A Possibility of Whales

by Karen Rivers

  He went into the living room. The largeness of the house was creeping him out. Then he remembered what Nat had told him about how her dad did yoga when he was stressed. He, Harry, was no XAN GALLAGHER, but if it worked for XAN THE MAN, maybe it would work for him, too.

  He had literally no idea how people did yoga.

  Harry lay down on the floor. He started to tug on his own arms and legs. Maybe if he could jam his leg behind his head, he’d feel better. The room spun a bit. Harry picked up his right leg. He stuffed his head under it. It hurt, but maybe he did feel better, at least a little.

  The trouble was that now he was also a little stuck.

  The 34B Frog

  The last thing Nat got from Solly before they left for Baja arrived on the Tuesday before they left and it wasn’t a letter.

  It was a page ripped out of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

  Victoria’s Secret was a store that sold bras and underwear. There was one bra circled in the middle of the page with a black Sharpie. Stuck on it, on a yellow Post-it note, she had written, 34B, then a series of exclamation marks. It took Nat a minute to even figure out what it meant.

  Then she understood.

  Solly’s boobs had finally arrived.

  Nat couldn’t stop thinking about them, which sounded creepier than it was.

  She wanted to stop thinking about them.

  Solly’s boobs.

  Her own future boobs.

  Boobs in general.

  She just couldn’t.

  She didn’t know why Solly’s new bra was suddenly front and center in her brain. Brains were weird like that, always pushing stuff forward that you didn’t want to think about.

  “Dumb brain,” she said out loud.

  Nat went into the house through the sliding glass doors. Harry was on the living room floor in his swim trunks. One of his legs was behind his neck. It didn’t look like yoga though. It looked really painful.

  “What are you doing?” Nat asked.

  Harry jumped, or he would have, if he weren’t stuck. Instead, he sort of twitched.

  “I was looking for you. I was going to ask you if you wanted to go for a swim,” said Harry, from under his own leg.

  Nat laughed. “Um,” she said. “Did you think I was on the back of your leg or something?”

  “No, why?” Harry sounded like he was trying not to laugh. But maybe he was trying not to cry.

  “Harry, are you stuck?”

  Harry snorted. Then he was laughing. He tipped over. His leg was still behind his neck.

  “Sort of,” he admitted. “I mean, I’m doing yoga.” He was laughing really hard now. Nat laughed, too.

  “I’ll save you, Harry!” she said.

  She went over and helped him get his leg from behind his head. She hoped it didn’t hurt too much. It seemed like it would. Afterward, they lay on the floor next to each other.

  “Thanks,” said Harry.

  “De nada,” said Nat. That was Spanish for “It’s nothing.” “That’s what friends are for,” she added. “Like specifically to help you get your leg unstuck from behind your head.”

  They both laughed again. “Then I’m glad you’re my friend,” said Harry. “Don’t you dare tell anyone.”

  “Whatever.” Nat shrugged. Her heart started beating faster. At first, it took her a second to figure out what she was feeling; then she realized she was just mad.

  “I know you won’t tell,” he said quickly. “I was just saying.”

  “Whatever, I said,” Nat repeated. “Just whatever.”

  They lay there for a minute watching the huge ceiling fans stirring the cool air around the cavernous room. The ceilings were made from white boards. It looked like it could be the ceiling of a barn. It was a really pretty ceiling, Nat thought. But then again, her standard for ceilings was set by the ceiling of the Airstream, which was pretty low and kind of rounded at the edges. It was fine, but it was nothing like this. She could get used to this.

  “Oh, Dad said whale watching boats disturb the whales’ peace or something, so we can’t go,” Nat said, finally. “We have to go out on a boat with some weird old dude he met on the beach instead so we have an authentic experience.” She paused, waiting for a reaction. When Harry didn’t say anything, she added, “We’ll probably be kidnapped. Dad says it’s like basically the difference between running into a celebrity in an airport and taking a phone photo and paying someone to take you on a tour of the stars’ homes. I wasn’t really listening, but that was the gist of it.”

