Teeth (10 page)

“Nobody ever goes home,” I mumble.

She stops and hugs me. “Oh, sweetheart. Your brother loves you so much.”

I have a headache.

She says, “Maybe someday there will be a good set of lungs for him at home, and we will look back on this as the thing that got him through the wait.”

“I hope so.” That does sound pretty perfect.

“Oh, look,” Mom says. She lets me go. “Fresh fish.”

The fishermen are hauling huge wicker baskets up to the stand, and now everyone in the marketplace is rushing over, haggling for a better price. But they’ll pay anything. They’re all in the same position as Dylan: saved from dying and petrified of being sick again. Without the fish, who knows if they’d go back to how they were: arthritic, diabetic, catatonic.

Of course no one ever leaves this island. No one’s willing to risk it. Why would we ever be? We’d be too afraid that the lung transplant would fall through the way it did last year, and we wouldn’t be able to get back here in time, and . . .

Ugh. I don’t want to think about that shit. That fucking scrapbook, that fucking library, the fucking fishboy.

The fucking fact that staying here is starting to sound not so horrible.

God, I really was desperate for a friend.

But no, I think about leaving. I think about college. This is what I’m supposed to do. I taste that promise for as long as I can, rolling it around my tongue and letting it settle into my cheek. Until I leave them. Until I get on a plane or a boat and get so far away that no one can even see me. I am free. I am free.

I can get through a few years.

I won’t get glued to this place.

I don’t have to be.

I’ll keep searching for exits all the time. Even when I don’t want to.

I’m a horrible brother.

I’m still chewing on everything when Fiona comes over. “The ghost likes you,” she whispers. She’s leaning on my shoulder. She smells like she’s from the ocean.

“You’re crazy, Fiona.”

“The ghost is with you,” she rasps. “He isn’t leaving anytime soon.”

“He’s not a ghost.”

She smiles with her lips closed. “Who’s
he
?”

“The . . . ” I shake my head. “See you next week, Fiona.”

One of the fishermen, the one missing an eye, looks over at me when my mom and I approach the booth. His hat is pulled low on his forehead. He grins at me with his gold teeth.

Why the hell
shouldn’t
they be bastards, seriously? They rule us.

My mom hands over a fistful of bills and points to the fish she wants, and the fisherman starts wrapping them in paper. I’m focused, this time, on the money instead of the fish’s dead eyes.

Fuck. We’re paying them.

The guy I pulled off Teeth is slipping the money into his pocket right now. He’s going to take it to Mr. Gardener’s stand and buy cigarettes and some crackers and whatever the hell he wants.

I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me before.

We’re eating Teeth’s brothers and we’re helping the guys who hurt him.

Mom makes me carry the fish home. I’m praying the whole walk by the water that Teeth doesn’t see me with this bag. I don’t see him, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t mean anything. He’s maybe a better hider than we give him credit for.

God, if he sees me, I’m so fucked. He’ll make me swim laps next lesson.

I say, “Can’t we at least start catching the fish ourselves? Instead of buying them from the fishermen?” I know this wouldn’t appease Teeth one bit, but it would make me feel better about the whole thing.

“They guard the bait with their lives, you know that.”

“Power-hungry assholes.”

“Sweetie, I wish it were simple too.”

Mom thinks we should try to make amends with Ms. Delaney, so she asks me to bring over a bottle of wine from Dad’s puny collection. I obviously decide to go over on a Tuesday evening. I’ll let Diana give her the wine. Or maybe we can drink it.

Maybe I can get her drunk and get her to show me the diaries. God, I’ve never ended that sentence that way.

Diana peers through the curtains at me, then cracks the door open, grinning. “Good to see you.” She’s all dressed
up again. She has her hair in a bun and glasses near the tip of her nose. I think she’s going for sexy librarian. The glasses don’t even have lenses. I’m smiling in spite of myself.

It’s still temporary, but it’s still amazing to feel something. Even when that something is just a tongue.

