sixteen
THE NEXT DAY ALL THE MAGIC IS GONE, BECAUSE I GO OUT TO the dock in the morning and Teeth is catching minnows and mumbling to himself. He’s shivering almost as badly as I was yesterday. I don’t know if he’s sick or just really freaked out. He has two black eyes and blood under his nose. “They broke it?” I ask. “C’mere, let me see.”
He doesn’t look at me. His eyes keep darting around the water. “My teeth are doing like yours.” They’re bending, they’re hitting against each other so hard.
“Yeah. Have you caught anything?”
“Want a catfish . . . They’re eating my fish. I saw one of them eating my fish.”
“The catfish are?”
He sneezes so hard it almost knocks him over. “I need to fix my fish. Killed a fish. Need to grow a new fish have a fish can’t have babies.”
“It’s okay.”
“Hurt Rudy . . . ”
“Whoa.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t hurt me.”
“Hurt the fish . . . ” He goes back to scanning the water. I touch his forehead, but his skin is just as cold as ever. I don’t know what to do. I settle with grabbing the back of his neck and just holding it, the way you’d hold a kitten. He doesn’t protest, but he doesn’t seem to care much, either. Still, this contact is making me feel better somehow.
A few tunas slide right through his hands, like he can’t figure out how to grab them quickly enough. I try to help, and after I practice for a while, I finally grab one, but he doesn’t want it. “I want to catch it myself,” he whines.
“You’re such a kid sometimes, y’know?”
“I’m a fish.” He rubs his eyes. “Rudy. Rudy.”
“Uh-huh?”
He looks at me and sighs. “I’m really tired.”
“Yeah. Let’s take a nap.”
He used to sleep, he told me a while ago, in a very small cave pretty close to the marina, but the fishermen found him there last week and now he’s skittish about going back there. He’s okay with letting himself be caught, sometimes, for some reason I will probably never understand. But he’s clearly really violated that they found his home. I saw it once after a swimming lesson. He had a little piece of net he stole that he used for a pillow and a moldy doll that he found at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know where he’s been sleeping since they found him, or where his doll is now.
He wants to go to the sandbar so he can have a bit of him underwater, but I convince him I don’t want to freeze again, and that the dock is better because no one can see him. I pull him up there, and he bitches the whole time, but as soon as we’re settled he falls asleep with his head on my knee.
He looks so different out of the water. So much smaller, and his scales look dry enough to fall off.
In his sleep he whimpers, and his webbed grip tightens on the calf of my jeans. “Rudy,” he whispers, and my throat clenches. In a way it hasn’t since Dylan was sick.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. I’m right here.
His hand around my shin is scaring the shit out of me. I can barely move. I don’t want to move, and that’s so fucking terrifying.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. But now I’m shaking too. Fucking fucking Fishboy, what am I going to do?
Dad’s making cookies downstairs, gingerbread. The burned-sugar smell is mixing with the salty air on its way up the stairs, and my mouth is watering up here in my room. It takes me back to my grandmother’s house, when she used to make caramel on the stove and spike it with sea salt.
It’s been a streak of warm days, and my window’s open. I know it isn’t night yet, but I don’t hear Teeth screaming, and I let this convince me that everything is okay. Maybe he’s still asleep under the dock where I left him.
I wonder if he liked gingerbread when he was a kid.
A breeze rolls into my room. It smells just like the water. I feel calmer than I have in a long time.
seventeen
IT’S TUESDAY AGAIN, AND EVEN THOUGH OUR MEETINGS AREN’T regular like they used to be, it still feels strange not to go up to Diana’s in the evening. And I regret it more than I would have thought. I know it’s only been a week, but I already feel like I’m forgetting what she looks like or the way her mouth tastes. I miss kissing, but I don’t think I miss kissing her.
Maybe that should worry me.
It doesn’t. I don’t know. Maybe I have too much else to be worried about.
Like the fact that I don’t see him on my way to the marketplace, but I hear him now that I’m on my way back. He’s moaning my name in between the thrashes of the waves. “Rudy. You motherfucker. Stop waaaaalking. Ruuuuuudy.”
“Just a sec.” I run the rest of the way home to drop off the groceries. I have a feeling he doesn’t want to see my bags full of fish. I can hear him the entire way back to my house, and again the second I step back outside.
“Christ.” I get up on the dock. “Where are you?”
“Below you.”
I lean over and see the tips of his webbed fingers. I grab his hand and pull him until he floats into the open water. His black eyes have blossomed all the way down his face, and big patches of his scales are missing. I’ve never seen his tail as mangled as this.
“Shit,” I mumble. They found him last night. I thought I hid him well before I left, in that nook by the marketplace. God fucking damn it. He already looked sick last night. He didn’t need this now.
He covers his face with his hands and starts moaning, “Rudy,” again.
“I know.” I want to ask if he’s okay, but he’s so clearly not okay—the scrapes, the bruises, the tearing at his tail—that I can’t ask this the way I mean to without seeming incredibly dense. I know he’s not physically okay, but I need to know where my fishboy’s brain is right now. I want to know, every time I see him, if they’ve finally pushed him beyond repair. How much of this he can actually take before his human brain explodes with human pain.
