Teeth

  He’s only about twenty feet from me. And before I notice anything else about him, I realize he’s about my age.

  And then the rest of him hits me: webbed fingers, the scrawny torso patched with silver scales, and a twisted fish tail starting where his hips should be, curling into a dirty fin. A fish. A boy. The ugliest thing I have ever seen.

  Can’t be real.

  I take a few steps toward him, but I’m afraid to get much closer.

  I’m afraid I’ll wake up, I guess.

  He gives me a funny smile and a small wave. And then he pushes off the rock and dives into the water.

  I find him with my eyes a few seconds later. He’s swimming out past the surf, hard. I see his fin hitting the water behind him with each stroke, setting up waves that push him farther and farther away from the shore.

  He can’t be a mermaid, because he has to come up to breathe. He’s stopping to pant. He’s tired. Mermaids sing underwater. Mermaids can’t get tired.

  Because mermaids aren’t real.

  And then he’s gone.

  three

  “I THOUGHT SHE LIVED ALONE,” I WHISPER TO MY MOM.

  She holds her finger to her lips. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that for three fucking months I’ve been thinking I was the only teenager on the island, and now I’ve found two others in one day. Even if one is half-fish.

  I watch Ms. Delaney’s daughter bring an enormous bowl of soup to the dining room table. Her red hair goes down to her hips. It sways with her like it’s another limb. She’s glancing at me, too. I feel guilty that I didn’t somehow let her know I was here.

  My parents don’t look surprised at all. You’d think they would have mentioned her. Maybe they kept this from me on purpose. Maybe the whole get-your-brother-well thing is a ruse, and we’re really here because my parents want me to be less of a slut.

  At home I went to a school with over a thousand kids. I had strings of girlfriends and the kind of friends whose cars you borrow when you take them out, because theirs have bigger backseats. Here I do math problems alone at the kitchen table. If celibacy was their plan, it’s working.

  I reach next to me and rub Dylan’s back while he chokes on his cup.

  It’s not like I actually think that’s their plan.

  Mom might not let me demand any more information, but she can’t stop me from staring as the girl sits across the table from me and passes the mashed potatoes to her left. “Thank you, Diana,” Ms. Delaney says.

  Diana. That’s also my mom’s name. This never happens in movies.

  My last girlfriend at home was Gabrielle. We were together for only a month before I left. I pretty much knew by the time we kissed for the first time that I was leaving soon. That’s probably why I kissed her so hard that I bruised my lip against her teeth. I felt like I could get every bit of me inside of her, if I tried hard enough. I don’t know.

  We haven’t written.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” I say to Diana.

  “I don’t get out much,” she says. She sounds proud of it.

  Diana Delaney doesn’t seem like a real name, and she’s so secret and pale, the closest thing to a ghost I’ve ever seen.

  She’s probably sick. There’s got to be a reason the Delaneys stayed.

  I turn my head and look out at the beach. Ms. Delaney has a window so big it takes up an entire wall. I’d be terrified, I think, living here with ghosts. They could push you right out through the glass and into the sea. You’d die with cuts full of salt water.

  “This brie is phenomenal,” my dad says.

  Ms. Delaney slices neatly through her fish. “Linda Curlin, who lives down on the north tip? She makes it from Sam’s milk, but of course it isn’t available every week.” She keeps chattering about the amazing apples she got from the marketplace last week, but while she makes small talk her eyes jitterbug from her plate and my parents back to her daughter, like she thinks any minute Diana will get up and run out the door.

  Diana chews each bite of food a zillion times before she swallows. Her teeth are straight and perfect. Each sip she takes from her water glass seems to take a lifetime. I don’t know how she does it. I want to shake her, or throw something at the wall. I at least get to go home to a house that isn’t made of right angles and wade through my brother’s toys. She stays here.

  I want to take her by the wrist and pull her outside.

  The conversation stays appropriately dull until Dylan faints, likely just from boredom, but my parents make a big deal out of scooping him up and making him drink water until he feels better. At home we’re so used to Dylan fainting that we barely blink. Half the time he does it for attention. He’s a clever little bastard. It doesn’t usually work at home, but here at least it’s something to talk about besides what fruit was good at the marketplace this week, so yeah, it looks like we’re letting him get away with it.

