Teeth

  “Your human sister.”

  “I knew what you meant. Seriously. You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?”

  I smile and he smiles and I lie down on my back, as far as I can get from the remains of the fishboy’s lunch. He’s sucking on all the little bones.

  Eventually he finishes eating, and I don’t say anything, and he doesn’t say anything. He reaches up to the dock and walks the fish bones back and forth like they’re people. I half-watch his hands and half-watch the sky. It’s the first time we’ve been absolutely silent together when it doesn’t feel like we’re fighting. It almost feels like we’re tucked in to go to sleep. The silence must last nearly five minutes before he looks up at me and smiles.

  It doesn’t matter what team I’m on, for a minute. For a minute it’s just me and that smile.

  “If you’re done relaying my family history to me,” he says, “I have a mission for us.”

  I sit up. All the blood rushes out of my head and makes me dizzy.

  “I knew that would make you pay attention. Poor, bored Rudy.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Operation Enki Freedom.”

  “Seriously, how do you even know these words?”

  “Ms. Klesko listens to the radio without her hearing whatevers in. And I am very, very smart, Rudy. You’re in?”

  I guess freeing a few can’t hurt. The fact is, my mom brought a whole school of fish home from the market this week, and the guilt is eating me alive.

  “Come ooooon,” Teeth whines. “Operation Save My Brothers.”

  Now it’s not like I have a choice. “Yeah, I’m in.”

  Fishboy licks his lips. “Excellent. Come on. Let’s go swimming!”

  I slip into the water. I start shivering from the second my toe breaks the surface. At least I’m more confident in the water now, after all the swimming lessons. Thank God Mom and Dad think I’m fucking Diana, or I’d have no excuse for why I’m gone so much.

  We swim. I let him lead, and I grab on to his tail when I get a little shaky in the deep water. He lets me, but not for too long, since it makes him a lot slower.

  He doesn’t swim like I do; he taught me how to flutter kick, but he hits the water with huge strokes of his tail, like an oar on a rowboat. He can hold his breath for almost three minutes. I timed him once. He says that with practice, I can stay underwater for that long too. I want to learn.

  We’re heading toward the marina again. Shit. I hope this isn’t a suicide mission. He should have disclosed that before he dragged me along. I still might have come.

  He stops us against a cluster of algae-coated rocks. They’re slippery, and I can’t get a good grip, so I latch on to his arm. He doesn’t shake me off.

  “What are you looking at?” I say.

  “Fishermen.”

  My fingers tighten on his arm. “Teeth, come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ve seen the fish. Hi, fish.” I see them now, swirling around his tail. He’s leaning in to them when he can.

  “Seen these?” He pulls me around the corner and shows me an enormous net filled with fish, hauled halfway out of the water. The fish struggle all together, like one huge animal.

  There must be a thousand of them. I can’t believe we eat that much fish, as an island. But even my tiny brother can go through four or five a day, I guess. And I can think of ten people off the top of my head who don’t eat a thing but fish.

  The fishboy grits his teeth. “Look at that. Look at what they’re doing. And they don’t even have the common decency to kill them quickly. They’re going to let them flop around in the sun until they drown.”

  “‘Drown’ means water.”

  “Whatever.”

  “If the fishermen catch you, I don’t think they’ll have the decency to kill you quickly, either.”

  “Well, that’s the truth.”

  I pull his wrist. “Why are you being stupid?”

  He glares at me. “I’m stronger than the fucking fishermen. Plus they’re at lunch.”

  “They’re twice your size.”

  “Then why do I always get away?” He looks at me like my brother does when he gives me his stupid five-year-old comebacks. I know you are, but what am I? “How come they can’t capture me for more than an hour?”

  I don’t have an answer for that, so he crosses his arms, triumphant, which throws my hand off his arm and leaves me treading water on my own.

  He says, “I can’t gnaw through that rope. If I could, the fish could too, and the fishermen aren’t that stupid. The rope is too strong. My teeth just bend against it.”

  “Ow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how are we doing this?”

  “Well, see, I can, however, slit through the individual whatevers of each rope if I turn my head the right way. The fishermen are that stupid.”

  “The fibers?”

  “Fiber’s that thing you eat, Rudy. I’m talking biting through.”

  I shake my head. “You’ve done this before?”

  “Once.” He licks his lips. “A year ago.”

  “It worked?”

  “They caught me before I could make much of a hole in the net.” His eyes get a funny glaze. Remembering. One of his hands travels to the back of his tail, right over where his tailbone is, or would be, I don’t know.

  I swallow. “This is a bad idea.”

  “Anyway, that time I didn’t have a lookout. Now I have a lookout.” He plants his hand on my shoulder and looks at me seriously. “This is a very, very easy job, Rudy. You hold on to the dock and you keep out of sight, but you do some kind of whatever if you see a fisherman coming.”

  “Okay, some kind of what?”

  “God, I have to tell you everything.” He whistles. “Like that.”

  “Got it. That one was hard to figure out from context, sorry.”

  “What the fuck is context?”

  I laugh. “Never mind.”

  “You’re so annoying.”

  “Are we doing this?”

