Read The Starboard Sea: A Novel for Free Online Page B

day. I sat down on one of the sofas, but the main hallway became thick with students streaming out of Barracuda. Everyone seemed to know where they were going, and everyone seemed to be going in the same direction. I got up searching for a friendly face and almost walked into a phalanx of wrestlers. I could tell they were wrestlers by the way their ears stuck out. Like they’d been pulled from clay pots into handles. I spun around and allowed the force of the crowd to carry me down the hall and out of the building.
    Outside, I saw Diana in front of the Academic Center, the Barracuda, speaking to a man wearing a wrinkled plastic windbreaker over a dark business suit. I looked around and decided to ask her what was going on. As I approached, I realized that the man she was talking to was holding his face in his hands. Diana was yelling at him.
    “Go home,” I heard her tell him.
    Keeping one hand over his eyes, the man reached into the side pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pale blue box with a white ribbon. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” I thought. When he offered the gift to Diana, she waved her hands in protest. He threw his arms around her and slid the box into the tote bag she carried over her shoulder. Diana shrugged him off, retrieved the box, pulled the white ribbon, and threw the gift at the man. The box landed on the pavement, and a square of cotton coughed itself out, along with a small, shiny object. Diana turned and saw me staring. Without any hesitation, she strutted up to me, grabbed my arm, and said, “Come on.”
I craned my neck and caught the man kneeling over his gift, desperate to fit the cotton block back into the box.
    “Who was that?” I asked.
Diana clicked her tongue. “No one.”
“Was that your dad?”
“He gets on my nerves.” Diana squeezed my arm and pinched me
    through my jacket.
We fell in with a group of students.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To Chapel.” Diana bit her lip. “Tell me, is he still there?” I glanced back at Diana’s father. His hands were shoved deep in his
    pockets. He looked like he’d just returned from the wilderness, like he could use a shower, a shave, a haircut, a hug from his daughter. It scared me to see a grown-up this messed up.
    “Yeah, he’s still there. Did he surprise you or something?”
    “It’s always like this.” She let go of my arm. “But I never see it coming.”
The Chapel was built on a hill, separated from the lower campus by a two-lane road. Cars stopped on either side of the crosswalk as an influx of students proceeded to block traffic like a herd of lazy sheep. We marched into the building, bells echoing from a loudspeaker attached to a telephone pole. There was no bell tower.
Diana pointed me to a seating chart hanging in the vestibule, then took her place. I found my name and the location of my pew. With its tall wooden ceiling and concave walls, the Chapel’s structural design resembled the frame of an inverted whaling ship. Rows of long benches, in a T-formation, ran down either side of the altar and along the center. All of the walls were lined with stained-glass windows. The images on them weren’t religious scenes or saints but generals and monarchs, their identities stenciled in colored glass. I read off names to myself as I walked down the aisle. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Attila the Hun. There was a lectern with a microphone, an organ, and an empty choir box. A plain wooden cross hung above the raised altar. Pepin the Short, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lion-Heart, Henry the Navigator. Four straight-backed wooden chairs stood empty on the stage. The chairs had been upholstered with red velvet cushions. One of the chairs had a higher back and was also embroidered with a golden crest. Oliver Cromwell, Louis the Sun King, Napoleon, Admiral Nelson.
An older woman stationed herself at the organ and began to play what I soon realized was the theme music to PBS’s