Page 12

“I can’t believe I’m driving you to a boy’s house right now!” Blair looked at me in the rearview mirror, her face bright as the sun reflecting off the ocean.

“It’s just Everett,” I said as if I was trying to believe it. As if I saw Everett as a boy with “just” before his name. As if he didn’t matter that much and I actually got sleep last night.

“Just Everett? Come on, you talk about him all the time, and I think he’s a very nice boy.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Except it did. Not that boys couldn’t be nice and be talked about without it meaning anything, but it was different with Everett. Blair didn’t have to know that, so I rolled denial from my eyes and huffed dramatically.

“Whatever you say.” She dotted a pinky over her eyelid to fix her eyeshadow in the mirror, the same way people checked their teeth for food or lipstick stains before a date. But she wasn’t going on a date.

And neither was I.

It was just a day at the aquarium.

So what if I caught myself in the same mirror checking my teeth for lingering bits of breakfast? So what if I wiped the summer sheen off my cheeks and wished I’d snuck some mascara and lip gloss from Blair’s bathroom? So what if I paired cutoffs with my fanciest linen tank?

The reason we were going to the aquarium at all was that Blair won four tickets in a SUNY 95.1 radio contest, and she begged me to bring a friend. My first thought was Haven, but the Rivera-Sanchezes were in Mexico for the first two weeks of summer. That left Everett. Sure, I could have invited Mason or Jorge, they were fine, but they weren’t Everett. Everett just got me. Ever since we met, we’d taken what was strange about each other and found a way to fit in those curves.

Blair pulled into the driveway of his beautiful house. Everett was the only one of us that lived oceanfront. Even Mason, whose parents could have probably bought the whole island, didn’t live close enough to sleepwalk to shore. Everett lived close enough to have to turn his lights off at night for the baby sea turtles.

Everett walked to the car with his fists shoved in his pockets and his head down, looking up just in time to open the door.

“Hi,” I blurted from the back seat.

He fastened himself into the passenger seat and turned around. “Hi, Quinn.” He smiled at me, then hung over the seat to tap Hadley’s knee. “Hi, Hadley.”

It was weird seeing him up front next to Blair at first, but I quickly got used to it. With me in the back looking out for Hadley, it was easier to keep my eyes on everything else too. Everett Bishop was in my car. Sitting next to my aunt. Teasing my cousin. It had been less than a minute and already he’d wedged himself into my family for the day. It was real now. I slunk my sweaty thighs down the polyester seat and hoped it made me invisible. I checked my face for redness. Wiped more sweat off my forehead and onto the seat. Wished I could do the same to Blair’s eyeshadow.

“So, Everett. What’s your story?” Blair asked protectively, filling the empty shoes of my father.

Isn’t that what dads were supposed to do? Grill anyone that got too close until they looked like blackened shrimp on a barbecue skewer?

Oh my God, Blair. I slapped my hand on my forehead and pressed my head against the cool window. She was supposed to be the cool aunt. When had she become so lame? How did she expect him to tell her his life story on the way to an aquarium? Where would one even begin?

But Everett didn’t look fazed; he hadn’t a complaint on his breath. “I moved here from Chicago last March.”

Everett decided his life story began in Piper Island, or maybe he thought that was all Blair cared about. Maybe that was all he cared about. He told her about transitioning mid-year into the local middle school, trying and hating sweet tea, how long it took him to get used to southern humidity and moody weather.

“There was a point when Quinn actually knew more about Piper than me.” He turned around and smirked at me.

I scoffed playfully and wondered how much of my face he saw—if he saw the sheen the way I did.

“I’m sure you caught on fast, just like Quinn did, huh? It’s pretty amazing here.”

“Especially in the summer. Even with all the tourists.” Everett looked at me again, his eyebrows raised in the beginning of a laugh.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a tourist. I’m local adjacent. It’s different.” I checked myself in the mirror. Resented the rosy cheeks staring back.

“All I’m saying is that tourists love the aquarium.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “Haven loves the aquarium.”

“Haven is Haven,” he said.

I couldn’t argue with that.

When we got to the aquarium, we stammered into a heat that was like a desert mirage snarling off the sidewalk. Fish statues hung suspended above a wishing fountain. Everett walked next to me as Blair held Hadley’s hand over asphalt so hot it could melt the shoes off our feet.

Once we got past the ticket booth, Blair told us to meet her and Hadley in three hours. We hadn’t discussed this before, but Blair must have had her own idea of how today was going to go. The way she looked at me, eyes shiny like her abalone eyeshadow, told me she wanted me to be alone with Everett, playing Cupid in a world where Cupid should be shot.

