SEAMONSTER: An Aquarathi Novella (The Aquarathi) (2 page)

As if she
—a mere youngling—were the cause of her mother’s death or her father’s indulgence.

I feel a
sharp twinge of pity. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like if I’d lost Soren. Nerissa had been young … young enough to understand the brutal pain of death and the aching emptiness that losing a mother would cause. Chances are, I would have isolated myself, too. Nerissa had cut herself off from everything and everyone, refusing to let anyone in. Anyone but me. Deep down, Nerissa tolerates our people’s hatred with cool indifference, but I know better. Instead, she has become the very things they made her out to be—cold, ruthless, and uncaring.

I’ve been her best friend for so long that I know exactly who she is, and f
ew people get to see past that tough, hardened exterior. I suspect that her human friend Jenna does, which is why they’ve gotten so close. But to everyone else, it’s all a front … one to protect her injured heart coupled with a deep desire not to be a failure. She’d told me once that if she didn’t try, she wouldn’t have to disappoint anyone. If you know that about Nerissa, you’ll understand why she is the way she is.

I sigh, and excuse myself
from the table before changing into a clean t-shirt in my room. As much as I do want to go back to Waterfell, I know even deeper down that I’ll never abandon Nerissa. No matter how irritating she is. Maybe my father’s right. She just needs to find herself … if I don’t kill her first, that is.

The Marine Center is crowded for orientation with all the new summer student workers
, and I make my way to registration. It’s kind of cool that Dover Prep allows students to get extra credit doing paid internships at the Center, and it’s a win/win for the Center because they get all these extra hands to help with ocean conservancy drives and beach clean up. Plus, who wouldn’t want to spend their summers on a beach and get paid for it? The coveted internships are only available to matriculating upperclassmen, and for those of us who aren’t going away on some fantastic, six-star Latin American vacation, this is as good as it gets.

Nerissa
hadn’t seemed too interested, but Echlios had made it crystal clear that neither of us had any choice in the matter and that we were both doing it for the summer. He insisted that marine conservancy was an important part of our duties in the human world, and that this would be a good start for us to get involved. I’d given in grudgingly after throwing a tantrum about wanting to go home instead, but Nerissa had taken Echlios’ decision surprisingly well. Truth is, she hadn’t seemed to care either way. For her, this was probably a good way to stay near the beach and continue to lose herself in the vacuous world of human existence.

“Hey,
Riss,” I hear someone shout. “Congrats on an undefeated season! You guys dominated the final match!” I peer above the milling bodies in the conference room to see if I can spot Nerissa. I’d already sensed her the minute I entered the Marine Center—our connection to any Aquarathi royal goes beyond any of the other five senses. Water calls to water in more powerful ways than anything else. She, too, would have felt my presence the second I arrived.

“Thanks,”
Nerissa yells back, and then I see the bob of a reddish-blond head a few feet away. In human form, we naturally lean toward our Aquarathi coloring, mirroring our fins and scales—with the exception of my father, whose scales are a vibrant red. Hair that color would surely cause a distraction.

Nerissa’s
skin glows with health, her eyes sparkling in her face. She’s the epitome of a California girl, and fits in perfectly. Not only is she fairly popular at Dover, she’s also the reigning co-captain—along with her best friend, Jenna—of the Dover field hockey team. I don’t understand her affinity for a game that is the opposite of a water sport. Then again, given that she’s been forbidden to compete in any water sports where she’d have an unfair advantage, maybe hockey is the next best thing. Still, I can’t imagine anything worse than tearing down a field, sweating like mad, chasing a ball with a stick. She seems to have a knack for it, and as long as she’s happy, that’s all that matters. At least, that’s what my parents say.

“Hey,” I say to her, pushing past a crowd of chattering girls to the front. “Thanks for waiting.”

She flings her head in impatience. “You were busy, remember?”

“Didn’t mean you couldn’t wait,” I reply sourly
, knowing that she, too, would have felt my earlier Aquarathi transformation. “I had to skateboard all the way here,” I grumble, responding to the confrontational note in her voice without thinking. I’m not sure what’s going on between us lately, but every time she opens her mouth, we end up arguing. Maybe it’s because I’m an overt reminder that she’s not who she thinks she is. I’m the proverbial fly in her pudding.

“Sorry,” she says after a long pause, her eyes darting to my sweat-soaked t-shirt, a guilty flush coloring her cheeks.

“Creeper cousin,” someone whispers amidst an eruption of smothered giggles.

