I USED TO BELIEVE that people couldn’t change. Now I realize that if other people are anything like me, they hold on to certain memories like pieces of themselves, and take them along wherever they go. We’re made of the things that happen to us, so that no matter how much things change around us, we will always be who we are. I try to think about that when I get stressed about change. I try to remember that I’ll always be me, no matter what is going on around me.
But even so, sometimes it really gets to me when I find out that a place I remember so clearly has changed. When Rose got back from Disney World last summer, the first question I asked her was if she liked the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea ride.
Huh? she said.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I said, slowly. You know — the submarines?
She blinked. I don’t know what that is, she said.
It’s only the best ride in the whole park, I said. You’ve seriously never heard of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? Jules Verne? Captain Nemo?
How long ago was it that you went to Disney World again? she said. Weren’t you like, twelve?
Yeah, I said. Four years isn’t that long, ya know.
Well I didn’t see anything like Under the Sea or whatever, Rose said. They must’ve taken it out.
How could they take it out? I said. There’s this ginormous pool for all the submarines. It’s huge.
How should I know? Rose said. Maybe it was busted. Or maybe no one knows what that is anymore so they shut it down. Who cares, anyway.
After that I just kept my mouth shut ’cause it was obvious that Rose was in one of her moods where everything I say is lame. And anyway, part of me really didn’t want to know that the submarine ride was gone forever. I wanted to remember it in my own way, and I wanted that memory to stay true forever.
When I went to Disney World with Da, the submarine ride was the best part of the whole trip. We’d only had the one day to do all the rides ’cause Da’s conference was in Miami and it was his only day off. Up until then I’d been hanging around the hotel swimming pool by myself during the day, bored as all hell. The pool had waterfalls and a floating bar in the middle. But when you’re twelve there’s only so much wading and suntanning and pineapple juice-drinking and magazine-reading you can do before you start wishing you had someone you could splash or play Marco Polo with. Jess hadn’t wanted to come ’cause she’d already signed up for Horseback-riding camp with her best friend for that week. I’d told her she was nuts to turn down a trip to Florida, but she said it probably wouldn’t be fun with Da anyway. Turns out she was kinda right.
I don’t remember much about Miami. I remember going down to the beach outside the hotel and seeing a lady doing cornrows in girls’ hair for money. Da had given me ten bucks and that got me two cornrows, one on either side of my head. Da was pissed when he found out how much I’d paid. How could you be so stupid? he’d said. I thought he was being super mean at the time, but looking back I have to admit it was pretty stupid. And the trip wasn’t all bad. Once Da was done with working and we drove to Disney World in Orlando, he let me drag him around wherever I wanted. It was a pretty fun day, all things considered. Da really wanted to go on It’s a Small World so we did, but when it was over I made sure he knew how dumb it was, how freaky all those little robot children looked, and he had to agree. When we came out of Space Mountain a bird landed on Da’s head and I laughed hysterically watching him swat at his hair and run around in circles, Get it off, Jesus Christ! But when we left the park that evening we both agreed, hands-down, that Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was the best part of the day.
We knew it was going to be good ’cause the lineup was the longest of any ride. When we finally boarded we got seats next to one of the little round windows at the back of the sub, where it was darkest. It was a nice break from the hot sun of the day and all the screaming and flashing lights and stomach-wrenching drops. Everyone was quiet in the sub, little kids included. We watched the blue water bubble and rush past, listened to Captain Nemo’s voice telling us scientific facts about the creatures peering at us with shiny glass eyes.
And when we came up on the giant squid near the end, even Da gasped. It was really the only sea creature along the whole ride that you could almost believe, so it made the fake-looking fibreglass fish and the mermaids with cartoon faces and stick-straight arms forgivable. In the dark, murky water, the squid was bloated and pink like a muscle. Its tentacles coiled tight around the belly of another submarine. A single glowing eye, big as a Frisbee, glared in our direction.
Full repellent charge! Captain Nemo ordered. Lightning flashes flickered in the water and our sub zoomed ahead. The eye, bright and unblinking, followed us like a waning moon.
A couple of weeks after we got back from Florida, Da surprised me with a book called SEA MONSTERS: GIANT SQUID. It had a black-and-white drawing of a squid attacking a submarine on the cover.
Just like the one we saw, remember? he said, grinning.
