably don’t want to use your strobes…the last thing you want to do is startle them.”

“Okey dokey,” the photographer said. She knew then that she couldn’t count on him. She decided she would look out for herself on this dive. 

As they dumped air from their vests, they sank slowly into the vast blueness below the shadow of the boat. While they drifted down to the research site he circled her, snapping pictures. He was a good diver and he had perfect buoyancy control under the water. Not easy to do when both hands were on his camera rig. She felt as if they were flying, floating now in water so pure that she could see for hundreds of meters in any direction. 

The awkwardness of bouncing in the surface chop dissipated and she was now graceful and focused. This was why she dove. This was why she worked underwater. As they settled toward the bottom and the spires and mounds and canyons of the coral rose around them she realized, as she did every day that she came down here, that all of it…her research, the gigabytes of data she compiled, the Foundation, her social media accounts, the articles that she wrote and that were written about her…all of it was just an excuse that allowed her to spend time in this place that she loved. A place that was going away as certain and bittersweet as the sun setting at the end of a fine day.

She checked to make sure the photographer stayed close enough, a safe distance should either of their air tanks fail. She flashed the “okay” signal, touching her index finger and thumb in a circle. He responded with a grin around his regulator mouthpiece and a nod of his head. 

Then she turned to her task, finding the ribbon and then nail in the big purple boulder of the coral head and attaching her tape, stretching it across the lip of the atoll toward the abyss on the far side.

Her breathing steadied. She checked her air. She readied her clipboard. She hovered above the tape, allowing a quick, sideways glance at the columns and thickets of corals around her. So many species. She’d never seen such diversity this far out in the deep ocean. This atoll was special. Like no place else in the world. It took her breath away and it conjured tears to think that it was all on the verge of collapse. Her emotion: this was her weakness. And her strength.

Then she studied the tape and started to clinically assess the coral colonies that fell along its length, scratching numbers into the clipboard, and she submerged into the data, into the beautiful, cold science, and she forgot the world around her in the glory and safety of numbers.

6.

Gabby lost her father in the divorce, or maybe just the good parts of him, the handful of warm memories. There was walking the beach as a child in the Marquesas and plucking pieces of coral rubble from the fine, white calcium sand, later feeling him beam at her as she organized them on her beach towel according to type: branching, plating, ridged, massing, piped, laced. “There’s my little scientist,” he’d said

Much of her life had been a bid to recreate that moment, even before the divorce. Like the night she sat at the dining room table in despondent incomprehension over her math homework. She so wanted to please him that she pushed herself hard, but he’d spotted her as he descended the stairs and he came over and pressed one huge, safe hand on her shoulder, closing her book with the other.

“Don’t worry,” he’d whispered. “It’ll come.”

And it had, and three years later she was valedictorian of her high school and had her choice of universities, but by then her parents were separated and her father seemed convinced that she was being raised poorly. They’d given her the choice of where to spend the bulk of her time, and she chose her mother for the obvious reasons: her father’s long nights at the lab; his travels for extended field work or the continuously increasing demand for visiting lectures and conference keynotes. She’d chosen pragmatically. She’d chosen what was best for her own academics: the dull routine of her mother’s administrative job as head of the women’s studies program at a small college. He was the exciting one, the vibrant one. His students loved him, his colleagues admired him, but Gabby had chosen her mother instead because that was the only real choice for a child of fifteen to make when she had grades to maintain and routines to continue and dance lessons and the riding club and a small, tenuously cobbled together circle of friends in the social maelstrom of high school.

And so he’d feigned indifference. He shrugged as if it didn’t matter, just like that night he’d closed her math book, but she could tell that he was disappointed by her choice, maybe even crushed.

So when she’d chosen his alma mater, for her undergraduate work he commented that their programs had slipped mightily in the years since he’d been a student there. When she had offers at multiple graduate schools and selected the most prestigious, he scoffed and complained how they’d been coasting on their reputation for far too long.

It was the same for her first publication and then her first academic job, her tenure-track appointment at Berkley and then the Genius Award. And she knew it was just his lashing out after being wounded, all of it a response to her perceived betrayal at fourteen. 

The great man was still just a child after all.

She had finally stopped trying to win back her father and instead tried to replace him. At university she worked in the lab of a demanding and flamboyantly overbearing researcher known for either lifting his graduate students higher than they thought possible or crushing them completely. He was a crusty German with thick sideburns and a gift for insult. “You should quit now. You’ll never be a scientist,” he’d told her more than once, as he did with all of his students. But when she finally graduated he was there for the ceremony, sitting in the front row, smiling with smug pride over his own hand in the endeavor, sitting right where her father should have been had he found the time to attend.

Then she acquired a brilliant boyfriend, a young scientist named Mark with an ego that rivaled that of her old man’s and a disarming smile that allowed him to get what he wanted, a skill that translated very well into the grant-writing process. Within a few years he had a flood of research funding and his own lab and when Gabby was forced to choose between his career and her own, she selected the latter. She’d chosen career over emotion and she figured her father might understand. But when she’d told her him over the phone, figuring he’d be the one person in the world who might understand how she could leave this charismatic fiancée, he said she’d obviously made the wrong choice. “You’ve got to be realistic, Gabby. It’ll take you ten years to build up a portfolio like Mark’s, and then if you ever want to have children, forget it. You should have stayed with him and coasted on his coattails if you ask me.” She’d politely ended that conversation, thanking him for his advice, and then she sank into her couch and hurled the phone across the room. 

