Teeth(19)

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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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.