A Possibility of Whales

by Karen Rivers

It made her even less herself.

  Too much of herself was taken up by being other people.

  The sun was dead center in the sky, and even behind the veil of clouds, it was blinding, big, and mean. Harry got on his bike. “Go time?” he said.

  Nat nodded. “Buena bebida,” she said. “Bebida bebida bebida.”

  As soon as she stopped saying it, it tried to escape from her memory, like a fish slipping through holes in a net. “Bediba. Bebida, babida, boobida,” she chanted.

  Then she blushed even harder.

  “Boob” was not a word she said out loud, ever, especially not in front of Harry. Maybe in a whisper to Solly, but even that was mostly just Solly talking and Nat listening. There was just something about thinking about all of that growing-up stuff that made Nat’s heart race. When they had Life Class in school, she had nearly passed out. Everyone thought it was because she was squeamish about blood, but it wasn’t that. It was more like there was a voice in her head that was shouting and then echoing, like her brain was a canyon.

  The voice was saying, You’re not ready for this yet. Not yet! Not yet! Not yet!

  Maybe one day Nat would be ready, and then she would be BFFs with Solly again. She would get her. Like magic. And Solly would get her back, because obviously, Nat would have caught up. Then it would be like when they were first becoming friends and Nat felt like Solly could read her mind. And Nat felt like she knew what Solly was thinking without having to ask.

  “Solly, Solly, Sol,” she said out loud while she pedaled. She reminded herself to buy a postcard. Solly was still doing letters, not postcards. She didn’t seem to notice that Nat’s replies were sporadic and didn’t say anything, sometimes literally. Right before she got on the plane, in the airport, she mailed Solly a postcard with a picture of a frog in a sunhat and sunglasses. On the back, Nat wrote, Why are frogs always happy? It was a riddle but the kind with no answer. A hypothetical riddle, or something like that.

  She was going to make up an answer and write it upside down at the bottom, but Harry wanted to get doughnuts before they got on the plane, so she didn’t. The answer, she decided, would be something about how they can just eat what bugs them. Eating bugs! But was that funny? She had no idea anymore. She was just sending the postcards so that Solly would write back. She didn’t want to read about boobs and kissing, but she didn’t want Solly to stop telling her those things, either.

  Solly had perfect handwriting, which was nice to read. Her A’s and O’s and E’s were all almost perfectly rounded, like a real font.

  In her last letter, Solly didn’t mention that her mom had a new hit song. She didn’t mention her mom at all. She talked mostly about her new haircut (something about ombre balayage highlights), and there was also a long story about who said what to who at a party that Nat couldn’t even imagine. It sounded like a teenager’s party, which was normal, obviously. They were almost teenagers. But reading about it made Nat anxious. Would she know what to do at a party like that? Would she know what to say to a boy she was alone with on a porch?

  Nat couldn’t figure out why the fact that Gracie had a hit again didn’t make it into the letter, above the part where someone she didn’t know threw up in the swimming pool. Did Solly think they didn’t have music in Canada? Maybe she just didn’t want to remind Nat that her mom was famous, in case Nat tried to exact her revenge, a type of revenge that would only be possible if Solly were as famous as Nat.

  Famous for being the kid of someone famous, that is.

  Nat squinted up the road. Harry was way ahead now. She had to pedal about a hundred times for every one time Harry did on his too-big bike.

  “What?” Harry yelled then, for no reason.

  “I didn’t say anything!” Nat yelled back. “I’m coming! Wait up!”

  Water Is Universal

  Between the low hills, which seemed to be inhabited by nobody, the wind was moaning like a hurt animal.

  “The wind sounds like an animal that’s been hit by a car,” said Nat, when she finally caught up.

  “Dude,” said Harry. He made a sad face. “That’s sad. It sounds worse now.”

  “Sorry! Maybe it was a really terrible animal that deserved to die.” Nat licked her dry lips and she tasted sweat and dirt and salt.

  “What kind of animal deserves to die?” said Harry. “All animals are better than people.”

  “Truth,” agreed Nat. She grinned. Harry was so much more himself—his great self—without Seth.

