Authors: Sarah Porter
“Yeah.”
“What’s her name?”
Dorian hesitated. But it was a harmless enough question, really. “Luce.”
“Is that short for Hallucination?” Zoe asked, deadpan. Then her lips curled into a sly smile.
Dorian couldn’t help it: he cracked up laughing and soon Zoe was laughing, too. They were both leaning forward, their laughter wild with a strange kind of shared relief, tears brightening Zoe’s round hazel eyes. Dorian felt like he was being a little disloyal to Luce, laughing at a joke about her. But it
was
funny—funny, he thought, in the way of things that are just a bit too true. Luce herself was real, of course, but her life in the sea sometimes seemed to Dorian like some kind of acted-out fantasy, with its queens and battles and shipwrecks. Not a hallucination exactly, but a willful waking dream that never ended. As if Luce was avoiding something.
“Actually,” Dorian said when he could finally talk again, “it’s short for Lucette. I don’t know what her last name was, though...”
Something about that brought Zoe up short. She stopped giggling abruptly and wiped her eyes with her sleeve, staring at him. “Lucette? That’s a pretty unusual name.”
“It is unusual, yeah. But it’s totally beautiful.”
Zoe’s eyes sparked with annoyance for a moment, then turned cautious and darkly curious. “I’ve only ever heard that name one time before, actually.” She was examining Dorian’s face, checking for his reaction. “Have you heard about that girl Lucette Korchak? From Pittley?”
Dorian wondered if she was trying to change the subject. Why would he want to hear gossip about some other girl with the same name? “Um, no. What about her?”
“Lucette Korchak? She committed suicide like a year ago. Early April. She threw herself off a cliff by the sea.” Zoe was staring at him, and Dorian could feel something in his face starting to unfold, to blossom with realization. “Or some people up there think her uncle murdered her. He’s this total drunk-ass creep, and there were rumors like maybe he was beating on her or something. They found her clothes scattered at the top of the cliff, but ... they never found the body...”
Dorian reeled back against the bed’s footboard. “Last April?” A whole year ago, now, even a little more. It
had
to be her. And he’d been living in Chicago with Emily and his parents then, not imagining anything crazier in his future than becoming a big-deal comic book artist.
Definitely
not suspecting how soon his little sister would die...
Zoe watched the emotions tearing through his face. “You
really
hadn’t heard of her, had you? You’re totally surprised.”
“So?”
“So you weren’t just using her name, to make me think ... And that means, maybe...” Zoe seemed almost frantic now.
“Where did
you
hear about this?”
“My friend Bethany’s mom is seeing this math teacher from Pittley. Mr. Carroll. And I was over for dinner at Bethany’s house, and Mr. Carroll started tripping out about that Lucette girl and how
guilty
he felt, like he knew she was having a shitty time and there were these sick rumors and he should have done more to help her. Me and Bethany kept getting more and more weirded out. But maybe—”
“Lucette Korchak didn’t die!” Dorian shook his head. It was too bad they couldn’t tell this Mr. Carroll the truth, though maybe the truth was still terrible enough that it wouldn’t make him feel any better. Luce had lived, but she had also killed, and she was still lost in a cold sea. “Her uncle didn’t murder her, but the part about him beating her is true. And then he tried to rape her...” Zoe flinched, hard.
“She
told you this?” Zoe’s voice buckled.
“Yeah. She told me the whole thing. How she changed...” Zoe’s expression had altered completely since the start of the conversation. It was wounded and open, shining with a kind of surrender. Dorian knew that she believed him completely. “God. Dorian ... Where is she now? Luce?”
“I don’t know.” Saying it made Dorian feel a little sick. How long could he go on insisting that Luce was still his girlfriend? She’d proved before that she would take insane risks and that she didn’t care enough about being with him to keep herself safe.
“You mean ... How can you not
know?”
“She had to leave. Because of the ice. And I’ve been waiting every night, but she hasn’t come back yet...” Dorian grimaced as he said it.
Something in Zoe’s face shifted again. “The ice has been mostly gone for like two weeks already.”
“I
know
that,” Dorian snapped. “I’ve been sitting on the beach freezing for hours every night, okay? It’s not like I haven’t had time to notice.”