It was a nice thing for Da to do, but I remember thinking it was kinda dumb at first. It looked like a kid’s book, and at that time I was trying to get into sophisticated adult books like Animal Farm and Great Expectations. The book sat uncracked on my bookshelf for months until one day, just out of curiosity, I decided to flip through. It turned out that the book actually had some cool facts inside. For instance, that all squid have camouflage capabilities. And not camouflage like the way some moths have wings textured like bark so they look like part of the tree. Squid have chromatophores in their skin that can actually shift and morph the pigment in the cells to change colour. If they want to, squid can blend right into their surroundings no matter what they are — coral, rock, or even sand — and they can do it so well that they practically turn invisible. One minute you see a squid and the next there’s only a tangled bunch of seaweed. They have the power to change into whatever they want to be. That means that wherever a squid goes, it’ll never be somewhere it can’t fit in.
That’s when I decided I wanted to be a marine biologist. I read that book cover to cover. Then I took out a whole bunch of other sea-life books from the public library. I dug up the boxes of Wiley’s old National Geographics in the basement and went through every single one looking for underwater photographs in coral reefs and deep-sea trenches.
I dreamt of squid. I kept having the same dream where I was swimming in the hotel pool in Miami and I felt something brush up against my legs, but when I looked down into the water there was nothing there. I tried to swim away but something was holding me by the ankle. Somehow I knew it was a giant squid, in camouflage with the clear blue water. Invisible. I kept kicking my legs but the squid held on, and then it began to swell up like a sponge, larger and larger, until the whole pool filled up with slimy squid flesh. I was trying to climb out but I kept slipping and sliding on the squid and falling on my face and getting squid juice in my mouth. The swelling flesh rose up around me like a thundercloud — and then I’d wake up.
I made the mistake of telling Jess about the dream and of course she looked it up in her dream dictionary, even though I’ve told her over and over that I don’t believe in that psychoanalysis crap.
Let’s see, she said, finding the page and running her finger down the list. Here it is — Squid. If you see a squid in your dream, you may be feeling unconsciously threatened.
’Kay, I said. Big whoop.
Wait, Jess said, there’s more. Your judgment might also be clouded.
This stuff’s so bogus, I said. It’s like horoscopes. Everything they say is so wishy-washy that it’d be easy for anyone to convince themselves, Oh yeah, that’s totally me.
Jess just ignored me. Alternatively, she said, a squid can also symbolize greed. You may be thinking about yourself while disregarding the needs of others. Oh wait — there’s also something here about eating squid . . .
I wasn’t eating it, I said.
Didn’t you say you got some in your mouth? It says here that — Ugh, just forget it, I said. I don’t believe in this stuff anyway.
Eating squid indicates that you are feeling self-conscious, and you worry about how others perceive you.
Oh my God, I said. Can we stop now?
Fine, Jess said. She tossed the book on her bed. She had a little smile on her face, as if she’d just learned some dirty secret about me. That look always makes me steam like a hot sausage. I threw a hissy-fit and stormed out of her room, which probably made her think she was even more right. It’s not like I cared, anyway. I mean, who isn’t self-conscious? Certainly not Jess, Miss I-talk-to-myself-in-the-mirror.
I had the squid dream a few more times after that. I wouldn’t call it a nightmare because by then I’d decided that squid were pretty much the coolest creatures on earth. And probably the neatest thing about them is that no matter how hard scientists and oceanographers try, they still don’t know much about them. There was one oceanographer who tried attaching cameras to the backs of sperm whales on the slim chance that they might come into contact with a squid. Surprise surprise, it didn’t work. And as much as I like learning new things about deep-sea creatures, I’m glad the squid is still so mysterious. It makes the things we do know seem like treasures.
My absolute favourite thing to tell people about squid is that they have not one, but THREE hearts. Nobody believes me at first when I tell them that. They think I’m making it up. I admit, it does seem kind of excessive. Why would a squid need three separate hearts when most other sea creatures get by just fine with one? Well, the reason is that squid need to circulate lots of blood in order to breathe at such low depths. They have one main heart that takes care of most of the body, and two smaller hearts, like mirrors of each other, that feed the gills on either side. Now, most people ask me why they don’t just have one big heart that pumps more efficiently instead. I don’t really know the answer to that. I’ve never been able to find it. But sometimes, just ’cause it’s more fun than saying I don’t know, I’ll say, Because three is my lucky number. That’s what I said to Rose, but she just clucked her tongue the way her mom does when her dad makes a corny pun.
Right, she said. ’Cause that makes a whole lotta sense. I guess that’s also supposed to explain why you’re wearing three rings?
I shrugged. They’re my Mum’s, I said. I can’t decide which one I like best.
Well, she said, you could at least wear them on different fingers.
Yeah, I said, maybe. But I didn’t want to. I’d been wearing them for long enough that there was a slight indent in my finger, as if the rings were starting to fuse with my skin. When I took them off it looked like some of my finger was missing. The skin that the rings usually covered was smooth and shiny, like the scar left by a bad burn.