“Come on,” Anne says, laughing. The sound is somehow brighter than all the bells and whistles of the carnival games nearby. “Buy me an ice cream.”
“Um…” The boy looks at his friends, who snicker. “Okay.”
The boy ducks out of the roller-coaster line and follows us back through the crowd to a stand where a bored-looking girl is dishing out scoops of homemade ice cream. Anne orders, looks expectantly at Jane and me.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Anne asks the boy, reaching down to touch his arm—skin on skin, that’s all it takes for our powers to work. She flashes a smile, tilts her head, all the things that she knows the boy wants, if only because at that angle he can see down her shirt a little. He doesn’t mind. They rarely mind, even if it’s dinner or movie tickets or letting Jane drive their fancy sports cars. I think that’s Anne’s favorite part: She knows just what to do and say to make them not care.
The boy buys us ice cream, banana-pudding-flavored, and then pays for a few rounds at the arcade. Jane finally shakes her head, though—he’s starting to think less of us, to suspect we’re just using him. So we drop him like a broken toy, sending him back to his friends pissed off that the anticipated hookup isn’t happening. We don’t care. After all, he was just practice.
I don’t really know what we’re practicing for, nor do I know how scamming boys out of money helps us understand our powers. I don’t think Anne and Jane know, either—they just like playing the game and want to justify it. They like being in control. Their powers give them that.
All my power does is weigh me down with everyone’s sorrow, everyone’s tragedies, things that can’t be changed or altered or fixed. It makes me afraid to talk to people for too long, worried I’ll reveal things about them I know yet shouldn’t know. It’s easier just to keep everyone away. Never touch them. Never read them.
My sisters’ powers are gifts. My power is a curse.
The three of us crash onto a bench in front of the Haunted Hotel ride, where rickety cars squeal through a darkened building. The drunker the tourists get, the more they love it, even though it smells like a basement and the fake corpses have twenty years of dust on them.
“This is boring,” Jane sighs. “All the good ones were here earlier in the season.”
“We could go home and watch that movie,” I suggest.
“Ugh, no, it’s Friday night! What about him?” Jane says, pointing to a handsome guy who’s holding a girl’s hand, in line to ride the carousel.
“He’s with her,” Anne answers.
“Yeah…” Jane sighs. Their rule is, they don’t use their powers to trick boys who are in love. Maybe it’s too many romantic comedies and sappy novels, maybe it makes them feel like what they do is perfectly okay, but they’ve held their ground on that one, Anne more easily than Jane.
Anne begins to roll her eyes, but before she’s finished, Jane reaches over and grabs her hand. Anne yanks it away, irritated.
“Don’t do that!” she snaps. We don’t use our powers on one another, and thus we try to avoid touching—but it’s a rule Jane has always found more flexible than Anne or me.
“Come on, it’s easier than wandering around all night. What did you see?” Jane asks.
Anne glares at her for a moment but finally reveals what she saw in Jane’s future. “There’s a tall guy somewhere, green shirt, I think. He’ll take us to that fondue place, if you want to go.”
“I hate that place,” I say, and the truth is, I think Anne and Jane do, too—they just like that it’s expensive. I’d be happier with a three-dollar hot dog from the street vendor.
“Everyone loves that place,” Anne argues. “Come on, let’s find him.”
“I’ll catch up later,” I say. Anne and Jane look at me, then each other, like I’m turning up my nose at an amazing adventure. When we were little, we were interlocked, like the three strands of a braid—pull one, and the others fall apart. But now, even though Anne is always reminding me that “we’re stronger together,” I can’t help but feel differently. They’re stronger without me. Sure, maybe I’m weak, maybe I’m nothing without them, but to be honest, I’m pretty sure I’m nothing with them, too.
“Fine,” Anne sighs. “We’ll see you at home, I guess.”
I’ll give it to my sisters—they want me to be one of them. The third piece to their matching set. But wanting is not enough, so while they wander off in search of a target in green, I weave through a row of food carts and toward the coaster, toward the pier.