“If she really loved you, maybe she wouldn’t leave you waiting around like that.” Zoe stared at him uncertainly, and Dorian could almost feel the words hovering on her lips. He was sure she would leave them unsaid, swallow them down in embarrassment. She exhaled hard, then risked it: “I wouldn’t.”
Dorian looked away, flushing. But he still wanted to know. “Zoe...”
Suddenly she looked angry. “Whatever. You don’t have the balls to say it!”
“No, I mean, what I want to know ... You felt the change starting, right?” Dorian asked gently. The heat inside him was soft and hopeful. Maybe it was really too late for Luce, maybe she would never leave the sea, maybe she was even dead. But it wasn’t too late for everyone.
“I felt it.” Zoe looked down, hard and morose. “Just like melting into really cold water, like you said. Right on my bedroom floor.” She looked up, her face agonized, but somehow there were still flickers of humor in her eyes. Dorian couldn’t help admiring the strength of that. “I wouldn’t have believed anything as retarded as this mermaid bullshit, okay? But I did feel like ... I mean, I basically knew I could change. Into
something.”
“But you didn’t.”
Her pink hair trailed, and Dorian felt an impulse to stroke it back from her face.
“No. I didn’t. I don’t know how it worked. But I pulled back. Like, there was this moment where it was up to me...” Zoe’s voice faltered.
“Why? That’s what I need to know, Zoe.” He was somehow closer to her now, and she was sitting with her legs folded under her, halfway kneeling. “Why didn’t you do it?”
“Well, because ... That’s a tough question.” She tried to smile at him. “Like, if being human is a problem for me ... it’s still a problem I have to deal with. You know what I mean?”
Dorian stared. “Totally.”
“And so, like, my mom sucks, and my stepdad’s an evil bastard, and there’s all this crap ... But I want to do a better job than they have?”
“A better job of being human?” Dorian asked. They were both grinning, but the room in front of him was warped by his tears.
“Yeah.”
Dorian sat quiet for a minute, thinking about what Zoe had said. He loved Luce, and he knew she was incredibly courageous: brave enough to confront a whole tribe of enemies out for her blood, brave enough to race out through orca-infested waters to save Nausicaa. But in a way her exploits seemed like the adventures of a child’s fantasy life, dreamy, removed from the problems of the real world. She’d run away, where Zoe had stayed...
Zoe, he thought, was even braver than Luce. Zoe was the one taking the chances that
really
counted. And she would face growing up, awful as that could be.
She slid closer to him, grinning widely. “Hey, Dorian?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, aren’t there...” Her soft, funny, completely un-magical face was only inches from his now. “Aren’t there some really heavy drawbacks? To having a mermaid girlfriend? Don’t you get frustrated?”
Dorian looked into Zoe’s hazel eyes; he liked her, a lot, but still she was being unkind by asking that. And answering her out loud would be a huge betrayal of Luce. He couldn’t do it. “Zoe...”
She was already straddling him, pressing him back onto the bed. Her hands were on his face, pulling up his shirt, warm and sweet and earthy, and her breath curled on his ear. “Maybe you should try a real girl.”
23
Breaking Voices
The water purled around her, glittering with sunlight, as Luce lay in wait on the pebbles of the seafloor. She was a few feet away from the beach where her father sometimes came for fish, concealed by a patch of loose seaweed and by the brilliant glinting of the sun. It was her third day spent lurking under the surface waiting for him to appear. It was hard not to feel a bit depressed, to keep circling back to the same anxious thoughts. The plan she’d made might not work at all. The hours went by, the sun dashed blades of brilliant green light through the water, and Luce slipped up for air as rarely and stealthily as possible. And still he didn’t come. She hadn’t heard so much as a trace of muttering winds for days. What was he
doing?
Had he given up on this beach entirely? She knew she had to stay still, but it took constant concentration to keep her tail from lashing with impatience.
Then through the soft distortion of the water, Luce heard it. A girl’s voice, high and tender:
“...none of Peter’s business!”
the voice sighed.
“Mom loved you!”