I don’t turn around or acknowledge the jab. Instead, I take a seat in silence, feeling a rush of
unwelcome heat creep up my shoulders. Something flickers in Nerissa’s eyes for a second and she does something I’d never expect. She defends me.

“His name is
Speio,” she says with a scornful look at the girls behind us. Their laughter drifts off into awkward silence. “And he’s not my cousin. He’s my step-brother, so back off.”

Shocked, I try to grab her attention, but she turns away and sits, focusing her attention
on the Marine Center Director.

Thank you
, I say via the waters in my body, feeling them connect with hers, opening a conduit between us through the moisture in the air. It’s one of our many gifts.

You shouldn’t let them bully you like that
, she responds.

It doesn’t bother me.

Don’t forget I can sense everything you feel, Speio, and I know that it bothers you. It’s bothered you all year.

A part of me wants to ask her why she’s never done anything about it before if she’d noticed the teasing, but I don’t. I accept the gesture for what it is.
I don’t let it get to me
, I reply
. It’s not worth it.
And that’s the truth. The humans
aren’t
worth it. The last part, I keep compartmentalized in my thoughts.

Nerissa
doesn’t respond, so instead I pay attention to what Kevin is saying as he goes over all the rules and expectations for the next six weeks. It’s not going to be difficult, mostly beach and cove clean up, running errands, and working a couple fund-raising events. I notice that Nerissa is listening intently. Every cell in her body is focused on what the director is saying, although the bored expression on her face would suggest the opposite. Deep down, she does care … of course she does. I mean, how could she not? The ocean is her home, regardless of how disconnected or unwanted she may feel in Waterfell. I have to hand it to my father. Maybe he does have some tricks up his sleeve, after all.

“Break up into groups of four, and check the assignments
written on the board,” Kevin is saying. “It’s organized by group number, charted by color, and it’ll change every week.”

I shuffle closer to
Nerissa, but she doesn’t have much choice about having me in her group. That’s just the way it is. I go where she goes, and she knows that. Our final group of four includes Nerissa, me, Sawyer—Jenna’s boyfriend who happens to be stuck here sans girlfriend this summer—and another senior who looks vaguely familiar, maybe from my math class.

“
We’re group two and it looks like we have cove duty,” Sawyer says with an easy grin, after checking the color-coded board. I grin back. I don’t mind Sawyer. He’s pretty easygoing and down to earth, which makes him an anomaly at Dover Prep. His girlfriend Jenna is not bad either, although she’s uber-focused on academics and hockey. She can be a little intense, but she’s got a kind heart. I suppose Nerissa could do worse in terms of friends.

Grabbing a black garbage bag and a pointy hooked stick, I follow them out to the beach
. “We’ve got the section over there,” the girl says. “I’m Laurel, by the way.” She stares at me, squinting. “We have English together, right?”

I nod mutely—Math, English, same diff. I
stab at a piece of plastic lodged in the sand, depositing it into my garbage bag. Picking up litter is mindless work, but at least it’s for a good cause. I scoop up another discarded bottle. Keeping the beach clean means less rubbish getting into the water and leaching harmful chemicals into the ocean.

My eyes wander across the dozen or so people spreading across the sand
, armed with the same gear as we have. Some of them I recognize, others I don’t. Although Dover has sponsored the extra credit program at the Marine Center for decades, I realize that there are some kids from other local schools. Suddenly my gaze stops and swerves backward to a slight figure sitting cross-legged in the sand at the top of the dunes and doodling in a notebook—a girl with long, dark hair. Sharp recognition twitches in my gut. I blink, but it’s still her. The girl from earlier.

Anya.

She hadn’t looked well enough to walk when I’d left her, and to see her sitting on a beach as if nothing had happened earlier this morning is surprising. She’d ditched the white nightgown for a shirt and a pair of shorts, but it’s definitely her. I frown and then discard my concern. Maybe I’d misjudged the look on her face before she jumped because she’d
wanted
to do it for fun. Or maybe I hadn’t. She’d looked distraught, not the usual holy-crap-I’m-really-going-to-do-it excited look that most cliff jumpers have.

Either she’s a brilliant actress or I’m the most gullible guy around.
I glance at the three people walking beside me and form a glimmer with my body, connecting to the moisture in the air and pushing my consciousness forward in a kind of aqua projection. It’s yet another of our many useful talents. I feel Nerissa’s acute awareness of what I’m doing—of course, she’d feel it—and ignore the unspoken question. I’m too intent on finding out what Anya’s drawing in that notebook of hers.

