“Brucellocis,” I read. “What is that?”

Helix and I were in my bedroom reading over files that he had uncovered and printed, earlier that day. Since I’d stopped training for personal reasons, he’d been helping me when he wasn’t at the snack bar. I wouldn’t say we’d become friends, exactly, but we had a good working relationship. I finally asked him why he’d agreed to help with all of this.

“I want to study painting, and my dad is adamantly refusing to pay for college, unless I go for science of some kind. He’s given up on me being a doctor, but he wants me working on some kind of ‘ology.’ I’m not him, but he doesn’t see it that way.” I nodded, understanding all too well about family expectations.

After telling me about his dream to study painting, he became shy again, turning back to the marine biology we were trying to understand at the moment. “Brucellocis. It’s a dolphin disease,” he read. “An infection that can . . .” Squinting, he stopped to click a link, and then muttered quietly, “that can cause infertility in dolphins.”

 “I knew I’d heard that word before!” I exclaimed, grabbing the iPad right out of his hands to search my bookmarks for one of the thousands of articles I’d saved in the past week. Unfortunately, I was gathering information too quickly to even remember what I’d read.

“This,” I said, finally showing him an article that talked about an increase of the disease in the dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, since the oil spill there in 2010.

“’Ten times the dead dolphins as usual,’” Helix read, “’including calves and unborn fetuses.’ But what, exactly, is the disease?”

“And, do you think it’s around here?” I asked, getting excited. This could be something.

Helix looked back and forth between his dad’s notes and the article, comparing the two.

“I don’t know about now,” he said, so slowly I was ready to scream. “But, I think that it was. We need Billy for this.”

I knew Billy was home; I saw him hanging on his family’s dock, fishing with Blake. So, it went without saying that if we needed Billy, I was not going to get one without the other.

“Nah,” I said, “this is about the dolphins. Let’s call Celeste.”

Celeste came over quickly, helping us understand the notes, and she explained details about the disease. It matched the details of what was happening around the Island in the years before we were born.

“This was his working hypothesis, it seems,” Celeste confirmed. Looking more closely at the medical jargon in the notes, she confirmed that the condition at the time was undetected in both patients and dolphins alike. Instead of calling attention to the matter, Doc had begun treating the women on-Island as part of his fertility treatment. First, he ordered any woman who wanted to get pregnant to trade fish consumption for vegetables.

“You guys eat a ton of fish, just like the dolphins do. If this was coming from food they ate, then it was likely in the food your parents were eating, too.”

“If people were sick from eating the fish, why didn’t they know it?” He asked, posing the question we were all thinking.

“It could have been a build-up over years,” Celeste said. “They wouldn’t necessarily have felt anything. And, it was just a hypothesis, so your dad probably didn’t want to say anything in case he was wrong.”

“So he was hiding something, even back then,” I said.

“Not exactly, Sweetie,” Celeste said, running a patient hand over my hair. I appreciated her comfort in the moment. “In an active study, second-guessing his experiments in public wouldn’t have helped. And, in this case, it does seem that some of these measures worked.” She looked at the file again, before continuing. “In addition to cutting fish consumption, Doc administered an intense course of antibiotics from the time women began his treatments through their pregnancy. The injections had been nothing more than strong-scale antibiotics meant to keep the Brucellosis, at bay so that the unborn babies could stay viable.”

 “So, that was it? His whole big fertility secret was penicillin?” I asked, incredulous that the guy we were expected to treat like a god, acted as little more than a pharmacist.

“I don’t think so,” Helix said, “because it doesn’t really explain all the twins.”

I nodded, and Celeste did, too.

“So,” I gulped, ready to ask the million-dollar question and afraid of what the answer would be. “Do you think this is what’s going on right now?”

“I’m pretty sure the tests for this disease were part of the course of tests that Doc did right after Shay went down,” Celeste said, “though I’ll double-check. But, if this was the answer, Shay and Mica would already be fine.”

“How?” I asked, drooping under the weight of a failing step forward.

“They’ve had antibiotics,” Helix answered. “Plenty of them, and they still haven’t woken up.”

I took in the news; it hurt my heart, literally. Helix awkwardly patted my shoulder, while Celeste scooped me up in a hug and let me cry on her, for the hundredth time that week. When my most recent bout of tears were spent, I looked up at the two of them again and strengthened my resolve.

“So, this is just the first part of his process?” I asked.

Helix nodded. “This was all the information we had at home.”

I nodded. I think I knew where to find the rest.

