Teeth (11 page)

Dylan gets up by himself and scales the very edge of the shoreline, heel-toe, arms out for balance. He’s right in front of our house, and I’m sure for a second that it’s finally going to fall. And crush him. I watch his feet leaving tiny prints in the sand.

“What are you looking at?” Dad asks me.

I don’t want to tell him. They get mushy when I admit I’m worried about Dyl. And I probably shouldn’t admit my obsession with our house collapsing. He’d probably turn it into a metaphor. Something about my shit of a life. Enough metaphors.

I say, “Are you and Mom going to get divorced?” I don’t know. Just to have something else to say. Just because I can’t stop thinking about our house crumbling, and now I’m thinking about metaphors.

He double-takes like a cartoon character. “What?”

The ocean pounds three large waves in a row, like a drumbeat.

I say, “You never even talk anymore unless you’re fighting.”

“Hey, you’re not around that much lately, kiddo.” He wiggles his eyebrows a little when he says this.

I start talking fast, mostly so he doesn’t get a chance to ask where I am all the time or why he apparently thinks I’m doing something eyebrow-wiggle worthy. I guess I’m glad they assume I’m spending all my time wooing Diana. I say, “It’s just that ever since we’ve moved here it’s like we became different people. And it’s not like we’ve changed, or gotten better, or worse, it’s just that . . . we stopped being who we really are and started being who we expected each other to be. We’re like . . . caricatures, compared to how we were.” I dig in the sand with my thumb. “It’s like we’re all trying to disappoint each other in exactly the same ways we always have, so that there are no surprises.”

“Rudy.”

“I’m all aloof and you and Mom are all . . . cramped.”

“Cramped.”

“In the tiny kitchen. And the house is so dark all the time. And the ocean’s so loud . . . . ”

He exhales. “This is a rough time. We know that.”

“It’s been a rough time for three years.”

“But now you can’t get away from it. And I understand how hard that must be for you. Leaving your friends . . . ”

“It’s not that.” God, it has nothing to do with them.

How long has it had nothing to do with them?

Dad says, “But he’s getting better now. Considerably.” He looks down at Dylan and smiles. “Dyl, start heading back, okay?”

“Okay!” Dylan shouts. He turns around and starts coming toward us, still pretending he’s on a balance beam.

I feel Teeth watching him.

“I know you don’t like it here,” Dad says.

“It’s not that simple.” I look back out to the water, but it’s nearly still right now, and Teeth has disappeared.

“You miss home.”

“Of course.”

He says. “We’re a family. And . . . unfortunately . . . ” He puts an arm around my shoulders. “That means your mom and I are going to fight sometimes when things are this rough, and it also means no one’s going to bail on anyone else. Even on you, kiddo.”

I look at him.

He’s giving me this encouraging smile that I don’t deserve. “We know that you’re not having an easy time here, and we’re so sorry. And we haven’t forgotten about you, you know?”

But the thing is that sometimes they have.

I feel my voice catching. “It’s like you’re mad at me all the time.”

He doesn’t take his eyes off me. It’s like this was the part
of the conversation he was waiting for, and he knows what I’m going to say before even I do. “Nobody’s mad at you,” he says. His voice is quiet, but it has all this air behind it.

“Like I don’t love him as much as you guys do.”

He frowns. “You feel like that?”

“No. You feel like that.” I push my feet hard into the sand. I have this stupid thought that I want to get trapped where I’m sitting, just to prove to Dad that I’m not going to get up and run away. Then before that thought is even finished, my brain screams at me to get up and run away.

Dad’s hand is suddenly on my shoulder, heavy and solid like a harness. He says, “It’s normal to resent him. It doesn’t make you bad. It’s understandable. He gets a lot more attention than you do. And I’m sorry for that, Rudy. I really am. It’s not as if, if we could . . . if we could have chosen things, this is where you would have ended up.”

“It’s not like that.”

“You were our only kid for a long time.” He gives me this little smile. “You were our whole world. We never would have planned for you to feel lost.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Though I have to admit that something in there plucked me in a way I wish it hadn’t. Because it sounds stupid to say that I’m my parents’ second favorite. I’m too old, anyway, to give a shit whether or not Mommy and Daddy love me best. Give me a break.

It’s stupid.

I tilt my head back and breathe out hard. Dylan is almost back to us. We need to finish this now. “I don’t resent him,” I say.

Dad watches me.

I choose my words as quickly as I can. “I am scared to death of him, Dad.”

Dylan runs—runs—into me and crashes into my arms.

I say, “Hey, buddy,” and give him a hug.

I think Dad is reaching out toward Dylan, but then he palms my head instead. And I can’t tell which of us he’s talking to when he says, “You make me so proud.”

I don’t want Dylan to see me cry again, so I hold my breath when he starts running around the beach in circles with his arms flailing around, looking exactly like this kid we’ve had in our heads for the past three years.

“Can I ask you a question?” Diana says, mid-kiss, not sexy, just conversational.

“Yeah.”

“What’s a swing set?”

“What?”

“They’re in books, but no one ever explains what they are. They aren’t in my encyclopedia.”

“When I was a kid, someone told me that ‘pear’ wasn’t in the dictionary and I never checked and I think about it
all the time
.”

“We can check later.”