I sharpened my eyes at her but softened them before Everett noticed. I smiled at both of them and hoped Blair could see through to the disdain. “See you in three hours.” I surprised myself with how normal I sounded when I would have preferred to lie out on the sidewalk and cease to exist.

But instead we set off into the freshwater exhibit while Blair and Hadley stayed back to “use the bathroom first.”

The air in the room was thick. If you breathed in too much, your lungs couldn’t hold it all. It was so warm and damp that our clothes clung to our skin like wet bathing suits. It was thick and warm and damp—the perfect air for two people who didn’t know how to act around each other.

I bet that was how Everett’s hands would have felt if I held them right now. Not that I wanted to hold them. Neither did he. His hands were deep in his shorts pockets. And I was, well, me.

Everett walked to the first tank. I joined him, staring at an alligator floating idly in the water. It looked fake until it finally looked at us like we were the attraction. What was she thinking? Did she have some alligator friend in there that was so cute and cool that she didn’t know what to do in all the thick, warm water? So she just thrummed there, her only movement a steady blink, trying to figure out what to do?

“Do you have something in your eye?” Everett asked.

“Yeah. Must be an eyelash.” That was why people normally blinked their eyes, right? Not because they were pretending to be a love-stricken alligator in a tank or anything stupid like that.

“You might want to gator it out.”

I looked at him. Seconds of silence passed before my mouth won the battle between smiling or not. Finally, we erupted into an ice-shattering laughter. It was a wonder it didn’t break all the tanks around us and send us swimming through the glass ceiling.

I swept a ceremonious finger through my eyelashes. “I think that gator it.” The pun sounded even dumber from my mouth.

Now with the proverbial ice all broken, Everett and I walked across its shiny shards to the next tank. He made another ridiculous joke. I did a disappointed-but-not-really head shake until it spilled into a giggle. We did this same push and pull at every exhibit. We teased a pond slider turtle for facing the wrong way. We named him Holden since his expression was stuck on annoyed and his defiance looked intentional.

Everett made a terrible joke about a school of rainbow trout swimming in a fake current, thus never going anywhere at all.

“If I could speak fish, I’d tell them it’s a trap.” My gaze was fixated on the way they moved in unison through the fabricated stream. “Do you think they know they aren’t really moving?”

“I don’t think they know what water is.”

“Of course they know what water is.” I said, half offended. “Maybe not while they’re in it, but they sure do know how it feels to go without it.” My mind wandered off some sad, deep end into my own woes.

“That’s very poetic of you, Q. Now I feel bad for these trout. You’ve made me really char about them.” Everett stopped my mind from careening, like a fake stream that kept me from veering too far at all.

“Ouch. That one was bad.” My smile made it seem like it was his best. The best at being the worst. The best at pulling me out of the deep end.

“That’s not very charring of you.” He winked.

When we’d exhausted our jokes in the freshwater room, we walked through the double doors into the Tidal Zone. Finally, I could breathe again, A/C peeling our clothes off our skin.

“What I like about this aquarium is it makes sense. It’s like we’re working our way from freshwater streams to the bottom of the ocean.”

“You sound just like a tourist right now, Everett Bishop.”

“I resent that, Quinn Kessler.”

My name sounded a whole lot like he practiced it in the bathroom mirror the same way I’d practiced my facial expressions last night. It sounded a lot like the smile on his face—soft and confused about how much he truly resented being called a tourist.

When I smiled back, it was nothing like the ones I decided on last night. Instead, it felt soft and confused about why his dumb jokes didn’t sound so dumb at all to my ears.

“You ever done a touch tank?” Everett led us to the touch tank.

“My mom says it’s how you get diseases.” I hid my hands in my pockets like he always did.

“Come on, you gotta try it. It’s awesome.”

“When my mom told me not to fall for peer pressure, I don’t think this is what she meant.”

“You’re not falling for peer pressure; it’s pier pressure.” Everett pointed to the pier painted on the wall behind the touch tank, just in case I didn’t hear the pun in his inflection. “Pier pressure is way more fun. And not dangerous like the peer pressure moms warn us about.”

I let out a little snort. “You’re so dumb. Why do your puns still surprise me?”

“Because you don’t spend enough time with me.” A look flashed across his eyes. He gulped and stammered, “Come on, touching a hermit crab isn’t a gateway drug.” Everett stuck his hand in the touch tank, gently inching back a hermit crab shell to force it out. The hermit crab dangled out, antennae dancing wildly in the water. “Hi, Quinn!”

