I riffled through my hamper, coming up with the cotton sweatpants and t-shirt from the previous evening. I couldn’t give him new clothes — it was too much of a risk that Mom would realize I was going through twice the usual amount of t-shirts. I handed him the pieces, trying to look reassuring.
“I’ll be right downstairs. Look, put these on. You can read while I’m gone. This is my favorite book, so be careful with it, ok?”
I pulled the glossy blue copy of Big and Small Fish of the Ocean from my backpack and handed it to the creature. Maybe he would find other creatures that he recognized in its pages and it would help him feel a little closer to home. He opened the book to the middle, somewhere in a section about sunfish. Content that he would be okay for the time being, I closed the door and took the stairs at a run, leaping the last five steps onto the hard wood floor.
The idea of having a secret colored everything with new exciting strokes. I folded shirts and underwear from the dryer, laying them on top of one another in the laundry basket. Mom hunched over her phone in front of the washing machine, trying to ignore Margaret, who was deep into a probing discussion about the new purses she had seen girls in her dance class carrying earlier today. She was trying to ask Mom which one had been her favorite, Mom responding by gripping the case of her phone more tightly with each passing question. I didn’t blame her. Maggie had enjoyed interesting things like animals when she was younger. She had wanted to be a veterinarian. Now she liked different colored bags.
“And Kate had a Kate Spade bag, which is funny if you think about it,” prattled Margaret, fiddling with the hem of her just-washed shirt. “But there isn’t anything close to Margaret, maybe just Mary—”
Mom slammed the phone down on the washing machine, breaking Margaret’s jabbering.
“You’re not getting a damn handbag,” said Mom.
Everything was quiet after that.
I hadn’t heard Mom swear before. I’d heard Dad say one when he didn’t know I could hear. I had been following him up the stairs, and he had caught his little toe on the step. This felt different though. Maggie stared at the floor, no longer pretending to procrastinate on her chore.
This would be the moment Dad would step in and make things okay. He was always the one to talk Maggie down when she threw a tantrum or Mom and I fought. Dad should be the one. But he wasn’t here.
So we sat. Eventually the tick tick tick of Mom’s phone filled the silence as she resumed texting. I wondered who she was texting, and if she was telling them why she had said a swear word at my sister.
There were a lot of things that parents could do — especially moms. They could take toys and books away, threaten to cancel entire trips. I had even been spanked on my side when I had talked back once. These were all things that parents could do because they were parents — it was in the rules. These things didn’t make my sister tremble though, hiding the puffy red developing around her eyes. We had both heard swear words before. I had even heard the worst word while listening to Jurassic Park with my Dad on book-on-tape. But it was different when the word was at you and not around you.
The rest of laundry night passed without much food or talking. Clothes went into the washing machine, coming out soppy and clumped together. They would spin in the dryer, rumbling and grumbling in the silence before they, too, came out fluffy and new to be folded into drawers. An eternity spanning thirty minutes later, Maggie rose from her seat, her ballerina-socked feet retreating up the stairs. I followed behind, leaving Mom alone to her phone.
Retreating to my room, the bad taste of the night was still in my mouth, but the excitement of my secret new friend was enough to push Mom’s angry words from my mind.
Your friend? Aren’t you being a bit childish? said the voice in my head.
No, I replied, creaking the door open. He’s not bad like I thought.
He didn’t look bad. He’d sprawled out on my bed, the copy of Big and Small Fish of the Ocean propped on my pillow. If you took away his brown and gray skin, gave him hair, and helped his face to line up a little, then he could maybe pass a kid.
That’s a lot of things he’s missing.
He was still naked.
“You should put the clothes on,” I said, clicking the door shut behind me.
My creature-friend looked up from the book.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what kids are supposed to do.”
“But I’m not a kid,” he said.
“What are you?” I asked again, sitting down on the floor beside the bed.
He shrugged, a perfect imitation of the gesture Dad gave Mom every evening at dinner when she asked how his day at work had been.
“Don’t know. Something like a kid?”
I contemplated this, trying to figure out what being like a kid was, even though exactly what it was currently sat on my bed looking at me.
“Do you have a name?”
Another shrug. I guessed he probably only knew as many words and gestures as he had learned in the past day.
“I know who I am.”
“And who is that?”
My creature-friend looked puzzled at this, as though I’d asked him to describe something he could not put words to. He was silent for a long while.
“I think you should have a name,” I decided.
He looked at me, reluctant to embrace the idea, as though I had just asked if he would try brussels sprouts.
