I say, “You know, if you want? I can teach you to read.”
He studies me for just a second before he scowls and dives back into the water. He’s really gone this time. He splashed my page, and now the ink is all smudged.
I’m on my way home when I see Diana under the house. She’s craning her neck to try to see the dock from here, but she can’t. “Were you with him?”
“Not just now.”
“It’s very cool that you know him.”
“You should come meet him sometime.”
She shakes her head hard.
“Have you ever even been to the ocean?”
“It’s rough.”
“You don’t have to go in. Or you can go out past the waves.” I say this like it’s no problem, like I do it all the time.
She looks at me like I’m about Dylan’s age. “I didn’t mean that kind of rough.”
“Um . . . oh.” I don’t know what to say, but she seems done with this conversation anyway. She pulls a book out of her bag and hands it to me. A copy of The Metamorphosis. I would have read that this year, if I were at home in my real school.
I don’t know if she always carries books or if she was waiting for me, and I don’t know which I want to be true.
“I think you’ll like it,” she says. “We’ll discuss later.”
God, it shouldn’t get me this turned on that she keeps acting like she’s older than me. Especially considering she has my mom’s name.
But then she’s kissing me, and I don’t care what I’m supposed to think for a few minutes. I still don’t know about her, really, but I know I like books, and I know I like kissing, so this feels right.
And now, for a few reasons, my routine has changed.
I still hug my family when I wake up and still watch Mom hit Dylan’s chest. Every day but Tuesday, when Mom still sends me to the market and my nights take a different sort of shape, I head down to the dock. Fishboy and I don’t say anything about it, but he’s always there now. It doesn’t feel like he’s waiting for me, and it doesn’t even feel like I’m going there to see him, most of the time. It’s just like we happen to be at the same place at the same time.
We don’t always talk much. He’ll show off his new bruises or the rips in his tail. He’ll tell me stories about what the fishermen do to him that I hope to God are exaggerated. The stories always end the same way. “And then I bit them and got away.”
My price for getting to listen to his stories, according to him, is that I have to learn how to swim rather than kind of flail around. “I’m not going to be whatevers with someone who can’t swim,” he says.
“Whatevers?”
“Yeah, like friends or whatever.”
He never looks at me when he’s talking. His eyes are always scanning the ocean and plucking out Enki fish; I can’t believe how easily he finds them. He holds them and cuddles them and lets them go, usually in the opposite way that they were going. “They’re so stupid sometimes,” he says. “They’d swim right into the nets if I let them.”
“You’re like the fish protector,” I tell him, and that seems to make him happier than anything I’ve ever said.
He claps his hands together. They make a noise like something squished.
“Swimming,” he says. “You have to learn to swim.”
He says the most important thing is that I learn how to float (I can fucking float, I say, and Reliably, he says, so whatever) so I spend a lot of time lying on my back past where the waves break, my hairline tipped into the water, kicking, while he bitches about my flexed feet or the way I’m holding my shoulders. Every conversation we have gets easier, and it amazes me over and over that there’s someone here I can talk to without agonizing over every word, because finally there’s someone who sounds more like a belligerent idiot than I do. Even back home that was hard to find.
“Hold on.” He leaves me floating on my back while he rescues some fish who got stuck in the current and are about to be swept over to the nets. He can’t rescue nearly all of them this way, but he does what he can, cradling each one in the crook of his elbow before he lets it go. “I don’t usually see them actually get caught in the current,” he says. “I’ve only really rescued three today. The others I just said hi to.”
“I’m sinking,” I say.
“Well, stop.” He swims up to me and puts his hands underneath my back. He lifts me a little. “Up.”
I go up.
“Good. Not sinking, see?”
I try to nod, but I’m scared to move my head.
After a minute, he says, “So.”
“So?”
“So what’s cystic whatever?” His voice is very, very neutral.
“It’s this disease in the lungs and the stomach. He coughs and he gets infections and he’s really thin . . . ” I try to explain, but it’s a lot harder than it used to be. I can’t just recite everything that’s the matter like I used to, listing everything he can’t do like I’m reading off a menu. Because the truth is, Dylan is getting well.
And that’s the other part of my routine that’s changed. Because every morning I hug Dad, I kiss Mom, and Dylan shouts, “Rudy!” and springs off Mom’s lap and wraps his arms around my legs. “Puzzle. It’s really important.” Sometimes he has to pause and take a shuddery breath between words, but he keeps going. “Play with me.”
Sometimes I do. But it’s kind of terrifying, because it’s like the whole world for Dylan when I stay and put together a bit of his puzzle with him. I worry that I’m actually doing him a disservice by playing with him. I’m just multiplying his broken heart the day that I go off for college or go back home or drown or something, and the last thing this kid needs is a broken heart.
“Pay attention,” Teeth tells me. He sounds like someone’s mom. “You’re floating away. Kick.”
I kick, but I can’t get back to him. He has to come fetch me and drag me back to the dock. “You are so annoying,” he says. “You’re like that bunny sometimes.”
I laugh. “What?”
