Teeth (5 page)

He laughs once. “Fiona’s full of shit.” He spits the hooks into his hand and buries them in the sand. “She said Ms. Yves would die at a hundred and two. I heard someone say yesterday that she’s a hundred and five. So.”

“You know Fiona?”

“I know all of you.” He smiles. “Rudy.”

I take a step back.

He stops smiling. “Is this really a surprise? What do you think I have to do all day? Spy on all you fucking humans while you kill the fish. Yep. Great. Thanks a lot.”

I can’t stop watching him while he talks.

He says, “Are you gonna be a fisherman when you grow up, Rudy? They don’t even have to do anything, now that they have those fucking nets up; it’s like, they can sleep all day and kill the whole population.” His face is turning red while he talks. “God, you’re even worse than them, you know? Because you walk around with your cute little family like you’re so fucking whatever, then you come down here
and start hunting all of us. Yeah, you’re such a little hero, saving the one fish and going home and eating a whole father-whatever-baby set for dinner.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Maybe he likes fish so much that he fused himself with one. Maybe that’s what happened. That doesn’t make any sense. “You’re not a fish,” I say. “You have, like, hair. And arms. Lungs.”

He seems to be agreeing with me, if a little reluctantly, until I gesture to his chest, and then he grabs me by the legs and tackles me into the water.

I’m not fast enough to close my mouth, so I taste everything: the salt, the algae, the shed scales. I never realized before how loud water is.

And mother of Christ, it’s cold. I struggle. The fishboy’s hands keep gripping my thighs, hard, like he’s trying to tear them off.

It’s the longest anyone besides Dylan has touched me since I’ve been here.

I’m kicking and it’s not working shit it’s not working. I’m going to drown. I can’t believe I moved to an island without learning how to swim. I’m choking and I’m going to die . . . .

He’s pulling me down as hard as he can, and he’s going to kill me, fuck, my parents are going to actually fall apart, but one of my flailing feet nails him in the ribs and it startles him enough that I can scramble to the surface for a breath.
My foot brushes his tail. It’s rough and ugly like a rash.

I push myself away from him, panting, grab on to the edge of the dock, and pull myself up, into the air. Safe. I’m huddling against the wood like it’s my mother. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to haul myself back onto the dock, so maybe I’ll just stay here forever. This is my new home.

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.

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, always, 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.

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.