So she forgot Mark, surprising herself at how easily the lingering scent of him on the bed sheets and the indentation on the mattress beside her faded into oblivion. Maybe in that way she was like her father. She delved into the work, wrapping herself up in the puzzles of marine ecology. She spent hours in the lab, just like her old man. She seized every opportunity to work in remote field stations.

And then it had been on one dive, as she collected coral fragments while lying on the bottom of a lagoon, that she caught sight of a shark out of the corner of her eye. She watched it with feigned indifference. It was likewise studying her with a sideways glance, twisting through the water at the edge of her periphery.

She worked the site for weeks and saw sharks on every dive. More than she’d ever seen before, up to a dozen at a time. And later, when she returned to the location after a massive coral bleaching event that left the reef bone-white and reeking of death, the whole area smelling spoiled, she noticed that the sharks, too, had disappeared.

When she returned to the university, she wrote a grant, almost as an afterthought, for a project to study the coral-shark relationship in one of the Pacific’s most pristine reef systems. The grant was funded and the eventual paper that she wrote, complete with dozens of photo she’d taken of massive sharks, was picked up by a top academic journal. And while such articles usually languished within the narrow orbits of a handful of scientists, the magic of the Internet allowed it to be linked by a mainstream publication. Sharks were sexy and in her field photos, some taken by Hamilton to document her equipment for other scientists, it was clear that Gabby looked good on camera. She had now streamlined her research into a pitch: corals and sharks need one another, and if one goes, they both disappear and the whole ocean goes haywire.

So when the world came calling, it found that she was willing to talk and passionate in her delivery. She made her case for clean energy, for saving reefs, for the banning of shark finning and for the creation of marine reserves. She appeared on television and public radio interviews. Young girls wrote her letters and emails and she responded to every one of them in detail. And then she gave her TED Talk. 

And money rolled in. And she left the university.

She’d known what her father would think when she gave up her academic career to become the poster girl for the decline of sharks around the world. But she was finished with her father. She now had a mission. Save one reef. One small atoll. One magic garden of sunken, glittering thickets. One last beach with scattered coral rubble. If she could do this, her life, all her research, would have purpose. She would become ruthless, employing human empathy for the “charismatic megafauna” like sharks and using it to draw interest to the more fascinating but more difficult to grasp corals themselves, these tiny animals that, with even tinier plants living inside of them, built entire worlds. People understood sharks. They loved them and feared them. So she would become known for sharks. She would use them for her own ends, and maybe even save a few of them in the process.

Added to Gabby’s passion, there was also the accident of biology, the fact that many men seemed to find her attractive. With her head in her books from the age of eleven, this awareness of her supposed beauty had never really sunk in. She always had a date to every dance and her male professors always selected her for their field work and she could, if she looked back, start to see a pattern in their leers, the way they watched her pull on her wetsuit, the glazed, drunken, hungry stares after field station cocktail parties.

This was a sort of power, gift or curse that she owned. Other people looked at her and saw an attractive creature. What in her mind felt spindly and twiggy, others described as sleek, sexy. She realized that there was something about her that was easy to sum up, easy to grasp, like a shark. Because of her father she’d always felt inadequate, the way he looked at her with disappointment, and she supposed that he’d always seen her conventional beauty as something of a design flaw, as if, for any real scientist, it would be a liability.

But now she embraced it. She spent as much time running on the beach and doing one hundred squats in the sand, curling up into crunches, to keep striations on her abs and in her thighs.

She spent as much time with a yoga mat as with a microscope, and sure enough a parade of people came by to help her further her ambitions. She posted her photos on her feeds and assembled a massive following. She emailed donors directly and held private lunches in warm places with them where she could dress smartly while still revealing just enough flesh. It worked more often than not. 

Whenever she fell out of the spotlight she merely had to send an email to an editor, almost always male, or a writer or photographer, and they would fly themselves out to her remote atoll where she’d taken up permanent residence and she was in this way able to feed them her propaganda, which allowed her to raise more funds, which would, in theory, allow her to save a small sliver of the sunken landscapes that she so loved.

Her body was a tool, a fine scientific instrument that she could use to extend the knowledge that she sought. But it had a shelf life. Thoreau said that we were the tools of our tools, but she believed that she and her tools were one, whether she leaned over the table at a three-star restaurant to whisper conspiratorially to some donor that together they could make a difference, taking his hand and squeezing it with friendly, chaste conviction that still gave him enough contact of flesh to take home and fuel a fortnight of fantasies. Or when she used those same lips to whisper lustily into the ear of the drunken writer at the bar, blowing her arrack-soaked breath at him, and wetting those same lips with her tongue as she unzipped the fly on his khakis later in her hut, fighting off the nausea but knowing that this was the best way to spread her voice and maybe even sometimes enjoying the intricate and seedy architecture of her great con.

So after a prolonged drought in fundraising after the shock of the latest elections, which seemed to skew the whole world in the direction of environmental catastrophe, Gabby had emailed both the writer and the photographer from the noted science and geography publication and within two weeks they had arrived to play the game. They were interested in her. The public was interested in her. And the sharks. And she would work to weave in her message about the corals and the changing climate and the need to continue her research project and the good work of the Foundation. And they’d wind up with a fresh press clipping or maybe a television appearance or two. And the Foundation’s development officers could approach more donors and the whole cycle would start anew. 

7.

Gabby heard the bubbles and the hiss coming from where the low-pressure hose connected her air tank to her buoyancy control device, and she saw the tiny seep of bubbles. She hadn’t noticed this before. There must have been a dirty connection or a bad rubber ring somewhere in the chain. She realized that she would be bleeding oxygen faster than she wanted, cutting short the time of this dive, especially at this greater depth on the outer edge of the atoll.

