HELP PLEASE adapted from Barnacles
by C. Safos

I had only been on deck for 20 minutes before Eugenio decided to bore me with another one of his stories. He had as much work to do as I did, but he still felt the need to ruin my morning with his nonsense.
He only had six stories to choose from and among them all, I must have heard those six stories a total of 3,487 times. I heard them so many times, I could recite each one. I had heard them so many times that I could measure time by the length of each one. Eugenio's story about being stuck in a well took fifteen minutes. His story about being related to Robert Kennedy took forty-five minutes. His story about losing his pinky finger to a mako shark could take almost an hour.
I didn't have that kind of time. I was already behind on my duties because I had to pick up the slack for Brecken. He claimed he was too sick to work this morning. It's funny, but Brecken always seemed too sick to work when it was his turn to pull in the crab cages. It's not like he needed to lie. His father was the ship's captain, and whatever the captain said went. If the captain said I was on cage duty because his son was sleeping off another late night, I was on cage duty. It wasn't fair, but this was my last tour with this company.
All I had to show for it were the scars on my hands; they looked like lines on a road map. I also had a pretty bad cough, the kind of cough you get when the ice and cold makes a home on your lungs. It feels like every breath you take is a sword being pulled out of your gullet. The one positive about my cough was that it disrupted Eugenio anytime he tried to tell one of those boring stories. As soon as he started my way, I started hacking and gagging until I saw him lose interest and move below deck. With him gone, I had the entire deck to myself. It was the only time I enjoyed on the Barbara Toome—being alone with the cold and the ice and water and the king crabs.
1
Select the correct answer.
Which word best describes the mood of this passage?

A.
sympathy
B.
melancholy
C.
annoyance
D.
anticipation