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wires to the electronics and rip out our radio and navigation equipment. Then they start tearing open lockers. One opens the fridge, grabs one of the plastic food containers and peels back the lid. His lip curls, but he scoops his dirty fingers into the cold lasagna and eats it. Then he throws the container across the cabin, spewing lasagna trails.
    I can feel my heart thudding through my jacket. I press my back against the cabin wall, trying to disappear into the wood grain.
    Five men are packed into the boat so close I can smell them. They’re wearing long-sleeved shirts and work pants. Some are barefoot; some are wearing cheap rubber flip-flops I recognize from the bazaars of Djibouti. But bazaars everywhere sell cheap rubber flip-flops. All I can see of the men is their eyes and mouths and their hands. Some are dark. All are the lined hands of working men. All are dirty.
    One lifts the floorboards of the boat and hoots when he finds Duncan’s stash of booze. He lobs a bottle of single-malt scotch to the gunman and opens another for himself. He pours the alcohol down his throat, then smears his mouth with the back of his hand.
    The man at the fridge finds the eggs. Laughing, he strews the carton so that a dozen eggs are missiles in the cabin. An egg explodes on the wall beside me and the broken shell peppers my cheek. My hands are useless to wipe it away, my limbs useless to even move, like everything in me is liquid. The egg slime splatters, then slumps down the wall.
    Now the men from outside jam themselves below, jostling for the booze bottles as they rip apart our sleeping cabins. I hear drawers being yanked out and dumped on the floor. In my cabin, they must be shoveling my school texts off the shelf because loose-leaf paper sails across the cabin. In front of me, one of the men uses his knife to slit open my pillow, then tosses it back into my cabin.
    The gunman is screaming at one of the men who seems to be admiring a Timex watch he took from my cabin. The gunman strikes the man’s hand and the watch flies to the floor. The egg man finds this funny. The gunman crushes the watch with his heel.
    In Duncan and my mother’s cabin a bottle breaks, and the smell of my mother’s perfume fills the boat. It’s not the scent of my mother that I would smell when I used to hug her, the skin and powder and perfume scent of her shoulders. It’s an explosion of smell, and I hold my breath against it.
    Now some of the men go out to the cockpit and the ones inside throw them the stuff they’ve torn from our boat. They take everything: gear, clothing, cans of food, all the booze, binoculars and electronics and gauges. They empty Duncan’s locker of spare engine parts. They take Duncan’s tools. They take my shampoo.
    On the floor, the heaps of books hurled from the shelves come up past my ankles. Glass from a shattered jar of raspberry jam is scattered in red sticky bits all over the cabin. A bag of rice, slit open, disgorges pearl pellets under my feet. Locker doors are torn off. Severed wiring looks like plastic spaghetti. Cushions have been sliced and stuffing yanked out. Long gouges on the dining table make me think of claw marks.
    One of the wooden boats’ engines starts, and I feel our boat rock as some of the men jump down into their boat. Their engine revs up. I hear their boat scrape against ours, then their engine roar as they take off.
    I’m aware that my hands are slippery with sweat. Sweat runs down my back. The remaining men toe the refuse on the floor of the cabin, sifting through the heaps for anything they might have missed. The gunman drains his bottle of whiskey. Behind the mask, his eyes are rimmed with red. He’s looking at me, then he screams at me, his mouth so close that his spit sprays my face. The other men look at him, then at me. I have no idea what he’s saying. He grabs me and shoves me toward the steps to the cockpit. When the gunman grabs my arm,