“Let’s go swimming,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say.
“I’m tired, Rudy.”
“I know.”
“I’m hungry,” he says. Really quietly.
“Have you been floating there all day?”
He nods.
I take a deep breath. “Then get off your ass and catch a fish. You can’t just lie around waiting for me all day. Christ, boy. I caught that one catfish and that was just luck.”
“You can’t even catch a fish with one of those big sticks.”
“Fishing poles?”
“Yeah.”
“I might have, if you hadn’t sliced my line.”
He grins, but getting bitched at seems to have given him some energy. He tilts himself up and starts watching the water.
“What did they do to your tail?” I try to ask like I don’t really care about the answer, because nothing makes Teeth uncomfortable like feelings that aren’t his own. I guess that explains a lot of things I don’t say.
“They got bored of my mouth, I guess.”
I whisper, “Christ.” I don’t want to think about it.
He shrugs. “It’s what makes me more interesting than a human. You have to use your imagination. Or I don’t even exist. I’m a ghooooost.” He looks up at me and sticks his tongue out, then dives into the water. He’s not as fast as he normally is. He comes up with a foot-long fish in his mouth, grinning at me.
I don’t smile. “Why do you do this?”
“What, this?” He slits the catfish’s throat. “Kills them faster. It’s actually nice of me.” He looks at the catfish. “You should be thanking me right now, fishy. Thank your fish king.”
“It’s dead, babe.”
“You know what it is? It’s mushy.” He holds up some of the meat, making a face. “Look at this. It’s mushy. Probably has bugs or something. Taste it. Do you think it has bugs?”
I smack his hand away. “Why do you let them catch you?”
He drops the catfish on the dock and shoves mea
t into his mouth with both hands.
God. God. I look up at the sky, really just so I don’t have to look at him.
He says, “Can’t we talk about something else?” And I hear that his throat hurts and he’s tired and he wants me here so he doesn’t have to think about the other shit. But I can’t keep doing this. He was . . . God, he was supposed to be my escape. And now he’s turning out to be just as much of a nightmare as my fucking family and this fucking island, because I can’t fix this. I can’t save him.
And even if I could, how many times am I going to have to save this boy who doesn’t want to be saved before I finally get it through my fucking head that I can’t actually change anything?
God, I’m just the world’s shittiest friend.
“Are you mad at me?” he says.
“I don’t know.”
This clearly wasn’t the answer he was expecting, and his face gets dark and his mouth gets small.
“Are you just fucking with me, or what?” I say.
“I’m not fucking . . . ”
“Do you even care what happens to you? Do you have to be so goddamn reckless?”
“They’re the ones who hurt me!”
“I just don’t understand why you don’t fight them off. Or swim faster. Or . . . bite harder. Something. I just don’t fucking believe that this is something inevitable. Can you honestly tell me that you’re fighting as hard as you can?”
He doesn’t say anything.
Which is not what I wanted to happen.
Even though I knew it was what was going to happen.
“Goddamn it, Teeth! You know that some people have actual problems, right?”
“Hey! Getting whatever—”
“Raped. The word is raped, you stupid fucking fishboy.”
That’s out of my mouth before I can even think about it.
And I don’t care how horrible it is, because what the hell, he can get away and he doesn’t.
And some people have actual problems.
He splashes halfheartedly. “It’s a big fucking problem, okay?” His throat bobs while he swallows. “It’s a big fucking problem.”
“But it doesn’t have to be.”
“What else am I supposed to do?”
“Anything,” I say. “Just get away. Please, Teeth.”
“And then what?”
“And then you’re free.”
He throws the catfish carcass into the sea. “Fuck it, Rudy, I’m not free.”
“Yeah, because—”
“Shit, boy. Look at me. Do they have me right now? Are you tying me up and hitting me and . . . whatever? Did you trap me?”
“I . . . ” I shake my head.
“And do I look free?”
He looks like a lonely kid in an enormous ocean.
He nods up at the dock. “Will you help me get up there?”
“Up here with me?”
“Yeah.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I thought the sun hurts your scales.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe I’m getting used to it. The salt’s hurting the cuts anyway.”
I make sure no one’s on the beach before I grab him by his elbows and haul him onto the dock next to me. He isn’t great at sitting—he has to keep his hands on the dock to brace himself—but he does okay. I can see the rip in his tail more clearly now. A bloody, glistening hole in the middle of his scales.
“Tomorrow I’ll bring peroxide to put on that,” I tell him.
Teeth touches his black eye and winces. “Look. If they don’t catch me . . . what do I do? I swim around my little corner of the ocean, afraid of them forever, wondering all the time if they’re coming up behind me. And I free a few fish, but I never free them all—” He looks at me. “You know I know that, right? That no matter what I do, they’re bringing fish into market every week?”
I didn’t know he knew that.