“The runaway one.”
I try to sit up and plunge right through the water.
Sometimes in the afternoons I take Dylan out to walk on the beach with me, though I still carry him for most if it. My hips are always sore by the time we get home.
“Can I swim?” he asks me.
“Nah, it’s way too cold.” This seems like an answer he can understand. It’s easier than telling him that there’s no fucking way I’m letting his head go under the water. Mom still watches him like a hawk whenever he’s in the bath.
Then he says, “No, can I?”
Oh.
I look at him and kiss his forehead. “Maybe someday.”
“Probably?”
“Sure, probably.”
I think I see Teeth out in the water. I wave Dylan’s hand at him.
“Who’s that?” Dylan says.
“My friend.” We can’t see Teeth’s tail from here, so he looks almost normal. Plus, I can trust Dylan. The kid’s good people.
Dylan waves on his own. Teeth waves back. I see him bring his hand to his mouth to chew on his fingers in that way he does.
That night my door creaks open. I’m not asleep. I’m listening to the screams and wondering if the fishermen have Teeth again. Maybe there’s another reason he screams. Something not so bad. I don’t know. It’s too early. They shouldn’t have him yet. I don’t like this.
He hasn’t told me how often they catch him. He doesn’t usually get specific about that, and he laughs so hard about it during the day that it can be hard to believe the screams are really his. But I know his voice by now. I recognize it when it’s scraping against his throat and breaking into sobs, even though I’ve never heard him sound that way unless it’s night, like this, and everything is blurred out by the noise of the ocean.
I sit up. Dylan’s standing in my doorway. He’s breathing hard and loud.
I say, “Did you just climb all those stairs?”
> He nods.
I don’t know if it’s more amazing that he did that all on his own, or that Mom and Dad have clearly turned the baby monitor off because they know he’s okay at night.
Magic fish. Another scream cuts through my ears.
“Had a bad dream,” he says.
I’m about to go over and get him, but then he runs right up to me and pushes into my arms.
He is so warm and soft and real.
It’s not just because I have this scrawny fishboy in my life that he’s not the skinniest thing in the world anymore. God. Dylan. Just fucking Dylan, okay?
And then Teeth screams really hideously, and Dylan has his face buried in my neck, and I start crying, so hard that I can’t even believe it, and my fucking five-year-old brother is holding me and telling me, Don’t cry, it’s okay, it was just a dream, you’re awake now.
And I can’t stop crying for anything in the world right then. And I can’t let go of him. Nothing could make me let go of that kid. The house could fall into the sea and crush everybody and we could go underwater and I would hold him the whole time.
ten
THE NEXT TIME I’M WITH DIANA, I CONVINCE HER TO LET ME into the library, finally. I think she was bluffing when she said her mother wouldn’t care that I was here, because she’s all anxious as we enter and quietly close the doors. “She’s right there,” Diana whispers, pointing through the wall, and if I listen very carefully, I can hear her crying. The noise is familiar in a way I can’t place.
Diana collapses in a plush armchair with a copy of The Wind in the Willows, and I drag my hands over the shelves, skimming the spines. I walk past a hundred books I’m dying to settle down with. I finally find what I want in the back corner of the library, closest to where Ms. Delaney is crying.
I grab this battered thing, this scrapbook, and sit down next to Diana. She barely raises an eyebrow when she sees what I have. “Detective work?” she says.
“I figured your family would have something written down.”
“We did discover this place.” She doesn’t sound nearly as proud of this as she did about never going outside.
I pour myself into the papers and start reading. These are letters, articles, and journal entries, all handwritten and dated from fifty years ago. Something in me crumples when I realize there isn’t anything newer.
I shouldn’t care. I’m here to read about the fish, anyway. And I do. I find out more about the fish than any of the townspeople have been able to tell me. The scales can be poisonous, they can probably see just as well as we can, but they’re weak swimmers. They mate for life.
They’ve been known to attack humans. God. I should say no to Teeth next time he asks me to swim. He’s lucky they aren’t attacking him. But I think of the fish I’ve seen, as round and lazy as tiny balloons, their scales the same dirty gray as Teeth’s tail. They don’t look at all capable of attacking a person. And I don’t know why they would.
There used to be tons of them, which was why the Delaneys started eating them in the first place, when really they had actually come here for the sea air. And, well . . . the rest I mostly know. The papers use the world “balance.” The fish make you how you are supposed to be.
So eating them wouldn’t cure my Pinocchio of a friend into a real boy, I don’t think. I guess I’d wondered.
There aren’t any scientific reports here. There isn’t a reason why.
But there’s no reason to think that the effect wears off. There’s no way to know, since anyone who needs the fish, as far as I know, hasn’t stopped eating them. The only people who ever leave this island are the ones who were here for a family member, who eventually cut free, or leave when their mother, a hundred and five years old, long cured of cancer, dies peacefully in her sleep from nothing but a tired body.
