Dive into The Cruise by Naïma Brown
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Read an extract of The Cruise by Naïma Brown.
Here he is, ten years later. The monster from my past walking right into the inner sanctum of my office, peering out at me from my own computer. Eli fucking Murphy.
The video window on my screen is taunting me. It’s a frozen shot of Eli standing in front of what looks like the giant glass wall of an aquarium, his face contorted on the precipice of speech. Unable to stop myself, I click play.
Hello there, my name is Eli Murphy. I’m twenty-eight, I live in San Diego and I spend most of my time here with these guys behind me. I’m a marine biologist. My specialty is sharks—specifically, hammerhead sharks. The ocean is my home, so obviously I’m attracted to the idea of The Cruise, just being out on the water every day. I mostly want the prize, I won’t lie, but I want to put it towards a good cause. I’m passionate about conservation, and I want to donate all of the prize money to shark habitat rehabilitation.
And, hey, if I happen to meet someone special along the way, all the better.
Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you. The words plough through my brain.
He still looks the same, although his hair is cropped close, and he’s got the broad shoulders and chest of the man he is now, rather than the boy he was then.
I shudder.
I can’t help but think of what strength he has coiled in him now. If he was able to overpower me back then, when he had the ropey, lean body of a teenager, imagine the damage he could do now.
The thought occurs to me that he’s planned this somehow, that this video, him finding his way into the final fifty candidates, is all a deliberate attempt to let me know that he knows where I am, that he won, he’s still winning and will always win. But that would be absurd. There’s no way he could know where I am, who I am, now. I made sure of that when I left Sarah behind and became Bailey.
I never told Vince and Sandra what happened in the woods. By the time I finally turned my phone back on and asked Sandra to come get me at the gas station I’d walked to, I’d formulated my story.
I hid the deeper truth of the worst thing that Eli had done inside the second-worst thing that he’d done—the cruel joke, the humiliation in the middle of the gym when they’d all laughed at me—and it had been enough for them. It was enough for them to forgive how drunk I was, ruining my dress, losing my shoes and ignoring their calls. And it had been enough of a reason to accept my insistence on finishing the school year at home. I would not set foot back in that place, I told them.
Vince wanted to report Eli, but I forbade it. ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘For being an asshole? You yourself said teenage boys are assholes. Are they going to give him detention? It won’t matter. Just leave it.’
Eli’s teeth had imprinted a deep, blue bruise on the soft flesh of my breast that took weeks to slowly pass through all the colours of healing: from purple to green to yellow and then
finally back to the peach of my skin. Throughout those weeks, it was a constant, painful reminder of how stupid I’d been to let my guard down.
I had been so, so drunk. I couldn’t trust my own memory of that night. Maybe he hadn’t planned to go any further than he did. Maybe I’d said yes when I meant no. Maybe when I said please, he thought I meant, please, keep going. Maybe I’d never actually tried to get away from him. Maybe I had accidentally smiled, encouraged, initiated . . .
It was only later, in my second year at NYU studying engineering, while I was sitting in the airless basement of a YMCA in Brooklyn with a stale cookie balanced on a paper napkin on my lap, that I began to see things differently. As the group-therapy facilitator put it, I was internalising guilt, engaging in self-blame. Still, while these concepts did illuminate some things, I couldn’t seem to fully absorb them. They hovered on the outer membrane of my deepest self, unable to reach my core. Until I met Katy Quinn.
For three weeks in a row, Katy sat directly across from me in the group-therapy circle. With her long, bone-straight ebony hair, porcelain skin and red lips, she looked like a modern-day Snow White in baggy jeans and a hoodie. You didn’t have to talk at this group, which was part of the reason I had stayed. I’d never actually told my story to anyone, but when I saw the ‘Women Survivors of Violence Support Group’ flyer on the bulletin board of the school clinic, I was drawn to it. I knew I needed something. I knew I wasn’t okay, but the idea of sitting alone in front of a therapist and—I mean, where the fuck would I begin?
The moment of my conception? It was too much. But a group felt doable. Safety in numbers, I suppose.
After the session was over, as I was zipping up my coat, Katy approached me. ‘Wanna grab a drink? There’s a bar just down the street.’
I couldn’t think of a reason to say no. Over a plate of fries and a few too many rounds of Vodka Collinses, Katy proceeded to change my life. Honestly, that’s the only way I can explain it. She told me she could tell I wasn’t satisfied with the approach at group, and that whatever my story was needed more than just breathing exercises and self-forgiveness
meditations. What I needed was to harness and embrace my rage.
‘How can you tell?’ I asked.
‘Girl,’ she answered, ‘your face. Every time I looked at you, I could see a bit of what I felt when I first tried these groups. Like you were waiting for the part where someone told you what you could actually do, not what you should feel.’