  Mom fusses over him for a minute, and Ms. Delaney murmurs “Poor thing” and “I hope he’s all right.” Diana looks kind of fascinated. Ms. Delaney is averting her eyes the way people think they’re supposed to, like Dylan has an extra head and it’s rude to stare, when, come on, he’s five years old, he wants you to look at him. And Diana does, smiling at him like he’s a little kid.

  Dylan starts whining and reaching his hands out to me, so Mom drops him into my lap. I feed him fish off my plate and he keeps the fingers of my other hand trapped in his fist. It means only one of us can eat, but I’m not a big fan of the fish, to be honest. I’ve only had it a few times. It’s expensive, and we need to save ours for Dyl. But the bit I ate tonight should beat off that cold I’ve been brewing, so there’s that. I stuff all I can into the kid on my lap.

  “Has the fish been helping him?” Ms. Delaney asks. She’s still not looking at him. Diana nudges the salt and pepper shakers toward Dylan. I start to motion that he’s fine, and then he grabs the shakers off the table and starts marching them like they’re soldiers. Diana smiles.

  Meanwhile, Mom and Dad are citing all the improvements in Dylan that they’ve only whispered to each other, like they’re afraid getting too excited will scare it all away. (Dyl and I keep track of them and high-five and say everything out loud, thanks.) “His color’s better,” Mom says. “He doesn’t get blue nearly as often as he used to, and chest percussion doesn’t take as long. And we’ve even gotten a few words out of him. We’ve always had the hardest time getting him to talk, but now he’s getting brave enough to use some of his air for that.”

  The Delaneys look at Dylan like they’re expecting him to suddenly explode into the Gettysburg Address. Yeah, he isn’t a trained monkey, and he just fainted. Give him a break.

  He reaches for another bite of my fish, oblivious, and his back pushes against my chest as he breathes. He’s not a great listener for a five-year-old, and we blame it on the breathing, but really I think he just acts like a bitch sometimes because he knows he can get away with anything. He flashes me that fucking smile of his. This kid can knock you dead.

  He hands me the pepper shaker, and I play with him. He keeps knocking his shaker against mine like he’s trying to beat it up, so I let mine fall over. He laughs, then coughs a little, and Dad glances over at me.

  I apologize to Dylan, not to Dad, and rub a few circles on Dyl’s back. He hides in my arm for the rest of the coughing, because we’ve fucking embarrassed him, fantastic. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “We’ll go home soon.” He relaxes a little.

  Ms. Delaney clears her throat and says, “It really is amazing what the Enki fish can do. We came here when I was fourteen, when the cancer”—she waves the word away like it’s a fly—“was close to killing me. My grandfather had written us letters about the place before he died, but we had no idea the effect the fish would have. And since I’ve lived here, I haven’t been sick a day. My grandfather lived to be a hundred and sixteen.”

  My parents talk recipes and legends and I take advantage of the white noise and my brother buried deep
into my shirt to lean across the table and say softly, “Is the other stuff true?”

  Diana raises her eyebrows. “Is what true?” She looks much older than me with that look on her face.

  I mouth ghosts, and she shakes her head. “Not ghosts like you’d think, anyway,” she says. So I try mermaids? and her eyes widen, and she looks my age again.

  The adults aren’t listening to us. Ms. Delaney says, “And this is some of the best-quality fish we’ve had in a long time, this year. It’s amazing the properties it has. I eat as much as possible.”

  “Me too,” Diana says, but she makes a bit of a face. She spears her fork through a bite of fish and turns it over on its end to rock-walk it across the table. “Right, Dylan?”

  He sticks his tongue out the side of his mouth.

  “Yeah, I know.” She laughs, and he smiles.

  I feed Dylan and listen to his chest loosen, and he looks up at me, like, “Am I well yet?” And sometimes it eats me up inside that I’m dying for Dylan to get well, but less for him than because I want to be done with our miracle cure and go home, and that makes me a really horrible brother.

