“So have you decided?”

“I’m leaving for America on the first of November. That’s almost a week exactly.”

“That’s not a no,” Isla says.

“No,” I sigh, pulling off my glasses to rub at the headache that’s already forming. “It’s not a no.”

2. ISLA

I’m fucking cold.

My brother Murray used to say that when we’d come on land to visit our mum. We’d shake our pelts off our shoulders like we were stretching in the sun, and Mum would be waiting with blankets and a hug. Murray would wrap the blanket around his shoulders like a cape, jump up and down, and throw his head back to the sky.

“I’m fucking cold!” he’d shout.

I always thought he was being dramatic or just doing it to get a laugh out of Mum. Sure, land feels differently than the water — the wind bites differently, the temperature sinks deeper — but I’d never felt the need to shout about it.

I’m real close to shouting now.

Land is fucking cold. My fingers are stiff and achy when I move them, and my nose is raw. I keep sniffling, and the scratchy wool of the jumper I nicked from Kit feels like it’s tearing apart my face every time I try to blot at my nose.

I’ve never loved land, but I’ve never hated it like I hate it now. It’s loud and cold and smells of rubbish and petrol, and every moment between coming up on the rocks to see Kit and standing at the ferry harbour watching Thomas Madigan have a meltdown has been frustrating and uncomfortable and generally the worst experience of my life.

Maybe it would be fine if Thomas weren’t such a twat, but he is. He’s a twat.

He actually yelled at me when I tried to steal a bag of crisps earlier, even though he refused to buy us lunch. And then he ignored me the entire time we were on the bus from Glasgow to the ferry harbour in Aberdeen, so I had nothing to do but sit there and think about how hungry and I am and how loud human children are.

And how extremely disappointing Thomas is. Kit made me think he’d be… more.

Even now he’s teetering on the edge of either a quiet homicidal rage or a nervous breakdown, his bushy eyebrows raised and his jaw clenched as he stares down the man behind the ticket desk at the ferry station. His brown hair is whipping in the wind, and when he closes his eyes, he looks like he’s counting to ten. I can see his fingers tapping out the beat against his leg and everything.

Humans are so weird.

“What do you mean it’s seventy pounds to the island?” he asks when he opens his eyes.

His voice is hoarse, and his weird accent is stronger than it was last night. I keep thinking of asking him where it’s from — it’s Scottish, but not. It’s loads lighter than Kit and I sound, anyway, with punches on odd words. I’ve never heard it before.