“You guys aren’t dropping dead,” he says. “So clearly they’re getting the fish out. And I notice when they’re gone. I don’t know all of them, but . . . you know? Some of them . . . some of them I notice when they’re gone.” He swallows. I wonder if he knew the one he fed me.
He says, “And then even if by some miracle I managed to stop them, the bigger fish are gobbling mine up all the time, and they’re not going to live forever. They’re fish. I don’t even . . . I don’t think fish live very long.”
“Yeah. They’re fish.”
“So I save a few and, in the grand whatever of things, it doesn’t fucking matter. I know that. I’m really, really smart, you know?”
I nod a little.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you.”
“You don’t even fucking listen to me anymore,” he says.
“What are you talking about?”
“You used to think I was cool, and now I’m just this fucking mess that you have to put perox-whatever on. We were . . . It used to be different.”
“But . . . ” I can’t save you and you can’t fix me and I still want to be here and I am scared out of my fucking mind and why won’t you get well?
He picks at the scales he still has until I stop him. When he speaks, his voice is much louder, but he’s still not looking at me. “So what’s the fucking point of me if I’m not, like, in this battle with the fishermen all the time? If I stop that, what do I do? Float around until I drown? It’s not like I can fucking . . . be something. Or even have a real friend.”
I wish he’d slapped me instead. “Yeah.”
“See, ’cause in a way . . . they’re sort of all I have.”
I exhale. “The fishermen.” And then his hand is in mine, and I don’t even know how it got there.
“They’re my reason to be here. They’re my battle, you know?” He looks at me with a little smile. “And it’s not like they do anything I can’t handle. I always win. I’m the hero.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” He takes his hand away and dives back into the water. “Look,” he says. “Anyway. Operation Fish Freedom Part whatever. You ready?”
I shake my head. I feel like I’m not getting enough air or something, because it’s like my head is fuzzy and I can’t focus. I think that conversation took too much of me. And it takes me a minute to process where he is. I think I’m still two minutes behind. Eventually I realize what he just asked and say, “Fuck no.”
There’s no way I’m helping with this, and really, right now I just want to go home. And there’s no fucking way I want him going over to the marina today. If he’s going to let the fishermen come get him, fine, but he should at least make them work for it. I’m not going to hand-deliver him. I couldn’t live with me.
He says, “Come on, Rudy, please?”
Dylan Dylan Dylan, I will not forget Dylan; no way, we’re not doing this again.
But I look at Teeth. He’s fragile.
Lately I’ve been thinking Daniel Daniel Daniel all the time.
There’s no fucking way I’m going with him, but I can at least be gentle. This isn’t the time to tell him he’s acting like a murderer. So I give him a smile. “I can’t tonight.’“
He frowns. “What are you doing?”
“I just have plans.”
“With your brother?” His eyes light up a little. “Oh, is he better? Are you going to play with him? Tell him I say hi. Can you play with him out here so I can see?”
“We’re still working on getting him better.” I say this with a bit of a bite. I can’t help it.
Teeth’s voice is small. “I’ll give you fish after I free them. I promise. Don’t get mad.”
“That doesn’t save everyone else.”
“But I can’t get fish for all of them. That’s . . . that’s too many.”
How many is too many? I shake my head. “I’m not mad. I just can’t tonight. I have plans already. Sorry.”
And then he starts screaming. Holy shit. He screams like the sound is coming through the top of his head. No human could ev
er make that noise.
Then he’s gnashing his teeth down so hard that the tips bend. “What? What are you doing? Are you going there?” He waves his hand to the Delaneys’ mansion.
“Daniel—”
Oh.
Shit.
I don’t know how it happens. I really don’t.
He’s staring at me, frozen exactly where he was before I spoke, his hand still weakly pointed toward his old home.
And he opens his mouth, and I’m ready for anger and spit and fire, but instead it’s just the smallest voice in the world. “What did you call me?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . I’m sorry. Really, I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Who?”
“You know who! That girl!”
“No, not really, I—”
“Not really?” He screams again. I just know someone’s going to come running out here. Someone has to come. This is not the wind. This is not a ghost. This is the realest thing I’ve ever seen.
He points his hand at me, his fingers stretched and slimy. “You can’t call me that! I didn’t tell you you could!”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You can’t hurt me with that!”
“I didn’t say it to—”
“I don’t even care if she told you.” He shakes his head hard. “I don’t care what she told you. You know why? You want to know why I don’t care?”
I can’t take this. I feel meaner every time he speaks.
He says, “Because I don’t care what you do. I don’t care what you do at all, Rudy! Go hang out with humans. I don’t care. I can do all of this on my own.”
“No, you can’t. Please don’t go to the marina. Don’t free the fish. Not tonight. Come on. You’re tired. You’re probably sick. Stay here and rest. Eat another catfish.”
It’s like he didn’t even hear me. “I don’t care if you hang out with humans. I hate humans. Go make out with my sister. Whatever. I bet her lips are, like, warm and stuff.”
I exhale. “She has nothing to do with this.”
“Bullshit!” He splashes hard with his tail. “You think I don’t see you going up to the house instead of coming down here to be with me?”
“I can’t be with you all the time!”