She pulls me inside, down the hallway, and backward onto her bed. I can’t believe that after all this passion, manufactured though it may be, we haven’t had sex yet. But I have to admit that the kissing is nice.

As is being half-drunk and crashed on her floor and talking about Kafka. I’m losing some kind of man card for this and I don’t even care. Wine is nice.

“Did you finish
The Metamorphosis
?” she says.

I roll onto my stomach. “Yeah.” She’s fixing her hair. I like watching how quickly her fingers move.

“Well? I don’t like it.”

“Then why’d you give it to me?”

She grins. Her cheeks are getting all flushed. She gets more turned on when we talk about books than when we kiss. I shouldn’t be okay with that. I’m beginning to think I’m using this girl as some kind of symbol and that’s really not okay with me. I wish I were a different person. I kiss her like that will fix me.

“I loved it,” I say. “It was the most relevant thing I’ve read in a long time.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“He’s ostracized and they throw fruit at him and he dies. From loneliness.”

She shakes her head. “The part where he turns into a bug.”

“Or whatever.”

“Or whatever. Why did that happen?”

“You don’t know. That’s the point. Sometimes there’s just . . . a transformation. And there isn’t a real explanation.”

She considers this, winding the end of her braid around her finger. “I don’t like that.”

“Spoken like someone who lives her life in books.”

She stretches like I’ve touched her. I wonder when I can ask about the diaries.

She says, “My father came by yesterday, and my mother threatened him with a gun.”

Just when I’ve written her off, she can make one sentence more exciting than my entire life. I say, “Your mother has a gun?” I’m not sure my mother’s even ever seen a gun in real life. I know I haven’t.

“A silver handgun.”

“Wow.”

“She keeps it loaded.”

“Um . . . damn.”

“She is not a fan of my father. They were never in a real relationship and they still fight like married couples do in
those books about teenagers. My mother thinks it was all a mistake. It was during a vulnerable time in her life. She is full of those, to be honest. My mother would not make a good heroine. She is weak and unsympathetic.”

I guess that’s how you talk about someone you know your whole life.

I guess that’s kind of how you think about anyone when you’re Diana.

I’m trying to figure out where Teeth fits into this. He’s almost definitely older than Diana. But he’s hard to age, with all the scales and that smile.

“He doesn’t live on the island,” Diana says. “He’s one of the men who rides the shipping boat and unloads everything at the market. Usually he knows he’s supposed to stay far away. I suppose he forgot.”

I mentioned that boat to Fishboy the other day, and he lit all up like a little kid and said, “Oh, man, I
love
that boat. That boat is
so cool
.” To be honest, I think he’s crazy about all boats, though he won’t admit it, because of course fish aren’t crazy about boats. But he knows a lot about them from all his time in the marina. He apparently listens well to what they’re shouting back and forth when he’s getting the shit beaten out of him. That’s where he learned to curse, after all.

“Boats are the fucking kings of the universe,” he’ll say, his fin twitching like crazy as the ship pulls into the marina,
and then he’ll start babbling about the difference between port and starboard like this is supposed to be brand-new information for me. “I could totally be a . . . whatever.”

“Sailor?”

“On a boat?”

“Yep.”

“Yeah.” He’ll sigh all wistfully. “I could be a sailor. But I’m too busy being a fish.”

Now Diana goes to her mirror over her dresser and puts on a bracelet. I’ve never seen a girl’s room with less makeup. Even my mom has a lipstick or two on the nightstand. “Do your parents fight?” Diana says.

Softly, I say, “More than they used to.”

“Maybe they’re going to get divorced.”

I didn’t know you were allowed to just say that. I clear my throat. “Your mom still probably likes your father more than she likes your brother’s father.”

“This is your way of asking for the story.” She sits down beside me. “The short and dark fable of my mother’s ocean adventure.”

