Water tunneled backward through Sophie’s nose until it ran bitter down the back of her throat. Her mouth tasted like drowning. She took a breath; there were boats where her lungs were. The mermaid was gone and everything was as ink-black as the hole bleeding oil at the bottom of the ocean. Sophie rolled onto her side. Her opening eyes cracked the darkness and brought her a vision of her best friend dumping creek water from a scummy beer bottle onto her face. She brought up her hands to block the filth of it. Sophie opened her mouth to shout, and a rogue wave of water spilled out from her lips. Her body contracted, and more water rolled out. Grimy, oily creek water. A single hardy fish surfed from Sophie’s mouth and flopped onto the dirt to suffocate. Sophie lifted him by his tiny tail and flicked him back into the creek. Who knew that anything lived in that creek? Ella stood over her, clutching the old beer bottle and crying. She flung it at the ground where it did not shatter but bounced precariously close to Sophie’s soggy head.
“You were out,” Ella said, “for so long.” She was not even going to try to convey the panic and grief she’d spent the last hour gripped in. The terror at Sophie being gone, the sorrow at Sophie being gone. The dread of having helped her pass out, the guilt at the sight of her, her breathing gone weird, slowed down, stop and go, had Ella helped her best friend into a coma, had she killed her, even? Would she go to jail, was she an accessory to something horrible? In her frenzied panic she’d grabbed a bottle from the weeds and plunged it into the creek, filling it with rancid water. She dumped it onto her friend’s soft face, loving her, hating her, weird dopey Sophie, sweet funny Sophie, Sophie who didn’t understand anything, Sophie who understood her. Again and again Ella poured the water over Sophie’s face, crying, until her actions ceased to make sense. Crying, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, smacking her friend, first because she’d seen it on television, a fainted woman getting smacked—that’s what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it?— and when Sophie refused to stir, when nothing in her face responded to the blow, Ella smacked her again, this time in anger, this time in fear, and she smacked her friend three times like that before her sense came back to her and she pulled her ringing hand away and clutched at her own face, not even caring that the muck of the creek was upon her, though later she would. She returned to the water, because she had seen this on television, too—someone throwing water in the face of a fainted woman. And the water was gentler, and didn’t bring Ella face to face with the violence of her own fear. The water splashed off Sophie’s face in every direction. And finally, Sophie came to, spurting an ocean of water, fish and everything, from her mouth, and Ella felt like maybe she was losing her mind. She grabbed her purse from where it lay in the weeds and pulled out her cigarettes, her wet fingers shaking like the branches of a tree in the wind of a storm.
Sophie sat up. She was soaked from the water that had poured from her mouth. Her mouth tasted terrible. Though Sophie had never smoked, she imagined it tasted like she’d thrown up cigarettes. “What happened?” she asked. Her face felt sore. She remembered the mermaid, the blue glow of her in the dark water, then a cyclone descending on her heart. Her chest ached. “Did I fall in the creek?”
“No!” Ella cried. Her talking came fast. “You passed out and then you just stayed that way, you stayed that way and your breathing got weird and I poured water on you, I smacked you, I shook you, I was yelling in your ear, I was fucking praying for you, Sophie, I was praying to god, I thought you were dead.” In its heat and speed Ella’s voice took on the tone and timbre of her mother’s, her everyday voice suddenly enlivened with accent, a backbeat of Spanish giving her words a new pulse. Ella shook her head and wiped her face with the back of her hand, her face still wet with its own water, her nose gooey. “Not dead,” she said, taking a manic drag from her cigarette. “Brain-dead. I thought you were in a coma. You were out for an hour. I thought that was it.”
Sophie was stunned. She’d been out an hour? Even her dream vision didn’t feel that long, maybe fifteen minutes, and dreams always felt much longer than they actually were. A normal pass-out lasted five minutes max, and most of that was just being too enamored with the tingly, relaxed sensation to break the spell by moving your body. An hour? She felt a chill dread play through her. Why had she let Ella talk her into playing pass-out?
“An hour,” Sophie breathed.
“Why was there a fish in your mouth?” Ella demanded. “What the fuck? Am I on drugs or something? Like acid, LSD? Did someone put something in my—” Ella wracked her brain for what she had eaten that day and came up with very little. Even the pizza from the boy on the beach had gone uneaten; as cute as he was, Ella was certain his hands were dirty, and she wasn’t going to put the food he’d touched in her mouth. She’d ingested hardly anything that day. She looked down at the cigarette fuming in her hand. “My cigarette!” she exclaimed. “Did someone put something in my cigarette?” She let it fall, half-smoked, from her hand and scuffed it out with her flip-flop.
Sophie sat up and considered her vision. A mermaid had come for her. Her hair was a disaster and she had a bad attitude. If not for being a mermaid, Sophie thought the creature would fit right at home in her very own family, or probably anywhere in Chelsea. She was grumpy and tired, not at all what Sophie thought a mermaid should be. Mermaids were happy, weren’t they? Happy to not be human, to have fish tails, to get to swim through the ocean without a shirt on, friends with all the animals. Wasn’t her father a king or something? Weren’t all mermaids underwater princesses? They had great, burly dads with dripping silver moustaches and golden pitchfork-y things. When they got mad, the ocean made waves. Mermaids were supposed to spend their days idly grooming their hair with fishbone hair combs, singing sweet songs, gazing at their reflections in a polished seashell. Sophie’s mermaid wasn’t even pretty. She looked like she hadn’t combed her hair in hundreds of years, her face was tough and sunken, maybe an edge of beauty hung there but it was the eroded beauty found of a wicked villainess, not the innocent beauty of a mermaid. Sophie’s mermaid was not innocent, not sweet. Sophie remembered the curse words streaming from the curl of her lip; she swore worse than Ella, who had the vocabulary of a truck driver or sailor. Or a girl from Chelsea. Sophie’s mermaid’s tail was not a curling hunk of jewels but the scabby flank of a sick fish for sale in a mall pet store.