“What do I do with a name?”
“It’s how other people know who you are.”
“You don’t know me until you give me a name?”
“It makes it easier,” I said.
Still puzzled. “But then it’s not really my name, is it? It’s your name.”
I was the one to pause now. I hadn’t really thought about my own name before. It was what I wrote down on the top of every test. When my teacher had asked us to introduce ourselves, I proudly told the class I’d been named after my grandfather. There were a lot more Silases when he was young, but I liked the fact I was the only Silas at Johnson Elementary. I thought about Maggie telling the family over dinner she wanted to be called Margaret now that she was a woman.
I picked up the discarded copy of One Piece from the ground beside me. Its binding was worn from constant stuffing beneath my bed. On the cover, the young pirate was leaping into the air with joy, surrounded by his new adventure-worthy friends.
“I’m going to call you Luffy,” I said.
My creature-friend mouthed the word through the off-center hole on his face. It did sort of look like a mouth if I twisted my head a bit.
“Luffy,” he said aloud, trying it on.
“See, that wasn’t so bad,” I assured him, returning the comic book to the shelf where it belonged.
Luffy kept mouthing the word aloud in different ways until a rumbling came from the place I imagined his stomach was.
“You’re hungry,” I said, surprised.
Luffy nodded, his expression guarded.
“I can see about sneaking some food upstairs. I’ll bet I can get you some snacks since I didn’t eat much for dinner.”
“I don’t eat that kind of food.”
The image of Luffy’s shadow looming over my father returned.
“Oh.”
“I just need enough food to get where I’m supposed to be,” he said, the uncomfortable note back.
“Back to the ocean?” I asked.
Luffy looked out the window, pointing with one webbed finger over the houses.
“It’s in that direction.”
I thought about the path we would take on our way to the beach, recreating the journey from glimpses out the car window. Out of the driveway, past the library, which means we went left. Then onto the highway, where we made the big circle that pushes me against the right side of the back seat. Then it was pretty much straight until seagulls flew outside the window.
“That’s it. Why do you have to go there?”
Luffy thought
for a moment, no longer meeting my eyes. “That’s where whoever called me here is. I’m pretty sure the reason I’m here is to go there.”
I contemplated that, trying to imagine how Luffy could know this for certain, and what I was supposed to do about it. The ocean was too far to walk. It had been a long day, and trying to solve any more problems tonight would be like pushing my spoon through oatmeal without enough milk.
“I’ll figure out a way to get you there tomorrow,” I said, noticing a tinge of guilt that I was making the promise without any real way to keep it. “I’ll figure something out, but you can’t eat my parents’ hopes tonight. You have to promise, okay? Dad was really unhappy, and I know you didn’t mean it, but it was a little bit your fault.”
Luffy curled up on my bed, recreating my Dad’s mood this morning. His words came out with an emotion that was undeniably human.
“I’m sorry. I saw your life too, and I’m sorry I ruined the tie.”
I hadn’t even thought about the tie since leaving it at the foot of my bed. The apology was more than I’d been ready for and left me standing awkwardly without anything to say. Last Halloween, a girl named Molly had broken my Spiderman mask. She hadn’t worn a costume to school. When I asked her why, she had snarled and ripped the mask off my face, breaking the rubber band. I hadn’t been upset enough to cause a fuss, but we were both taken down to the counselor’s office where Molly had been made to apologize. She stared at her sandals while she repeated the words, and I accepted them without really caring. They weren’t her words anyways. They were words that adults said to each other, deciding for some reason they had to make their kids do the same even when they didn’t feel it. Molly hadn’t felt it. Luffy did though, and that made me feel it too.
“It’s okay,” I said, deciding to sit on the bed next to him. “I’m sorry you have to go hungry tonight.”
Luffy lifted his head at this. They were free of tears, but the hollows around his eyes had developed small red rings.
Just like Maggie, I thought. There were similarities to the emotions between us after all.
“It’s alright. The books help, actually. I’m still a little hungry, but they’re enough.”
“The books?”
“We get hungry for real things, Silas,” said Luffy. It was the first time he had used my name aloud. I wondered if he had found it in my father’s memories. “That’s what we really want.” He saw the confusion on my face.
“But most of the books are made up,” I said, picking a comic from the shelf. On the cover, a boy pulled a mask away from his face, revealing a hard scowl underneath.
