pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

half a page. Her father would help her, and they would put in things about the ocean and looking in the microscope, birds’ names, and the size of a whale’s eye equaling an orange. The porpoises were cool, the way they swam around the ship. The artist was cool. And she had gotten to watch movies she was not allowed to see at home, with sexy parts and bad language.

      She was also having a secret crush on Alex, who had very long eyelashes you could appreciate when he took off his glasses. He was always doing that—taking off his glasses to clean them with a handkerchief. She had spent much of the week thinking about him in non-boat circumstances as a way of entertaining herself.

      At the table they were all clowning around, saying things like “That was a flaming good time” and “He is a flaming idiot” and “I am so flaming thirsty.” This was because she was there and they were not supposed to swear in her presence, as though when they said “flaming” or “frigging” or “effing” it wasn’t just the same as saying “fucking,” which is what she heard. But that was only part of it. “Flaming” was the new word because they weren’t supposed to talk about setting stuff on fire when they were on the ship, so it was a kind of joke.

      Her father was singing along now, words about setting the night on fire. It was some old song from the hippie times. At home, her father liked to play records and sing when he was having drinks. Sometimes then he liked to have long, serious talks with her or her brother, but they were always depressing, about how terrible everything was and how there was no real point in life except propagation and evolution-shit. She usually stopped listening when he got to the pointlessness part.

      Aurora saw her father exchange glances with the artist, who was dancing with Cinda or maybe just by herself and came now to the table to peel her father’s hand away from his glass. She practically dragged him onto the dance floor, where he looked sheepish and then stupid as he danced a stupid dance like a washing machine, sliding his feet and twisting his arms back and forth. She loved her father, but he was a science nerd and was never going to be as cool as he wanted to be.

      Helen sat with her glass of wine at the table with the others, who hopped up and down for dancing or lining up quarters at the pool and foosball tables. For some time she’d been half-watching an older Native woman who was hunched on a stool at the end of the bar. The woman was small and thin and her feet didn’t reach the footrest part of the stool. She was by herself, just sitting and, now and then tipping back a beer bottle.

      Helen did not frequent bars on a regular basis. She knew all too well the role that alcohol played in the destruction of so many Native families. In Igalik, ostensibly a “dry” village, she’d seen men she knew to be kind get blind-drunk on bootleg and beat their wives and children. Boys she’d known had killed themselves after drinking. Her own aunt, her mother’s youngest sister, had fallen from a boat and was never found; the boyfriend had been so drunk he couldn’t remember when she’d fallen out or where the boat had been or much of anything about that summer day, now years ago. Later, he put a bullet in his head.

      She felt sorry for the woman at the bar, and was embarrassed by her, too.