Hovering in the air
above her, I almost wish I hadn’t done the glimmer. The notepaper is covered with questions—
Who am I? Who are you? What are you?
—written in varying sizes, and all surrounding a drawing of a boy that bears a stark resemblance to me—my human self, that is. My stomach dips. The boy has a spattering of what looks like scales shadowed just above the rise of his cheekbones. I peer closer, seeing the barely there outline of a long fish tail behind the boy. Right at that moment, Anya looks up into the crowd as if sensing that she’s being watched. I snap back hard into myself, like the pull of a rubber band, and duck out of sight behind Sawyer, the image of the drawing seared into my brain. She’d seen me. She’d
drawn
me … a messed-up, in-between version of me.

Nerissa’s
gaze is sharp as are her mental words.
What is it?

Nothing
, I say
. Thought I saw something.

What? A threat?

Anya’s head hasn’t moved from her position. She hasn’t looked up again, even though I’m not sure why I expect her to. It must have been a coincidence when she looked toward me before. She couldn’t have felt my glimmer, and I’m one of a few dozen people walking on the beach.
I … I don’t know.

Who is she?
Nerissa asks.
The girl over there?

Someone I saw on the beach.

Someone I saved.

Someone I should leave alone.

Someone who has seen me. Or part of me, anyway.

There are so many answers to choose from. In the end, I give
Nerissa the one that seems the simplest.
She’s just someone I met. Nobody
.

Frowning,
Nerissa accepts my evasive answer, but then lets it go with one of her usual shrugs. We both focus on the task at hand—continuing to spear pieces of garbage from the beach. After a while, Laurel and Nerissa pair up, walking farther up the sand, while Sawyer hangs back with me. He’s chattering about how much rubbish gets swept into the ocean, and I let him talk. At least his chatter is helping to take my mind off the drawing I’d seen in Anya’s notebook.

“So
, dude, how’s your summer been so far?” Sawyer asks, his teeth glinting in his tanned face. “Get any surfing done? I caught some mega waves down at Trestles this morning. Tide was epic.”

I shrug
, remembering the high swell from earlier … and the fact that it’d been the only reason that Anya hadn’t had to peel herself off the jutting rocks in front of Dead Man’s Cliff. My gut hitches, wondering if she was really as okay as she’d seemed sitting there on the beach. She has to be. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she be in a hospital or something? “Had a small session last night,” I say to Sawyer. “Closed out, though.”

“Bummer.”

“It’s okay. Wasn’t feeling it anyway.”

“You want to come with later? We’re heading up to Black’s.”

“Sure, if Nerissa goes.”

Given our connection with the water, we
Aquarathi are talented surfers. Then again, Nerissa isn’t the kind of person to use her abilities to control the flow of the wave, and neither am I, so we throw our hats in with everyone else. Surfing is one part torture, and one part sheer awesomeness. I say torture because when the saltwater hits our bodies, every single Aquarathi cell fires, and it takes a lot of control to not light up like phosphorescent plankton. I wonder if that’s what Anya had seen, if my skin had been glowing post transformation.

“So no Jenna, huh?” I say, trying to make conversation
to distract the thoughts that seem intent on returning to a girl I should have no concern with whatsoever. I need to let her go.

Sawyer nods with a dejected look. “Yup. She’s gone for five weeks.
I don’t know how I’m gonna live without her.”

“How long have you guys been together?” I ask, curious.

“About a year. We got together sophomore year.”

“Sounds like it’s serious.”

Sawyer shrugs. “Well, when you know, you know, I guess. My parents were high-school sweethearts and they’re still together, so it’s not like it doesn’t happen. Everyone keeps telling us we’re too young, but Jenna feels the same way. It’s like we’re two pieces and we’re not quite whole until we’re together. I know it’s corny …” he trails off.

“No, it’s not,” I say and I mean it. Human relationships intrigue me. In
Aquarathi culture, we don’t exactly date. I mean, we court each other, but it’s on a far more instinctive level. When we come of age physically—via a process called
dvija
—we become ready to take a mate. And when we physically bond with another Aquarathi, we do so for life. In the human world, you could have your share of partners, and it would have no bearing on whether you would stay with any one of them or not. I’ve seen more than my fair share of casual hook-ups, make-ups, and break-ups at Dover the last few years, and given my cynical view of humans on the whole, Sawyer’s perspective is curious. “Did you date anyone before Jenna?” I ask him.