When We Believed in Mermaids(101)

My gut twists. “No! Not yet!”

“I know. It’s fast, but we can keep in touch.”

As if we are just old friends who bumped into each other. But I have to give her space. “Thanks for coming out. Thanks for talking to me. Thanks for all of it, Kit. I mean it.”

She softens and leans forward to hug me. I smell her hair, feel her muscles. “We’ll stay in touch.”

“Javier is in love with you, Kit. I think you might want to give that relationship a chance.”

“Mm,” she says, and sits back in her seat. “I hope things work out with Simon.”

“Yeah.” I run a thumb along the seam of the leather on the steering wheel. “Are we just leaving it like this? That’s it?”

“I don’t know. What are we supposed to do? I’ll call you when I get home.”

“Okay. Sarah will love writing to you.”

“And I will love writing to her.”

I take a breath. Consider keeping this one last thing to myself. Rain starts to plop down hard on the windscreen. “Kit, there’s something else I need to tell you. So everything is out in the open.”

Wariness fills her entire body. “Maybe don’t.”

“We can’t go forward with any more secrets.”

She bows her head. Touches her fingernails. “Go ahead.”

“When Mom and I went to Santa Cruz the day of the earthquake, I was having an abortion.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I’m sorry that happened,” she says. “But it’s not exactly a big shock.”

“Well, actually, I did make out with a lot of boys at that time, but I didn’t have sex with anyone. I was afraid. But then I did.” The burning in my chest feels like it will melt my bones. “When you were at that doctor camp and Mom and Dad went to Hawaii, I got Dylan really drunk, and I had sex with him.”

Her body goes so still it’s like she’s turned into a photo of herself. All the color leaves her face.

“The abortion—it was his. And he was dead, so what could I do?”

She still doesn’t move for the longest time. Rain patters down on the roof, obscures my view of the world. “Why didn’t you tell me, Josie?” she asks quietly.

“I didn’t want you to hate me. Blame me for his death.”

She sighs, closes her eyes. “That’s why he drowned himself,” she says, and it’s not a question.

My bones all melt, and I can’t look at her. “He was so angry and ashamed. I should never have done it. I don’t know why I did. He was so fucked up.” Tears I can’t halt fill my eyes. “He never spoke to me ever again.”

“You kind of deserved it,” she says, and then opens the door and jumps out, then turns around to face me, the rain pouring down on her head, soaking her hair, tipping her eyelashes. I love her like she’s one of my own organs, my eyes or my heart. “No one ever protected you the way they should have. But I would have.” She’s crying. “I would have.”

She slams the door.





Chapter Thirty-Two

Kit

Two weeks before the earthquake, when I was thirteen, I found Dylan’s body.

It was a cold, misty morning, with a fog so thick I almost couldn’t see coming down the steps to the cove, and I had carried down a breakfast of Pop-Tarts and a bottle of milk to get away from the endless fighting that filled our house. My mom yelled at my dad. My dad yelled at Josie. She yelled back. On and on and on. She’d done something bad this time, but I didn’t know what it was, and honestly, I didn’t care anymore. They called her names at school, really bad names, and after four years of steadily declining behavior, I was over trying to understand her. Her actions embarrassed me.

Dylan was lying facedown on the hard-washed sand, just about where we used to set up the tent long ago. He wore the same shirt he’d left with the day before and jeans and no shoes. His hair was loose and tangled. On his left wrist was the leather bracelet I’d made him in fourth grade, the one he never took off, with silver beads. There was no question he was dead.

I sat down beside him. Touched the bracelet. My heart in my chest was exploding, a scream I couldn’t allow into the world. Once I told them that he was here, I would lose him forever.

So on the beach where we’d spent so much time, I sat beside him and wondered if his ghost was still around. If he could hear me. “I wish you hadn’t done this,” I said, and took a bite of Pop-Tart. “But I guess you just couldn’t stand it anymore. I guess I knew you would eventually.” Tears welled up in my eyes, and I let them fall down my face. “I just want you to know that you made my life better. Like, so much better, dude.”

Some of my tears fell on my upper chest. I took another bite and chewed it, in no hurry. “Number one, you helped me get to school every day, and you know how much I liked that.”

The fog eddied and moved, and between tufts I thought I saw Cinder, sitting with somebody. “Number two, you taught me to surf, which you know I love as much as you do.” Meditatively, I took another bite and a sip of the milk. “I sorta thought surfing might save you, really. Like maybe it could have if—I don’t know, maybe if people hadn’t been so mean to you when you were little.

“Number three.” My voice broke. His hands were flung out beside him, and I thought of those hands on books, reading to us. I thought of them on knives, flying through a zucchini. I thought of them in my hair, braiding it every day so I didn’t look like a crazy girl.