Dive into The Cruise by Naïma Brown
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.
My phone rings. It’s Gianna. I decline the call. I can’t talk to her right now—it wouldn’t be fair. I need to be able to focus on her monster, but I’m too busy staring at mine.
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. The worry hadn’t left their faces from the moment they realised Eli was not coming to pick me up. They understood, and made the arrangements.
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 never told Sandra and Vince that although I didn’t blame them for what had happened with Eli—I wasn’t that naive or callous—I did blame myself for trusting that they understood the world better than I had. For believing them when they said that I could be the Sarah that they wanted me to be: their Sarah, a Kilkenny, with an inheritance of love and belonging. If I’d trusted my own instincts, the ones that told me in no uncer[1]tain terms that I was my mother’s daughter, that I was Sarah Hickson, and my only inheritance was violence and loss, powerlessness and rage, then I could have kept myself safe. Lonely, yes. Isolated, sure. But safe.
And the worst part wasn’t that I’d allowed myself to believe Vince and Sandra, or that I’d been lulled into a sense that good things were about to happen for me. It was that I’d also believed Eli. He’d been so convincing. In those three weeks before prom, I’d allowed myself to be vulnerable with him, to confide in him. Not only was he the first guy I’d had a crush on, but he was also my first friend. What had I thought would happen when I followed him into the woods? When I confronted him? That he’d look at me, in the make-up that had gone sweaty and blurry, the dress that had become stained, its hem dragging in the dirt, and realise the error of his ways? That if he just saw me again—really saw me—the Eli I thought I knew would come back? What a fucking idiot I was.
And then when he kissed me, I had liked it. I’d liked it so much. Isn’t that what I’d really wanted, deep down? To be restored to the person I’d thought I was for those three weeks? The kind of person Eli Murphy would have truly desired? For it all to have been a mistake? If he had only kissed me . . . would I have asked for more?
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.
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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