“All right,” I say, clapping my hands together. “Train away. Let’s do this.”

He looks at me for what feels like ages, before something shifts in his expression. His lips quirk, just a little. His eyes darken into something that seems almost cruel.

He gestures for me to follow him. “Come on, then. We’d better get you an apron.”

FIFTEEN

Food prep. Quint tells me we’ll be starting with food prep.

I want to believe that means we’ll be making cheese sandwiches for the staff, but something tells me I won’t be that lucky. We make our way down the long corridor and pass another half-dozen workers in matching yellow shirts. I was beginning to think it was just me, Quint, Rosa, and Shauna. Oh, and that Opal person that was mentioned, who I think might be the vet. I wonder if the other people here are volunteers or paid staff. They seem busy, whatever they are, tending to the animals inside the little cubicles that reminded me of horse stalls. A few of them give smiles and nods to Quint, and curious glances to me, but for the most part they’re focused on their tasks.

I take in as much of the center as I can, trying to figure out what might be useful, but this is about as far from a tourist destination as I can imagine. Some of the walls have shower heads, and all the floors have drains. Some even have tiny plastic kiddie pools. There are crates full of blankets and towels scattered throughout the hall, and metal carts loaded with cleaning supplies and scissors and boxes of latex gloves and plastic tubes and measuring cups and harnesses and a whole lot of tools and bizarre medical equipment.

The wall beside each enclosure has a piece of paper tucked into a plastic sleeve with the name of the animal inside, along with notes on their care. I try to read a couple, seeing things like feeding schedule and medications listed there, but Quint whisks me quickly to the end of the hallway.

We turn into a small room, not much bigger than a closet, with three large utility sinks. Quint grabs a canvas apron off a peg on the wall and hands it to me. I slip it over my neck and tie the cord around my waist. The heavy-duty material is covered in brownish-rust-toned stains that I do not want to think about.

Then Quint opens a giant refrigerator and the reek of fish increases tenfold.

I stumble back, my stomach heaving. I’m staring at buckets of dead fish, their black eyes dull and bulging.

I clamp a hand over my mouth and nose. “Oh, gross.”

“Having second thoughts?” Quint says, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. Without waiting for a response, he grabs a bucket and thumps it on a nearby counter. “So, a lot of the animals that end up here haven’t learned to feed themselves.”

“Seems like a flaw of evolution,” I mutter, thinking back to ninth-grade science and all that talk of survival of the fittest. I don’t say it out loud, and I don’t think Quint picks up on my subtext. Let the smart ones that figured out how to devour fish the right way live, and the rest can become shark food. Circle of life, right?

He grabs a stainless-steel bowl and sets it on an electric scale beside the bucket. “Well, sometimes it’s because they got separated from their mom too early, before she could teach them to properly hunt for themselves.”

I bite my tongue, hating that he had a perfectly reasonable and depressing explanation.

“They need to eat the fish headfirst,” he goes on, “because if they eat them tail-first, the scales will scratch up their throats.” He’s working as he talks, pulling dead fish from the bucket, inspecting each one before tossing it into the bowl. “We also check each fish to make sure there aren’t any cuts on its body, which could introduce harmful bacteria to the animals. Then sort them by size. This bowl is going to Joy in pen four, who is pretty young still, so she gets small to medium fish, and the bigger fish will go to the more mature animals out in the yard.” He points to a label on the bowl, which does indeed read, Joy—Pen 4—5 lb.

“Seems easy enough,” I mutter.

Once the scale hits five pounds, Quint turns on the faucet and starts running each fish beneath the spray, using his gloved hands to clean off … whatever it is he’s cleaning off. Salt? Sand? Scales?

“Lastly, we rinse off the scales,” he says, and I cringe. I’d been hoping that wasn’t it. “Mostly just so they don’t clog the drains and dirty up the water. And that’s it. On to the next.” He sets Joy’s bowl down on the counter and reaches for another, this one labeled for Ladybug in pen five. “They get fed three to four times a day depending on their needs. You and I will prep the food for this morning, and the afternoon volunteers will handle the next batch.”

Once Ladybug’s bowl is ready, he pauses and looks at me. “You’re not going to throw up, are you?”

“No,” I say defiantly, though I suspect my face has taken on a greenish tinge.

“Then what are you waiting for? You said you wanted to help.”

