THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA SHEILA HETI

There was a general sadness that day on the ship. Dani was walking listlessly from cabin to cabin, delivering little paper flyers announcing the talent show at the end of the month. She had made them the previous week; then had come news that the boys' ship would not be attending. It almost wasn't worth handing out flyers at all—almost as if the show had been cancelled. The boys' ship had changed course; it was now going to be near Gibraltar on the night of the performance—nowhere near where their ship would be, in the middle of the North Atlantic sea. Every girl in school had already heard Dani sing and knew that her voice was strong and good. The important thing was for Sebastien to know. Now Sebastien would never know, and it might be months before she would see him again—if she ever would see him again. All she had to look forward to now were his letters, and they were only delivered once a week, and no matter how closely Dani examined them, she could never have perfect confidence that he loved her, because of all his mentions of a girlfriend back home.

- 

The best thing about liking a boy was that it filled in all your time. You could lie on your bed and listen to music for an entire afternoon, daydreaming about him, feelings travelling deliciously all throughout your body. Without a boy to like, you were liable to spend your energy spreading gossip and causing drama among the other girls, just to have something to think about and do.

Sebastien wasn't any normal boy. He was a technophobe. This meant that very few girls could get close to him. In person, he wore huge headphones at all times, so he was very difficult to approach. It was a big deal that he liked—or maybe liked, or at least was writing—Dani. Somehow, she had slipped through the cracks of his consciousness, which she believed to be a moral, self-protective, and upright place. Sebastien's pant legs were the perfect width. His mother was a nurse. He liked music made in generations long ago. She didn't know much more than that, but she didn't need to know much more than that. The last time she had seen him, on the girls' ship, she had experienced a sudden, warm drop in her stomach. She hadn't known of his existence before he entered the dining hall, where their eyes had met, and that was when she felt the warm drop. It was the first time a boy had made her feel that way. She had the attention deficit disorder, but she was able to think about Sebastien for hours on end. Surely this was good for her brain. Maybe it was even making her smarter. Thinking about Sebastien, she could lose all sense of time and space.

Now Dani knocked on the door of the cabin that Lorraine and the delicate Flora shared. When Flora opened the door, Dani rushed in and fell on Flora's bunk, dramatically throwing the flyers everywhere.

“What's the point of the talent show now? You've heard the news, haven't you?” she asked them.