  Like he was reading her mind, he said, “Seth has horses. They are so awesome. He’s going to teach me how to ride.”

  “Oh,” said Nat. “Cool.”

  Maybe Seth wasn’t so bad.

  Maybe he was.

  Probably.

  She’d never actually talked to him. In her mind, he was the Enemy, and that was that.

  “I know you don’t like him,” Harry said.

  “I do so,” lied Nat. “He’s fine. He’s just a boy.” She shrugged.

  Harry gave her a look.

  “I just don’t get him. Because he’s a boy, I guess.”

  “I’m a boy,” said Harry. His voice was sharp. It made her think of a blade, thin as paper.

  “I know!” She winced. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  They both stared down the road. It looked endless, in the same way the trip itself suddenly seemed endless. The road was paved, but the wind was working hard to smother it with sand and dust. The heat shimmered over everything.

  Nat and Harry weaved crookedly around in the middle of the road, zigzagging tire tracks into the sand that the wind quickly erased. Every once in a while a bird flew over, casting a shadow on the ground that made Nat think of pterodactyls.

  “It’s like we’re time traveling,” she said, panting. “Dinosaurs!” She was trying to find common ground. She felt like they’d just had a fight. She wasn’t really sure though. Maybe she was overthinking it.

  Maybe she was overthinking Harry in general.

  He was just a boy. A regular person who didn’t overthink everything like she did.

  “What?” yelled Harry.

  Nat wondered if maybe Harry needed his hearing checked. Harry said “What?” about a hundred times per day. Not just to her; to everyone.

  “Nothing!” Her bike wobbled, churning up extra dirt, which blew directly into her eyes. Nat wasn’t wearing sunglasses. She hated the way they tinted everything yellow. Harry, on the other hand, was wearing aviators that were so big his cheeks were almost completely hidden.

  Harry let go of the handlebars. “No hands!” He raised his palms flat up into the air.

  Nat couldn’t do no-hands, but she took one of her hands off and put it on her leg for a second. Her hand left a sweaty handprint on her dusty skin. Then she put it quickly back on the handlebar. They hadn’t brought Band-Aids, and she didn’t want to fall and bleed and faint, right there in the middle of the road. Harry wasn’t watching anyway—he was way ahead, the wind pushing his hair away from him, back over his shoulders, the bike going straight as an arrow, his hands whipping through the air like wings.

  On the last long steep part, they coasted with no brakes, going so fast that the bumps all blurred together to make one vibration. When they finally slammed on their brakes and skidded to a halt, they had to spit dirt out of their mouths and wipe bugs off their faces. “They eat what bugs them!” Nat said to herself. She laughed. It was funny, after all. She wished she’d written that on the postcard.

  Maybe she’d send it on a separate one. She imagined Solly reading it. She pictured her rolling her eyes.

  Maybe not, then, she decided.

  “What?” said Harry.

  “Nothing,” said Nat. It was too hard to explain.

  Harry gave her a look. “Weirdo.”

  The place
where they had stopped seemed to be a bus station, but it didn’t look like any buses had been there for a hundred years. The sign said Central de Autobúses.

  “The zombies have already been here.” Harry made a gesture with his finger across his throat.

  “Stop it,” said Nat. Her dad was in a zombie movie once. She saw it when she was about six and woke up screaming every night for almost a whole year, imagining her dad with his eyeball hanging out. It didn’t matter how many times he told her it was just makeup. She knew that. It was still scary.

  The wind was desperately trying to pull off all the flyers advertising surf lessons and cerveza, and they were flapping like thousands of moths half burned to a light bulb. “Mothy,” said Nat, but Harry didn’t even say, “What?”

  Instead, he sat down on the metal bench. “Ouch.” He pressed his whole hand flat against it. “This is burning. I bet you could cook a grilled cheese on this. Maybe my leg meat is cooking. Zombies probably like cooked meat better anyway.” He crossed his eyes and made a zombie groaning noise. “I bet my hair is crazy, huh.”

