He’s panting too. Probably from the kick in the ribs. He was already pretty bruised.
I say, “You’re not a fish, you’re a fucking maniac.”
He laughs, hard, his face up to the sky. I see all his teeth. There must be a hundred of them, as thin as pine needles. He has a loud, piercing laugh, like a whistle.
I know that voice. He’s the screams at night. He’s the hours of screaming and the crying that my parents told me is the wind.
Goddamn. Either he really is a maniac, or he’s got to be the saddest fishboy in the world.
He grabs me by the front of my shirt. “I don’t want to see you around any more dead fish, you got that?”
I pull myself back. “My brother needs them.”
I really didn’t think this would concern him, but he lets go and looks at me. He keeps his eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong with your brother?”
“You’re a shitty spy.”
“What’s wrong with your brother?”
“He’s sick. Cystic fibrosis.”
“Cystic whatever.” He doesn’t say it mean, but like he’s trying to figure out what I said. “Whatever fibrosis.” He tilts his head and I practically see the words rolling around in his brain. It’s not an uncommon reaction. It’s so normal.
I say, “Yeah. The fish are making him well.”
He pushes his tongue into his teeth. “They’re working?”
“Yeah.” Slowly.
“Well. Good, I guess.” There’s this pause, and then he goes, “The little one, right? Who was with your . . . you know.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the one.”
The fishboy rubs the back of his head. “My hair used to be really long. It was awesome. Fisherman cut it off, said I looked like a girl.”
“Oh.”
“Your brother’s cute. How old is he?”
“Five.”
I can tell he doesn’t like this answer. “Oh. He looks more like four. I thought maybe four.”
The way we’re balanced in the water right now, I feel like he’s a lot shorter than I am. And his frown makes him look suddenly younger.
“Good luck with that, then, I guess,” he says.
I say, “Thanks.”
“But stay the fuck away from my fish.”
Wait. “I . . . ”
Fishboy mumbles, “Sorry about your brother,” then he pushes off from me and swims away. He’s faster than I could ever be, but he doesn’t get out very far before he stops. His silver-spotted chest is heaving. I should have kicked him somewhere.
Then he dives back under the water and he’s gone, and I psych myself through a few breaths (can let go, will not drown, can let go) before I let go and push myself off the dock and hold my breath until I hit shore. I walk home shivering and trying to think of what story I’m going to tell my parents about why I’m all wet, but when I get there, Dylan’s coughing so hard that they don’t even notice me come in.
six
TWO DAYS LATER I’M CROSS-LEGGED WITH MY SKETCHBOOK when I hear Mom climbing the wooden stairs to my room, every one of her footsteps creaking the house closer and closer to the demise I’ve imagined and drawn a thousand times. I’ve been drawing a lot since I’ve been here. My friends and I made it a point to berate each other for any hobbies that didn’t involve girls or cigarettes, so my books and sketch pads were kind of contraband back home. Now it’s like when you have your favorite meal every day for a month. Too many drawings. She knocks on the open door of my room, and I’m really grateful for an excuse to stop.
She and Dad have been fighting all day. I don’t even think it’s about Dylan this time. Just like Mom looks for things to worry about, they search for stupid reasons to fight. I guess it makes them feel more normal.
She comes in and sits down at the foot of the bed. I like my mattresses thin and firm, which baffles Mom. She hates sitting on my bed because it reminds her that I’m sleeping somewhere she would never tolerate. She says she feels like Harry Potter’s aunt. Another example of making up problems where there aren’t any.
“Wow, look what you’ve done with the place.” She grins while she looks around the room. I’ve taped a few of my pictures up. It’s not much, but it makes the irregular walls look more uniform when they’re all papered with my sketches. “I like that one of your father,” she says.
“The one of you with Dylan is the best. I got your noses perfectly.”
She kisses my forehead and hands me a letter. “This came for you.”
Everyone here is really crazy about mail. People are always leaving cards and letters in each other’s mailboxes. We got all these “Welcome to the island” notes when we first arrived. Everyone gets excited when mail arrives from the real world, too, since it can take almost a month for the boat to bring it to us. That must be why I haven’t heard from anyone at home. Their letters just haven’t reached me yet. I can’t believe I thought they were blowing me off. Here it is, here’s proof that they didn’t all forget me. I used to get an e-mail or a Facebook message at least every once in a while, and I know it’s my own fault for not answering—but what could I even say? I would need to invent a real location, a real school, a real life—but I still wasn’t expecting them to dry up this quickly and this completely.
Mom’s gone, and I still haven’t opened the letter. I’m staring at it, clinging to it like a raft in a storm. I know it’s stupid, but I feel like I need to savor this moment. I let myself believe, just for a second, that the letter will say someone has found a loophole, that I get to come home. That ever since I left, they’ve been scheming ways to get me back to my house and my school and my life.
It’s going to tell me that everything has paused since the second I left, and nothing has changed, and my girlfriend misses me, and there’s a set of lungs for Dylan, and none of this has even happened. And that fish don’t do magic and they don’t talk.
I turn the letter over and look at the return address to see which one of my friends its from. And it says just “Diana.”
