taken Sage’s shaved hair to grow long again, shorter than it’s taken me to grow twenty-six fighting fish from eggs for my science experiment, “The Relationship Between Aggression and Hypertension in
B. Splendens.
” I got the eggs one month before the accident. When I showed them to Isabel, red and clumped together in a small tank, she laughed and said she could hardly believe that bunch of caviar would become real animals. Well, guess what? They are now.
Every day I feed them and give them liquid vitamins and alter their blood pressure with drugs, and still get my homework done and make it to school just as if I were fully recovered. Which I’m not, in many ways. My parents are aware of this. As a kind of remedy, they came up with the idea of a spring-break trip to St. Maarten in the Virgin Islands. We’re not a family that tends to take spring-break trips. We’ve never taken one, in fact. So when my father rose from his chair at the dinner table and asked Sage and me what we thought about going to St. Maarten, I took it to mean we’d reached a state of emergency.
They’ve been talking about the problem between Sage and me for months, our psychologist mom trying to give us counseling, our dentist dad distracting us with jokes. Now scuba lessons, in preparation for the trip. What our parents don’t understand is that their son has become cruel and unusual, and he shows no sign of changing.
We stop at a red light and Sage eats a handful of fries all at once. I stare out the window. Beneath the streetlights, snowflakes swarm like moths. It’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t winter. Sage crumples the greasy bag in his lap and tosses it into the back seat.
“Anyone could fuck with your tank underwater,” he says. “One turn of a knob. That’s all it would take.”
I lower my sandwich from the eating position. The feeling I remember is being in Isabel’s car with the water coming in, filling my mouth with its cold fishy taste, and me groping in the dark for my seat belt, my lungs already hot and tight, and Isabel in the seat beside me bleeding into the darkness. Sage must know what I’m thinking about, but he won’t look at me or say anything more. He revs the motor hard, three times, and then the light turns green and we’re off.
At the YMCA I follow Sage into the lobby, where the chlorine smell of the pool stops me cold. Sage doesn’t notice. He doesn’t even look back. He just disappears down the hall toward the men’s locker room, leaving me standing there alone. I look at the trophies in a glass display case, silver swimmers and wrestlers and softball players, all frozen mid-sport. The lobby is full of kids and old people milling around and getting snacks from the machines. I sit down on a bench and think about my tropicals, my pet fish, the ones I don’t do experiments on. It calms me to imagine them swimming in their pH-balanced environments, the clown loaches loaching around near the bottom of the freshwater tank, the pearl gouramis flirting in a stand of bamboo plant. I have a marine tank too, with three yellow tangs and two fireworks anemones and a dusky angelfish. Tonight, for the first time, I’ll begin to know what my fish have known all their lives: how to breathe underwater.
When I get calm enough I go to the women’s locker room and find an empty locker. All around me, teenagers are tying back their hair and putting their naked bodies into tank suits. Someone in the next row of lockers says she heard we’re not actually scuba-ing today, just learning about the equipment and doing some laps with fins to get used to the feeling. That makes me feel a little better. When I go to St. Maarten I will have my own fins, according to my father; we have already looked at examples in the window of Arbor Valley Sea and Ski, and I have admired a translucent blue pair with a matching mask. They seem like they’d be almost invisible underwater.
Looking at those fins made it easy to
B. Splendens.
” I got the eggs one month before the accident. When I showed them to Isabel, red and clumped together in a small tank, she laughed and said she could hardly believe that bunch of caviar would become real animals. Well, guess what? They are now.
Every day I feed them and give them liquid vitamins and alter their blood pressure with drugs, and still get my homework done and make it to school just as if I were fully recovered. Which I’m not, in many ways. My parents are aware of this. As a kind of remedy, they came up with the idea of a spring-break trip to St. Maarten in the Virgin Islands. We’re not a family that tends to take spring-break trips. We’ve never taken one, in fact. So when my father rose from his chair at the dinner table and asked Sage and me what we thought about going to St. Maarten, I took it to mean we’d reached a state of emergency.
They’ve been talking about the problem between Sage and me for months, our psychologist mom trying to give us counseling, our dentist dad distracting us with jokes. Now scuba lessons, in preparation for the trip. What our parents don’t understand is that their son has become cruel and unusual, and he shows no sign of changing.
We stop at a red light and Sage eats a handful of fries all at once. I stare out the window. Beneath the streetlights, snowflakes swarm like moths. It’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t winter. Sage crumples the greasy bag in his lap and tosses it into the back seat.
“Anyone could fuck with your tank underwater,” he says. “One turn of a knob. That’s all it would take.”
I lower my sandwich from the eating position. The feeling I remember is being in Isabel’s car with the water coming in, filling my mouth with its cold fishy taste, and me groping in the dark for my seat belt, my lungs already hot and tight, and Isabel in the seat beside me bleeding into the darkness. Sage must know what I’m thinking about, but he won’t look at me or say anything more. He revs the motor hard, three times, and then the light turns green and we’re off.
At the YMCA I follow Sage into the lobby, where the chlorine smell of the pool stops me cold. Sage doesn’t notice. He doesn’t even look back. He just disappears down the hall toward the men’s locker room, leaving me standing there alone. I look at the trophies in a glass display case, silver swimmers and wrestlers and softball players, all frozen mid-sport. The lobby is full of kids and old people milling around and getting snacks from the machines. I sit down on a bench and think about my tropicals, my pet fish, the ones I don’t do experiments on. It calms me to imagine them swimming in their pH-balanced environments, the clown loaches loaching around near the bottom of the freshwater tank, the pearl gouramis flirting in a stand of bamboo plant. I have a marine tank too, with three yellow tangs and two fireworks anemones and a dusky angelfish. Tonight, for the first time, I’ll begin to know what my fish have known all their lives: how to breathe underwater.
When I get calm enough I go to the women’s locker room and find an empty locker. All around me, teenagers are tying back their hair and putting their naked bodies into tank suits. Someone in the next row of lockers says she heard we’re not actually scuba-ing today, just learning about the equipment and doing some laps with fins to get used to the feeling. That makes me feel a little better. When I go to St. Maarten I will have my own fins, according to my father; we have already looked at examples in the window of Arbor Valley Sea and Ski, and I have admired a translucent blue pair with a matching mask. They seem like they’d be almost invisible underwater.
Looking at those fins made it easy to
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