O most omniscient God our Father, Who art everywhere, even upon the high seas, look with mercy upon fifteen-year-old Deena Truitt as she sets sail with her parents on a week-long cruise on the Carnival Breeze, departing from Miami, Florida, in August with three ports of call in the exotic Caribbean and an all-inclusive holiday package featuring a variety of exciting onboard entertainment, non-stop luxury dining, fun-filled youth programs, whale and dolphin viewing, and much, much more. Help Deena not to lose her sense of breathless anticipation as she stands in an interminably long line in a vast and overcrowded embarkation hall with her father, Bob Truitt (flowered shirt, khaki shorts, reddish hair, and sunglasses), and her mother, Barbara Truitt (turquoise blouse, white stretch slacks, sensible shoes, and a lightweight metal quad cane), together with their definitely-not-luxurious mob of fellow travellers who have come provisioned with ice chests of beer, novelty foam hats, and boomboxes. Remind her, dear LORD, as her parents will also, that Bob and Barbara have been planning and saving for this cruise for three years, and it may be the last chance they’ll get to spend this much time together as a family, what with their little girl starting high school already, and Barbara’s bad knees, and who-knows-what’s-going-to-happen with Bob’s position at Sears, now with the cutbacks and layoffs. Let them enjoy their well-deserved Caribbean cruise vacation. Let them get their money’s worth.

Hover over Deena, ever-present LORD, in the tiny, port-holed stateroom she shares with her parents, the one that smells suspiciously of spray disinfectant and sewerage; assist her in repositioning her cot as far away as possible from her father, who snores. And later that afternoon, at the Sail Away Party on the Lido Deck, when Butch the cruise director coaxes Deena’s father into joining the Hairy Chest Competition, and Bob, although he doesn’t win (he doesn’t stand a chance, not with his pale flabby torso), nevertheless jumps enthusiastically into the Back It Up line dance, where Butch, wild-faced and hooting, slaps him repeatedly on the butt, shouting, “Hump it, Mr. Man! Hump it hard!”: do Your best to restrain Deena from flinging herself over the nearest rail into the sea. For this is her father, and these are her parents, and no matter how utterly grotesque they appear to her, she knows she must continue to abide with them, at least for another week.

Follow Deena, vigilant LORD, when she disembarks with her parents at their first port of call on the isle of Grand Turk, an enchanting colonial paradise complete with olden-style British pubs, working windmills, picture-perfect beaches, and always-smiling and friendly islanders. Try not to lose sight of her when, in an attempt to distance herself from her parents, she foolishly wanders off by herself up the beach, away from the well-scrubbed Carnival Cruise Complex, turns inland, and soon finds herself in an unpaved warren of cinderblock homes with dirty bed sheets for doors, and starved, mangy-looking dogs nosing in piles of garbage. Confer with Deena, O LORD, as she puzzles over the discrepancy between the photos in the cruise brochure and what she sees here. And when small dark children crowd around her legs making peculiar, compulsive opening-and-closing gestures of their tiny hands and tugging on her shorts, repeating, “Money money. Gimme gimme. Money money,” and she replies, over and over, “But I don’t have any . . .”—forgive her, LORD. Forgive Deena when one frail boy reaches into the side pocket of her cargos, grabs her iPod mini, and tries to run away with it, prompting her to catch him by the arm and yank him right off the ground, the poor kid’s so light, he weighs practically nothing. Her iPod falls to the dirt and she stomps her sandal on top of it so none of those other filthy monkeys can steal it, but then the little thief starts crying, piercingly loud, O God, he won’t shut up, he won’t stop screaming, no matter how much she shakes him . . .

LORD, try to console Deena as she rushes up to her parents in Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, where she finds them sitting on stools at a thatched bar with outside air-conditioning and tall, slushy drinks in their hands, and startles them with her tearful outburst—“How long do we have to stay on this stupid island? Can’t we just go back to the ship now? Please? Can’t we just go back?”

Take a little break now, LORD. You must be tired. Spend a relaxing afternoon at the Cloud 9 Spa. Visit the Limelight Lounge and the Comedy Club; sit with Jerome at the Piano Bar, and try your hand at blackjack in the Lucky Day Casino, before catching up with Deena again a night or two later.