I hiss air out through my teeth. Goddamn it.
Rudy—
I am locked in my tower, awaiting your rescue.
But I’ll meet you at the door.
My mother typically cries in the bathroom most Tuesday nights, on the opposite end of the house. For your peace of mind.
Perpetually,
Diana
This is just great. This is exactly what I need in my life right now.
I want to get back under my quilt and sleep for a million years.
Although, in my admittedly limited experience, if a girl tells you her mother isn’t going to be around, it means she wants to have sex with you.
So I should be twitching. This should make me feel . . . something.
I’ve been stuck in one place for way too long. I don’t feel anything. All my thoughts these days are either profound or profane with nothing in the middle. Nothing normal. I’m contemplating the sea or I’m contemplating jacking off. Maybe sex is the answer.
It’s touching someone, at least.
And it’ll give me something to do on Tuesday, something to do besides listen to the screaming ocean, or finish my math problems, or draw more pictures of my brother or my parents or more of the ones hidden under the skinny mattress, the ones of girls from home with their shirts off and the ones of the fishboy and his healthy lungs and his tail. That’s something. It’s just something.
Dylan’s a fiend with puzzles nowadays. So even though it’s cold and almost dark, he and I are out here on the deck with all the pieces spread on the picnic table, because the puzzle’s so big there isn’t room for it inside.
Dad’s looking through the doors periodically and smiling at me, like it’s praiseworthy that I’m playing with my little brother, I don’t know. Sometimes I think they forget who I am and what makes me happy.
Dylan doesn’t solve puzzles like normal people. He concentrates on one piece at a time, alwa
ys, like if he stares hard enough at it, he’s going to see the whole puzzle. Once he’s looked at a piece long enough, he sets it aside and starts over with another. And I’m chuckling at him, trying to fit two pieces together. Then he makes some noise of triumph, and I look up and he has half the puzzle finished over there. This kid is great sometimes.
Sometimes I wonder if he remembers before he was sick. It sounds horrible, but he was somewhat of an unremarkable part of my life then. I was crazy about him when he was a teeny baby and cuter than sin, even though I had to pretend that I wasn’t, because I was eleven and stupid. But then he got to the bratty toddler stage, and that’s when I was starting to spend more time out of the house, too, and he sort of became just an annoying blip on my radar, except when he would crawl onto my lap all sleepy and smelling like orange juice, and that part was okay. My parents worried about why he caught every cold and why he wouldn’t put on weight, but I didn’t, really. Worrying wasn’t my job.
And then practically overnight he stopped being a kid and became a walking tragedy. He’s the world’s smallest ghost.
He finds the piece he was looking for and holds it up with both hands. I say, “Good job, buddy,” and his face is like I’ve just fixed the whole world.
seven
ON TUESDAY I SCAN THE WATER ON MY WAY OVER TO THE MANSION, but there’s no sign of the fishboy. And once I’ve climbed the hill and the huge doors open up, he kind of flees from my mind. Diana opens the door in a very serious black dress, all of her hair piled up on her head. “Thank you for coming,” she says, in a voice I imagine a butler might use.
Then she grins, and the bridge of her nose wrinkles, and I realize she isn’t fully delusional, she isn’t some let-me-show-you-the-world lost girl and she isn’t Emily Dickinson with a sex drive, she’s just a teenage girl fucking with me, and it’s been so long since I’ve been around anyone my age that I didn’t even recognize it.
Really, if she had sent a letter that said, Hey, want to hang out, would I even have come? Probably weirding me out was the right choice to get me here.
“You’re a tactical genius,” I tell her, shutting the heavy door behind me.
She says, “Don’t go thinking I’m all normal just because I know how to get what I want. I can get unfortunately batshit. It’s not cute. Make sure you’re not expecting cute. This isn’t Looking for Alaska.”
“What will your mom do if she finds out I’m here?” This is dirty talk, and I think she knows it.
But she just shrugs. “Probably nothing. But let’s pretend.” She grins. “I’ll give you a tour.”
That’s another code phrase I know. It means, we’re going to my room. This is going to be the easiest sex I’ve ever had. I don’t know how I feel about that.
Diana is leading me down this wide hallway with walls stacked with portraits. They’re so old and dusty that they almost look velvet, like those hideous pictures of dogs my grandmother has in her house in Tampa.
Diana says, “I hope you weren’t expecting me to show you around our splendid homeland.”
“Why don’t you leave the house?”
“Occasionally I do. It isn’t usually an option.”
“Oh.”
“It makes my mother worry. And most of the time I don’t want to. Everything worth it comes to me eventually. There are a lot of things out there I don’t need.” She looks at me, her eyes slightly narrowed. She reminds me of the fishboy for a second, with that look on her face. “You wouldn’t understand.”
No, after three months of dying to get away, I don’t think I would.
But then she says, “And everything I want to know I can read about,” and it’s like a string yanks out of me and ties itself to her. She nods toward an enormous library as we walk past. It’s so stupid, but the way our hands linger the same way on the door frame, for a minute I feel like I can understand everything about her.
