A Possibility of Whales

by Karen Rivers

“Harry,” said Harry, his voice cracking but firm. He looked down at the floor. He looked so uncomfortable that Nat suddenly, without knowing how she knew, just knew.

  Harry was Harriet.

  Why hadn’t he just done what she had done, just said, “Actually, it’s Harry”?

  “Huh,” said Mr. Hajeezi. “Must be a mistake on the form. I’m just going to go down to the office and correct the record.”

  Harry turned pale, then red, then pale again.

  His face finally settled on white: the color of a piece of paper. A piece of paper that wanted to be folded into the shape of a crane so it could fly directly out the window and disappear into the foggy sky.

  “I’m Harriet,” he mumbled. “Forget it. I mean, don’t worry about it.”

  “Sorry?” said Mr. Hajeezi, which Nat understood now was a Canadian way of saying, “Pardon me?”

  “I’m Harriet Brasch, OK?” Harry was shouting. “I’m Harriet. GO AHEAD AND STARE, EVERYONE.”

  Then he ran out of the room, his Converse squeaking just like Nat’s had squeaked until the sound was gone.

  They must have just waxed the floor, she thought, goose bumps rising on her arms.

  “Oh,” said Mr. Hajeezi. “Oh man. Shoot.”

  The two girls who Nat had had her eye on as potential BFFs giggled. The giggles turned into full-on laughter. A wave of myötähäpea, which is a Finnish word for sympathetic embarrassment and also the very first untranslatable foreign word that Nat had learned, crashed over her.

  She liked to roll myötähäpea around in her head. It was a perfect marble of a word, red and swirly in the middle and definitely made of glass.

  “Stop that,” said Mr. Hajeezi. “This isn’t funny. I need to . . .” His voice trailed off. Nat wondered what he needed to do. It seemed to her that what he needed to do was to go get Harry and to apologize. She raised her hand, but then she quickly put it back down again. She couldn’t tell a teacher what to do.

  The class became quiet.

  Then someone mumbled, “Harriet,” in a terrible, singsongy way.

  And then everyone in the room was laughing, except for Mr. Hajeezi and Nat.

  Nat found that she was standing up. She didn’t really decide to do it; it just happened. She felt funny; her ears were ringing. She ran down the hall after Harry, so fast that her shoes didn’t even squeak. She wasn’t running, she was flying. She flung the door open and then ran out into the fog, which had rolled in sometime between her dad dropping her off—which seemed like a million years ago—and now.

  The whole playground seemed wrapped in the hush of it, the whiteness making everything a shadow.

  She stepped onto the field and yelled his name. “HARRY!”

  At first, he didn’t answer. Then she heard a quiet, “What do you want.” It didn’t really sound like a question.

  Harry was on the playground structure, sitting inside a tunnel on top of a climbing wall. The playground wasn’t separated into boys’ and girls’ here. It was just one playground, small and ramshackle. It looked magical in the fog, like it was a ship and the field itself was a calm, foggy sea.

  My last school would have been unbearable for Harry, Nat thought. Which playground would he have run to?

  Nat walked over to the structure so she was standing directly under him. She could see his outline through the holes in the tunnel. She cleared her throat. “Um,” she said. She wanted to say just the right thing, but she didn’t know what it was.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Harry said.

  “OK,” she said. “I don’t really either. Like, I don’t know what to say, even if I did want to talk about it.”

  “Maybe I will later,” he said. “Just not right now.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Nat shrugged but she knew he couldn’t see her. “Hang on, I’m climbing up.” She scaled the wall easily—it was made for really little kids—and scooted into the tunnel.

  He looked at her.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He almost smiled. “Hi.”

  “So, I should tell you that XAN GALLAGHER is my dad.”

  “He is?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, I should have said. Before. In the bathroom.”

  He laughed in a way that didn’t sound like a “ha ha” kind of laugh. “No big deal,” he said. “But, yeah, you should have said. I was going on and on! What are you doing here?”

