"The first night is always the hardest." She said, offering Julie a hand to stand up with. Julie took it, and stood up wavering, eyes red, the seagull sitting patiently on her shoulder.

"Where are we going?"

"Wherever the wind takes us."

"And where is that?"

"Where there's more people like us. The wind always knows. It took me a while to figure that out, but its true."

"People like us?"

The girl smiled. "Yeah. Lost travelers. People who need to go somewhere but if you showed them a map of the whole world they couldn't point it out to you." She eyed Julie speculatively. "What's your name?"

"Julie."

"Well, Julie, welcome aboard. Let's go get you something to eat."

Julie spent the whole day eating, resting, and exploring the ship. There wasn't much to see. A kitchen, a catch full of food and water, the deck, the wheel, the captain's quarters, and the sails. the crew wasn't large, and they all had a look in their eyes that she recognized. She didn't feel at home on the ship, but she felt like she at least belonged.

Nearing nightfall she voiced a question that had been bothering her to the girl she had been following around all day.

"Where do you all sleep?"

"In the sails." She responded casually.

"What?"

The girl smiled, observing Julie's perplexed expression.

"Follow me."

And so Julie followed. The girl climbed up the mast with Julie behind her, and continue to walk right onto the rigging, using a support rope for balance. The sail met it's base log in such a way that it created a hammock-like trough perfect to curl up in. The girl carefully stretched out in the cushion of the sail, and Julie laid down in the space after her, so that their heads were next to each other.

"Wow, how cool is this." Said Julie, she could see the sail rising clean and white above her, and the star filled sky beyond it.

"This is definitely my favorite thing about being at sea." Said the girl.

"Me too, I think." Julie said with the first smile she'd put on since leaving. "I feel like I'm sleeping on a cloud.

Julie quickly became used to having the ship as her home. It took a few days for her sea legs to come, and once they did she quickly learned how to help sail the ship. She enveloped herself in the work of sailing, and the days blurred together. At night she collapsed into her pocket of the sail with the other sailors, the stars being the last thing she saw before closing her tired eyes. Sometimes she would recount stories of her old travels, amazing the other sailors and prompting them to tell stories of their own. She was always fascinated by the stories of the world around her. To imagine that at one time she had been cooped up on a tiny oasis amazed her. The seagull stayed by her side almost constantly, and became a favorite of all the sailors. They especially enjoyed it one day when he landed on the captains shoulder out of nowhere. The captain took off his sailors hat and placed it on the bird, almost completely covering his tiny body. The seagull peeped in a savage way, and the entire crew dissolved into laughter.

"I should think he is one of the pirates of old!" Cried one of the crew's older members.

"No." Said Julie. "He is not a pirate, he is my guardian. He's saved my lives more times than I can count."

Every single member of the crew would swear that the seagull smiled just then. Shrugging off the hat, he flapped over to Julie's shoulder and she grinned at him.

"I may have lost my entire family and the land I would have called home, but I'm okay as long as he's with me." She grinned, stroking his feathers.

The adventures of Julie and her seagull were not yet over, however. In fact, the next one was about to begin. Julie looked up from her bird and her eyes fell on the horizon.

"What direction is the wind blowing in?" She asked, frowning.

"Why?" Asked the other sailors, turning to look in the same direction.

"Because I sure don't like the look of those clouds."

As chance would have it, the clouds and the ship were on a collision course. The only storm Julie had ever seen of comparable size and rage was the storm that had ravaged her old oasis home. The waves seemed to be as huge as small mountains. the sky was an angry purple, and torrents of rain came crashing down on them all. The ship seemed to be tossed around for hours, and it was impossible to find traction on the slippery-smooth deck. Julie, along with several others, was desperately trying to run down the sails so they wouldn't be torn in the wind. Their work was thwarted time and time again by waves crashing over the deck and huge gusts of wind. The storm was so loud that Julie barely could hear herself think, and the captain had to scream three times at her to give it up and go below deck before she understood him. She took one stumbling step, heard the roar of a gust of wind, the crash of an enormous wave, an earsplitting groan and a crack, the screech of the seagull on her shoulder, and then felt herself slip and fall.

Then darkness.

She found herself laying on the broken mast of the ship, with white sails and splinters of wood floating lazily around her. The actual ship itself, however, was nowhere in sight. For miles around her in every direction all her eyes could see was water. The sky above was totally clear, and the hot sun seemed to fill it with heat and light. She reached a hand up to shield her eyes and felt a bump on her forehead. It was extraordinarily sore, and she supposed it was the reason she had blacked out. Her legs were floating in the water, and heat she felt was the sun beating down on the rest of her body that was not submerged.

With a sudden despair she realized the tragedy of her situation. If the ship didn't come back to find her she would die. She had no water or food, and she was stranded in the middle of an ocean on a broken mast. She began to cry out her frustration. Tears ran down her already sunburned face. Why oh why had she ever left her mother and her old life? She cried for a few minutes into the waterlogged wood of the mast until a wave washed over her, startling her back to her senses. She spat out a salty mouthful of ocean water and began to think clearly again. She couldn't cry, she needed to save her water reserves. There was so much water everywhere, but she couldn't drink a drop of it. If only she could fly. But wait! The seagull could fly!

She looked frantically around for her friend, but he wasn't on her, nor on any of the wreckage, nor in the sky or water. What if he died? She thought, thinking of the friendly little bird who's life she had saved so long ago. She searched everywhere for him, even underneath the sails in case he really had drown, but he was no where. It seemed her little friend had finally left her. She really did despair then, and cried out her pain not caring about water resources or even death.