She looked around for the photographer so that she could point it out to him in case the situation deteriorated and she needed to borrow some of his air. But as expected, he had abandoned all safety protocol and gone off to snap photos on his own. She saw flashes from his strobes the next coral canyon over from where she now worked and she shook her head because if either of them had a serious problem there now would be no way to help one another.

She checked her air pressure and estimated that she still had a half hour left on this tank. She was tempted to surface and change tanks now, but air was precious and her curiosity pressured her into taking a risk. She looked around once more for the photographer, and when she didn’t see him she took a diversion down the side of the outer reef where the atoll plunged into the ocean abyss. There was a cluster of mesophotic corals, species that required less light and lived deeper. She was thinking of designing a new project to study their connection to the shallower reef systems, and by extension the change in shark populations. It would make for a novel new paper, great basic research, though probably too wonky for the popular media. But she was still a science nerd at heart. 

She hovered at the greater depths for only five minutes, shining her light and snapping photos of the deep corals, taking a few measurements and scribbling notes on her clipboard. As she started to ascend back to her work site, her dive watch beeped, warning her that she would need to make a decompression stop to avoid the risk of getting bent.

She paused to allow the magic of physics to work the nitrogen out of her blood stream. She always wondered at such moments, as she lay suspended, her belly inches from millions of coral polyps on the wall of the outer reef, how many breaths she had left. In the tank. In life. She wondered if this little choice, to dip down to a dangerous depth with a seeping leak in her hose, to milk precious air to its last, would be her last important decision. She unclipped her camera from the harness and spun it around to snap a selfie. She posed with the “all okay” signal and smiled around her regulator. All in a day’s work. #RisksAndRewards.

After the first decompression stop, she rose back up to working depth and looked around. She no longer saw the photographer’s flash. She worried just for a moment. But then she immersed herself once more in her measurements, tracing slowly, centimeter by centimeter, along the transect tape and noting the size, species and health of every coral colony. Plucking a sterile syringe out of her bag and peeling off the packaging, scraping the surface of the colony with the tip to distress the tiny polyps, like tickling their microscopic noses so that they ejected a film of mucus into the water, which she sucked up with her greedy syringe, sealing it in another bag, labeling it and stowing it to study later. Amassing data. The swirling constellation of microbes that the corals spat out with the mucus. This microscopic sneeze of goo, thick with the roadmap to their health and decline. Part of the story was in those microbes. They were the tiniest pieces of evidence to be entered into the case she was building: that corals were the canaries in the coalmine of climate change, that the ocean could not survive our thirst for fossil fuels, that we must change our ways. The proof was in the microbes. They told the story of how one degree Celsius could bring down an entire ecosystem.

Gabby would send the samples out for genetic testing. She would receive gigabytes and gigabytes of data. Oh, the mounds and piles of it! She so loved it. Down here, alone, with no distraction other than the itch of the awareness of the seeping air hose at the edge of her consciousness, she could revel in her data. The unraveling of a tiny mystery that would diagnose the fascinating demise of this great, dying lady we know as our Earth. The climate was changing and this delicate latticework of calcium carbonate rock so carefully crafted by a living skin of corals would be the first of Earth’s finery to fully succumb, smothered by the carbon that humans poured into the air to satiate their hunger for flickering screens, for instant news, for greasy, half-pound burgers and monster trucks, for inane cell phone games and live football and, of course, social media posts from bikini clad scientists in the South Pacific. 

But down here, in the womb of this beautiful reef, with the promise of data to come, Gabby could forget all of that for a little while. Only through this intense concentration and focus could she really push it all to the side, one part of her mind aware of the machinery of tanks and bubbles and hoses that was keeping her alive and another part focused on the tedious tasks and the rest of it simmering in awe at the beauty of the mountains and mountains of data that she was amassing, growing like the living rock around her. A massive reef of data, so huge you could see it from space.

She unclipped her camera again and snapped a macro photo of the rows and columns of numbers on her clipboard.

This Shark Girl got numbers! #IHeartData 

No bikini in that that post. No selfie. That post wasn’t for the lonely, frustrated dudes in their office cubicles looking for some safe titillation to break up their workdays. That one was for the young girls that followed her. Study your maths, gals! Someday you’ll learn it’s all just as beautiful as you are. #STEMgirl #GorgeousData

She moved another few meters along the tape. She added another row to her clipboard of columns. She took another temperature reading. Another syringe full of primordial goo, the coral snot that held the heart of the ocean, the oracle that would read the future of this reef after she shipped these samples over to the data priests at the lab on the mainland who would read back to her its genetic code. 

And then there came sudden movement at the corner of her vision, a shadow across the blurred edge of her clear dive mask. She turned her head, expecting to see the photographer, his lens thrust at her, capturing her work while she toiled unaware, immersed in the beautiful detail of it.

She still hadn’t seen the photographer. How long had it been? Twenty minutes? She checked her watch. She looked around. A school of yellow triggerfish streamed around her and she marveled at their lithe, synchronized movements and then went back to her data, that true love of her life. The only passion that she still shared with her father.

She knew that she should start looking for the photographer. She checked her air pressure gage and then studied again the slow leak in her inflator hose, which had now grown to a steady stream, the hiss of escaping gas louder than before, perhaps made worse by her risky diversion into the abyss. She should start to ascend. She would have to stop again for a good five minutes to allow the rest of the rest of the nitrogen to work itself out of her blood. She’d seen what could happen when divers panicked and raced for the surface: the burning pain, the blue lips, the loss of balance. A host of maladies—the worst being the loss of her ability ever to dive again—to never again see this magical —with death coming in a close second.