  “Here in this tunnel or here in Sooke?”

  “Sooke.”

  “Getting away from the paparazzi,” she said. “Plus, we like beaches.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I saw whales,” she told him. She didn’t look right at him; instead she looked out the end of the tunnel, away from him. A huge bird flew by. There was no traffic nearby, so she could actually hear the thwap thwap of the bird’s wings pushing against the air. “On our first day here, that’s when I saw them. They were scratching their bellies on the beach.”

  “That’s cool,” he said. “I really really like whales.”

  “Me too.” Nat thought about all the whales she had seen, all over the world, but she couldn’t tell him, because it would feel like showing off. She kept her mouth closed.

  Nat could hear all of her own breaths and Harry’s. She wished she could think of something good to say. The sprinklers came on and sprayed the field with huge swaths of water, ticking and tocking like giant clocks.

  Then the principal appeared out of the mist, like an apparition.

  She was an older lady who had the hunched-over back of someone who has been carrying too much, too far, and for too long. Her hair was silvery gray, and Nat could see the comb marks in it. It was as thin as a baby’s.

  The principal walked all the way over to where they were sitting and looked up at them and sighed. Then she shook her head. “I knew this would happen. I told him, but he . . . Never mind.”

  “But how did you know?” Nat wanted to ask. “What is ‘this’? Who is ‘him’?” But she didn’t.

  It wasn’t her business.

  At least, she didn’t think it was.

  Nat and Harry looked at each other. He nodded.

  He climbed out one end of the tunnel. She climbed out the other.

  He jumped to the ground. She carefully found footholds and climbed down, one step at a time.

  Walking back into the classroom, Nat’s legs felt heavy, like they were made of stone. She couldn’t even imagine how Harry felt.

  “There,” said the principal, at the classroom door.

  They could hear that everyone inside was talking and laughing, but when they opened the door, the whole room fell silent.

  Mr. Hajeezi stared at them. He looked embarrassed.

  “Well,” he said, finally. He was almost-not-quite smiling and almost-not-quite frowning. It was a hard facial expression to read. “Well,” he repeated.

  Harry took a deep breath. Nat could tell he was going to say something. Nat was surprised. If it were her, she would have ducked into the back row and kept her head down. Instead, she stayed next to him, in case he needed her. Harry was clearly a person who did things differently than she did. She liked that about him already. He was brave. She put her hand on her phone in her pocket in case she might have to call 911. Harry looked like he might faint.

  He steadied himself by holding on to the corner of Mr. Hajeezi’s desk and cleared his throat.

  “Go ahead, Harriet,” said Mr. Hajeezi, stepping back.

  The class stared. Nat took one step to the side and put half her body behind the coat rack. She felt too visible. She didn’t like it. She didn’t know what to do with her hand that wasn’t in her phone pocket. She touched her face and then her hair. She wished she’d cut those bangs, after all. She found the one short part with her fingers and tugged on it. Then she stuffed her fingers into
her belt loops.

  Harry was staring at the collection of clocks on the back of the classroom wall that showed the time where they were, and in New York City, and in Paris, and in Hong Kong. Nat had been to all of those places. Nat could tell that Harry’s knees were shaking. He looked like he was going to fall over. He looked like he wanted to fall over, preferably into the huge sinkhole that he was hoping would open up right in front of him, before he could talk.

  At least, that’s how she would have felt.

  His lips were very white. “I was born a girl,” he blurted, so quickly that there were no spaces between his words and Nat had to replay them in her head more slowly just to understand what he said. “I mean, I wasn’t, but that’s what they thought. That’s what the doctor said. My parents named me Harriet. But then it turns out that I’m not a girl. I’m a boy. I’m sure you don’t get it. I didn’t get it either, when I first figured it out. I’m not sure I even get it now, so don’t ask me a bunch of stuff that I can’t answer. I just know it’s true.” The more he talked, the more his voice sounded calm. “Not everyone gets it. My dad doesn’t get it.” He made a face.

  A couple of kids laughed.

