Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (12 page)

“Wait, so that's your actual
job
?” Ella asked. “Like, you're getting paid?”

Sophie hedged. “No, I'm not getting paid. But I'm working.”

Ella snorted a last bit of smoke from her nose, like a dragon, and flung her butt in the creek. “That's not a job, Soph. That's slavery. There are child labor laws. I bet you could call social services on your mom and they would take you away like that.” Ella snapped her
fingers. “Think of it—single mom sends her daughter to the
city dump
to work, underage, without pay, for her wicked grandmother.”

“It sounds so bad when you say it like that,” Sophie agreed. “But it just feels like being grounded, you know?”

“No, Sophie. Really. Think about it. This could be your lucky break. Social services could take you and place you with, like, some family in the country or something. Or out where the ocean is really pretty, you know, where it's clean. You could have a dog, and your own room, and food, and I bet the people would be, like, so nice, just really nice people who want to save teenage girls from working at the dump.”

Sophie joined the fantasy. “Or a family in Cambridge,” she said dreamily. Ella wrinkled her nose.

“Cambridge is busted,” she said. “That's where Ben Affleck is from.”

“Not that part,” Sophie insisted. “The good part of Cambridge, where Harvard is. Maybe I could get adopted by Harvard professors. They'd have a whole room of books, like a library. And real art on the walls, and I'd have my own room and have a pet, even. A dog.”

“A smart dog,” Ella offered. “Not some dumb fucking dog.”

“Yeah,” Sophie said. She imagined herself curled up in a sunny room with a smart dog gazing at her lovingly while she read a really difficult book that she totally understood.

“Or you'd just get thrown in with some pervert and wind up molested,” Ella said.

“Or with one of those couples that live off their foster kid checks,” Sophie concurred. “Like, in a house with fifteen other foster kids. Really awful kids who'd torture cats. Like, put firecrackers up their butts or something.” Sophie shuddered. “People do that, you know.”

“Foster-kid hoarders are creepy.” Ella nodded grimly. “You're better off where you are.” Ella pulled a green hair elastic from where it sat on her wrist like a bracelet, and pulled her hair into a shiny loop atop her head. “Let's get to it,” she said. “I want to go first. I didn't even get to pass myself out last time.”

Sophie looked uneasily at her friend. “I don't know, Ella,” she said. “I've been having some weird things happen to me…”

“You said the doctor told you it was no big deal. You told me
she
passed herself out when she was our age. And look at her! She's a friggin' doctor!”

“I know…” Sophie was feeling wimpy. There was no way to deny it. She felt a wimpy look settle across her face, part a squirmy sort of fear, part shame at the fear, with a tinge of a plea for mercy from her merciless friend.

“Don't wimp out on me, Swankowski,” Ella said sternly. “If I don't play pass-out with you, who will I play with? Come on, it's still fun, don't you think?”

Sophie recalled the dreamy visions and the sweet body-buzz. She
did
think it was fun. But passing out felt linked now with those strange feelings and visions, and that desperate need for salt. When she had fixed her bowl of cereal earlier that evening, after her mother had drifted into the living room, Sophie had swiped at the fat, round salt canister in the cupboard and plucked out the spout, sending a fall of the stuff into her Cheerios.
Weird
. But it had been delicious.

“Just one time,” Ella pushed. “Once for me and once for you. Come on, why did you even want me to meet you out here, if not to play pass-out?”

“Because we're friends,” Sophie said dumbly.

“Yeah, we're friends, and this is what we do when we hang out. I smoke and talk too much, you don't smoke and listen to me, and we
pass each other out.” Ella flicked her lighter in the dark, casting enough light for them to find a slight clearing free of dog poop or condoms or jagged smashed bottles. Smaller bits of glass sparkled in the light and reminded Sophie of the recycling shack, of Angel and the tumbler and the bright bins of glass, and she found herself actually excited to return.

“Okay,” Ella said. With her knees in the dirt Ella bent her head and began her huffing and puffing. When she flung herself up Sophie tensed behind her, waiting for her body to begin its slump, to catch her and lay her gently on the ground. She did. She pushed some weeds aside so that they framed her face. Ella, she realized, was beautiful. She always had been, and Sophie had always known it, but Ella's beauty had always been neck and neck with Sophie's own. Looking down at her friend's cheeks, the relaxed pout of her mouth, the way her lashes swung up at her smooth eyelids, rapid with the movement of her dreaming, Sophie thought that Ella's beauty had pulled ahead, was in the lead, would almost certainly win.

Ella's eyes shot open, and Sophie felt like she'd been caught doing something creepy, staring at her friend while she was gone. “What?” Ella demanded.

“Nothing,” Sophie said, nervously. “You were out for a while, I was just checking on you.”

“How long was I out for?”

“Like, five minutes, maybe ten,” Sophie lied.

Ella thought about it, then shrugged in the dirt. “I felt like I was out for five or ten hours,” she said.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. Maybe a dog. Yeah, a dog, a big sweet dog. God, I want a dog so bad,” Ella mourned. “My mother is such a cat person, she'll never let me get one.” Ella closed her eyes, trying to get back to the fading sensation of some soul mate dream-dog. “It felt so nice to be next to it!”