She reluctantly left her transect tape and the coral colonies, rising slightly out of the canyon to peer over the cliffs and scan for the photographer. She could see for hundreds of meters in all directions, but still there was no sign of him or his bubble trail. She spun around. She sucked deep breaths of worry, using up precious air.

Shit.

Panic threatened now, as the data reverie dissipated. If the photographer were injured...or worse, dead…it would be on her head. An accident was the last publicity she needed for her project. She would lose funding. She would take hits in the media. 

She swam around a massive bommie coral and then suddenly shrank back as a huge white-tip shark nosed out in front of her and then veered away. It circled, wiggled, curious. She readied her camera as the shark circled back to get another look and then she snapped a burst of images. The shark’s gills rippled as it came at her and then twisted away. Got it. It was close. Maybe a little too close. Feeding behavior. She looked around for some schooling fish or maybe turtles, but there weren’t any. She was the only edible thing around, and a chill worked its way into her wetsuit and down her spine.

She hung motionless. The shark would lose interest. They always did. She checked her camera screen and saw that she had a captured glorious photo of the creature, inches away from its black, luminous eye, and she could see by the gill markings and the pouch at its tummy that the shark was a female. 

Was the shark here to rear her pups? Returned from the vast emptiness of the pelagic ocean to birth her young in the latticework of the coral reef where they could hide from big predators and grow and learn to stalk their own victims? Was it the muscle of her procreation that was making the shark hungry and protective and provoking the feeding behavior? 

Look at the beautiful momma shark I met this morning! #nextgen #whitetip

Even as Gabby worried that this shark might see her as food, she still couldn’t help but marvel at the creature. 

Her beauty reminds us why we must save this #reef from #climatechange.

Then there came another burst of movement at the edge of her vision and she turned and spotted a second shark…this one smaller and swimming in a tight circle, jagged teeth spilling out of its maw. A tiger. It was also exhibiting feeding behavior. Its back arched. Its tail twitching, its movements erratic.

A cold thought gripped her through her wetsuit. What about the photographer? Was that why these sharks were acting so strangely? She spun in a circle, scanning in all directions, looking for a blood plume, or a tattered body. Even though she knew that these sharks would never attack, that they were virgin sharks that had seen few, if any divers before. Sharks that were, comparatively, well fed.

But the climate was tipping. Was there some subtle shift in this reef ecosystem already? Did they sense the decline? Was food becoming scarce? Was the smell of death given off by the dying corals causing them to gorge themselves on anything that might be a meal, knowing full well that there were lean times to come?

There was no sign of the photographer, but she did spot two more sharks. They were schooling. Unusual behavior, especially without baitfish nearby.

But then a shadow passed over her and she looked up and saw them. Directly above her, always the biggest blind spot for a diver.

Dozens of sharks, twisting, circling. Layers of them between her and the surface. They were twitching and thrashing. Her heart dropped…suddenly what had been a beautiful sight, a lone, sleek shark sharing this reef with her, became a frenzied, ravenous mob. One nick. One cut. One bump against the razor teeth of a single shark’s snout. One brush that drew blood and they could turn on her and rip her to pieces. 

She’d heard stories before…scientists, naturalists who had gotten too comfortable. Who had gotten too close. And what scared her most was not the thought of being ripped and shredded to bits. It was what her death would do to her work. To her story and credibility. What terrified her was the sad, slow shake of her father’s head when he heard the news. 

Whoa! Look at these beauties! #SharkMob

She snapped a photo. She remembered that she was Shark Girl. Fearless. Intrepid. She swallowed the fear. The fear of the reef’s demise. The fear of the seeping air in her regulator hose. The fear of the world’s most glorious predators in a thick layer of teeth and fins and testosterone between her and the surface, the place where she needed to go because she was running out of air.

What was causing their behavior? Was she in danger? And what had happened to the photographer?

She searched her mind. She squinted up at the surface where there was the shadow of the boat. She scanned in three hundred and sixty degrees.

A school of sharks. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Exhibiting feeding behavior. Near the surface. But no sign of prey species. And the photographer was gone.

“Fuck.” She choked the word out, taking in a mouthful of water around the edges of her regulator. 

She shook her head as she ascended a few meters to get a better look. Her dive computer beeped a decompression warning to not rise to quickly. Between the mass of shark silhouettes she could see glimpses of the boat more clearly now. And then the gory, frothing tumult at the edge of the gunwales. She squinted and rose another meter. Her computer beeped warning again. And now she made out the chunks of flesh and their unfurling ribbons of blood. The side-to-side rip, thrash and tear of the sharks.

The photographer had returned to the boat and was now chumming the water to draw the sharks. You fucking idiot, she thought. You fucking idiot, not here.

These were white tips of the Pacific open pelagic variety. A different thing entirely from the tourist sharks you attracted in the southern islands.

The markings were similar. It was an easy mistake.

And then there were also the tigers. And some bulls. The most erratic of all. Even the females of this species were jacked on testosterone. Several of them mixed in now. These were not predictable sharks. If any wild creature in a changing ocean could be called predictable.

She saw the photographer plunge off of the far side of the boat and then there came the maddening flash of his strobe lights as he snapped bursts of photos. Spools of red blood twisted and swirled into the water until sliced by the fins of the gliding, thrashing sharks.

From the angle it was clear that the photographer wanted to frame her in a photo below the sharks. She could even imagine the picture. Her hovering mid water, a churning halo of sharks breaking up her silhouette. She wondered if he was shooting in high enough resolution so that he could pick up the look of horror in her eyes. He snapped away, and the flashes pulsed under the water and it seemed that this drove the sharks into a greater frenzy. 