I knew the crab was a crab, but a small part of me believed it really was waving at me, begging me to join in. It only sounded vaguely like Everett putting a voice on.

Part of my mind wanted to listen to Mom’s voice in my head, but something about the dopey grin on Everett’s face made me want to touch the hermit crab. And a sticky anemone, a stout horseshoe crab, a spiny sea urchin.

I touched the starfish at the same time as Everett, feeling an unrehearsed, dopey grin on my face with each touch.

When we finished, Everett didn’t laugh when I was on my second hand-wash. Or when I checked my forearms for that salty smell and washed a third time. In fact, he joined me.

We made our way to the Reef, coming face to face with rainbows of corals and Nemos, Dorys, and Gills all around them. I was sure Hadley and Blair would think the same considering how many times we’d fallen asleep watching Finding Nemo together. I was about to make a joke about how they weaved in and out of the coral, but Everett was standing before the jellyfish tank.

It was dark over there. A large sheet of dark blue outlined his silhouette. Even in the shadows, I knew his hands were stuffed in his pockets.

I joined him in the quiet. These jellyfish demanded a special silence, the way they floated through the water like it wasn’t even there. Their bodies were illuminated by the blacklight, a soft blue outline carving out what we otherwise might have missed.

How could something so beautiful be so dangerous?

I watched Everett watch the jellyfish. His face and that beauty mark on his cheek were lit the same ultraviolet blue. His mouth was open slightly, lost in awe. He was so beautiful, even with that expressionless expression, watching another beautiful creature pulse through the water.

He must have felt my stares, because he turned to look at me. This gave me two seconds to decide if I wanted to pretend I wasn’t just staring longingly or pretend that my own expressionless expression was only from the jellyfish.

In a moment of courage, I kept my face on his, taking back some control with a soft smile. “Your face is a little blue.”

“So’s yours.” He smiled. His teeth shone bright white in the blacklight. “I wish I had a pun for it, but it’s just blue.”

Just blue. If just blue were as beautiful as him, then I hoped for a lifetime of just blues. Just blue like the very deepest the summer sky gets. Just blue like the off-brand cotton candy ice cream colored the wrong shade. Just blue like a dark living room during an afternoon thunderstorm.

Just blue. The haze that kissed us from the moon jelly exhibit at Piper Island Aquarium.

My heart was thrumming too fast. My hands felt cold and clammy. My guard fell to the floor around two beautiful, dangerous things.

“Blue is kind of ugly,” I said. I knew it would shatter the moment, but ruining nice moments was easier than letting them ruin you.

The look in Everett’s face ruined me anyway. His face fell so subtly that I would have missed it if I hadn’t been so mesmerized by him. My heart went with his face, both of them scorned and lifeless. I’d never seen him look like this, but I should have known I’d make him feel like this eventually. Better to show myself—the poison that hid beneath my guard—sooner and let him run away and save himself before it was too late.

“Come on, let’s go to the Deep Ocean,” I said in an attempt to revive the moment.

Everett followed me quietly downstairs to the next exhibit. It was just as blue, but I felt more comfortable away from the moon jellies. In the two-story showcase tank, small hammerhead sharks, stingrays, and a sea turtle swam around in circles. A school of skinny, silver fish like the ones in the fountain outside carved their own path.

Everett and I had carved our own path as well, swimming between discomfort and delight throughout the day. After what just happened, this tank brought us back to delight. Inside the tank was a spherical indentation meant to get you closer to the fish.

“I dare you to go inside,” Everett said. “Real peer pressure this time.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Meaning it’s dangerous?”

“No.” He smirked and rocked on his heels.

“Then you go first.”

“Pinky promise you’ll go in, too?” He held his pinky out.

I linked pinkies with him. “Pinky promise.”

He crawled into the tank, an inviting smile on his face. If he could do it, then I could too. I pinky promised, after all. I shrugged and crawled my way into it. It was deeper than it looked. I turned around and rested my back against the clear tank, dizzy from the water’s distortion, paranoid we were going to burst through it. The shape pushed us into the middle. We were pressed into each other on one whole side. My throat felt stuffed with cotton, but not the candy kind.

Everett pointed to the belly of a hammerhead, the gaping mouth of a stingray. A sea turtle swam over us. I gasped and laughed like I never thought I could. I pointed at it, smiling my cheeks into apples. We were wrapped up in another just blue haze, and Everett watched me instead of the sea turtle.

I wondered if his cheeks were apples, too.

