Cover

Dedication

To my dream come true, for making room for all the other dreams I didn’t even know I had.

Chapter 1

‘Can you believe this?’ Millie thrusts her phone closer to my face.

‘Believe what?’ I ask, squinting at the screen, attempting to decipher the scientific garble she’s pulled up.

We’re sitting on my couch while The Bachelor is paused in the background.

‘Him!’ Millie exclaims with a huff. ‘Hugh Harris!’

‘Oh,’ I say, realisation dawning on me. Like Millie, Hugh Harris is a marine biologist, but he’s based out of Sydney and he happens to disagree with everything Millie publishes. He’s a know-it-all. Millie never shuts up about it.

She inches closer to me on the couch, as if bringing the phone as close to my face as physically possible will make me sympathise with her faster. I take the phone out of her grasp and zoom in on an article titled ‘Coral Bleaching Is No Longer the Biggest Problem Facing the Great Barrier Reef – and the Butterfly Wrasse Can Prove it’.

I haven’t read The Marinist since I studied marine biology in college, but I proofread all of Millie’s stuff, so I know this article. For the past two years, she’s been on the hunt for the butterfly wrasse, a little purple fish with a yellow stripe and a nubby fin on its belly. I thought it sounded cute at first – kind of like Millie’s own Finding Nemo, but after listening to her drone on and on about how she thinks the species survived its supposed extinction, and what that means for coral regeneration in the Great Barrier Reef, I don’t think it’s cute anymore. If I have to hear her say one more time that fund-raising efforts to stop coral bleaching should be redirected to stop fertiliser runoff from banana farms, my head will explode.

Millie heaves an impatient sigh, tired of waiting for me to validate her annoyance, so I scroll to the problem area — the comments section.

@HughHarris As a marine biologist with a university degree from the top marine biology programme in the world, I do not agree with Millicent’s claims. Considering the rate at which staghorn corals were bleached, there is almost a zero per cent chance the butterfly wrasse has survived. Regardless, the severity of coral bleaching should not be dismissed. Also, @milliepaxton, you missed a comma in the second sentence.

@santabarbaraecowarriors21 If biologists @millie-paxton @hughharris can’t even agree on basic facts – like, let’s say, SPECIES EXTINCTION, how do they have the right to tell us what to fund-raise for?!

@greatbarrierreefscuba818 They don’t. And

@millie-paxton lives in Ohio. How would she know?

My mouth falls open. ‘I didn’t miss a com—’ I start to say, scrolling back up to the second sentence of the article. I stop short because, unfortunately, Hugh is right. There is not a comma where a comma should be.