“Eli…” she tried to say, but the sound that left her mouth wasn’t human.
She raised a hand to her throat, but her arms were too short, the wrong shape. She turned and felt her body, strange and strong, thrash through the shallows, as her back arched.
In the sunlit water, she glimpsed her reflection, her scales deep gray and alive with rainbows, her fins the bruised violet of twilight, a veil of starlight cast against the darkening sky. She was monstrous. She was lovely.
It was her last human thought. She was diving into the water. She was curled around … who was this? Eli. The dim echo of a name, something more ancient and unpronounceable, lived at the base of her brain. It didn’t matter. She could feel the slide of his scales over hers as they slipped deeper into the lake, into the pull of the current, together.
HEART
When they found her bicycle leaning against a pine near Little Spindle, Annalee did her best to explain to Gracie’s mother. Of course, her mother still called the police. They even sent divers into the lake. The search was fruitless, though one of them claimed that something far too big to be a fish had brushed up against his leg.
Gracie and Eli had summers, three perfect months every year, to feel the grass beneath their feet and the sun on their bare human shoulders. They picked a new city each summer, but they returned most often to Manhattan, where they’d visit with Annalee and Gracie’s flummoxed mother in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, and try not to stare at their beautiful host with her running-water skin and river-green eyes.
When fall came, they shed their names with their bodies and traveled the waters of the world. The lake hated to give them up. She threatened to freeze solid and bind them there, but they were two now—sinewy and gleaming—monsters of the deep, with lashing tales and glittering eyes, and the force they created between them smashed old rules and new arguments. They slipped down the Mohawk to the Hudson, past the river god with his sloped gray shoulders, and out into the Atlantic. They met polar bears in the Arctic, frightened manatees near the Florida Keys. They curled together in a knot, watching the dream lights of jellyfish off the coast of Australia.
Sometimes, if they spotted a passenger leaning on the rails of a freighter by himself, they might even let themselves be seen. They’d breach the waves, let the moonlight catch their hides, and the stranger would stand for a moment—mouth agape, heart alive, his loneliness forgotten.
I don’t realize how early I am until I open the door. The rows of desks and chairs are empty, the room is silent, and Mr. Trout peers at me from behind the podium.
“It’s been a few years,” he says. “I got a note that you’re auditing this class?”
“Yeah. I want to brush up.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. My future?”
He laughs. “I’m not supposed to say this, but you don’t really need this stuff for your future. You need it for high school. It’s a box to check, and you’ve already checked it. Perfectly, if I’m remembering correctly.”
“Maybe I just want to feel really good at something.” I cross the room and claim a front-row desk. “Maybe I just happen to love geometry.”
“All right. Whatever floats your boat, Flora. But I have never in my career had a student repeat a class for fun. And during summer.”
He turns to the window, the bright morning light streaming in as if to prove my foolishness. But I look instead to the stacks of geometry textbooks on his desk, and I swear, the sight of them sends beams of light straight to my heart.
“I can pass these out,” I offer.
“Sure,” he says.
As I’m centering them at each desk, placing the bright yellow textbook checkout slips inside each cover, I send silent thank yous to Jessica for letting me do this. It was the last week of school, and the impending summer at home with my parents—with both of my best friends away the whole time (Rachel working at a summer camp in Tahoe, Tara in Barcelona with her cousins)—was closing in on me. It was like a creeping fog. So much heaviness. “What do you need?” Jessica asked me. Even she wouldn’t be here for me over the summer break, and my weekly visits to her office had become the best part of school. I was going to miss the way she touched her fingertips together when she asked me questions, and her plants by her window, and even her tissue box, perched next to me like a suggestion to cry. I told her I didn’t know what I needed.
And then I said, “Actually, maybe I need summer school. A reason to get out of the house every day. Homework, so I can stay in my room whenever I’m home.”
“I don’t know what we’re offering this summer…” she said, opening her laptop and pulling up the schedule. “Too bad there isn’t art or theater.”
“What about geometry?” I asked.
She cocked her head. “Aren’t you in trig?”
“Maybe I could audit.”
Her fingers tapped the keyboard. “Tim—Mr. Trout—he’s teaching it on the Potrero campus.”
I smiled. Even better. He was my teacher the first time I took it, my freshman year. He’s the one who first talked about axes and symmetry.
“Perfect,” I said, and she enrolled me right then. She made it so easy, even though it wouldn’t have made sense to any other adult.
I finish passing out the books, and Mr. Trout and I make small talk for a few minutes, until he tells me, “Okay, go take a lap. I need a few minutes to plan the first lesson.”
I leave my backpack on a front row desk and head to the corridor. For a week or two, when I was a freshman, I rode the bus here after school to hang out in the front quad with Blake. He liked to stand with his arm around me. I liked being mysterious, the girl from Baker High. All these random kids would come up to me and ask if I knew their cousins or exes or friends, and I would say yes and yes and yes, and Blake’s arm would be there around my waist the whole time, and I usually liked having it there.
I never got past the front quad then, so I give myself a tour now. The main buildings are squat, a faded blue, and behind them are rolling hills, golden with summer. I trace the campus’s edges, along the basketball court and the pool and the administration wing, and the morning is so bright, and I’m glad to be here, about to learn something I already know. I reach the parking lot. Heading toward the stairs to the campus entrance is a group of three kids, and my breath catches.
They’re taller now. A little wilder. Louder.
Travis stops walking and squints at me.
“Hey,” Mimi says. Her hair is the same length as it was then, but now part of one side is buzzed short. Her cutoff overalls are only clasped on the right, the left buckle dangling. I feel my face get hot at the sight of her. “It’s you. Blake’s ex-girlfriend.”
I force a laugh. “I didn’t realize that month of my life would define me forever.”
Hope, still kind, says, “Our long lost Flora!”
“Hi, you guys,” I say.
“Please tell us you’re here for geometry,” Travis says.
I nod because I can’t speak. Sharing a class with them was the furthest thing from what I imagined when I thought about what summer school would offer me. When I chose this class, I was choosing shapes and logic, angles and numbers, strangers and anonymity. Not this gang of three who I never thought I’d see again. Not this girl whose presence makes my head tingle and my hands shake. Even though I’m trying to look anywhere else, I can’t help but stare at the bare skin of Mimi’s hip, between where her overalls end and her tank top begins, as I follow the three of them up the stairs.