8.

Gabby knew sharks. She did not fear them. But she respected them. And she knew that these sharks, here on this reef, were largely docile in the daytime and unpredictable and dangerous at night.

One afternoon the motor died and it had taken Hamilton until well after dark to fix it. As soon as the sun went down he’d grown nervous, working quicker. Once he’d had the engine sputtering again, she’d shone a flashlight into the water. They drove through churning masses of terrified fish leaping out of the froth and landing with thumps on the bottom of the boat. Sharks leapt into the air after them. The placid expression of contentment that Hamilton normally wore was replaced by wide-eyed terror. Later he’d shown Gabby three small lines on his calf next to an indentation of shriveled muscle. On another such night, when as a boy a smallish white tip had leapt into the boat and thrashed around, slicing open his leg before his uncle was able to beat it to death with an oar. Sharks transformed at night. It wasn’t superstition. It was well known in the traditional ecological knowledge of the islanders…the kind of hard-won wisdom that scientists, and wildlife photographers often take for granted. 

But in the daytime, no worries with these sharks, right?

Except for now, as she looked up into the mass of her namesake species, she saw their mechanical fury. Cold fear crept inside her. Maybe it was the onset of hypothermia after too long in the water. She started to shiver uncontrollably. The regulator chattered in her teeth.

And then there was the tank. The steady oozing of oxygen. It was getting harder to breathe now. The tank was emptying. Becoming lighter. She was starting to rise against her will, so she dumped air from her BCD and remained hovering near the bottom. Air, precious bubbles, drifted toward the surface.

She checked her pressure. Maybe ten minutes of air left. Her dive computer reminded her that she couldn’t race to the surface: she needed a five-minute decompression stop, hovering mid-water, if she wanted to avoid getting bent. Otherwise it would mean a lifelong disability, or even a slow, more immediate, painful death on the surface. 

There was a sudden upheaval. She could vaguely see the shimmering outline of Hamilton seventy feet above her at the side of the boat as he upended the tub and spilled the remaining blood and chum into the water, an inky dark, red stain of it fanning out into the water and spreading. 

More sharks came. From all directions now, a thick school of them thrashing and twisting. The photographer saw it too, and he scrambled to the far side of the boat, pulling himself up over the gunwale into it and out of the water. It was too much now even for the heroic war photographer. 

Now it was just Gabby below and the furious mob of sharks thrashing between her and the boat. No way to swim around them. She had seven minutes left now, at best. Had she more air, she could cruise along the bottom, away from the sharks, and surface at a distance from them, inflating her orange, day-glow safety tube and blast on the whistle clipped to her vest to summon Hamilton.

But she didn’t have time. If she wanted to avoid running out of air, and choking on the sea around her, she had to surface now, right through the heart of the mass of them, up into the slowly spreading stain of blood where she would have to hover for five minutes before continuing to the surface.

The bubbles trickled out of her leaking hose. She sucked down precious air fighting panic, striving to control her breath so as not to waste any. How many minutes left?

Her guts rumbled. Fear made her whole body wobble. Everything felt loose. She felt a sudden softness in her bladder and then a warm pool grew in the leg of her wetsuit.

She had to decide. Drowning or sharks? What would be worse? The slow constriction of sucking the last bit of air out of her tank. The aching and squeezing of her lungs and then the gulp of water, sucking the sea into her body. Long moments of choking panic before death.

Or there was the possibility of a quick ascent, through the mass of sharks. Pop to the surface and risk getting bent, the bubbles of nitrogen too large to circulate through her body, her joints aching, her blood vessels blocked, her lungs bursting, the ripping and tearing it would cause inside of her.

Or finally there was the calm, controlled decompression ascent up through the sharks and blood. The long minutes of hovering required right in the thick of this frenzied mob. Five full minutes of waiting to be torn to bits like a baitfish.

Now one of the sharks broke away. It dove down and eyed her. Greedy. Hungry. Its appetite whet by the chumming. But there was nothing left to eat here now. The photographer’s tub of bait was empty. The prey species on the reef had been thinning for years, from overfishing, from the loss of coral habitat. Her study was showing this. Nothing to eat here now. Except for her.

A slow ascent and five-minute hover right in the thick of the animals: this was clearly the best chance she had to stay alive. 

 But if she were killed by them, what would happen to her project? Shark Girl eaten alive, read the headline. Any credibility that she’d earned. Any publicity that she’d drawn to the cause…all of it would be lost in the lurid finale. Her social feed would fall suddenly silent. There would be a half-day of online tributes. Then her star would evaporate into the ether even quicker than it had risen.

No, it would be no good to be killed by the sharks. For her cause, it would be the worst way to die. She couldn’t risk it. It was better to drown. To sink to the bottom. The story would be that it was the photographer’s fault. Or that she had faulty equipment. That she was careless. Maybe too driven, too committed to her data. Her father would shake his head. Maybe he’d leak a tear or two. As much as he might try to stop himself, in his heart he’d still critique her demise. “She should have been more prepared. She shouldn’t have been so careless.” He’d taught her to dive. He’d shown her the hand signals. “Never dive with someone you don’t know. Ever. Period,” he’d said. “Never dive alone. This is you’re life. Your life is precious. No data are worth your life. No paper is worth your life. Don’t be a stupid girl, got it?”