  Nat’s eyes were full of grit. “Your hair’s fine,” she lied. “Me and Dad once fried an egg on a sidewalk. In Australia,” she added. “There was a heat wave.”

  “Oh.” Harry twisted his hair up with both hands. “Did you eat it?”

  “What? The egg?” Nat shook her head. “Too dirty.”

  Harry’s dad wouldn’t let Harry cut his hair, even though he wanted to more than anything. “Not under my roof,” he said every time Harry asked. Harry’s hair was down past his shoulders in big loose curls that tightened up in the heat and sprang upward and outward with reckless abandon when he sweated.

  “You’re lying. It’s all poufy.” Harry let it go, and it escaped like so many snakes hissing and uncoiling all at once. “I give up.” Harry dropped his head down, scuffing his shoe in the dirt.

  “No one’s looking. Who cares? The zombies?”

  Harry shrugged. He swung his foot in a half circle. In the reflection on his aviators, Nat could see that her own hair was sticking out all over. It looked like she hadn’t brushed it in a week.

  “We’re both in wild disarray,” she said. “Can you stop doing that?” She coughed. “Wild disarray” made her think of wildflowers in a meadow, a hurly-burly of colors and smells. “Wild disarray,” she mouthed again.

  “Sorry,” he said, darkly, stopping.

  “Your hair looks totally fine! Windblown, maybe. So does mine. It doesn’t matter! Check this out.” She tiptoed across the dusty sand in front of the bench, back and forth. “Hanyauku,” she explained. “It means ‘to tiptoe in warm sand.’ It’s from Namibia.”

  Harry stared at her. Then he grinned, and it was like someone reached into his face and flicked on a light switch. “Oh, there you are,” she wanted to say. The Harry she loved was in there, she could see it. He was maybe just taking a while to go from being Seth’s friend Harry to being Nat’s friend Harry. That was fine by her.

  “It probably means more like when the sand is too hot to touch with your bare feet, like when you can’t stand to touch it because it’s going to burn your skin right off? Or else it wouldn’t really need its own word.”

  Right away, as soon as he said it, Nat knew he was right, that she got it slightly wrong. It changed the shape of the word in her head from a word that was as oval as an egg to something more like the end of a hot poker. “Hanyauku,” she repeated, sharply, feeling how the word was now hot enough to leave a scar. “Yep.”

  Nat sat down next to him. The bench burned the back of her legs, too. “This is too hot to sit on! Why are you sitting here?”

  “Don’t sit on it!” he said.

  “I’m already sitting!”

  He pushed her and she almost fell off, and she pushed him back and he landed with a thump on the ground. “Ha,” she said.

  “Ha yourself.” Harry wasn’t looking at Nat. He was staring toward the rolling hills. No matter what direction you looked, everything looked the same except the ocean, but that was hidden behind the buildings. Nat worried Harry was disappointed, that this wasn’t the postcard-pretty place he was expecting.

  Nat still couldn’t believe it had happened, that her dad had somehow made this happen.

  It was a miracle that Harry was here, when you considered that Mr. Brasch still thought Nat’s dad was a hippie. Nat knew this because her dad told her about his outings with Mr. Brasch. “Hippie!” he’d say, laughing. “Man, that guy is a blast. I just don’t think that word means what he thinks it means!”

  “Hippie” was Mr. Brasch’s worst insult though. If he had a bad experience at the grocery store or at work, he always muttered about hippies under his breath.

  Nat’s dad didn’t seem to get that. Or maybe he did.

  Harry had had to get a passport. It was his first time out of Canada. Nat had been traveling for her whole life. She couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to never have gone anywhere else in the world, to never have seen anything. Canada was plenty nice, but it was not enough.

  “This place isn’t what I thought it would be,” said Harry. “Why aren’t there any people?”

  “Every place is weird.” Nat tried not to sound like someone who had already been everywhere and knew everything. “In different ways. This town is just really small. Dad likes to get away from people-packed places. It gets weird, even for him, when people grab at his shirt and scream.”

  Harry gave her a funny look, the one she couldn’t read. “I guess I wouldn’t know.”