The pier juts off a short cliff and is eerily dark compared with the Pavilion—its old lights can’t conquer the enormous blackness of both the sky and the nighttime ocean. A few lovers look out over the sea, a guitarist with an open case for tips sings a song I don’t recognize, and a handful of fishermen tend to their lines. I look down at the water. The tide is massive tonight, the perigean tide, if my memories from astronomy class are correct. As I go farther and farther toward the pier’s end, the sound of the Pavilion fades, replaced by the powerful noise of the ocean.
We’re from the middle of Georgia, a tiny landlocked town and a house full of siblings—all brothers, save me, Anne, and Jane. It doesn’t make sense that I feel most myself when I’m alone by the ocean. Maybe it’s because I think the ocean is like me. It knows the past. It’s seen yachts and ships and pirates and a time before people. It has secrets, secrets you don’t know just by watching the surface.
I look down the beach, which is illuminated only by moonlight and the glow of the Pavilion. This isn’t a swimming section—it’s too rocky. Most of the houses at the bottom of the little cliff, right on the sea, were abandoned a year or so ago when a hurricane battered them beyond repair. There’s an old church, a single-room building with faded graffiti—cheap spray paint doesn’t last long against the ocean’s spray, so it looks like the church has a pastel hue.
The guitar player wanders near me, still playing and singing under his breath. He’s wearing a shirt that’s real vintage—it has a few tiny holes, and the sleeves are stretched out. I can’t tell if he’s handsome or not, but I want to keep looking at his face, thin lips and deep-set eyes. I don’t have any money and hate to give him false hope for tips, so I turn away, back to the water. I wonder how deep it is. I wonder how deep it is everywhere.
The guitarist stops playing, I hear something like running or stomping. I turn around, eyebrows raised, just in time to see it happen.
He trips on an uneven plank. He tries to catch himself but throws his weight backward to keep from falling forward on the guitar. Everyone is watching, no one is moving. It happens so fast—he’s off balance, hits the railing of the pier at just the right angle. The right angle to fall into the blackness, into the ocean.
CHAPTER TWO
Lo
We don’t want to go to the surface.
We linger under the water, down deep, where it’s cold; it makes us feel the most alive. Only the new girl wants to go up. Her skin is still a little pink, like it remembers the sun, whereas most of ours are pale, with places tinted the light purples, blues, or greens of seashells.
It’s nice that we look the same, that we are the same. It means we are safe, because there are dozens and dozens of me. When they move, I move; when I move, they move. It has long stopped surprising me, the speed at which new girls forget their first names. You don’t need a name when everyone is you and you are everyone.
I’m still on my second name, Lo, the sound the water makes during a thunderstorm when you’re deep beneath the waves. But eventually, I’ll forget this one, too. I’ll move on to a third, maybe even a fourth, until I’ll give up on names altogether, like the oldest of us have.
The pull of the tide gets stronger; the full moon is rising. The new girl looks up through the softened wooden planks of the Glasgow’s deck, and the tiny bit of moonlight streaking to the depths illuminates her face. She looks sweet, kind, gentle. Human. She lifts, releases the rock she was holding on to, and starts toward the s
urface.
“I suppose it’s time,” Key says, lingering just outside the cracked ship’s hull. She and I came to the ocean just a few months apart. Her name used to be Julia. I don’t know why I can remember her old name but not my own. Key sighs and pushes off the ocean floor; sand blossoms around her bare feet as she swims upward. She never wants to surface. Whatever happened in her human life, she was more than happy to forget it long ago—I don’t think she even tried to remember, to be honest.