Got it, pop. You were right. #StupidGirl

She sank. She slowed her breathing. She’d milk the last of this air. She’d live here among her corals as long as possible. The trickle of bubbles that leaked out of the hose connection was slowing. The needle on the pressure gauge dropped toward zero.

9.

She would die down there among the bones of her fading reef. She imagined lying at the bottom, the latticework of broken coral rubble collapsed around her. Was there really any other place for her to be?

But then something happened. It was as if a giant hand was tugging her up toward the surface. She began to rise, to float above the submerged city of corals. She panicked. She grabbed for a branching acropora to arrest her ascent, but she scraped her fingers along some fire coral and yanked them back, her hand stinging.

Slowly she rose. She sucked air and it came very hard now, as if the hose were constricting. She was lightheaded. Disoriented.

Now she heard the cool, pedantic voice of her father.

“How do you approach a problem?”

I don’t know, daddy. #IAmDyingHere

“Don’t be smart.”

Look @ my fkng pressure gauge! #NoAir

“How do you approach a problem?” He said again with his cool empiricism. He eschewed emotion of any sort. How could he be so calm at moments like these?

Okay. Fine, Daddy. How do you approach a problem?

“Don’t be Socratic, honey. Just be a scientist,” his voice said, steady, calm, as she drifted up. The sharks writhed above her. She was picking up speed now, growing more buoyant as she rose. It was pure physics. The remaining gasses were expanding as the depth decreased, as the pressure decreased. At this rate she would shoot up through the sharks to the surface. She would miss her decompression stop. Her lungs would burst. Her eardrums explode. A slow, excruciating death awaited her on the surface. He waited patiently. He wasn’t about to give her advice. She’d have to figure it out for herself. Her dive computer beeped in warning.

How to approach a problem? #observe #measure #hypothesize

“That’s right. The good, old scientific method, my girl. Basic bench science since the Age of Reason.” She heard the smile in her father’s voice. The smug bastard.

But she heeded him. For once in her life, she would follow his direction. What did she have to lose? All she wanted now was to sink and drown on the bottom. She wanted to determine the method of her own death, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be exploding her body with a quick ascent.

Observation one: she was rising. Why was she rising? 

Wait, it’s too early to hypothesize. Gather more data.

Observation two: she was dizzy, light headed. 

Observation three: her gage showed that her tank was nearly empty. She was breathing residual oxygen, and it would run out at any moment.

“So?”

My tank is emptying of air. Air is heavy, when compressed. I’m losing mass.

 “Good. Your hypothesis?”

#IAmBecomingBuoyant

“Excellent. So how will you test this hypothesis?”

I need to dump air. In my vest! #ThinkI’veGotIt!

“So get to work.”

In her foggy, oxygen-starved brain, the notion of losing volumes of air and then rising as a result was a puzzle in this reversed mirror-world under the water. She was slowly floating up toward the schooling sharks. She could hear the pressure crackling in her ears. She was gaining speed. There was no telling how long the conversation in her brain with her father had lasted, but she needed to shake the fog and take action to have time to test her hypothesis.

What should she do?

She needed to dump air. Somewhere, inside or outside, there were pockets of decompressed air. So she exhaled the air out of her lungs, slowly, steadily. Then she reached around to the back of her BCD and pulled the release cord. Bubbles of air belched out of the vest, up toward the sharks, and her ascent slowed. She dumped more air. And then she stopped in a hover.

“Nice work,” her father said. This was strange, because he wasn’t the sort to offer compliments. But then he always admired anyone who could keep a cool head under pressure. Was she cool-headed now? Or just oxygen-deprived and numb?

She finished her long slow exhale and then began to suck in a controlled breath. The tank had to be almost empty. The air was a now a thick, cold milkshake drawn through a narrowing straw. Her cheeks were concave with the effort.

She checked her depth gage. 

Forty-five feet.

She’d reached decompression depth. She looked up through the water and saw the shadow of the boat, closer now. She thought she saw faces peering down at her. She thought she saw the flash of a camera strobe. Or maybe it was the glint of sunlight on water.

Then she looked down at the corals. So colorful. The beautiful landscape, bejeweled. Dazzling. She was tired. She so wanted to rest down there. But she was more buoyant now without the weight of compressed air in the tank and there was no way to get back down. She would have to hover here in mid water.

She felt the sting on her hand again, and she looked at it. It was swollen and blistered from her attempt to grasp the fire coral and anchor herself to the bottom. And there was the red line of a cut across her palm, oozing a thick spool of blood into the water.

Something bumped her leg. 

A shark. 

Something else bumped her tank, jolting her. A rude shove.

Another shark.

Another bump. Harder now. Angrier. The schoolyard bully, feeling power in his cruelty. Others gathering around him to lick at the edges of that power. 

All around her were sharks. They smelled her blood. She knew it. She could see it in their black eyes. She knew their olfactory epitheliums could detect blood in parts per million, parts per billion in some species. Her blood was a signal to the entire reef population for miles around.

She was dizzy. Sucking air. Perhaps she’d drown before they attacked.

The blood curled out of her hand into the sea, the strand of it tugged to and fro by the surge of the waves.

Our blood is seawater. We are all made of the #ocean

Another bump. A shark cruised up, a lovely little white tip. It slowed and eyed her. It waggled away and then circled back. Smelling her salty blood. All the sharks around her could smell her blood.

But then she saw the pregnant shark again. The one that had first come to her on the bottom. Gabby recognized her, the paunch at her belly. She circled Gabby. She radiated a glow of her procreation. She swam in a slow circle around where Gabby hovered. Her vision was blurring. It was harder and harder to focus now. Harder to suck air.