I watch her. I don’t say anything, If she really knew how much I want this, she would stop. She would keep teasing. It’s not like she’s the only one being used here.

I’m trying not to wonder why I care so much. It’s curiosity. That’s all it is. It doesn’t have anything to do with how I feel about Teeth.

She says, “Four years before I was born, my mother decided to take a swim at almost exactly midnight. She’s living all alone, because this is right after her parents died in a car accident, when they were on vacation in Capri. She’s been told to never go into the ocean, that it isn’t safe. And at this time, there are very few others living on the island. Fiona and her husband and some other people who are not at all important.”

Yeah, it would be Fiona.

“So Mother wears her favorite bikini and goes down to the shore. A pink bikini. Her diary is very specific about the bikini. She usually used it for sunbathing. The diary implies there was once sun here. I don’t know if that is for effect. Maybe this is like
Holes
and the weather is very metaphorical.”

I have absolutely no options but to hear this story or to lie in bed at night and listen to the ocean and his screaming and wonder, wonder, imagine who is right. These are my only two choices.

I need to be right.

I need to hear that the fish are bad.

Diana lowers her voice to this dramatic whisper. “So she wades into the water, up to her hips. She’s in too deep, it’s too dark. She takes a step backward. She falls. She feels something pinch her skin, feels her bikini bottoms rip.”

I’m picturing Fishboy doing this, even though I know that his part of the story doesn’t come until later. I can’t
get the image out of my head, and it’s scaring me.

With her voice so quiet I can hear the ocean groaning outside and the ticks of the clock on her shelf, each one so small and precise, like drops of water hitting the ground.

Diana says, “At first she thinks it’s a piranha, but she looks down and sees a chubby Enki fish. Her father has told her horror stories about these fish. Their scales are poisonous, their teeth can crush rocks, they are only safe dead, but she’s always been so fascinated, thought they were beautiful, loved them. Now she wonders if she can scoot out of the water before it bites her. And then . . . ”

I stare. Her voice is so excited. I wonder if she forgot that this is something that really happened—to her mother—and not just some horror story she read in her library.

Diana says, “She looks down and sees the fish has entirely disappeared. And she feels so much pressure—”

“Wait—”

She nods. “The whole thing.”

“No.”

“The entire fish. En. Tire.”

“Christ, Diana. That’s disgusting.”

She looks offended while she rolls onto her back and looks at me with her head tilted into the carpet. “It’s not disgusting. Books are disgusting.”

“I like books. I thought you liked books.”

“Let’s be honest, Rudy, books are pornography for brains.
All that subtext and bullshit and hidden imagery. This is real life. It isn’t like that. Isn’t that what you just said?”

“I . . . ”

“You said, ‘Sometimes there’s just a transformation.’”

“I . . . ”

“This is real life. This is a woman raped by a fish. And sometimes it just happens.”

I’ve never hated getting what I want quite this much.

“YOUR FISH.” DYLAN POINTS TOWARD THE SEA. “THERE?”

I see the tip of Teeth’s tail poking out of the water. He does that on purpose when he knows I can’t come be with him, just to screw with me. “Yep, there’s one right there.” If Teeth heard me tell my brother he’s a fish, he’d never let me live it down. He’d do that little dance where he waves his arms around his head and go, “I’m a fish, I’m a fish!”

Sometimes, when I think about it too hard, I start wondering where Teeth learned how to be happy. I try not to think that hard, especially not about him.

To be honest, I’m having a hard time thinking about Teeth at all right now. I don’t know. I don’t know what to
think. I’ve been avoiding the dock and spending more time at the mansion with Diana these past few days. I don’t know if he really knows that. I really, really hope not.

I glance at Dad to make sure he hasn’t noticed the fish tail that’s a little too big to be real. But he’s focused on the house, up by where Mom’s cooking with the door open. We’re sitting on the beach so close to the house that we can smell the fish she’s frying. I can’t see the dock from here, so I know Teeth came out of his way to wave his fin at me.