  “Oh man,” said Harry. “Dude.”

  “I know,” Nat agreed. “Dad is sometimes kind of a . . .” She trailed off.

  “. . . hippie,” they said at the same time. They smiled at each other. Nat was still mad, but she also wasn’t.

  It was complicated.

  “What do you think your parents will say? Like will they let you do it?” said Nat. She had a suspicion that normal parents might not say yes to sending a kid out with a stranger on a boat to have an “authentic” experience.

  Harry sat up. He shrugged. He pointed out the window, where they could see the place where Mr. and Mrs. Brasch had set up chairs down at the beach below the house. They had been sitting down there all day, by themselves, ignoring both Harry and XAN GALLAGHER, which probably hurt his feelings. Nat hoped not.

  She also hoped they weren’t burned to a crisp.

  “They don’t seem to care,” said Harry. “They haven’t said anything about anything since we got here. I think their minds have been completely blown by all of this.” He gestured around the room.

  “Yeah,” said Nat. Then, “My dad really wants to be friends with them.”

  Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t think they get that,” he said. “I think they think he feels sorry for them or something.”

  Nat closed her eyes. Watching Harry’s parents sitting on their chairs in the distance made Nat furious. XAN GALLAGHER brought them here so he could befriend them! How dare they!

  “Jerks,” she said out loud. Then she felt bad. They were still Harry’s parents, after all.

  “Nah, they’re OK,” Harry said. “I mean, they aren’t anything like your dad. You’re lucky. He’s rad. Do you think he’d teach me to surf?”

  Nat shrugged.

  “Rad” was a Seth word. A “Seth-ism,” she thought. “Rad,” she echoed. Then, “Yeah, he probably would.”

  Thinking about her dad teaching Harry how to surf made her feel weird inside though. She wasn’t sure what the feeling was. Maybe it’s jealousy, she thought.

  Her dad did really like Harry.

  Harry is like the son he’s always wanted, she thought, and something hot and bitter rose in her throat.

  She burped.

  “Gross,” said Harry. “That was the loudest burp that anyone has ever burped.”

  “Sorry to be so loud with my almost-throwing-up,” she snapped.

  “Huh?” said Harry. “I was just impressed, that’s all.”

  Nat got up. “Whatever!” she shouted.

  She stomped up the stairs.

  She was feeling something like rage simmering just under her skin. The French had a word for that kind of irritation, an itching irritation. That word was dépit. Nat was dépit about everything and nothing in particular.

  “I am dépit about everything,” she said to no one, shaking her fist at the heavens, or—in this case—the skylight. “This is de pits!”

  Nat went into her room and flopped down on her perfectly made bed. The air-conditioned air was as shiny and solid as platinum. Nat took a big breath and then blew it out, half expecting a metallic bubble to appear.

  She slid her phone out of her pocket.

  She didn’t even know, for sure, if it worked here.

  She opened it up. It said 1:33 p.m. Th
en there was a picture of the sun.

  “Duh,” she said.

  Nat got off the bed, went to the closet, and opened the door. She hadn’t unpacked—what was the point?—but her suitcase was open on the rack. She lifted out the handful of T-shirts and jeans, as well as her yellow swimsuit. She unzipped the pocket on the inside of the suitcase and pulled out Solly’s bra picture, which she had folded into the shape of a frog.

  Nat went back to the bed and sat down. She made the frog jump a few times. She was pretty good at origami.

  Through the huge, floor-to-ceiling window, she could see her dad sitting at one of the many outdoor tables with the Brasches, who had finally come up from the beach. They looked very pink.

  Karma, she thought.

  She could see by the way her dad was gesturing that he was telling a story. They sat back like an audience and watched. That’s how it was for him. Mostly people didn’t talk with him, they waited for him to perform, like they were at a show. Her heart squeezed with a bunch of feelings for her dad that happened all at once, a collision of them in her veins. I love you, she sent to him, telepathically, and made a heart with her hands.

