Teeth(6)

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 f*cks 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 f*ck 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.