But nonetheless, she’ll still surface—we all will, because we are the same thing. My hair floats around my body like a cloak, then trails along behind me as I kick off the ground, dodge the caved-in bits of the ship. I follow Key, faster, faster; I can feel the others behind me as the Glasgow fades from sight. The water cradles us from every direction until we break the surface, and I feel so, so…
Exposed. Like I’m falling into the sky. The air hurts my skin, and I close my eyes to the pain. Around me, I hear the gentle splash of the others breaking the surface, winces or gasps as they remember what the shore looks like. I brace myself and open my eyes.
Light, so much light—from the moon, from the tiny pinprick stars, but mostly from the pier and the city beyond. It glows; it’s beautiful in a way that nothing beneath the water is. I inhale even though it burns, brush a few strands of dark hair from my face.
The new girl—Molly, her name is Molly, I think—has tears running down her cheeks—they’re somehow so different from the ocean water, so unusual that I notice them immediately.
“You won’t miss it as much, eventually,” Key reassures her. It’s true—I don’t miss my old life at all. I don’t remember it, of course, but even if I did, I’m happy here. I have my sisters, the ocean….
“I don’t want to stop missing it,” the girl says. The words were clearly supposed to be sharp, but they’re softened by her crying.
“Well,” someone else says, “find your mortal boy, then.”
A few girls chuckle, but inside we all feel the same twinge of pity for her hope. It’s the cruelest thing, hope, the way it strings you along, the way it makes you believe. Only the old ones have ever seen a mortal’s soul stolen, and they can barely remember it to tell us the story. They say she walked, though—she walked right out of the sea; her skin was pink again, her lungs made for air instead of water.
It’s hard to believe sometimes, but hope never lets you truly stop believing. Our souls fade slowly, just like our human memories—I imagine mine is gone entirely now, though to be honest, I’m not sure. What does having a soul feel like, exactly? I still believe that drowning a human would get me a new soul, but it’s not something I care to pursue anymore, and I’m somewhat relieved to feel that way, especially when I look at the tortured, desperate look on Molly’s face. She must still feel her soul, feel it bleeding out of her. That’s the only explanation for the pain in her eyes.
Music, we hear music bouncing across the water and audible only in the seconds between waves lapping at our shoulders. A light and airy song, and then beyond that, the buzz of a crowd. How many people are there that we can hear them from this far away?
I look at Key, at the others. They stare, either at the moon, the pier, or the tiny little houses on the shore. Do people still live in them? They look different than when I saw them last, more chipped and faded, like the ocean has punished them. I wonder where the people who lived there went. Someplace far away from the water?
I don’t even know what that sort of place would look like, I think, shivering a little.
There’s a bang somewhere ahead, a shout. It’s coming from the pier—we stare as a dark form falls over its railing, into the water. There’s a horrible slapping sound when the thing hits, splashing, screams from those above.
We are silent. We don’t move, staring, like one creature with dozens of heads, dozens of eyes watching curiously. We see a thousand times better than we did as humans, but the waves block our line of sight. Then, in one motion, we dive forward, slipping through the water toward the pier.
It’s splashing—he’s splashing desperately. The waves are unusually harsh tonight, and his clothes weigh him down.
We watch. Oldest in the back, apathetic, here only because the rest of us are. Youngest closest to him, intrigued, wondering how long before he’ll slip under the water and die. Me, somewhere between the two groups. It’s so strange to watch the boy struggle, fight against something that’s so natural for us.
But the new girl is watching with a different sort of intensity than the rest of us. She inhales, draws closer to him. She’s shaking; he’s thrashing, trying to swim, but every time he gets his head up, a wave knocks him down again. There’s something strapped around his shoulders that’s pulling him beneath. The new girl turns back to look at us as the boy’s flails slow; he begins to go under more often….
“How do I make him love me?” the new girl asks.
“That’s the tricky part,” Key says, eyes flickering like this is a brilliant game—most things are to her. “It’s hard to make someone love you when they’re dying.”
Key’s words seem to both scare and embolden the new girl. She presses her lips together hard, sinks under the water, and emerges beside the boy. He grabs hold of her arm to try to keep his head up. It works; he stops fighting the waves, but when he breathes, I can hear the water in his lungs.