  He couldn’t see her because there was one-way glass in all the bedrooms and bathrooms.

  From outside, the windows looked like mirrors. She could watch for as long as she wanted without them noticing. That made her feel weird, like a spy. Still, she didn’t look away.

  But suddenly he looked up at her window. He held his hands up in a heart shape.

  Nat laughed.

  Her dad and the Brasches were now drinking from tall glasses with tiny umbrellas sticking out of them. Nat used to love those umbrellas. There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have collected them from the adults’ glasses to play with for the afternoon. She would have built sand­castles around them, tiny little cities with umbrella roofs. She and her dad used to call them monkey umbrellas. “For very tiny monkeys,” her dad would add.

  That was when she was a kid though.

  And now, she sort of wasn’t a kid anymore.

  She would be a teenager in one more day.

  “Natsukashii,” she told the frog. She assumed the frog would understand, because the word was Japanese, and so was origami. Natsukashii was a sad, nostalgic feeling for something that would never come again. She felt natsukashii about Solly and the tiny umbrellas. Maybe she felt natsukashii about everything.

  Nat started to cry. She cried until she was all cried out. Then she felt better. She sat up. She couldn’t explain why she’d felt so jarringly and suddenly sad. It had passed like a squall.

  She picked up the phone again. She badly wanted to talk to Bird (Mom) about something. Not specifically about Mexico or her dad or even about Harry, but just to hear her voice.

  Nat had just pressed the Bird (Mom) contact on her phone when there was a banging at the door. She pressed “disconnect.”

  “YOU ALMOST GAVE ME A HEART ATTACK!” she shouted.

  “It’s just me,” said Harry. “Are you getting changed? Are we going swimming?”

  “I forgot,” said Nat. She put her hand on her heart, which was racing like she’d been running her hardest. She was a good, fast runner. She looked at her face in the huge mirror that was on the wall. Her skin was red and blotchy, and her eyes looked swollen. Pickleflitz, she thought.

  “What?” said Harry.

  “I JUST NEED A FEW MINUTES,” she yelled.

  “Don’t freak out,” he said, in his normal voice. She could tell that his face was pressed to the crack in the door by the way it was muffled. “I wasn’t going to come in or anything.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute. Don’t wait.”

  “What?” said Harry.

  “I’LL BE DOWN IN A MINUTE,” Nat repeated, but she stopped because she could hear him laughing.

  “I was kidding!” he said. “I could totally hear you.”

  “You have a mysterious sense of humor,” she told the closed door.

  “That’s why you like me,” he said. She could hear his footsteps disappearing down the hall, and then the door to his room opening and closing again.

  Nat put the phone down and picked up her yellow bathing suit. She bought it the summer before in Greece. She loved Greece. The white buildings against the blue of the sky! The silky sand beaches! The food! She hoped the bathing suit still fit. She hadn’t worn it for a while.

  Looking out the window, it was impossible to remember the gray dustiness of the morning. The water in the pool was calm and glittery. She watched as Harry walked over to the stairs and into the water. She could tell he was on his tiptoes.

  Harry was wearing a swimming shirt and long surf shorts that came down to his knees. Nat closed the blinds. Sometimes she thought it would be so much easier to be a boy than to be a girl, but then she remembered how complicated it was to be Harry and she took it back. Maybe it was impossible to know how easy or hard anything was for anyone. Everyone had so much going on that you couldn’t see.

  “Never mind,” she said out loud.

  Nat took the yellow bathing suit into the bathroom.

  Without looking at herself in the mirror, she hurriedly stuffed herself into it. The straps felt too short. The bathing suit was definitely tight. She straightened up and looked at herself in the mirror.

  She did a double take.

  Somehow—overnight?—something had happened.

  It’s like a horror movie, she thought.

  It was happening.

  Nat stood sideways and then straight ahead. No matter which angle she looked at herself from, they were definitely starting.

  She was getting boobs.