  “Where are you from?” Diana asks me.

  “Michigan.”

  “Mmm. Like Song of Solomon.”

  “I haven’t read that one. We did Beloved instead.”

  “I had a tutor for Beloved,” she says. “He kept slipping up and saying Alice Walker wrote it. Wishful thinking on his part, I think. It would have been so much more subtle.”

  “Walker, um. The Color Purple?”

  “Have you read it?”

  I shake my head. “Do you have it?”

  “I have eeeeverything.” She rolls the word around the back of her mouth, and fuck, it’s not like I didn’t know I was easy before, but apparently a few months and a few smiles and the promise of a few books is enough for me to want to rip my clothes off right here at the table, parents and little brother and nice tablecloth be damned. Come on, Rudy.

  Ms. Delaney is still going on about the fish. “They’re getting harder and harder to come by. The fishermen are catching fewer every month, and they don’t know how to explain it. They’ve been working so hard not to overfish; they keep their fishing methods secret to ensure they have control over the population . . . . There should be plenty. It’s almost like the fish have discovered how to avoid the nets.” She laughs, this high nervous thing.

  “Maybe they’re being hunted,” Mom says. “We had a whole skunk population back home that—”

  I say, “I saw something. In the water.” Something covered in scales. Something that made Diana’s eyes get big. “Maybe he’s hunting them.”

  Mom says, “He?”

  “Well, it. Whatever. It looked like a boy.”

  Ms. Delaney’s head jerks up. “Where?”

  “In the water. He had scales all over him.” He looked like he had a tail. “He was a really fast swimmer. He looked, like, feral.”

  “Probably just a boy from the other side of the island,” my dad says.

  “He was a teenager. There are no other teenagers.”

  “What about me?” Diana says. But she’s giving me a funny look, with her eyes narrowed. “A teenager? How old, would you say?” She looks like she’s about to start taking notes for a news report.

  “He wasn’t really a teenager. He was . . . He had webbed hands, and—”

  Then I see Ms. Delaney, as white as her fish fillet.

  “Where was he?” she says.

  “He was on the rocks by the big dock and then he—”

  “How close to the house?”

  I can’t remember a time an adult has ever looked at me like I am this important. I wish I knew what the hell she wanted.

  “Um. How close to this house, you mean? This house is on a hill . . . . ”

  She nods with every muscle in her neck.

  “It was way down the beach . . . closer to our house than here. By the dock.”

  She looks relieved for half a second before she gets up and leaves the table. I hear her footsteps fading down the hall. We all turn to Diana for explanation, or help.

  She shrugs a little and twists her face into a smile. “She’s retired for the night, I’m guessing. Can I clear anyone’s plates?”

  My parents give me weird looks all through packing up Dylan and scraping plates into the trash, and I’m convinced they’re wondering if the island has a psych ward for their son who sees merpeople until Dad nudges me and says, “Why don’t you ask Diana over for ice cream?”

  He’s not nearly as quiet as he thinks he is.

  I look at Diana “Oh, do you want—”

  “My mother doesn’t like when I leave the house,” she says. “I don’t think this would be a great night to test that rule.”

  “Oh.”

  “Some other time,” she says, with a little head shake like she knows this isn’t true.

  “Huh,” Dad says.

  Dylan rests his head on my shoulder the whole way home. I keep one eye on him and one eye on the ocean, but I don’t see the fishboy. Just my brother’s head blocking most of my view.

  Three nights later the screams outside wake me up from a soggy dream about Sofia, one of my friends at home, in a trash bag. It’s a memory I’d almost forgotten—the time she got so drunk she passed out and we tied her up in a bag and tossed her in a Dumpster. We didn’t go anywhere, just leaned against the Dumpster and laughed until she woke up. But we had no idea how freaked out she was going to be. She screamed and thrashed so hard we could barely haul her out.