“My name is Molly,” the new girl says. He doesn’t hear her, but her voice is delicate, rainlike. The boy turns his shaky eyes toward her, but I don’t think he really sees her face—he looks unfocused, dazed.
“Yes, there, see,” Molly says, grinning so wide the moonlight glints off her teeth. His eyes begin to drift shut. She shakes him awake, says her name again, tries to talk to him. When it doesn’t work, she begins to sing. Her voice is pure, lovely, just enough humanity in it to remind me how she was a human girl less than a year ago. The song is one of ours, but it seems foreign on her tongue.
I look away from her, toward the pier the boy came from. People stare in our direction, but they can’t see us in the darkness. But then there’s a rustle from the shore, and something comes down the road by the beaten-looking buildings, bright flashing red lights that bounce across the water.
“They’re coming for him,” one of the girls says. Molly stops singing, looks up.
“Leave him,” another girl tells Molly. “There’s no time. And no point.”
“There’s time—there has to be time,” Molly says, voice rough and dangerous. She positions herself in front of the boy’s face, water dripping off her eyelashes. His eyes drift shut. “No, look at me. Look at me. Do you love me?”
“It’s too fast,” I tell her, grimacing as a breeze touches my shoulders. I lean back so they’re wet again.
“Was it like this for the other girl? Or did it take longer?” Key asks one of the oldest ones; she doesn’t answer. Key shrugs. “I remember human stories about love at first sight.”
“Those were stories,” I say. Lights, bright white and big like the moon, shine at the waves from the shore farther down the beach. They’re making their way toward us, rolling steadily along. We can’t stay. We don’t want them to see us. We don’t want to see humans, really; the oldest girls are finding it difficult to even look at the human boy, his head cradled against Molly’s shoulder.
There’s a quiet sound, like raindrops—we’re leaving. My sisters slip underneath the water delicately, more and more with every moment. When I look back to Molly, the boy’s eyes are open again. They aren’t trained on her, though—he’s looking at us—no, at me, I think. Not in the dizzy, confused way he was watching Molly earlier, but like he knows me, like we’re in the middle of a conversation. His eyes are light gray pools that remind me of the ice that forms by the ocean farther north. His gaze startles me, and I back up, my lips part.
“Go with them if you want. I’m not leaving till he says he loves me,” Molly sniffs. She’s crying, so humanlike that she and the boy actually seem a pe
rfect match. She looks down at the boy’s face and follows his gaze to me. She frowns and turns him around, so he can’t see me. I swallow hard; it feels like his eyes are still boring into me. I realize that in the long moment of the boy’s gaze, my sisters have left. I’m alone with Molly.
“Leave him. He doesn’t need to die like this. He doesn’t love you.”
“He might!”
“No, Molly,” I say, and grimace as I remember the boy I killed. The way his body rocked with the currents, dead and lifeless on the floor. I don’t want to imagine the boy with the gray eyes like that. Hope forces me to believe getting his soul is possible—I don’t know how, exactly, but I believe it’s possible—but something deeper makes me believe it isn’t right. And it certainly isn’t right like this, when I know there’s no chance Molly will walk out of the ocean tonight.
Yet I know what Molly feels. I may not remember my human name like she does, but I remember being her. I remember needing to believe the fairy tale, in thinking of hope as a real thing instead of a pretty idea. I swim closer to her.
“Let him go,” I say, trying to sound gentle, comforting. “His people will find him. We need to leave. We don’t belong here.” I feel unsettled without the others on the surface, like I’ve lost a part of myself.
Molly’s fingers are wrapped so tightly around him that I can see his skin starting to bruise. The lights on the beach are moving, growing closer, little by little. A puttering noise bounces toward us—a boat coming from somewhere, probably more searchers. The thing weighing the boy down brushes against my legs, the strings sharp like sea urchin spines, some sort of instrument, I think.