  At home it was always me coming up with the crazy plans and forcing my friends to follow. Maybe that’s why I’m into this—following along, I mean. It gives me the chance to pretend I’m someone else.

  My hand is on his arm again. I really am easy.

  “So we’re going to do this on my count,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  “Except, see, I like to concentrate when I’m counting, and right now I’m busy keeping watch. So.”

  I look at him. “So we’re doing this on my count?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When I say three?”

  “Three. All right.”

  “It’s going to come after two.”

  “I know numbers, Rudy.” But after a beat he says, “Two. Okay. So that’s when I’ll get ready.”

  Or maybe it’s conversations like these that are the reason I’ll do crazy shit with the fishboy. Because I haven’t felt like this in a really long time. It’s hard to explain. Like I said, I’m easy.

  “One. Two.”

  He gets all twitchy, flexing his fingers and getting ready to push off the rocks. I’m trying not to laugh.

  “Three!”

  He grabs my hand and we jet forward. He’s swimming so fast that bubbles rush to the surface with each stroke of his tail. We swim into the marina, and he gets me settled on the dock, then he grabs the net and starts slicing away with those sword teeth. I turn the other way and lower myself between the bottom of the dock and the surface of the water. I feel like an alligator. This is how I find Teeth all the time, floating on his back underneath the dock where no one can see him. Now I need to pray that no one can see me, either.

  No sign of the fishermen. Just when I’m about to ask Teeth how it’s going, I hear the swish-plop behind me of a fish hitting the water.

  “He’s swimming!” Teeth whispers. “He’s alive!”

  It’s hard to think about the implications of freeing maybe-violent fish when I hear how happy Teeth is
. So I just say, “No fishermen so far.”

  “Good. Careful. They’re sneaky.” I hear a few more rips of his teeth, and I can’t help but turn around when he cheers and starts laughing. As soon as I turn my head, the the fish start pouring out like a rainfall. I catch glimpses of Teeth through the downpour of scales. He’s grinning like a maniac and dancing among the fish. “Safe! Safe safe safe babies!”

  “Okay,” I say. “Now we get the fuck out of here.”

  “Right. Out of here!” And then he takes off. He leaves me.

  Shit.

  I can’t believe this. He’s leaving me with the fishermen.

  Christ. He set me up. Fuck.

  He is a fish after all.

  He left them a new boy and now he’s swimming away and fuck, why the fuck did I trust him? Am I fucking crazy? Who the fuck trusts a fish?

  I could be with Diana right now.

  Shit. This is just the kind of crap you fall into when you live on an island for too long. I wanted a friend so badly that I latched on to the first guy who smiled at me.

  I am way, way too easy.

  Never again. Never fucking ever again. If I get out of here, I’m never getting screwed over again. I’ll stick with girls who stay inside, if that’s what it takes. I don’t need this shit. I need drunk girls in trash bags and friends who step on my brother’s breathing machine. I don’t need these fucking feelings.

  I can’t believe he did this.

  Okay. This is going to be fine. The water’s deep, but if I can just push off the dock, if I don’t get disoriented, if the fishermen don’t catch me, shit, shit—But then he’s back.

  Oh.

  He laughs and grabs me. “Sorry!” Oh my God. He’s hugging me. He says, “Thought you were behind me. I’m sorry! You’re such a shitty swimmer!”

  And then he’s throwing me into the water and pulling me along with him, and we’re out of there.

  And fuck it, because that was seriously fucking fantastic.

  Once we’re back to safety, we float on our backs by the sandbar. Teeth does big, lazy kicks.

  I’m so tired. If the water weren’t just a few feet deep, I’d probably be freaking out that I might fall asleep and drown, and Teeth would forget about me again, even if it’s just for a minute. Though I once read something that said babies can drown in like four inches of water. I wonder how many inches it would take with me. He better not forget about me again.

  Teeth is singing about wanting another minnow. He cannot carry a tune at all.

  Mostly just to make him for the love of God shut up, I say, “So I am seriously almost sleeping with your sister.”

  “Why do you keep talking about that?”

  Because I like it. Because I’m waiting for you to care. “I thought you’d be interested.”

  “This isn’t, like, my life. I don’t care. I hate humans.” Then he doesn’t talk for a minute. I stroke behind me, my arms moving in circles.

  “How old is she?” he says.

  “Your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “About my age.”

  “Oh. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I’m not sure how old I am.”

  I know Diana told me how long the fish-bikini thing was before she was born, but I can’t remember how many years she said. So I say, “Probably nineteen or twenty. Older than me.”

  “Yeah. Older than the baby.”

  “I wonder how long fishboys live.”

  “Forever.”

  I say, “Wait. What baby?”

  “My sister.”

  “Not a baby, you know?”

  “I know that. I see her sometimes. She just . . . was. Fussy baby.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Yeah, so I knew her when she was a baby. I didn’t know her. She was a baby. Like, whatever. Stupid baby. Didn’t have a personality.”

  “So you were still in the mansion when she was born.”

  He sits up in the water, so I do too. I can only see his torso. He looks like a regular boy with a bad skin condition. I have a hard time staying afloat this way, but I want to be able to watch him.