Luce remembered that conversation exactly. The voice was hers, but hers from more than two years before. Even as Luce’s heart started thudding she still shook her head in disbelief that she had ever sounded so innocent, so cared-for. She couldn’t repress a spasm of envy and resentment directed at that younger girl, the one who’d felt so secure in her humanity, who’d been loved and safe...
She fought to clear her head, to keep herself from being sucked into a whirl of painful memories. The only thing that mattered was the present: the moment directly before her,
now,
and everything that might still be saved in this moment if only she could make herself be quick and wise enough. If the voices were on the beach, then her father probably wasn’t far behind. Luce tensed, ready to spring.
Footsteps. The slow crunch of pebbles, dragging and lifeless. He was there, walking closer, and the windy gibbering grew louder and more eager. It was awful to hear how vital and happy the voices sounded in contrast to her father’s weary, defeated shambling. Closer, still closer. Through the veil of the water Luce could just see two dark blots at the sea’s edge: his feet swaddled in dirty fur. Luce was almost choking, suddenly terrified to move. If she failed now her father might truly kill himself.
Luce gathered her determination and shot up out of the waves. But she was careful not to look at Andrew Korchak at all, keeping her eyes fixed instead on the murmuring disturbance all around him. “I need to talk to you!” Luce announced loudly, aggressively. “Now!”
Luce knew that her younger self had never once spoken to anyone that way. She had always been shy and gentle. That was the point.
She had to be as different as possible from her father’s memories of her.
He stumbled back from the water’s edge in shock, but to Luce’s infinite relief he didn’t take off running inland. Instead he sat down hard twenty feet from the water, his mouth open and his eyes bright with pain. But he was still there. Still watching, and still
listening
...
“You voices, whatever you call yourselves, lost
hopes,”
Luce snapped. “Get over here! You heard me.”
Up on the beach her father began to moan a long, low note, holding his head. The voices babbled, gusting back and forth in astonished outrage.
“You want me to leave, right?” Luce demanded. “Then you need to start doing what I tell you, or I’ll stay here on your island and mess up your memories forever. I’ll hurt the memories in every way I can! Answer me!”
It was hard for her to be so abrasive, so rude. But wasn’t there a hint of something different, something just a bit more awake, in her father’s expression? The voices gabbled in agitation and then seemed to arrive at some agreement. Luce braced herself as they came at her: a tangle of boiling winds carrying spinning fragments of grass and torn wildflowers.
“Child of Proteus,”
the wheezing old voice gasped out, grating and vicious.
Luce cut it off.
“I am NOT the child of Proteus!” She shouted the words, and suddenly her rage wasn’t an act anymore. “Don’t you ever dare to call me that again!”
The voices wheezed and hissed, debris flung higher and higher in their whispering torrent. Luce knew they were astonished, beside themselves with confusion. This was her chance!
She pressed on. “You want to know whose
child
I am? I’m the daughter of Alyssa Gray and Andrew Korchak. Alyssa Gray is dead. She’s nothing but memories now, and there is
nothing
I can do about that! She’s gone forever.” Luce knew what she had to say next, but she could barely make herself do it. It seemed so cruel, especially with her father right there listening. “I’m going to
forget
her.”
Luce’s hands were shaking now. Her father suddenly looked straight at her, his eyes wide with hurt. She waited with desperate hope for him to argue with her—to yell,
“Lucette! Don’t
say
that!”
Luce could practically see the words taking shape in his eyes, but they didn’t come to his lips. Not yet.
The voices came closer, an angry chaos of winds. They lashed out at her with airy tentacles, then just as suddenly pulled back. Luce’s hair jerked in their grip and fell again.
“Child of...”
the angry old voice gasped.
Then it paused uncertainly, and Luce attacked.
“I’m also the child of Andrew Korchak. The
man
you’ve been keeping here. I thought he was lost forever, but he’s not. He’s still
alive,
and he can still have a future. He can forget Alyssa, too—forget her enough, anyway, and fall in love with someone else. And maybe he should forget
me,
and have a new child...” Luce gagged on the words even as she said them, and the tangled voices screamed in her ears. They were going insane; at any moment, Luce thought, they would start invading her head again. Their shrieking pierced her thoughts, and she raised her voice to make sure her father would hear her above their wailing. “But I am NOT letting you keep him!”