  “My dad left when I was three!” a kid yelled from the back row.

  “I like my dad,” said the girl with very long, blond hair. She blinked, prettily.

  “Hey, did anyone else see XAN GALLAGHER this morning?” a boy in the front row asked. “He’s someone’s dad!”

  “His daughter’s name is Natalia Rose!” someone else called. Nat drew back farther behind the coats. It wouldn’t take them long to realize that she was Natalia Rose, would it? Why didn’t they already know? Did she just not look glamorous enough to be XAN GALLAGHER’s kid? She frowned.

  Harry did not turn to look at her.

  He did not tell the kids that Nat was “Natalia Rose.”

  She loved him so much for that, she felt like her heart actually flapped, its wings thwapping like the bird’s they had seen outside.

  Everyone in the room started talking all at once. Harry/Harriet was forgotten. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot. Mr. Hajeezi clapped his hands, once, twice, three times, in a pattern.

  The class quieted.

  “Are you finished?” Mr. Hajeezi said to Harry. His face was kind, but he also looked relieved. Everything was out in the open and no one was crying, which Nat supposed was a win from a teacher’s point of view.

  Harry’s face was, by then, normal colors again, but his eyes looked like they were going to overflow. Nat took her hand out from her belt loop and was surprised that it was shaking.

  “I’d just rather be called Harry. That’s all,” finished Harry, looking both relieved and miserable.

  “Great job, Har . . . ,” said Mr. Hajeezi. He let the name trail off like that, like he didn’t know what to do.

  It sounded like he said, “Great job, Hair.”

  “Great job, Hair,” Nat whispered to Harry.

  He laughed.

  The girl with the long, beautiful hair leaned over to the girl next to her and whispered something, too. Then they both laughed in a way that was definitely mean. Nat found her fists curling at her sides.

  “Thank you, Harriet,” the girl called out. “Thank you for telling us your sad story.” Her voice was like a silk ribbon.

  Nat knew two things right away: That girl was the most popular girl in the class. And that girl was terrible.

  Harry collapsed back into the desk that was beside Nat’s desk. It was the only desk that wasn’t taken. Nat followed him and sat back down at her own desk. Her heart was beating too hard. Harry’s foot tapped the floor in an uneven rhythm.

  It’s fine, Nat tried to say, telepathically. She believed wholeheartedly that telepathy was a real thing that worked. It definitely worked with animals, she’d noticed. And sometimes it worked with people. People tended to block it, though. She could almost feel it when that happened, like she was trying to send a message to someone through a curtain or even a brick wall. Harry had a curtain. “It’s fine,” she mouthed at him when she finally caught his eye. (Mouthing sometimes worked when telepathy didn’t.) He stared at her and then slowly looked away.

  “Yep yep,” a boy’s voice called out, and someone else said, “XAN THE MAN!”

  “Back to work now,” said Mr. H. “If anyone has any questions for Harry, please write them down and we will discuss them after lunch.”

  • • •

  It turned out that even at a school that professed to be open and accepting, kids could be the worst. Mr. Hajeezi crumpled most of the questions up and put them in the big blue recycling bucket at the front of the room.

  He sighed.

  “The most commonly asked question is one that I can answer.” He smiled at Harry. (I am smiling gently at Harry! he was thinking so loudly that Nat could almost hear it. That was a kind of telepathy, too.) “The question is, ‘Why does Mr. H call Harry Harriet when he said to call him Harry? That’s rude.’”

  That was Nat’s question.

  She held her breath.

  Mr. H paused and scratched at his arm. He had a skin condition. Tiny flakes of his skin showered down on his desk in a little flurry. He sighed. “Sometimes,” he said, “we do what parents request because our job as facilitators is not to make choices for our students, but to help them navigate the lives in which they exist.”

  Nat raised her eyebrows at Harry.

  “The lives in which they exist,” she mouthed. Then she rolled her eyes.

  She watched Harry watching her mouth. She couldn’t tell if he understood or thought she was rude or what.