  I can look back at these things that I did and see that they were mean, but I don’t regret them. They seem so far away, like they were done by someone totally different. And what I really feel is jealous that there was a point in my life—God, just a few months ago—where I could get away from all of this, run around with my friends, turn off my cell phone and not worry if my family would want me, and get all the human contact I needed from a drunk girl’s leg as I folded her into a plastic bag.

  And now the closest I can get to anyone outside my family is apparently a grip on the shoulder from a fortune-teller, a girl with my mom’s name, and a series of piercing screams that may or may not be the wind.

  And a fishboy on a rock.

  I’m ripped from my thoughts about the screams by a different kind of shouting from downstairs. My mom to my dad. Those hurried, unsteady footsteps. He runs into something, curses. I don’t hear coughing. That fucks with my head like you wouldn’t believe.

  I want to go straight downstairs, but it’s so cold. I have to pile on socks—and I still want to be barefoot, what the fuck is wrong with me?—before I can let my feet hit the wood floor, and still it aches all the way up to my calves, like the time my friends and I dared each other to run barefoot across the frozen lake. And just like then, I’m not going fast enough, and I don’t think it’s possible for me to go fast enough.

  Downstairs, Dad has my little brother tipped over his knee and he’s hitting the kid’s chest while Mom feeds him bites of fish and soothes him, and I don’t know when she’s going to figure out that those “It’s okay it’s okay baby you’re going to be okay’s” make Dylan more scared than he was before. It’s how he knows when something’s wrong.

  It’s so stupid, and I think I just do it for attention, but every time Dylan gets really bad, I feel like I can’t breathe, either. I have to keep telling myself that my chest isn’t closing up, that I can exhale whenever I want to.

  I stick more fish in the microwave and try to catch Dylan’s eye. “You with me, kiddo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  He pulls in this breath, this one breath, and it crashes through his lungs with more noise than I can make with my whole body.

  Mom kisses his forehead. “That’s right, baby. Great job.”

  I hand the plate to my mom and say, “What can I do?”

  “Oh, honey, thank you,” she says, like I caught the fis
h myself. Jesus.

  “Dyl, you need anything? You have your dino—cool, you have your dinosaur. Okay. Cool.” I blow on my hands. It feels like so much air. “I’m gonna go for a run.”

  Dad says, “It’s the middle of the night, Rudy.”

  “No big deal. I’ll be back soon. Okay. Awesome.”

  I just have to get out.

  I’m just still so shitty at this.

  I’m out the door without even putting on shoes. I’m running. The air has the rotted midnight smell of sea foam, and the sand is mushy underneath my feet. My socks are soaking through. I keep running.

  I push closer and closer to the marina. There are no majestic sailboats here, just the dingy rowboats, one with a bell that I hear flapping in the wind on the most quiet nights, and the one corroded shrimp boat the fishermen must sometimes use. But I think they rely mostly on the big nets set up just off the shore that catch the fish as the current sweeps them around the corner, past the rocks. I’ve never seen anyone out in the boat.

  It’s almost four a.m., and I guess I thought the two fishermen would be awake by now, thought maybe I could barter a fresh fish or two off of them, but I only see one from here, lit up by the swinging lamp on the shrimp boat. He’s . . . What is he doing? He’s lying in the sand and . . . Is he on top of . . .

  The fishboy.

  I run faster. There’s the fisherman. I can’t tell which one; they look the same unless you’re close enough to count the gold teeth. He has the fishboy just out of the water, in the sand, and he’s digging his thumbs into the top of the fishboy’s tail and biting his neck. I can’t hear anything over the ocean.

  So I yell, “Hey!”

  They can’t hear me, and now the fisherman is sitting on him, straddling his tail, rubbing his stomach. I’m close enough to see the fishboy’s webbed fingers and his flailing fin and his open mouth full of sharp teeth. He gnashes, and the fisherman pulls his fist back and hits the fishboy across the face. I’m close now, close enough to hear, and it sounds like the time I stepped on a jellyfish.

  I scream, “Hey!”

  And at first I still don’t think the fisherman heard me, but then in a second he’s up and he’s gone, disappeared into the shrimp boat without a look in my direction. And here I am, standing over the fishboy.