Our three hours were almost up, so we worked quickly through the rest of the tanks. Halfway across the floor, I stopped in my tracks. My pulse quickened so rapidly I felt it in my toes. A chill zapped through me. The cotton feeling came back.

Everett stopped. “What’s wrong?”

“The whale,” I said to our toes. “I’m afraid of whales.”

I couldn’t look up from the blue ocean lights dancing on the carpet. I was too afraid to even look at the beast responsible for the large, whale-shaped shadow we were standing in.

“Whales? That’s your fear? Why not sharks?”

I didn’t tell him about my real, deepest fears, the ones you shouldn’t bring up in an aquarium with your friend. I didn’t tell him I would have swam with the whales if it meant being able to trust people. If it meant I could stop calling someone my friend when I really wanted them to be more.

“It’s something about the shape. And the size.”

I pictured the horrid ridges carved down its bloated white belly. Barnacles stuck to its fins like mold to an abandoned beach house. I’d only ever seen them in Hadley’s picture books and that scene in Finding Nemo, but I turned my head when I knew it was coming.

“Let’s go look at the seahorses, then.” He held his hand out.

A hand is different from a pinky, but my mind wasn’t working right, so I took it. Let him lead us to shallower waters. I was holding his hand. Everett Bishop’s hand, wrapped in mine like a seahorse’s tail grips swaying sea grass. I couldn’t figure out who let go first, but I still felt his touch buzzing in my hand as he cracked jokes about the baby seahorses and snow crabs and lobsters. I didn’t catch the punchlines.

When we were done exploring, we killed the rest of our time waiting for Blair and Hadley in the gift shop. I squished a penny into a sea turtle and Everett squished his into a shark.

On the way out, it was hotter than earlier. The sidewalk melted our shoes on the way to the car. We followed slowly behind Blair and Hadley, our shoulders brushing each other’s without a spherical tank needing to do the squishing. Everett stopped me at the fountain and pulled two unsquished pennies from his pocket.

My hand acted on autopilot, opening for the penny. At this point, Blair was nowhere in sight, probably watching us through rows of hazy car windows, giddy because we were staring at each other in front of a wishing fountain.

“You can’t pass a fountain without making a wish,” he said.

He closed his eyes. He mulled over a wish for a few seconds, then threw the penny behind his shoulder. The way his eyes shifted under his eyelids made it seem like he’d done this at a million other fountains. His confident smile indicated that every single wish had come true.

Before he could catch me staring, I closed my eyes. I whispered my wish into the penny warming in my palm, sent it soaring behind my shoulder, and listened to it splash the water. I pictured it floating down to make a permanent home next to someone’s wish for money or fame.

It was the same wish I had whispered to every cheek eyelash, flickering birthday candle, dandelion puff to the wind. It was what I would wish on a shooting star if I were ever lucky enough to see one.

I wish my dad had never hurt my mom.

The wish didn’t come true, of course. That was what happened when you wished for something that couldn’t come true. Or when you assigned belief to things that didn’t make logical sense. You couldn’t rewind tape that was already spun out.

Maybe I should have wished that I’d see a shooting star one day—then I could ask the star for help and hope it had enough power to turn back time and fix the unfixable.

Life didn’t work that way. Wishes were for fun. At least, they were supposed to be.

“What’d you wish for?” Everett asked.

I opened my eyes and blinked away the sudden brightness. My face managed a smile that I tried to hide between my lips. “I can’t tell you. You know the rules.”

“Well, I wished that you’d tell me your wish.”

“That’s a dumb wish. And you told me, so it can’t come true.”

“Huh, you got me. I guess you’re right.”

“Guess so.” I raised my eyebrows with a smirk and turned on my heels toward the car.

The drive back to Everett’s house was filled with talks of our favorite sea creatures. Everett recited his top puns for Blair. Blair rolled her eyes at them the same way I did. Hadley excitedly babbled about her favorite fish. Her cheeks rested on her new dolphin stuffed animal. The evening air streamed in from the cracked windows.

It helped me forget the jellyfish threatening my mind.

When we got there, Everett thanked us again and said his goodbyes.

While Blair backed out of the driveway, I rolled my window down.

I waved and shouted out the window, “Hey, Everett! Sea you later!” I emphasized it so he could hear the pun.

He pivoted on his front porch, waving back. “You shore will!” He shouted his own pun through megaphone hands.

A laugh escaped me while I rolled the window up. I threw my head back onto the headrest with a smile, watching the houses blur by.

“You like him,” Blair said with a laugh from the driver’s seat.

“I do not,” I said. I watched my face turn red in the rearview mirror.