She was right: that was exactly how I felt in the group. Like we were all bleeding out in front of each other, but instead of a tourniquet we were offered affirmations and platitudes. Then
Katy told me about a group of women that she was a part of, roughly forty of them at the time, from all around the country.
‘We all have a monster out there. We’re our own support group, Sarah,’ she explained. ‘Honestly—and I say this as someone who has been to every kind of therapy there is—it’s the
best I’ve ever had.’
‘So, wait, why were you at group tonight, then?’ I asked.
Katy looked at me and smiled. ‘To rescue you. I could just see it in your eyes. You’re one of us. You’re a part of the Squad.’
Apparently, it was something she did from time to time, attend group-therapy sessions and keep an eye out for anyone whom she recognised herself in.
‘I wish I’d found the Squad earlier,’ she explained. ‘It feels really fucking great to shorten that process for someone else. For you.’
We finished our drinks in comfortable silence as I processed everything she’d told me.
She was right. I did find the group-therapy approach too soft. Too easy. I wanted to be angry.
I wanted to be outraged. I wanted to growl and howl and snarl.
‘I’m in,’ I said eventually. As far as I knew at that point, being in simply meant joining a WhatsApp group where we shared our stories with each other without trying to dress it up in therapy-speak and what the Squad referred to as toxic positivity.
Sometimes all you wanted was for other people to say, ‘Honestly, fuck him, he’s a fucking evil cunt,’ and therapists didn’t tend to say that kind of thing. And the Squad was that, but it was so much more, too. But that would take me a little while to understand.
‘What name should I use to add you to the group?’ Katy
asked, holding up her phone.
‘What do you mean? Like, what’s my last name?’
She put her phone down and regarded me.
‘You know,’ she said, arching an eyebrow, ‘Katy Quinn isn’t my real name.’
She explained that a lot of the women in the Squad had changed their names, some of them for literal safety from their monsters—like Katy—and others for the symbolism of it. Leaving the old you behind, the one who’d been hurt, betrayed and humiliated, and choosing who the next you would be.
I instantly loved the idea. I felt no connection to the name Sarah, and Kilkenny had always felt borrowed. There was no way I wanted to be a Hickson again.
I looked at the rows of spirits behind the bar, and my eyes fell on a bottle of Irish cream. ‘Bailey,’ I said.
Katy smiled. ‘Bailey what?’
‘What are these again?’ I pointed to our cocktails.
‘Vodka Collins?’
‘Done.’ I clapped my hands like I was performing a magic trick. ‘Bailey Collins, that’s me.’
Things moved quickly after that. The thing about transformation and reinvention is that, once you commit to it, it takes on a kind of unstoppable momentum, a life of its own. You can’t be half pregnant, as they say. And changing my name was only the beginning.
I dropped out of school—I couldn’t really change my name there, after all, and every time I looked at my engineering homework I thought of Vince and Sandra and the home I’d had
with them, a home I couldn’t go back to. My monster had taken everything from me.
Through a friend of Katy’s, I got a job as a runner at a production company that made television commercials. It was an entry-level job and the pay was shit, but it ignited my love for producing and set me on the path that I’m on now. I cut my hair short and bleached it blonde, and I started wearing brown contact lenses. When I’d saved enough money, I had a breast reduction. I told the surgeon it was for back pain, which was true. But I also hadn’t been able to look at my breasts without seeing Eli’s hands on them. They hadn’t felt like mine in years, and after they were reduced to a B-cup, they did.
Through all this, I had the Squad. It was mostly just on WhatsApp, since Katy had moved to Maine to be with her girlfriend (a short-lived relationship, but Katy fell in love with the riverside town, and stayed), but I felt more supported and loved than I had in my entire life. Even more than with Vince and Sandra, because the Squad knew everything about me, and
loved me for it.
These changes were more than superficial. They altered me on a fundamental level. And now I’m Bailey Collins, senior producer on The Cruise. Capable, when I feel like it, of being the life of the party. Someone who loves her colleagues, who loves
her job, who loves her life.
I watch Eli’s video again. And then again. And then once more.
The first time I watched it, I felt like Sarah again: scared, cornered, powerless. But now, I feel like Bailey. And what will Bailey do in this situation? Will Bailey Collins allow Eli fucking Murphy to just show up in her world, her carefully curated and protected world that she’s earned and fought for?
No. No, she fucking won’t.
I message the Squad with the four words that we have all pledged never to ignore, the four words I’ve personally responded to twice.
I have a mission.
Within seconds, Thelma & Louise gifs flood the thread.
And I smile.
Partially extracted from The Cruise by Naïma Brown, available now.
The Cruise
by Naima Brown
The revenge fantasy novel that every woman secretly wishes for: that her closest, most loyal group of female friends would do anything to take down the man who hurt her.
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