Girl at the Bottom of the Sea by Michelle Tea Page A

was Odmieńce, 100 percent. But Sophie was only half. And was it even half? It’s not like she’d been tested at some sort of Magic Lab. Who knew—maybe her Odmieńce gene was weak. Maybe there had been a rotten mistake. She looked glumly at her impatient tutor.

    â€œYou command the waters,” Syrena said flatly. “Or I summon a dolphin to bring you back to creek in Chelsea. I’ll be done with you.”
    Sophie gazed out into the water. It was like looking into a dark sky—grayness all around, monsoon clouds erupting from the floor. She knew there were millions of molecules here, but it looked like nothing. Darkness. She felt her magic pouch still tied to her belt loops, hanging soggy in the water. What was even inside it now? Mud? She poked and squeezed it, but was not called to it. She dropped it, and it floated limply beside her.
    While she waited, Syrena plucked a piece of shell from her hair and busied herself filing her opalescent fingernails into wicked points. She curled her lips and brought down her baleen, coated in debris from the geyser. With a huff she blew it all back into the ocean.
    Sophie turned away from her. She didn’t want to waste her time hating the mermaid. It wouldn’t help her out of this problem, this terrible problem—thousands of miles beneath the sea, far from any land,and barely able to swim. She bit down her rising panic. She closed her eyes and floated. She breathed in and out slowly, slowly, letting the water hold her. And it did, it did hold her. She was suspended ever so lightly above the vents in the ocean floor, the hot clouds billowing around her.
    What was holding her, exactly? What was water? It moved at the command of the moon, coming in strong and pulling back. It moved at the command of her grandmother, gathering itself, working against nature. Was Kishka the ocean itself? Had they swum deeper and deeper to escape something that was now all around them, something endless just waiting to strike them again? Would the sea suddenly hurl them into the sky, or would it wrap around their throats like an ocean-sized anaconda? What was this water they moved through?
    â€œSyrena, is the water… could it be Kishka? Could she turn into the whole ocean? Is the ocean on her side?”
    The mermaid looked at Sophie evenly and shook her head. “Ocean my home always. Ocean is ocean. Is water, is element. Basic. Like air, like fire and the earth, the lava and sand and dirt. Elements are neutral. If you have magic to work them, you make them good or evil, like puppets.”
    Sophie remembered the fist-shaped wave punching up from the water. She remembered the flash of her grandmother in her beastly bird formation, reflected in every drop of the creek. How powerful was Kishka, able to summon and control nature itself: perhaps she was nature, an unknown force of it. But Sophie was Kishka’s granddaughter.She might not be able to summon the waters and make them box for her, but surely she could figure out how to swim.
    Sophie calmed herself and grew quiet. She began to truly feel the water, alive all around her. Though she felt stillness in its embrace, she became aware of its motion, its constant shifting, the way it perpetually morphed and flowed over her body. The waters accommodated her, filling the space around her as she bobbed and floated. Its motion was never ending; its thought— thought? —ancient and eternal.
    The waters, Sophie suddenly understood, were alive . She understood it deep in her body, half girl, half Odmieńce, a body made up of so much water—indeed, most of her body was water, and Sophie started to feel the communication happening. Her body’s water in conversation with the ocean around her, like the beating of her heart, the motion of blood in her veins, an automatic, subconscious activity. Like a whisper. Sophie was water. And so she spoke to the ocean, and asked that it carry her.
    Syrena felt the