The Coral Museum Spectacle

My flight into Kerikeri was forty minutes late and my bag never showed up at all. That's the kind of luck I have. I stood at the little carousel watching it go around empty for the third time while a guy in a hi-vis vest shrugged at me like I'd asked him to explain the meaning of life.

"Sorry, mate. Probably Auckland. Probably tomorrow."

Probably tomorrow! My whole trip hinged on tomorrow. I was only in the Bay of Islands for two nights, and the whole point of the thing, the entire reason I'd spent money I didn't love spending, was waiting for me in a town called Rāwene with a name I'd practiced saying out loud in my bathroom mirror.

My name is Levi Young, I'm twenty-nine, and I make my living as a chemist. Not the exciting kind. I formulate theatrical makeup, and my specialty, the thing I'm actually known for in a very small circle of very small people, is mime whiteface. It doesn't crack, it doesn't sweat off under stage lights, and it won't poison you. I'm weirdly proud of it. Adriana thought it was hilarious and fascinating, which is one of about four hundred reasons I liked her.

We'd met on one of those dating apps three months ago. She was twenty-eight, an archivist at a coral museum up north, of all things, and her profile said she'd talk your ear off about branching corals if you let her. I let her. We messaged every single night for eleven weeks. You don't do that with someone unless something's there.

So there I was, no bag, no chargers, no clean shirt, standing in a rental car lot with a phone at nine percent and a paper printout of directions because I'd figured, correctly as it turns out, that reception up there would be spotty.

"Zoey, I'm calling from a payphone mindset," I said when she picked up. My coworker and friend from the warehouse answered on the second ring, already laughing at me.

"Let me guess. Disaster!"

"The airline lost my bag! Everything's in it! Adapters, deodorant, the good shirt."

"You own a good shirt?"

"Zoey."

"Okay, okay. Breathe. Buy a shirt, buy a charger, and go be charming. She's been talking about this date for weeks on your end, so I assume she's nervous too. Don't blow it because your undies are airport undies."

She hung up on my squawk of protest, which is Zoey's love language. I found a petrol station, bought a charger, a toothbrush, and the least wrinkled shirt in a rack of four options, and drove the hour and a bit to Rāwene feeling like a man assembled from spare parts.

The Coral Museum of Rāwene used to be a bank. That's what Adriana had told me, and she was right. High ceilings, old counter windows gone milky with salt haze, and a big central hall glowing blue from tinted lights overhead. The whole place smelled of brine and furniture polish, and there were corals everywhere, white branching things and red ones and great fan-shaped slabs mounted in glass cases like they were the crown jewels.

And there she was. Adriana Chu, in person, for real. She'd warned me she was short, and she was, barely up to my chin, with her dark hair pinned up with what I swear was an actual paperclip. When she spotted me in the doorway she did this little hop that she immediately pretended hadn't happened.

"Levi. Oh my gosh, you're real," She said it like she'd half expected me to be a bot all along. "You're taller than your photos. That's good, that's a point in your favor, most people go the other way."

"I come from a long line of accurate photographers," I said, and she laughed, and something in my chest unclenched for the first time since the airport.

She'd arranged to stay late so she could give me a private tour. I know how that sounds. It sounded good to me too. She walked me through the main hall with her hands going like windscreen wipers, pointing at specimens and telling me where each one had come from and how long ago it had died and what the reef around it was like when it was alive. I barely understood a third of it. I hung on every word.

"This one's my favorite," she said, stopping at a case with a huge staghorn piece, all wild antler branches. "Acropora. The collector wrote his notes on the back of a bank deposit slip, can you believe it? We still have the slip. It's in the archive."

"It's beautiful," I said, and I was looking at her when I said it, and she noticed, and went a bit pink.

That's when the security guard showed up.

Big fella, early thirties, uniform shirt with the museum patch on the shoulder, name tag that said G. RASMUSSEN. He came around the corner of the central exhibit like he owned it.

"Afternoon, Adriana," he said. "Didn't know we had visitors after hours." He gave me a look, top to bottom, like I was a coat someone had left behind.

"This is Levi," Adriana said, bright and easy. "He's visiting from Wellington. Levi, this is Gus, our security."

"Mime artist, is it?" Gus said, because I'd apparently mentioned the whiteface thing in a message she'd quoted to him or something, and his tone made it sound like I juggled for coins.

"Chemist," I said. "I make the paint."

"Right." He turned back to Adriana like I'd been dismissed from class. "You've got that labeling wrong, by the way. The staghorn. Morrison had it as a false acropora, not true. It's a common mistake."

"It's not a mistake, Gus," Adriana said, patient as anything. "The label follows the 2016 revision. Morrison's classification was superseded."

"Well, collectors still go by Morrison." He leaned in toward the case, and then, and this is the part that lit me up like a stove, he put his hand on her elbow to steer her a step toward the next cabinet. "Here, let me show you the horn coral, you'll want to hear this."

He'd touched her. I know it was nothing, I know a hand on an elbow is practically a handshake, but eleven weeks of messages and one lost suitcase and a four-shirt petrol station rack had all piled up in me, and my jaw went tight.

She eased her arm free without making a thing of it, which told me she'd done it before. That made it worse somehow.

"Actually, Gus, I'm mid-tour," she said. "Levi's the guest."

"Happy to take over for a bit, give you a break." He was already moving toward the next case. "This piece here came out of the Poor Knights, and there's a story behind it, isn't there. I've told it better than the placard does, honestly."

Adriana caught my eye and did something with her eyebrows. I decided it meant rescue me.

I stepped between them. Not shoving, nothing dramatic, just planted myself in the gap as a fence post would while Gus was mid-sentence about sedimentary whatever.

"I'd love to hear her tell it, actually," I said. "She's got the good version."

Gus studied me for a moment, his jaw working. "Bit of a know-it-all, our Adriana," he said, and laughed like it was a compliment.

"She's an archivist," I said. "She'd have to be."

Adriana made a sound she choked into her sleeve, and Gus's ears went red. Before he could answer, a radio on his belt crackled and a voice asked about the staff staircase door, something about a hinge. He held up a finger to us like we were children waiting for a teacher.

"That'll be the trapdoor again," he said. "Loose hinge, been meaning to fix it for months. Give me five minutes."

"Take ten," Adriana said sweetly.

He went. She let out a long breath and pressed her hand flat over her mouth, shoulders shaking.

"I'm so sorry," she said through her fingers. "He's not a bad guy, he just... he does this. Every time anyone visits. Especially anyone visiting me."

"Does he ask you out?"

"Once. Last year. I said no and he acted like it never happened, and now he just... performs at me." She looked up at me and her voice dropped. "Thank you for stepping in. You didn't have to."

"I wanted to," I said. "Is that possessive and weird? It felt possessive and weird."

"It felt nice," she said. Then she bit her lip and glanced toward the back corridor, where Gus's boots were clomping up the staff stairs, and that creaky