  He isn’t looking at me, just splashing the water with his hands and watching the ripples. “What did she tell you about me?” He barely moves his lips when he talks.

  “Nothing,” I say, which is sort of true. I want those fucking diaries.

  He lived in that house. For years.

  Teeth clears his throat. “I don’t care about her. She’s a human.”

  “You’re half-human.”

  He mumbles something about me being half-asshole.

  I say, “What makes fish better than humans, huh?”

  “Better tails.”

  “Fishboy.”

  “Humans suck.”

  “What about the minnows?”

  “Minnows are delicious.”

  “And they’re fish. Like you or whatever.”

  He plays with his tail. “The minnows have their own brothers to worry about them.”

  I’m quiet. Teeth gives me a minute, because he knows what I’m thinking about.

  I say, “You know, fish aren’t perfect.” I can’t believe these are sentences in my life. “Your mom . . . ”

  He shakes his head. He doesn’t like the word “mom,” I can tell.

  “The fishermen,” he says softly. “Did you not get how this conversation really sucked the first time? Do we have to?”

  “Hey. We don’t. You okay?”

  “I’m bored of this. I want to hear about you. Favorite color. Go.”

  I laugh. “Green.”

  “I’m green!”

  “Fuck yeah you are.”

  “Why are you laughing? Isn’t this what friends do?”

  “Interrogate each other?”

  “What? Uh, sure. I don’t know what that means. But yes.”

  I lean my head back as far as it will go, letting the water creep over my head and onto my forehead. “See, I know what having friends is like, because they are something that I had. Have you . . . ever had a friend?”

  This horrible question doesn’t seem to make him sad. “Fiona used to feed me.”

  “Really?” So she does know. I knew it. She’s talking in weird fortune-teller code. Someday, years from now, when something, anything, has happened that will make sharing the fishboy with someone okay, I’ll rub Mom’s face in the fact that Fiona isn’t crazy. Just a little handsy.

  Teeth says, “Yeah, when I was . . . after . . . ” He’s either confused or upset and doing a good job of hiding it. “I mean, before I was big enough to catch anything, and I was just floating around and crying and stuff . . . she would give me bread and carrots and stuff in the morning. Healthy shit. She was really into that. She’s still alive, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I haven’t seen her in forever.”

  “She stands by the cliffs on Tuesday mornings, at the marketplace. Always. I . . . think she looks for you.”

  “I can’t go over there. Too many people.”

  That might be the first time I’ve heard him say “people” instead of “humans.” “What are you afraid of?”

  He shakes his head. “If you see Fiona, say thanks? I never said thanks.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “Your friends. I want to hear about your friends.”

  I paddle myself in circles. “They’re not even really my friends anymore. They were . . . before we moved here. Forever ago.”

  “Like a hundred days ago.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m good with days. Sunrises.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen him sleep. “A minute ago you couldn’t count to three.”

  “Could too. Was making you feel smart. I’m a great friend.”

  “It feels like we’ve been here forever.” I hold my breath and sink under the water for a minute. “And I haven’t heard from them since I left.”

  “You miss them?”

&
nbsp; “I guess. They were fun, you know?” The sun is setting now. I should be colder than I am. I close my eyes. “It’s not like I really needed them or anything. They just made stuff more fun.”

  “I gotta be honest, you sound like a shitty friend right now.”

  “Hey.” I start to sit up again, but it unbalances me and I start to sink, this time involuntarily. The water is a lot deeper than I thought. I start kicking hard to roll myself over, and then I feel Fishboy’s arms scoop me up and toss me onto the sandbank.

  “Don’t do that,” he says.

  I breathe hard. “Thanks.”

  “Why didn’t they move with you?”

  I catch my breath. “What?”

  “Your friends.”

  “It . . . doesn’t work like that. They couldn’t leave home just because I did.”

  “Why not? If you moved without me, I’d be pissed.”

  I look at him and wonder how the fuck exactly he thinks he could follow me anywhere farther than the dock. My stomach hurts a little. I don’t know how to tell him that friends at home weren’t anything like this, because then I’m scared he’ll ask what this is. And . . . God.

  I shake my head a little and say, “They have stuff at home that’s more important than I am. They have families and school and, like, reasons to stay.”

  “They have fish.”

  “Yeah, there’s fish . . . ”

  “No, I mean . . . stuff to take care of.”

  “Well, yeah. Metaphorical fish.”

  He doesn’t even pause to try to understand that word. “Fish who need them. And your fish came here, so you came here too.”

  “Yeah.”

  He kicks his fin. “I wish we could get away from our fish.”

  I feel like I just breathed in some water, but I don’t think I did. I think it’s just how my throat feels right now. “You do?”

  “Yeah. Everything would be a lot easier if you could just dump fish the way humans dump their families.”

  “No, wait. I’m talking about . . . you realize me and my friends don’t actually have fish, right? I should probably have told you what metaphorical means. My family is my fish.”

  “I hate being responsible. I mean, I like the idea of being responsible. Like that fox, the one in that story? And he’s in love with that other fox, and the bear sings a song . . . ”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean. Um . . . there’s a tiger. He’s bad. He’s a king.”