Teeth (3 page)

He hands me the pepper shaker, and I play with him. He keeps knocking his shaker against mine like he’s trying to beat it up, so I let mine fall over. He laughs, then coughs a little, and Dad glances over at me.

I apologize to Dylan, not to Dad, and rub a few circles on Dyl’s back. He hides in my arm for the rest of the coughing, because we’ve fucking embarrassed him, fantastic. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “We’ll go home soon.” He relaxes a little.

Ms. Delaney clears her throat and says, “It really is amazing what the Enki fish can do. We came here when I was fourteen, when the cancer”—she waves the word away like it’s a fly—“was close to killing me. My grandfather had written us letters about the place before he died, but we had no idea the effect the fish would have. And since I’ve lived here, I haven’t been sick a day. My grandfather lived to be a hundred and sixteen.”

My parents talk recipes and legends and I take advantage of the white noise and my brother buried deep into my shirt to lean across the table and say softly, “Is the other stuff true?”

Diana raises her eyebrows. “Is what true?” She looks much older than me with that look on her face.

I mouth
ghosts
, and she shakes her head. “Not ghosts like you’d think, anyway,” she says. So I try
mermaids
? and her eyes widen, and she looks my age again.

The adults aren’t listening to us. Ms. Delaney says, “And this is some of the best-quality fish we’ve had in a long time, this year. It’s amazing the properties it has. I eat as much as possible.”

“Me too,” Diana says, but she makes a bit of a face. She
spears her fork through a bite of fish and turns it over on its end to rock-walk it across the table. “Right, Dylan?”

He sticks his tongue out the side of his mouth.

“Yeah, I know.” She laughs, and he smiles.

I feed Dylan and listen to his chest loosen, and he looks up at me, like, “Am I well yet?” And sometimes it eats me up inside that I’m dying for Dylan to get well, but less for him than because I want to be done with our miracle cure and go home, and that makes me a really horrible brother.

“Where are you from?” Diana asks me.

“Michigan.”

“Mmm. Like
Song of Solomon
.”

“I haven’t read that one. We did
Beloved
instead.”

“I had a tutor for
Beloved
,” she says. “He kept slipping up and saying Alice Walker wrote it. Wishful thinking on his part, I think. It would have been so much more subtle.”

“Walker, um.
The Color Purple
?”

“Have you read it?”

I shake my head. “Do you have it?”

“I have eeeeverything.” She rolls the word around the back of her mouth, and fuck, it’s not like I didn’t know I was easy before, but apparently a few months and a few smiles and the promise of a few books is enough for me to want to rip my clothes off right here at the table, parents and little brother and nice tablecloth be damned. Come on, Rudy.

Ms. Delaney is still going on about the fish. “They’re getting harder and harder to come by. The fishermen are catching fewer every month, and they don’t know how to explain it. They’ve been working so hard not to overfish; they keep their fishing methods secret to ensure they have control over the population . . . . There should be plenty. It’s almost like the fish have discovered how to avoid the nets.” She laughs, this high nervous thing.

“Maybe they’re being hunted,” Mom says. “We had a whole skunk population back home that—”

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 fucks 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 fuck 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.

Mom kisses his forehead. “That’s right, baby. Great job.”

I hand the plate to my mom and say, “What can I do?”

“Oh, honey, thank you,” she says, like I caught the fish myself. Jesus.

“Dyl, you need anything? You have your dino—cool, you have your dinosaur. Okay. Cool.” I blow on my hands. It feels like so much air. “I’m gonna go for a run.”

Dad says, “It’s the middle of the night, Rudy.”

“No big deal. I’ll be back soon. Okay. Awesome.”

I just have to get out.

I’m just still so shitty at this.

I’m out the door without even putting on shoes. I’m running. The air has the rotted midnight smell of sea foam,
and the sand is mushy underneath my feet. My socks are soaking through. I keep running.

I push closer and closer to the marina. There are no majestic sailboats here, just the dingy rowboats, one with a bell that I hear flapping in the wind on the most quiet nights, and the one corroded shrimp boat the fishermen must sometimes use. But I think they rely mostly on the big nets set up just off the shore that catch the fish as the current sweeps them around the corner, past the rocks. I’ve never seen anyone out in the boat.

It’s almost four a.m., and I guess I thought the two fishermen would be awake by now, thought maybe I could barter a fresh fish or two off of them, but I only see one from here, lit up by the swinging lamp on the shrimp boat. He’s . . . What is he doing? He’s lying in the sand and . . . Is he on top of . . .

The fishboy.

I run faster. There’s the fisherman. I can’t tell which one; they look the same unless you’re close enough to count the gold teeth. He has the fishboy just out of the water, in the sand, and he’s digging his thumbs into the top of the fishboy’s tail and biting his neck. I can’t hear anything over the ocean.

So I yell, “Hey!”

They can’t hear me, and now the fisherman is sitting on him, straddling his tail, rubbing his stomach. I’m close enough to see the fishboy’s webbed fingers and his flailing
fin and his open mouth full of sharp teeth. He gnashes, and the fisherman pulls his fist back and hits the fishboy across the face. I’m close now, close enough to hear, and it sounds like the time I stepped on a jellyfish.

I scream, “Hey!”

And at first I still don’t think the fisherman heard me, but then in a second he’s up and he’s gone, disappeared into the shrimp boat without a look in my direction. And here I am, standing over the fishboy.

“Are you okay?” I say. And I feel stupid. I have no reason to believe this guy has a human brain in that human head.

He shakes his head hard for a few seconds and touches his cheek with his scaly hand. Then he sits up, balancing where his tail meets his torso, his fin curled behind him, and dusts himself off. “Thanks.”

His tail is skinny and silver, the same color as Dylan’s fish. All of his scales, especially the ones on his chest, look dry, like they’re about to flake off. His hair is short and uneven. Mermaids in fairy tales are never this ugly.

Mermen.

I say, “Hey. All right?” Because his cheek is bleeding now, and because I don’t know what else to say.

I should go.

“No. See, someone ripped off my head and gave me this stupid human one instead,” he says. He spits a mouthful of blood into the water.

“Oh . . . ”

“I’m fucking joking. I’m fine. Those assholes can never keep me forever, anyway. I bite. I would have gotten away. You didn’t have to do that.” He tries to scoot back toward the ocean, but it’s obviously hard for him to move in the sand. “Hey. Give me a shove.”

“I . . . ”

“I’m not fucking contagious, I promise. And I won’t bite you. Even though I could.” He looks me up and down. “Yeah, I could take you.”

I don’t want to give him a push, because I don’t want him to go. But how the fuck do I explain that?

I say, “What are you?” too fast for my brain to figure out what a completely shitty thing that is to ask.

But Fishboy just smiles and says, “I’m their dirty secret.” He wiggles around a little until he’s free, then gives me a nod and pushes himself into the ocean without my help.

I find a fish, already gutted and drying in the fisherman’s basket, and run it home.

I really think I’ll see Fishboy again. I can just feel it, in the hungry part of me.

So I’m holding my sick brother on my lap, keeping him busy while my mom fries up the new fish, and I’m thinking: My friends at home weren’t nearly this interesting.