  “OK,” said Nat. It was awkward being famous. People didn’t really understand it. She had thought Harry was different. He’d never made too big a deal about her dad after he found out that XAN GALLAGHER and her dad were the same person. But maybe she just super badly wanted him to be that way, to be a person who wasn’t seduced by the XAN GALLAGHER part of her life

  They got back on their bikes. The road flattened out and they passed a building that might have been a bank, three decrepit gas stations in a row, a post office that looked haunted, and finally a 7-Eleven with a half-full parking lot. A few people were standing around, leaning on the hoods of cars, wearing board shorts or bikinis, drinking Big Gulps.

  Surfers.

  There was a VW camper van with a couple of people sitting on the roof. They all looked American. “Look!” said Harry. “Dudes.”

  A dog came rushing up to Harry and Nat, barking.

  “Hey now.” Harry stopped pedaling and leaned forward. “Hey you.” The dog was yellow and tufty-looking.

  Hey Tufty, Nat said to it, using telepathy. Sit, she tried, with her mind. Tufty sat. “Can dogs smile?” she asked Harry. “He looks like he’s smiling.”

  “Maybe his lips are just stuck like that. Want a Slurpee? I’m thirsty.” Harry reached into his pocket for money.

  “No! I don’t want anything I can get in America. The point of not being at home is to not be at home.” Nat’s dad said that all the time when they were in, say, Croatia, and she wanted a cheeseburger from McDonald’s.

  Harry pulled his glasses down and looked at her over the top of them. “We don’t live in America,” he said.

  “Well, true. But you can get Slurpees in Canada, too. Anyway, let’s find a place that sells something Mexican.”

  “What’s Mexican?” he said.

  “Water?”

  “How is water Mexican? Every place has water. Anyway, I’m sure you can get water at 7-Eleven. And I think you’re not supposed to drink the water in Mexico.” He scratched his ear, which was another one of his habits that she had started to notice. “Mom said.”

  “That just means water from the tap. Bottled water is fine. Anyway, they have lots of soda drinks that are Mexican. I bet they have Coke. And Jarritos. Let’s get some Jarritos.” She tried to pronounce it right, with the J sounding like a Y and the R�
�s rolling like rocks down a hill. It felt like a stick, stuck between her teeth.

  “Jarritos,” repeated Harry. He pronounced it perfectly. “Sure.”

  The year before, Nat and her dad were in Mexico, too, but in a place called Coba. They climbed up a million stairs on Ixmoja, which is a huge pyramid. Nat was so thirsty at the top, she broke her no-sugar rule and drank a Jarritos, because that was all that her dad had brought in his backpack. It was cold and bubbly.

  She was about to tell her dad that maybe she even liked it, sugar and all, when a tourist recognized her dad and screamed, “OH MY GOD, IT’S XAN GALLAGHER!” and dove in for a photo, pushing Nat out of the way. Nat dropped the bottle, which broke, and also nearly fell to her death down those steep, scary steps, skinning both her knees badly, the blood ruining her shoes.

  Now when she thought about Jarritos, she felt panicky and light-headed.

  Nat opened her mouth to tell Harry the story, then decided not to, in case saying it out loud made her faint or made her seem like a show-off. She sighed.

  “You’d drink Jarritos?” he said. “Is it like Coke? What about the sugar?”

  Nat shook her head. “It’s fruity. You’ll like it. I don’t want any, actually. But they’ll have water, too. But we have to find a real Mexican store, OK?”

  “Mom says—”

  “Bottled water, I promise. It’ll be fine! It’s fine anyway!”

  “Water is water.” Harry scowled. “You wanted something Mexican.”

  “Water is universal,” she said, but then she realized she was just making his point. She wasn’t sure why she was being so stubborn. She wanted to feel unprickly, but she couldn’t. She wanted to be normal and have fun, but it was like she was in her own way and couldn’t get out of it. “Tell your mom,” she muttered. Her irritation maybe had something to do with Harry always mentioning his mom.

  Harry had never even asked about her mom, so she had never lied.

  Harry had never asked about the Bird, either, but why would he?

  She hadn’t told Harry about her.

  She hadn’t told anyone.