Siren's Storm by Lisa Papademetriou

inquisitive.”
    “Not usually,” Will admitted. He fought the urge to ask her about walking into the sea. It wasn’t the moment—not yet.
    “I enjoy talking to people,” Asia said. “Is that so strange?”
    He wanted to tell her that she didn’t act like someone who enjoyed talking to people. She wasn’t really acting like she wanted to talk to him, for example. But that would be obnoxious, he knew, so he stayed silent.
    Two high school girls that Will vaguely knew sat down at a table nearby. They stared at Asia with barely disguised contempt. Will had seen girls give Gretchen that look sometimes, too. “Most people have horrible personalities,” Will said.
    Asia nibbled a clam and nodded. “Many people,” she corrected. “Not most.”
    “Enough,” Will said. “I see it at our farm stand all the time. People cut in line, they’re rude to each other, they talk on their cell phones and ignore whoever’s behind the counter. It drives me nuts.”
    “Well do I know it.”
    “Well do I know it,” Will repeated.
    Asia’s green eyes lingered on his, reading the amusement on his face. “Was that strangely put?”
    “Strangely put?” Will laughed.
    “What’s so funny?” Asia asked.
    “I don’t know … sometimes some of what you say sounds kind of old-fashioned.”
    Asia popped a clam into her mouth and thought it over. “I should watch more TV, I guess.”
    “No, no—it’s cool. I like it.”
    “I’m glad you approve.”
    “There you go again.”
    Asia smiled at him, and his heart tripped a little. “So tell me more about you,” Will said.
    “What would you like to know?”
    Everything
, he wanted to say. But, somehow, he didn’t dare. This moment, with the air in his face and the strange, beautiful girl—it was so dreamlike that he was almost afraid to assert himself too much. He didn’t want to wake up. “Tell me anything.”
    Asia shrugged.
    “Okay … tell me about your family.”
    Asia placed her hands on the countertop. Her long white fingers spread like tentacles, then were still. She looked at Will, and suddenly he felt as if he had slipped down a well. He was disoriented, as if he were falling … falling …
    “I had a sister,” Asia said at last. Her eyes turned down to the table.
    And that was all.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Thank you.”
    Silence.
    “How did she die?”
    Green eyes snapped up, met Will’s face. “In a fire.”
    Will winced. He didn’t say that he was sorry again, although he wanted to. It was hard to say the words, but he forced them out: “I had a brother.”
    “Yes,” Asia told him. “I know.”
    He felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart—cold shock, disorienting pain. “You know?”
    “Gretchen told me.”
    “Ah.” Will looked to the window that opened onto the street. Someone was singing beneath a tree by the curbside. The kid had stringy hair and a tall, awkward body, and he was singing a sad song—something about the sea. It was Kirk Worstler.
    The song seemed to be an old sailor’s song, but it wasn’t one that Will knew:
    There’s no sign of canvas upon the blue waves;
    You’ll never return home to me
.
    For the waves beat the shore
    Like a knock at the door
,
    And all things return to the sea
.
    The song floated over them. Kirk had a surprisingly beautiful tenor voice.
    “There’s something about losing a sibling, I think …,” Will said at last.
    “It haunts you,” Asia said.
    Haunts
. Yes, that was the word. Will felt haunted.
    The hardest thing for Will to accept was that Tim would never be anything else—never anything else but dead. It didn’t comfort Will to think of him in heaven, waiting for all of his loved ones to die and join him. And it didn’t comfort him to think that God had a plan. If God had a plan, surely it wasn’t a plan tokill off an eighteen-year-old right after his first year of college, to tear him from his mother before his life had even begun. What kind of crappy plan was that? These