And I’ll leave and my parents will eventually die, and my brother, my little fucking brother, is going to be stuck here forever. We’ll have drilled it into his head that the most important thing is surviving and maybe he’ll never even think that if the only way for him to do it is to live here alone and hopeless and go slowly crazy and so old. Maybe he’ll never move back to the real world and wait for that lung transplant. Maybe he’ll marry Diana. Maybe he’ll die alone.
Before I leave, I’ve really got to introduce him to Teeth for real.
Or . . . fuck. Maybe I can’t leave.
Just . . . just fuck, okay?
I put the papers down on my lap.
“You seem disappointed,” Diana says. But she’s not looking at me.
“Just thinking.”
“Nothing about your fishboy in there, huh?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Yeah, all that is in my mom’s diaries.” She turns a page in her book. “His exciting conception.”
I’d kind of figured, but I wasn’t expecting confirmation to be that way. “Half-brother fish?”
“See why I prefer books?”
“Where are the diaries?”
She chuckles a little, her eyes still locked on her book. “Not in here, I’ll tell you that.”
She’s not going to tell me. Goddamn it. I groan and flop backward in the chair. She’s still grinning.
“Have you read A Farewell to Arms?” she says. “It’s good.”
“No.”
“I’ll lend you a copy.”
“Thanks.” But I can’t pretend this is what I want. Half an hour ago, books were all I wanted. Now I want a fucking boat. Someone to offer to ship fish to the states. An actual cure.
“He is getting well, though.” I’m sitting on the dock, throwing pieces of seaweed into the water.
“That’s kind of why you’re here.” Teeth scoops his lips over the surface of the water and gobbles up the seaweed I threw. I toss the next piece into his mouth.
“I guess I didn’t believe it would really happen. You know I could bring you some real food, right? Candy, even.”
“I hate human food.” He’s eyeing the seaweed in my hand. “Give me the rest of that.”
“There’s more everywhere. Go get your own.”
He whines, long and loud, like a scream. “That’s a really good piece. You got lucky.”
“Or maybe I picked it out on purpose. Best seaweed in the sea.”
“Stop fucking around. It’s not like you need it. You can’t even eat seaweed.” He stumbles around the word a little.
“Of course I can.” I eat a bite to screw with him. It just tastes like salt. “How often do the fishermen catch you?” I say. I’ve been trying to get him to talk about them all morning. He has this bruise around his neck in the shape of a hand. And his eyes are really red today.
“Most nights. They’re crafty.”
“I don’t get why you don’t swim away.”
“I just bite them. So you guys are going to stop eating the fish now, right? Now that he’s well.”
“We don’t eat them, really. Only him.”
“Is he going to stop?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want him to go back to how he was. And it’s not like he’s totally well.”
“I think it’s time to stop, Rudy. I mean, what if . . . what if he becomes whatever from the fish from eating too much?”
“Uh, allergic?”
“No.”
“Immune.”
“Jesus Christ, if I knew the word I’d fucking say the word, Rudy.”
“All right, kiddo, calm down. It’s not like we’re eating you.”
He sighs, really big, in this way that reminds me how much of him is human. I can hear all the air leaving his lungs.
“Stop being mean and give me that,” he says, pointing his chin at the seaweed. “All I ever do is skim the shit off the surface. Dead and slimy. The good stuff’s too hard to pick.”
“You’re really not adapted to your environment.”
I mean that as a joke, just more banter, but he kind of looks away and splashes a little with his tail.
I say, “Hey, I’m so
rry.”
“I’m not exactly . . . whatever. A thing that was made for what I do.” He’s doing the whatever thing the more we talk, because I guess we’re venturing past the subjects he’s used to hearing about. He learned English from listening to the islanders, I assume, and if they don’t say the word evolutionary, he’s not going to know it. It’s not like there’s anything for him to read out here in the ocean. Really, he’s the opposite of Diana in every single way, ever.
“I’m a mistake,” he says. “Let’s be honest.”
I want to ask now about his mom. If he knows she’s still up there in the mansion. And how long he was with her. And if he remembers when she must have read him Runaway Bunny. And about how the hell one goes about having sex with a fish.
He pushes himself out of the water to try to get to my seaweed. He snaps at the air. His teeth are long and thin as needles. I pull my hand away before he can bite my fingers off, and he says, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I know, asshole.”
“Plus they’re sharp, not strong. I probably wouldn’t even break skin.” He bites his hand to test and examines it critically.
“Stop that. Like you’re not beat up already.”
“Didn’t break skin.”
“So your bullshit about biting the fishermen is actual bullshit, then. Do they just let you go?”
“Why the fuck don’t you ever get in the water unless I’m giving you a fucking lesson? You’re driving me crazy. Jesus. Get in and give me that.”
“I’m not getting in today. Water’s rough.” I remember when Diana said that.
“Then why are you wearing a bathing suit?” God, he sounds just like a bratty kid sometimes. All of the time.
I say, “Because somehow or another you seem to always get me in the water. But I’m not fucking coming in voluntarily. Go out and start choking again if you want me in so badly.”
He grins. “So many big words.”
“Sorry.”
“I liked it.”
“Not coming in. Will freeze.”