So I explain to her what a swing set is and then I try to tell her about TV and the Internet and all sorts of foreign crazy things and she rolls her eyes and reminds me how much you can learn from books and how much you really can’t, like the feel of her waist in my hand, like sea air, like what a swing set is.

And her face when I tell her about Michigan, when I show her what to do once our pants are off . . . God, that fascinated face. I know that face.

My hand drifts to her hip and before I can stop it, before I can even process that I’m thinking it, my brain thinks,
What would it feel like to touch scales, tail, scars?
and I’m kissing her deeper without meaning to and okay, fine, it’s fine, who the fuck
hasn’t
had a mermaid fantasy? That’s something you can get from a book. That’s something that’s not real. It’s fine.

No, what’s actually weird is that I’m not really that concerned.

“Where have you been, kiddo?” Fishboy says as I make my way down the dock afterward. “Christ. No, I know where you’ve been. Don’t answer that.”

“Hmm?” I sit down and plunk my feet in the water. It hurts in a good way. “I need to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“It’s about the fish.”

“What about my fish?”

“Have you ever seen them hurt anyone? Anybody?”

“Like a human?”

“Yeah.”

He frowns. “Of course not. You know what I have seen? Humans hurting fish.”

“It’s not the same. No. Stop. You can’t say it’s the same. I . . . I don’t know, Teeth.”

It’s not as if people are going out and capturing his fish just to do it. We catch them because we need them to live. What did the fish get out of impregnating Ms. Delaney? What good did that do them?

I look at Teeth, bobbing in the water.

Shit.

Teeth frowns at me. “What?”

They needed something to keep them alive too.

I have to stay still for a few minutes just to collect everything in me. I can’t believe I’m weighing the morality of hurting a fish versus hurting a human. But it’s so hard not to compare the two with that creature in the water in front of me, sucking on his fingers.

“What are you
thinking
about?” he says.

“What would you say if I told you a fish hurt someone? Really hurt them?”

He’s making eye contact so fierce it scares me. “I’d say the fishermen hurt me every night.”

“Hurt you—”

“No.
Really
hurt me.”

“I—”

“Fuck humans! I hate humans. What the fuck do you want from me? I don’t give a shit about your little human stories, okay? Some fish are bad, and do you have any idea how many humans have fucked me over? Goddamn it, Rudy!”

I try to say something, I don’t even know what, but then he dives under the water and he’s gone.

AND THE NEXT DAY, IT’S LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED.

“So I know where you came from, by the way,” I say.

“Humans and a house and all that. Yeah, I know.” Fishboy isn’t even looking at me. His eyes are busy tracking something under the water.

“That house. The big one, right there.”

“You must think I’m an idiot.”

“What are you looking at?”

“I’m—” He dives and emerges with a tiny fish in his mouth. He spits it onto the deck. “Look at that! Check that out! Oh, man, Teeth is the king. Teeth is the king. I am the king of the seas. Look at that.”

I squirm away from it. It’s flopping around like my brother during a bad night. “What is it?”

“Minnow. Oh, God, look at this minnow. Mmm. It’s beautiful.” He kisses it and cuddles it against his cheek, then neatly slits its head off with his teeth.

“Oh, Jesus, Fishboy.”

He looks up, a laugh, halfway through, frozen on his face. “What did you call me?”

“Fishboy.” But I didn’t mean to. Shit. “It’s, uh, what I called you in my head before I knew your name.”

He shrugs and nods a little. “Fishboy. Yeah, that’s cool.”

Thank God. This would have been such a stupid fucking thing to fight about.

He’s really grossing me out with this fish, licking the blood off its neck, so I shake my head quickly and say, “You know how I found out where you’re from?”

“I don’t care.”

“I made out with your sister.”

“What’s ‘made out’?” He’s looking at me with these huge eyes.

“Kissed.”

“Ew,” he says. “You kissed a fish?” Then he buries his face in the minnow and rips it to pieces.

“This is so gross.”

He comes up with flesh speared on his teeth. “Oh my
God. Rudy, this is the best minnow in the world. You have to try this.”

“I’ll pass.”

“I’ll save you the
liiiiver
.”

At least now I know he’s screwing with me. “Do fish even have livers?”

“You’re a liver.”

“How do you know that word?”

“I’m very, very smart.” He licks the skin clean. “Oh my God. Minnow. You are a beautiful minnow.”

“It’s dead.”

“It doesn’t speak English anyway. Oh, lovely, lovely minnow.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“You’re the one kissing a fish. Gross.”

“Your human sister.”

“I knew what you meant. Seriously. You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?”

I smile and he smiles and I lie down on my back, as far as I can get from the remains of the fishboy’s lunch. He’s sucking on all the little bones.

Eventually he finishes eating, and I don’t say anything, and he doesn’t say anything. He reaches up to the dock and walks the fish bones back and forth like they’re people. I half-watch his hands and half-watch the sky. It’s the first
time we’ve been absolutely silent together when it doesn’t feel like we’re fighting. It almost feels like we’re tucked in to go to sleep. The silence must last nearly five minutes before he looks up at me and smiles.

It doesn’t matter what team I’m on, for a minute. For a minute it’s just me and that smile.

“If you’re done relaying my family history to me,” he says, “I have a mission for us.”

I sit up. All the blood rushes out of my head and makes me dizzy.

“I knew that would make you pay attention. Poor, bored Rudy.”

“What are we doing?”

“Operation Enki Freedom.”

“Seriously, how do you even know these words?”