“Were you even passed out?” Ella asked, accusingly. “Did you even have a vision?”
Sophie yanked down the wet collar of her t-shirt, so Ella could see the sea glass. She was afraid to touch it. It felt different on her skin, hotter or colder, Sophie wasn’t sure. Just electrified somehow, charged. Sophie was surprised to see it look so ordinary. She thought it should still be glowing, that there should be an image of the mermaid imprinted on the seashell.
“Yeah?” Ella peered at it. “What about it?” She regretted stubbing out that cigarette. She was in the grip of a nic fit. It was either smoke, or begin to obsess on the multitude of germs she’d just gotten on her body. Creek bacteria, festering diseases from that dirty bottle—there was probably dried spit on it somewhere, from whoever had drunk from it. Stuck in the weeds for so long, some animal had probably peed on it. Some animal or some boy or some man. She snatched at her purse and rifled for her pack.
“This is what Angel gave me. Remember, I told you? I had a—” Sophie was hesitant to call it a vision, or a dream. She knew it was real. “I saw a mermaid, and she had one like it, and both of them were glowing and we were in the water. We were in the creek, right there.” Sophie pointed to the water gleaming flatly beside them. It barely picked up the moonlight, so dense was it with ick. “She’s some famous mermaid from Poland. She was sort of gnarly, like she wasn’t beautiful, her hair was really awful, and she said she’s going to help me fix Chelsea. I was talking to her underwater. We had this whole conversation. Then she did something.” Sophie’s lungs felt heavy with the memory. A twinge of the darkness she’d been shown shuddered through her. She coughed a tiny cough, and spat a splat of creek water. “Do you have any gum?” she asked her friend.
“A famous mermaid?” Ella tossed Sophie a pack of gum from her purse. “What’s she, like, Beyoncé mermaid? Does she sing? That’s a weird vision.” Ella lit up and breathed deeply from her cigarette. Her words jumbled out on a wave of smoke. “Usually not so much happens.”
“Usually nothing happens!” Sophie exclaimed. Usually you just had a feeling, a strange and dreamy moment, and poof, it was gone, and you tingled. Sophie didn’t tingle. Her jaw hurt as she worked the gum around her teeth. She touched it.
“I smacked you,” Ella admitted. “I’m sorry. You were out for an hour.” She stabbed her cigarette in the dark, toward Sophie. “I didn’t know what to do. I thought you were in a coma.” A wave of the fear, still so close, broke over her again and tears squeezed out her eyes.
“It’s okay,” Sophie said. “That’s what they do on TV. And salts. Smelling salt.” Something tugged at Sophie at the thought of salt. She felt the sear of it on her tongue, and rubbed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, seeking the flavor of it.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t have any smelling salt,” Ella said. “What about the water? How was there so much water inside you? That was even scarier than your coma or whatever.”
“From you pouring it on me?” Sophie suggested, even though she knew it wasn’t so. She’d felt the dribble of the creek water hitting her face, a weak splash. Not the tsunami her body expelled.
Ella shook her head. “No way,” she said.
“It was from talking underwater,” Sophie said. “It had to be. I must not know how to do it right. I must have gotten a bunch of water in my lungs.”
Ella stared at her. “You weren’t really underwater, Sophie.”
Sophie nodded. “I think I was.”
“I fucking promise you,” Ella said, “that you were right here. You were lying right here hardly breathing while I smacked you and threw water on you. You were not in the creek. I fucking promise you.”
Sophie thought of the mermaid. “You don’t have to swear so much,” she told her friend. “I would still understand your point if you didn’t.”
“I don’t fucking think you would,” Ella raged. “I don’t fucking think you understand right now how scary it was that you almost died, and then you go and puke fish, and now you sound crazy, like maybe you’re brain damaged or something. Sophie!” Ella started to cry again.
Sophie appreciated her friend’s point. Sophie totally sounded crazy. She supposed one of two things was happening. She was either crazy, or she wasn’t. She mulled it over. Thinking that she might be crazy made her feel crazy, right away. If she doubted any one thing that had happened to her over the past twenty-four hours—the way she’d felt her mother’s feelings, or Laurie LeClair’s; the way she’d come at Angel’s and found them hard, hidden, and now the mermaid and something wide and dark beyond her, something she wasn’t allowing herself to remember—if she doubted any one of these things then she’d have to doubt everything, and she knew so much to be true. If she thought that maybe, just possibly, something incredible was happening, that didn’t make her feel crazy at all. It made her feel upside-down and a little bit scared, but exhilarated, too. Not crazy.
“Ella,” she addressed her friend. “I don’t think I’m crazy. I think I was just hanging out underwater with this totally busted, sort of mean mermaid.”
Ella stared at her friend, waiting for her to snap psych! or at least bust up laughing. It didn’t happen. “Oh, no,” wailed Ella, watching Sophie’s wide-eyed, earnest face. “Great. Fucking great. You totally ruined your brain.”