  And then Harry laughed.

  Making Harry laugh was a great feeling. It felt like the time when she and her dad were up in the mountains somewhere. It was very cold, with deep snow. One night, they sat on the front porch of the house they had rented and blew bubbles, which froze instantly into fragile ice balloons. They lined them up in a row and then tapped each one with a tiny silver hammer and they exploded in tinkling shards of light. It was magical. Nat did not know how or why her dad had a tiny silver hammer. He was just the kind of person who sometimes had a tiny silver hammer exactly when you needed one.

  Harry’s laugh made her think of that tinkling.

  Harry’s laugh made her heart tinkle.

  Solly/Soleil

  The letter was waiting on Nat’s bed when she got home from school.

  Her dad must have picked up the mail while she was gone. She didn’t notice it at first, because she was still thinking about Harry.

  Or rather, about his former life, when people called him Harriet.

  When people thought he was someone who he wasn’t.

  Hair, she thought, and giggled.

  “How was your day?” Nat’s dad had asked when he’d picked her up at three o’clock. He was on the scooter. The crowd was even bigger than before. They were shouting and waving, although Nat’s dad appeared not to even notice. Sometimes he was impenetrable, like he was encased in a soundproof bubble. “Tell me everything! Was it great?”

  “Dad,” she said, “just go. Go! I’ll tell you at home. I’ll tell you later.” She looked at the crowd. “From now on, I want to walk home,” she added. “This is ridiculous.”

  Everyone had seen Nat climb onto the back of XAN GALLAGHER’s scooter.

  And just like that, everyone knew.

  She also felt that they were somehow disappointed, and she hated that she felt badly that she wasn’t someone more exciting, even if only for a second.

  Well, she thought, too bad for them. At least she’d had one whole day when she could just be Nat, and not NATALIA ROSE, DAUGHTER OF XAN GALLAGHER.

  Nat’s insides felt like a piece of twine that had been tied into such a complicated knot that it was hard to tell if it was a knot-tied-on-purpose or just an unfixable
mess. And seeing the letter lying there on her bed, with Solly’s familiar handwriting on the front, didn’t make it better.

  If anything, it pulled the twine tighter.

  Nat’s dad was in the kitchen, cooking chicken. Specifically, cooking four chickens at the same time. They smelled delicious. He was singing a song from the last movie he had done, which was an animated film about a mouse who thought he was a rat. “I’m not who you think I am,” he sang, “I’m not who you want me to be, but the glorious part of all of this heart, is that under my fur, I’m just meeeeeee.”

  “DAD,” she yelled. “I can’t even think.”

  “Sorry!” he called back.

  “You’re turning Canadian already,” she said. “Sorry yourself.”

  “Sorry for being sorry! Yep yep.”

  She could tell even from her room that he was smiling.

  “Sorry for YOU,” she said. “You great big nut. I never said you should mail that postcard to Solly!”

  “Sorry!” he yelled. “SOOOOOOORRRY!”

  “Stop!” she yelled back.

  Nat picked up the letter and inspected the handwriting. It was written in purple pen. Solly always used purple. The swoops and swooshes were as dramatic as she was. Nat sniffed it and then felt weird about that. It probably smelled like the mailman’s hands! What was she thinking?

  It actually smelled like grapes.

  She held the letter up to the light. Solly had already broken the rules. For one thing, the whole point of the Great Postcard Project was postcards. The letter was heavy, and when she squished it around with her fingers, she could feel something in the envelope that wasn’t paper. She wanted to see what it was, and she also didn’t want to see.

  “I’m going outside,” she told her dad. “Go ahead and serenade the chickens if you need to.”

  Nat’s head spun a little as she stepped out the door. She had no idea why she felt so strange. The letter was as heavy as lead.

  She walked over to the edge of the clearing and sat on a big rock that had a view through the trees to the ocean. The rock was warm from the sun. It was a little bit windy, enough that the envelope flapped in her hands, like it wanted to blow away.