“Don’t panic,” she heard her father say. “Don’t panic, Gabby. Breathe easy.”

It was unlike her father to offer such direct advice. Usually he teased her toward the solution, dropping hints, challenging her. But now here was his voice in her head.

“How long have you been suspended there? Think.”

Don’t know. Losing track of time. #LowOxygen

“You needed to hover, to bleed out the nitrogen bubbles, and then you can surface.”

There are so many sharks. Around me. #BeautifulGrayCloud

“Don’t think about the sharks. Think about the minutes. You don’t have long.”

Gabby looked at her dive computer and squinted at the dial. She looked up and saw the boat above. Maybe thirty-five feet. Not far. Almost close enough to touch. But also too far. Most dive accidents occurred at the surface. The dive watch. She had to look at the dive watch.

“How long have you been there, suspended like that?”

Hard to tell. #TwoMinutes #MaybeThree

“That’s not quite long enough. You still need another couple of minutes. Slow your breathing. Milk that air. Get the nitrogen out of your blood. Save one last long breath. Then try to surface. You got it?”

Got it. Thanks Dad.

“Good girl. Wait just a little longer.”

The window of focus, blurred around the edges, was closing. There was just a pinhole of clarity now at the very center of her dive mask, and through it she could see the cloud of sharks. They were twisting and swirling now. They weren’t angry. They weren’t frenzied. The blood in the water had dissipated. They were a great shifting cloud of black eyes and gray fins and sleek sides and pumping gills. They were glorious. It seemed as if she were seeing them for the first time.

This was one of those moments that, even in her extremity, she recognized that she would never see again. She realized that she was spinning. She saw the boat and the surface and then the bottom below her. She was in suspended animation, in orbit like a satellite. She couldn’t tell which way was up.

“Focus. Look at your computer.”

Gabby forced herself to look at the dive watch. She grasped her forearm and studied the dial. One more minute. 

“It’s time to get ready. Suck that last breath slowly. If you are going to have any chance at all, you need a full breath in your lungs. Then you need to slowly exhale as you rise through the water. Make bubbles, just like I taught you when you were a little girl. Don’t hold your breath. If you do, your lungs will burst. Remember.”

I remember, daddy. #basicsafety #makebubbles

She sucked long and hard on the regulator. There was the thinnest needle of air. It was an awful feeling, to suck and suck and get so little. Panic circled like a tiger shark. If she panicked, she’d use her oxygen. She’d be dead. Just a thread of air left in the tank. And then the shock of nothing. No more air to give and thirty feet to the surface.

She pulled the useless regulator from her lips. She started her final exhalation. Tiny bubbles trickling from her lips. She had to make this last. Her lungs burned. Her brain was mush. She couldn’t tell which way was up.

“You can rise now. You’re free of nitrogen. You can go to the surface,” her father said.

She looked around. A mass of sharks. Which way was up? She had one chance, but which way was up?

“Drop your weight.”

Gabby reached to her weight belt. Right hand release. #BasicSafety. She pulled the buckle. It snapped open. The belt dropped. She began to rise. She still didn’t know which way was up.

But then the sharks began to shift their pattern. They circled and circled, gliding in a swirl, obscuring the sun. Disorienting her. 

Bubbles trickled out of her lips. Each one a tiny compartment of her life’s final breath. Each one rising.

“Observe,” her father said. “Hypothesize.”

No more scientific method, Daddy. Please. #AmDrowning

“Observe,” her father said.

Bubbles escaped from her lips. The vestiges of her last breath. Her final exhalation running out. After that, inhalation of seawater. She would become one with the sea.

“Observe.”

Her father’s voice was faint now. Fading with her final breath. She didn’t know which way was up. She knew she had to swim to the surface. One last decision to make. But which way was up?

“Observe…”

A bubble escaped from her lips. And it went…up. Toward the surface.

Follow the bubbles. #scientificmethod

The bubbles. That was up. She understood this now. The bubbles escaping her lips. She must follow them. She had a few seconds of remaining exhalation. Her lungs were straining. Sucking. Biting.

She finned. Kicking with her legs. So weak. The cloud of sharks parted and showed her a clear path to the light. She swam toward it. They showed her the way. She followed her bubbles. The trickle became one bubble at a time. She wanted so badly to suck breath. Her lungs ached for it. Her lungs screamed for it. Only inches from the surface, and in one final irony she would suck breath and drown here while feeling the warmth of the sun on her body.

10.

She heard the slosh of water against the bottom of the boat. She heard a gull cry, and then the photographer.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, sobbing. She felt his lips against hers, felt his palm on her forehead. He blew and her chest inflated and then it came out. A stream of it. A flood of sweater.

As her lungs deflated and forced the water out, it blew up like a spout over the Photographer’s face. Then came more water. A second flood. He lifted her and she heaved it over the bow. It came and came and then was followed by a slick, raw strand of burning bile. 

And then she was sitting on the gunwale, staring at the chop on the water and Hamilton was laughing, tears in his eyes. He even clapped. “Miss Peacock,” he said. Applauding.

The photographer had fallen back on the pile of his equipment and lay there, astounded by her resurrection and his part in it.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he breathed. “I thought I lost you. Jesus.”

 Hamilton laughed and laughed.

Gabby threw up again, this time the crumbs of her breakfast coming out from way down in her stomach. 

“Jesus,” the photographer was saying.

Gabby sat up straight and looked at him. Her face held no expression. She worked the muscles of her jaw, sore from biting and sucking on the regulator. The photographer was shaking his head, running his fingers through his hair. She noted how his arm flexed as he did this. The pale strip under his armpit. The outline of his ribs. She saw his camera lying on the pile of gear.