  “Boobida,” she whispered, but it wasn’t even slightly funny. She squashed them down flat with her hands, but that hurt, so she stopped. She sat down on the toilet again, with the seat closed, and thought about crying. This is exactly what mothers are for! She needed her mom. She needed a mom.

  It was completely unfair that she had no mom.

  “Who is my mother?” she wanted to shout to her dad, where he was still sitting and laughing with the Brasches. He held his hands above his head. He made a victory gesture and then doubled over, laughing. “It’s not funny!” she wanted to shout. “Tell me right now! Tell me everything! I need her!”

  Would he answer?

  Would he actually tell her?

  Nat went back to the bedroom, picked up the phone and pressed Bird (Mom) before she could be interrupted again.

  The phone rang.

  Then it rang again.

  Nat listened to the phone ringing somewhere in a little house in LA that had a view of the ocean from up high on the hills when the smog wasn’t too thick. She pictured the Bird, who she imagined had long black hair and probably wore long, floaty tunics. Maybe even bright pink ones, like the old lady in the grocery store. Except the Bird wasn’t that old. She definitely wasn’t mean.

  Nat counted the rings: thirteen.

  Then she hung up.

  This was the first time ever that the Bird hadn’t answered her call.

  Weird, Nat thought. Maybe she was in the shower.

  Or maybe her phone was broken.

  Or maybe . . .

  She didn’t want to think about it, but she couldn’t help it: Maybe the Bird just didn’t feel like talking to Nat. Who was Nat to her? Just a prank caller who kept calling back.

  Nat grabbed a towel off the pile of perfectly folded striped towels—the striped ones were for the pool, the white for inside—and headed out. The air was heavy and humid and smelled like flowers.

  “Hey,” called Harry from his inflatable mattress. “There you are. Finally. I thought you were dead or something.”

  “Ha ha,” she said. “Funny.”

  “I’ve always thought it’s weird when someone says something is f
unny but then they don’t laugh,” he said.

  “Ha ha,” said Nat again.

  “Saying ‘ha ha’ isn’t laughing,” he said. “Weirdo.”

  Nat rolled her eyes. She walked on tiptoes across the pool deck, which was horribly hot to walk on. Hanyauku, she thought. But it wasn’t sand, so it didn’t count.

  “You look different,” blurted Harry. “Like . . . you know.” He blinked. He looked really embarrassed, like he had meant to think that and not actually say it out loud.

  Nat chewed on her lip for a second without answering. “It’s OK,” she said, softly. “Just don’t.” She tried to think what she would have said if Solly had said the same thing. She maybe would have laughed, even though she felt uncomfortable. She was being different around Harry because he was a boy.

  Or maybe she was being extra different because he was a boy who was complicated.

  So maybe she was being a jerk, sort of in the same way Harry was being a jerk when he assumed the cashier at the SUPERMARKET mercado didn’t speak English.

  And she was similarly assuming a lot of things, like that Harry wouldn’t want to talk about girl stuff.

  Maybe he did want to talk about girl stuff.

  Maybe it was her problem, not his. She didn’t want to talk about girl stuff with him.

  Because she liked him.

  Duh.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she said. “Like anything else.”

  “Fine by me.” Harry started kicking his feet off the side of the float, and the spray splashed over her in a wave. “It’s not exactly my favorite topic.”

  “So why did you bring it up?”

  “I didn’t! I didn’t mean to. I don’t know. Maybe I did.” Harry frowned. “Do you ever just say things without thinking first?”

  Nat thought about it. “No,” she said, finally.

  Harry splashed her, a huge wave of water that went into her eyes and up her nose.

  “Hey!” She spluttered. She clenched her fists.

  “Sorry!” He looked at her hands. “Don’t hit me! Jeez!”

  “Backpfeifengesicht,” she mouthed at him.

  “I can’t hear you when you mouth things,” he said. “Dude.” He was floating on his back now. He turned his head to get a mouthful of water and then blew it up into the air.