The thing about playing pass-out was it felt so nice to be next to
whatever
was in your dream. Once Sophie had gone under and had a vision of a kitchen table. She came out of it filled with a tender, almost mystical affection for the furniture. It was the weirdest thing. But Sophie could see her friend getting a little hooked on the dream dog. At least she hadn't had a vision of the beach boy, Sophie thought.
That
would for sure be unbearable.

“Go,” Ella said to Sophie, arranging herself on the ground. “I got you.”

Sophie resisted laughing as she began to pant and huff. Her hair did not cascade to the ground like Ella's; she felt loose strands catch and bunch around the snarls, like seaweed caught on a rock. Her heavy breaths puffed the dust of the ground back up into her face. She sat back on her heels and held her breath, gripping the edges of her throat tightly. She felt it in her face first, a hot tingle. Next in her hands, they seemed to disintegrate, atom by atom vanishing with a lovely shimmer, followed by the rest of her body, buzzing and gone. Sophie was faintly aware of Ella's hands on her, laying her down. She was in a fluid place, slow and liquid, a cave perhaps. She was
underwater. Things floated around her slowly, things too dark to see, but before her eyes one simple thing glowed, a starfish trapped in a hunk of sea glass illuminating the bare chest of a wild-haired mermaid. The sea glass cast a pale blue light, giving the fish-belly-white skin of the mermaid a sickly fluoresence.

Sophie thought
her
hair had problems. The creature's inky mane hung suspended in the water around her head. Tangles unraveled into long, tough locks, only to join once more in a round weave of snarl, snarls stuck with slimy ropes of seaweed, with fragments of seashells and urchin shells and the curving, fragile bones of fish. Her endless hair floated out past her tail, which was a great and muscled thing, shining in places and dull in places, sometimes healthy and sometimes looking like a fish kept in a neglected aquarium, its body coming off itself in ghostly tendrils.

In her vision, Sophie pulled her twin jewel out from her shirt, the seashell buried in the frosted, ancient glass, and showed it to the mermaid. And the mermaid opened her mouth and spoke inside the water.

“Yah, I know,” she said, sounding annoyed. Her words were heavy, each one sounded carved from rock. It was an old voice—not the shaky timbre of an elderly woman but old like bedrock, a hard voice, solid. “Why do you think I am doing here, anyway? I come for you.”

The current of the waters pushed the mermaid's hair in front of her face, obscuring her. She pulled a six-pack of plastic rings from the creek bed, tore a circle free and pulled her hair through it at the top
of her head, subduing a bit of the wild mane. Sophie could see more six-pack rings and other bits of garbage stuck in the mermaid's hair, trying to control it.

“You came for me?” Sophie asked. The mermaid's heavy accent, her struggle with English, made Sophie unsure she was hearing right. They spoke in the glow of their jewels, their faces lit but the water dim around them. Sophie was glad about that. She had come to understand that they were submerged in the creek, and what floated around them was the terrible flotsam and jetsam of Chelsea. She would be completely grossed out if not for the absolute wonder of a mermaid, or the bizarre ability to speak and breathe underwater. How was that possible? Sophie thought it was better not to question it.
Of course I can breathe underwater
, she thought.
That's what happens when you hang out with a mermaid.

“You have the amulet, yes?” the mermaid gestured to the jewel. “I know you are the one. Now, put it away. Do not flaunt.”

Sheepishly, Sophie dropped her amulet into her shirt, which ballooned around her in the water.

“I come all the way from Poland to be here,” the mermaid said, her voice thick with her country. “I watch over my city, and now, come to get you, who watches over my river? No one. Is unprotected. Will turn into a mess, like this place. I try and try not to come. I try to get out from it. I try to come later. No, no, no, everyone say, time is now, the girl, you do what you call—pass out?”

Sophie nodded.

“Very great way to come to you, in this special place, half-real, half-dream. Is own space. Girls find it when they come into power, at certain age.” The mermaid sighed with deep resignation. “So, was time to come for you. And here we are in this—what you call this? Not a river—”

“A creek,” Sophie offered.

“Yes. Is terrible! So skinny, like a girl that doesn't eat. I am used to my big river, water all around me.” The mermaid spread her hands grandly, to indicate space. One hand banged up against a rusted, submerged shopping cart, the other slapped against the earthen wall of the narrow channel. Sophie noticed shining rings on the creature's pale fingers, iridescent shards of seashells. “My back is very sore from having hunch to be in this small water,” she continued her complaint. “And the water, so dirty! But all the waters everywhere, very, very bad. I see in my journey here. One place in the ocean is so evil, a machine pours darkness into the water, pure darkness, and if it touches you, you become the darkness, you get caught in it like this—” She caught a floating tangle of hair and thrust it at Sophie. Sophie saw a hermit crab, its tiny shell
imprisoned in the snarl. “You cannot move, the darkness ensnares you, you sink down down down until you die.” She shook her head. “I would think that machine is where the night comes from, except night comes from the sky and is gentle. This is something wrong.”