Books. Books I haven’t read with spines I don’t recognize. I want to go in. I want to sink into one of the gold armchairs and smell the dust from all the pages. I’ve read our house’s measly collection of waterlogged paperbacks four times each. Please. Please can we stop.
But we keep walking. I try to pull myself together. I’ve missed both books and girls, but I don’t think this is the time to try to bargain my way into both.
I realize it’s warm in here. I shrug out of my raincoat. Diana takes it and drapes it over her arm.
I say, “Oh. Thanks.”
“’Course. I’ve always liked raincoats. I like weather-specific clothing.”
“And you don’t go outside.”
“I also like Turkmenistan and I don’t go there either.”
“I have a weird thing with Argentina.”
“The bottom line is, there is a world outside waiting to kill you, and my mother has experienced more than enough of it for both of us.”
Whoa. “What happened to your mother?”
“A horrible injustice,” she says. “But a fascinating one. My room is right through here.”
She leads me in and shuts the door behind her. There aren’t any chairs, so I sit on the floor, leaning against the bed. It’s thin and gray, just like mine. This whole room is blank and pale, and the only accents are the stacks and stacks of books.
She moves her hands to the top of her head, twists something, and all her hair falls down to her shoulders. I think there’s glitter in it.
Her room smells like peppermint.
“Overwhelmed” seems like the wrong word, but it’s all I can think of. And I think there’s something wrong with me that what I most want to know right now is more about her mother. God, Rudy.
But she walks to me and sits down next to me on the rug. “I find you very interesting, Rudy,” she says.
“You do?”
I find myself really boring, most of the time.
She says, “I haven’t seen a teenager since Elizabeth Danziger used to babysit me. And I didn’t pay attention then, and she moved away years ago. And I’ve never seen a teenage boy before.” She stares into my face. Her eyes are so light blue they almost look white. “I’ve only seen pictures.”
“You’re really freaking me out,” I say, but I whisper it. Because her lips are so close to mine.
She grins.
But then she’s kissing me.
Her mouth is warm and soft. This feels more like drinking hot chocolate than kissing. Her lips and her tongue are everywhere, filling my entire mouth, and it’s suffocating and it’s a little fantastic.
It’s not that I’ve been an angel, and it’s not that I don’t like Diana all right, but I don’t think I’ve ever kissed someone I cared this little about. Here in this room, we could kiss, we could have sex, she could kick me out, her mom could discover us, and it wouldn’t really mean anything. Nothing would change. It’s not as if my life needs her.
There’s something freeing about it, and no amount of thinking can change the fact that I’m sitting here, my hand on her waist, her hand in my hair, with the unfleeting thought that I want her to swallow me.
And it’s so warm.
We kiss for a few more minutes—hours, in kissing-time—but I don’t get bored. I could keep doing this until we fall asleep. But she pulls away, rests her forehead against mine, and says, “Very good.”
Man, she’s a good kisser for a hermit. I say, “You must read a lot of books,” and she laughs.
“Just the right ones. I special-order them!”
God, I wasn’t supposed to get caught in this trap, she fucking warned me, and now all I’m thinking is that I want to bring her outside, somewhere farther than the bottom of her house or the marketplace. I want to take her off this island and run away with her to Argentina.
Christ, I’m so easy. A girl kisses me, and all of a sudden I’m making plans to elope with her or some shit. I need to cool down.
While I’m taking even breaths in and out, she says, “So far this is nice,” in a voice like she’s making the decis
ion for both of us. Which is fine with me.
So I say, “Thank you.”
“Do you have a lot of experience with girls?”
“You sound like you’re writing a report.”
“I’d never read about sucking the bottom lip like that.”
“Yeah, one of my . . . My ex-girlfriend taught me that.”
“Hmm.”
“Did you like it?”
“I didn’t mind it.”
“Well. Thanks.”
I look around her room, at the stacks of books on the floor. Most of them are old ones I haven’t read. The only classics I’ve read are the ones for school. I feel like I should ask her how Jane Eyre ends, because I never finished it.
“You like books?” she asks. Kind of gently.
I nod. I can’t look at her right now, for some reason. I’m scared she’s going to ask me what my favorite is, or like she won’t believe me, so I say, “Roald Dahl.” I say, even though she doesn’t ask, because I can feel the question sitting between us anyway, because I feel like I have to prove myself. “I like Roald Dahl. Um. I read them to my brother.” Not true, but it’s easier than explaining that I like kids’ books more than adult books, or reality.
“The Witches,” Diana says, with a nod.
“Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
She stretches out on her stomach and puts her feet in the air, her ankles twisted together. I remember flopping like that when I was a kid. It makes her boobs look amazing. She says, “I like how his books pretend to be about something for the first third, then switch gears completely.”
“The real plot doesn’t show up until the middle, yeah. And usually the real characters.”
“And everything before that is completely dropped.” She smiles and rolls onto her back. She’s basking in this conversation. “It’s like a little story of its own that’s never finished.”
“Only Roald Dahl could get away with that shit. I mean, they let him write The Magic Finger.” I take her copy of Runaway Bunny off the bookshelf. “I like that you have this in here.”