“Yeah, but can’t helping be, like … I don’t know. Training some cute little seal to balance a ball on its nose or something?”

The look he gives me is so full of derision, I wilt a little.

“This isn’t a circus. We rescue animals that are half-dead, do our best to treat them, and then release them back to the wild. That’s what we do here. You do know that, right?”

“Yes?” I say, though I had only gotten a vague idea of all of this.

“So what use, exactly, would it serve to teach them circus tricks?”

“Relax, Quint. It was a joke.” I’m suddenly defensive. I hate how he’s talking to me, looking at me. Like I’m some prissy snob who is clearly only here to get a good quote for my paper and then I’ll be on my way. Like I’m the sort of person who doesn’t care about things.

I do care about things. I care about lots of things.

I’ve just never particularly cared about sea animals before.

But he does back off a little, and for a second I think he might even look a little guilty. He exhales sharply through his nose, then shakes his head. He closes his eyes and the tautness in his expression fades. “Wow,” he says, opening his eyes again. “Never thought you would be telling me to relax.”

“Yeah, well, you’re being kind of intense. They are just animals, you know.”

He cuts a look to me, and I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Whatever it is, it seems to pass. He gestures at the bucket. “Are you gonna help or not?”

I gulp. “Do I get gloves?”

He reaches into a box tacked to the wall and pulls out another pair of latex gloves. I take them greedily and pull them over my hands. It’s the first time I’ve ever worn latex gloves and I hate the way they cling to me, but when I go to reach into the bucket for my first dead fish, I’m beyond grateful to have them. Even so, I imagine I can feel the sliminess, the slick scales. I can’t ignore the bulbous dead eyes or the pudgy, lifeless fish lips. I can’t keep the disgust from my face, even when I feel Quint watching me, judging me, laughing at me.

“Amazing you don’t come to school smelling like fish every day,” I say, after we’ve gotten through the first bucket.

“Honestly, sometimes I worry about that,” he says, “so I’ll take it as a compliment. You’ll definitely want to take a shower after working here for a few hours. The smell will stay with you.”

“Do you ever get used to it?”

“Yeah, sort of,” he says. “But if I don’t come in for a few days, it hits me all over again when I come back.”

While we’re working, another volunteer comes and stacks the prepped bowls on a metal cart before wheeling it away down the hall. I watch, dismayed, as our hard work disappears.

“Hold on. We don’t get to feed them?”

“We’re on food prep duty, not feeding duty.”

I turn to him, aghast. “But how do I get to be that volunteer? The one that gets to see their cute little faces, all excited over food?”

“For starters, you volunteer for more than twenty minutes,” says Quint. “If you really stick this out for four weeks, you’ll get to feed them eventually.”

I frown. It’s clear he thinks this is a passing phase, and I can’t blame him. Despite our deal, I’m not sure I can imagine coming back to this place day after day. I feel like I’ve already seen enough to rope the center and its mission into my ecotourism plan. I can’t exactly expect tourists to pay for the pleasure of sorting stinky dead fish, but feeding the animals seems like it would hold some appeal.

But how would I get Quint to sign off on it?

“So,” I say, trying to act interested, “how many more buckets do we need to clean?”

“All of them.”

I freeze, one hand gripping a cold, slippery body. “All of them? You mean everything in … in there?” I use the fish to gesture at the refrigerator.

“That’s right,” he says. The cruel glint in his eyes is back. “We go through tons of fish every week. We get it delivered by the crate load.”

I look at the refrigerator. The bucket. The fish in my hand. “Yippee.”

Quint chuckles. “Not the glamorous life of a volunteer you had in mind? Maybe you’d be more suited to”—he thinks for a second—“leading a Girl Scout troop or something.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that would get me far with Mr. Chavez.”

He grunts. “Tell me, do you even like animals?”

I open my mouth, but hesitate. I don’t dislike them, but I know that isn’t the same thing. Finally, I confess, “We had a gerbil when I was a kid. I liked him well enough.”

For a moment, Quint doesn’t move. He just holds my gaze, as if waiting for something more.

Then he throws his head back and laughs. “Awesome,” he says. “You’re a shoo-in.”

I bristle, but there’s not much more to say, so we both get back to work. Now that I know we’re expected to get through all those buckets, I force myself to move faster. No matter how disgusted I am, I will not give Quint any reason to call me lazy. After all, that’s my line.