The water had only been closed for a day after Mica. His condition had been classified under head injury. I found myself evilly hoping for someone else to go down, so maybe they would take it more seriously.

Blake hadn’t stopped though. Every morning, he’d waited outside my house for me, board in hand, expecting me to come surfing. I wouldn’t go, but he persisted.

The first two days, I ignored him. The second two, I slammed the front door. Yesterday, when he’d had the audacity to, once again, turn up with a surfboard, I gave in to my own needs and cursed him out.

“Are you crazy?” I screeched, pleased when his eyes went wide at my tone. Yelling made me feel mentally closer to Mica, which, of course, Blake saw right through.

“Screaming won’t make him better,” Blake said slowly, the quiet vibration of his tone reaching into a part of me that I quickly slapped down. “But, surfing might. Make you feel better, I mean; closer to him.”

“Surfing? With you? That’s what go him into this mess!” I said, using all of my mental armor to not react to the pain that appeared in his eyes when I threw out the words like daggers.

“Cami, he’s my best friend. I would never…,” he struggled to get the words out. “You know that! I can’t even…” He whirled around, like an animal himself. “God! What you’re saying!” He shook his head. “It’s making me sick.”

I could see it was. He looked horrified, and haunted, and so alone. But I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—be the person to make him feel better.

“Not as sick as Mica, though,” I jabbed. “And even if he could go, he wouldn’t go with you.”

In truth, the thought of going surfing, of letting the waves calm my pain for just a little while, was exactly what I wanted to do. Mica would definitely have escaped to the waves and let them work their magic on his mood.

“You’re wrong,” Blake said. “You can think want you want about what happened out there, make me the one to blame. But, Mica? He’d be the first one to tell you that you’re way off base here, and I think you know that.”

“No, I really don’t,” I snapped quickly.

“No. The problem is that you’re placing blame on everyone. And at the moment, it’s me, which is ridiculous,” he said, finally loosing the steady calm that was so not working on me, anyway.

Good! I was mad, and sad; and I wanted him to be, too. It killed me that, even though I hadn’t said it out loud, he knew it, and threw it right back my way.

“Cami, these past few weeks with you, they’ve been beyond amazing. If you don’t want to be with me that way anymore, I’ll accept it. And, since I know we’ve got other things to worry about, I won’t even ask you why right now. But us not being together as friends, at all? How can you live with that?”

“Aren’t you the one who said life, right now, is nothing like normal? Even if you didn’t cause what happened to Mica—and I said if—the fact that you want to go surfing, instead of spending every possible second trying to find out why this is happening, and how we can fix it, is absolute proof that you have no clue.”

“None of us do! Not even Doc! Not for a second, have I stopped thinking about Mica or Shay or Darwen! It kills me that I don’t know how to help them. And that whatever’s happened to them, could happen to me—or you—next. All I do know is that my best friend is in a coma right now and I could be next. So, I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend more useless hours locked up in a room researching science and theories that I don’t understand.”

“So, just chuck it all, grab a board and go? And if you go down, okay, ‘cuz at least you were surfing? You can live with that?”

“Yeah. I can. If the same thing happens to you, you’ll have wasted these days alone, crying and sitting inside, frantically searching a computer for answers that clearly are not there. Instead, you could be with me. Outside, doing something we love.”

My jaw dropped, and then the tears fell down my cheeks, pushed out of my eyes by the horrible truth of what he was saying. My armor had been shattered. He was talking about how to spend his last days—his last minutes—and that he wanted them to be with me.

He approached me; I let him.

“Doesn’t being with me on the waves sound better than how you spent yesterday?” he asked, wiping my tears away with the pads of his thumbs, cradling my face in his sun-warmed hands.

For all of two seconds I sunk into his touch, and into the idea that Blake and I together was right, not wrong, that our being together could make this better, instead of worse. My heart slowed and I closed my eyes, hearing all the sounds around me: the birds and waves, the splashing of water on the dock, the chirp of the dolphins, somewhere in the distance. Avoiding Blake was about more than my love life; it was about everything.

I opened my eyes again, facing reality. “It’s not that simple, Blake. This is up to me. I don’t know why, or how, I am supposed to do this, but I know that it is. Pretending that surfing will solve our problems, hasn’t worked so far. We need science and facts, not dolphins and waves. As long as Mica is lying down, instead of standing here next to us, waxing his board to go surfing with us, I can’t even stomach the thought of going myself. Or, being around anyone who can.”