“How do the pictures look?” she asked. 

The photographer looked at his camera as if it were an affront. As if it had been the cause of all of this.

“Any good ones?”

He reached for it. He switched it on and stared at the screen at the back of the waterproof housing for a moment. As he scrolled through the images his eyes came to life again. Greed crept into them. “Holy fucking shit,” he said, pausing on one of the pictures. He turned the back of the camera to her. “Look at that,” he said.

She took the camera. Her hands were weak, trembling. But she held the heavy camera close to her face so she could see. She saw on the tiny screen a photo of herself. She was gracefully poised, her hair streaming, one arm outstretched like the fingers of David stretching toward God in the painting on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. And around her, a swirl of sharks. More than she had ever seen. A great, synchronized, swirling mass of them.

She looked up from the camera and at the photographer. She smiled.

“Can I have a copy of that?” she asked. “To post on my feed?”

11.

Later that night as they both lay sweating on her mattress, she wiggled out from under his arm and padded across the hollow floor of her hut on stilts. She unhooked her computer from its plug and went out to the porch where she could get a stronger WiFi signal from the little store three huts down where she paid a share of their monthly bill.

She fired up Skype and looked to see who was online. It was evening in the States. She saw her father’s icon: Peacock Lab.

She dialed it figuring that he wouldn’t answer. She sat in the darkness in the glow of the screen listening to the waves that were creeping closer and closer to the road across from her house because the sea level was rising. They were all the frogs in the boiling water. The whole world, frogs.

She let it ring and ring and she was about to close her laptop when she heard the blip and he picked up. His face was pixilated and almost indistinguishable but she saw his lab coat and his shock of white hair.

“Hello Gabby,” he said, and his voice was clear, but distant, canned. And familiar. And she now remembered that the voice that she’d heard in her head underwater was this Skype version of his voice, digitally distilled and captured and blasted around the world. Still, her heart leapt at the sound of it. It was like she was stepping off of a plane into his waiting arms. She gripped the sides of the laptop screen and grinned.

“Hi Daddy.”

“How’s the research?” he asked her.

“Fine. Have had the media here the past few days, so real work’s been slow. All part of the funding dance. But now I’m going to get back to it, full steam. In a few more weeks I’ll have what I need for the new paper. We’ll see what comes back from genetics.”

“That’s great.”

“You’re well, Daddy?”

“Um, yes. Fine.”

“Daddy…” she said. She stared at the screen searching for words. Even through the pixilation he looked tired and worn. He was at the end of his career. The long hours in the lab were a young man’s game. She checked her watch. It was six p.m. his time. He’d be there another few hours. He had nothing else. He lived alone now. He had few friends. Grad students no longer sought him out. Those who’d admired him were retiring. Dying off. He was heading into oblivion. His career, another frog in the boiling water.

But she realized now that he’d taught her everything she needed to know. Everything of value that she knew. His words in her head, what he had taught her, what he had drilled into her ad nauseum: that had saved her. He was always with her.

“Daddy,” she said. “I just wanted to say, thanks…for everything you taught me. I…”  I love you, she finished in her mind without saying the words. She let slip a sob. Through the poor connection she wondered if he could hear the emotion in her voice.

“Gabby, I…” he started, and then hesitated. She couldn’t quite tell, but was he choked on a sob as well? I love you, daughter she finished in her mind. She thought back to one afternoon when she was ten and she was unboxing her first microscope, a gift from him. She just wanted to play with it, but already he was starting to lecture her on the scientific method.

“I have to go,” he said, finally, through the static of the bad connection, and then she knew the truth of it. That nothing had changed for him. She was still the frivolous Shark Girl and he was the serious scientist. “I have to get back to my work,” he said, gesturing to the lab behind him. “Be smart. Be safe,” he said.

I love you, daddy, she said in her mind. She wasn’t bitten by his brusque dismissal. I love you, daddy. It’s so hard to do, but I love you. She decided then that whether he loved her back or not didn’t really matter. Did the corals love her back? Did the sharks love her back? Did this photographer she’d slept with tonight love her? This man who had almost killed her? Did Hamilton love her? Had the writer the night before loved her? Had any of them?

It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter one bit. #HeartOfSteel

She was a scientist. An empiricist. Observe. Measure. Test. And then she added one more term to the circle: act. She was the one who acted. The scientific method hadn’t changed in three hundred years. It hadn’t needed to. The reefs would always be around. The fish would always swim in the sea and the birds in the air. Until now. Now, she knew, scientists had to evolve. If they wanted to have anything left to study, they needed to adapt. To change. Her father was of the old world. She thought of her own graduate students. Their starry eyed zeal. Their activism. How they ate vegan to save the corals. How they argued with their fathers passionately over Skype. They had evolved, these young students. Her father was an endangered species. Perhaps incapable of passion. Or perhaps culturally conditioned to suppress it. He would die out. And maybe, just maybe, Shark Girls like her would adapt enough to survive. To help the rest of the world survive.

She crawled over to her bed and rolled over so that she could scoot back against the photographer. His sweat smelled like the arrack they’d been drinking, but it was comforting rather than unpleasant. She pulled his arm over her. It made her feel safe, though she knew this was just a feeling, not a reality. In the morning he would be gone. He would file his photos and she would wait for the article and once it came out she would send it to the Foundation and all of their donors and use the good PR to continue her work. And in the morning she would find Hamilton at the dock waiting with fresh tanks. And she’d return to her transect tape. And her data. And her sharks. And her corals. 

And she would fight to save them until she ran out of breath.