It’s Cruise Elegant Evening in the Sapphire Dining Room, an enormous but cool and dim hall on the Mezzanine Deck, and Deena and her parents are being waited on by their regular server, a charming young man from Slovakia named Vladim. He has sharp, dark features and straight dark hair swept back from his forehead. He refills their glasses with wine and water, one gloved hand behind his back, and compliments Deena on her emerald green dress; she blushes and touches her pearl necklace. He tells them about his home country, which none of the Truitts has ever quite heard of before, calling it “the hidden paradise of Europe.” For the all-you-can-eat Surf and Turf Special, Bob and Barbara order fruit cocktail, Caesar salad, oysters Rockefeller, and chicken tenders for appetizers; Maine lobster tail, filet mignon, and Italian lasagna for the main course; and baked Alaska, New York cheesecake, and warm chocolate melting cake with vanilla ice cream for dessert (because it’s all-you-can-eat, after all). Don’t be cross, bountiful LORD, when they forget to thank You for their food; it’s only because Bob and Barbara are excited about the lobster, and Deena, You know, hasn’t had much of an appetite since her misadventure on Grand Turk a few days ago. She’s still thinking about those kids in the slum, wondering why, if You’re so great and good, You made those kids so poor and so obviously underfed, while her parents are here slathering their lobster with melted butter, and Bob is dripping pieces of white meat onto his plastic bib, and Barbara is complaining that she can’t possibly eat one more bite even as she eagerly saws her filet mignon and lifts another forkful to her mouth . . .

Take a step or two back, LORD, as Deena flings down her own knife and fork and exclaims, “It’s disgusting, this much food!” Her parents look up from their plates, baffled. “We’re like pigs at a trough!” she says, and, “What did we ever do to deserve this much food? Huh? What?”

“You don’t like the lobster?” her father asks, mouth stuffed, but Deena is already up and rushing away from the table, dear LORD, rushing right past You.

Your ways are mysterious and complex, LORD. Sometime later that night, as Deena is wandering by herself through the quiet and empty SportSquare on Deck 12, You lead her right into the path of Vladim, their waiter from dinner. He’s leaning against the base of the enormous smokestack and drinking from a small green bottle.

“So you found me,” Vladim says, startling Deena.

“Sorry, I wasn’t . . .” Deena replies.

“Do not be afraid,” Vladim says, stepping out from the shadows. “Do I frighten you? I do not want to frighten you.”

He has changed out of his waiter uniform and is wearing distressed blue jeans, a jean jacket with upturned collar, and a white shirt with curious red stitching up and down the front. Here, against the smokestack, without his uniform, he looks smaller, younger and less sure of himself. He smiles quickly at her.

Send a light breeze, O LORD. Let Deena believe that You arranged this encounter, because hasn’t she been secretly praying for something exactly like this to happen? Hasn’t she seen Titanic, and doesn’t she know that on a cruise ship, romantic liaisons are practically guaranteed? She wants this, LORD. She needs some affection in her life, and a chance to show that she can be generous and kind in this unfair world. She’s still wearing her shiny emerald green dress with the low-cut back and her pearl necklace, and she imagines she must appear quite rich and glamorous to this poor foreign waiter, even though of course she’s not, she’s just plain old Deena Truitt from Gainesville, and the pearl necklace came from Target and cost practically nothing, for goodness sake. Inspired by the moonlight and the breeze You’ve sent, she holds onto a support beam of the ropes course and leans away from it, letting her shimmery dress drape out like a fan as she sways to and fro, casual-like. She asks the waiter what he’s drinking.

“Would you like some?” Vladim says, and offers her a sip from his bottle of slivovica. He tells her that the drink comes from his hometown, Banská Bystrica, a beautiful city on a river, with mountains and snow skiing and many recreations.

“Pfah!” Deena says, gagging on the liquor. “How can you drink that?”

They talk. Vladim tells her more about Slovakia, the hidden paradise of Europe; Deena pictures castles, dark forests, and dashing young men on horseback. “That sounds awesome,” she says, imagining herself there. She tells him about her stupid parents and how she loathes sharing the cabin with them. She manages to drink more of the slivovica. She tells Vladim she’s just graduated from high school and is starting college in the fall, at Harvard. A curious expression flashes across his face—he looks like he might burst out laughing—but then he goes on quickly to say that he knew she was older than she looked, maybe 19 or 20, he guessed, which pleases Deena immensely.

Follow them down, O confounding LORD, down to the staff quarters on a low, low deck, one that Deena never even knew existed, a deck that’s not shown on any of the ship’s maps and is indicated only by an “X” in the service elevator. Vladim leads Deena through a narrow passageway and into his tiny cabin. She eyes the bunk bed built into one wall, and the desk and mirror along the opposite wall. The desk is cluttered with toiletries, a laptop, and a TV tuned to a Spanish-language variety show. Piles of clothes litter the floor, and shirts and pants hang from clotheslines strung against the walls. The cabin smells funky and closed-in; there’s barely enough room to turn around. Deena has a feeling that she might be entering into something very foolish, quite possibly dangerous here, but Vladim has already closed and locked the door behind them, and he seems so sincere and needy. Now he’s massaging her hand and telling her what a pretty girl she is, what pretty eyes she has, what pretty hair, what a pretty mouth—and, dear LORD, she wants desperately to believe him.

Maybe You’d like to wait outside, LORD. You know what’s going to happen anyway. Stroll up and down the passageway; peek in on some of the other cabins while Deena and the waiter do what they must. Because You set them up for this, didn’t You, LORD? You answered Deena’s naïve prayers. You delivered her right into the arms of this slimy waiter (Vladim? Really, LORD? Could You have created a more obvious villain than this?); and while it’s true that Deena went willingly, even eagerly, down to his cabin, do You think she’s really ready for this? Barely fifteen years old? How can You stroll up and down with Your hands clasped behind Your back, whistling like that, when You know what’s happening right now inside that smelly cabin?

O infuriating LORD. O damnable LORD.

Sneak up on Deena a half hour later high up on the Serenity Deck. There she is, standing at the rail looking out over the bow of the enormous, ugly ship. The Serenity Deck is for adults only, but Deena figured, screw it, what are they going to do, throw her overboard? Behind her, synthesized ocean sounds play from hidden loudspeakers. The wind lifts her dress, swirls around her bare legs.

She didn’t like it, LORD, not one bit. Her arms are bruised from where Vladim held her too roughly, and her green dress is ripped along one seam. This is not what it was supposed to be like. This is nothing like the Titanic. She feels debased and miserable. And You did this to her, LORD. You did this, didn’t You?

The most humiliating part of it all—the one detail she knows she’ll remember the rest of her life—was when he refused to let her kiss him. She kept lifting her head to try and plant a kiss on his lips, but he clamped his mouth shut and twisted his face away. Was she really so ugly? Was she so repulsive that he couldn’t even tolerate her kiss, even as he grunted and squirmed on top of her? Her dress was bunched up under her chin, his pants on the floor, when she finally shoved him off. She snatched up her shoes and unlocked the door, and still Vladim kept grabbing at her and asking, incredibly, when she would visit him again. He was wearing nothing but his shirt and socks when she fled his cabin, ridiculous long black socks that came up to his knees, that creep.

Gripping the rail, she stares down at the water, at the moonlight silvering the surface, unusually calm tonight. She thinks of those grubby little kids in the slum back on Grand Turk. She thinks of her parents digging into their lobsters. She thinks of all the slights and injustices she’s had to endure until now and will undoubtedly have to endure for years to come, and she wonders: What the hell are you up to, LORD? What can You possibly be thinking? Is this some kind of a test? Is that what this is? You mean to teach us, Your children, a lesson? Pardon the profanity, LORD, but what kind of a fucked-up lesson is this?

She stares at the water, gripping the rail so tightly she begins to tremble. She’s crying. She’s praying to You, LORD. She’s begging You. Just one goddamn thing. Just grant her one goddamn little thing she can feel good about. That’s all she asks. Or are You really that mean-spirited, LORD? Are You so cruel and low that You’d leave her hanging here at the rail with nothing?

She stares at the water. She stares and stares; she stares so long and hard that she begins to feel sick to her stomach. She wipes her eyes with her arm and is just about to turn around and go back inside—when a low dark wave swells in front of the ship. She watches as a strange, craggy hump rolls alongside the ship, and then, unexpectedly, a plume of water sprays into the air, so close she can hear it, like a deep, sad sigh rising up from the bottom of the ocean. A wing-shaped fluke as big as a minivan breaks the surface and flops back down, and then the water closes over it and is still again.

Deena stumbles back from the rail. Holy crap, she thinks. She just saw a whale. She just saw a goddamn whale. She glances left and right to see if anyone else has witnessed this, but the deck is empty, there’s no one here but her.

Only she saw it. Only she did.