“But they’re about real things. It’s like…” Luffy paused to think. “It’s like the difference between fruit and fruit flavored candy. The candy can taste like fruit, but not really. It’s only got one layer. But real fruit…” he paused again, perhaps sorting through memories not his own. “Real fruit has lots of different flavors. It’s got the pulp, and the rind, and the juice, which is tart and sweet and sometimes a little bitter when it’s not ripe enough. It’s more pure and less pure all at the same time. That’s how it is up here. Once you’ve eaten the fruit, the candy doesn’t taste right. It doesn’t even taste like anything.”
“And memories, hope, and stories, they all taste like real fruit?”
“It’s what people put themselves into,” said Luffy. “They pour their real selves into them. It overflows and tastes like all the rind and pulp and even the seeds.”
“Silas! I’d better hear footsteps. It’s time for you to get ready for bed!” Mom’s voice cut through the floorboards. I looked at Luffy. His face had developed new lines that were making him seem more human by the minute.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. Before leaving, I pulled the second volume of One Piece from my bookshelf and tossed it to him. He caught the pages with both hands, looking excitedly at the cover.
“You should learn more about yourself, especially if you’re going to be my friend,” I said, before closing the door.
I woke up a few times in the early hours of the morning, interrupting dreams about a child-sized boat taking fruit across the ocean. Trevor and I had to carry the fruit to another country far away from the front yard of my house, and we were on the lookout for pirates in black boats that wanted to stop us. We had to move quickly because the fruit was quickly going rotten. Trevor said he was hungry, but I told him the fruit wasn’t for us. The boat rocked, and an orange fell from the small boat into the water. I tried to grab it, but the fruit had already sunk out of reach. The small orange ball became smaller and smaller. It was a deep ocean.
I woke up from this same dream each time to watch Luffy, my mind still half in and half out of the ocean of sleep, reading by the moonlight. Each time, the stack of discarded comics and books grew beside him. I would drift back into unconsciousness, returning to the same ocean outside my front yard. Each time, I could sense that the boat was sailing a little further from my house and a little closer to the black boats, but neither seemed to rise or fall completely from view.
Chapter Six
Finally, I woke up to sunlight washing over the bedroom onto my blankets. The rumbling of footsteps up and down the stairs told me that I was the last in the house to wake up, which surprised me. Given the importance of today, I’d expected to spring out of bed, but the choppy sleep had left me more tired than expected.
Luffy was still perched by the windowsill, no longer reading but watching traffic pass on the street below.
“People sleep for a long time,” he said, a practiced smile parted his lopsided mouth.
“Did you get bored?” I asked, looking at my nearly bare shelves.
“Nope,” he replied, picking up a random book from my shelf, a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. The book had frightened me, but I hadn’t told my parents it had been a scary one. They might not have let me keep it if I had. “People write books from all over the world, but they’re all about the same things. It really doesn’t matter how far you go, does it?”
“I guess not,” I said, responding to the feeling that Luffy had read more into my books than even I had. I was trying to recall the dream I’d had last night.
Something about a black ocean?
“Listen, Luffy. I know I said I would get you to the ocean today, and I’ll try, I really will…”
“But you don’t know how you’re going to do it,” finished Luffy.
I nodded, ashamed.
“It’s okay,” said Luffy, trying to smile again with his lipless mouth, “we’ll figure something out. We’re coming up to the point in the story where the good guys come up with something clever. We just haven’t reached that page yet.”
I tried to return the smile, still uncertain. If Luffy hadn’t been here long, he wouldn’t have learned that things didn’t always work out the way they did in books.
Sometimes Dad doesn’t come home, and Mom says mean words at dinner.
The scene from the night before was more solid in my head than the dream currently dripping from my brain like water through my fingers. The last snapshot I could recreate was of something dark in the distance before the sound of my father’s voice outside my door erased it completely. He had come home late last night, and was now speaking in a hushed tone I could not make out.
Still in my pajamas, I made to walk out the door, planning to ask Dad for a bath before he left. Luffy promised that he would be back to his usual self, and maybe in his uplifted spirits would even agree to take me to the Justice League movie this time around.
“…and maybe you need to just grow up,” came my father from down the hall. His voice was all wrong though, like he had recently finished a bout of coughing. I couldn’t see him from the crack in my door, only the shape of my sister. Her back was pressed against the wall, my father’s shadow looming over her.
“I just wanted to know—” her voice squeaked.
“You just wanted to know how much more you could get out of me. Christ, Magg
ie. You think I’m made of money? It’s always this and that, what one girl has and what you don’t — you need to stop acting like such a spoiled little brat.” The word brat popped like the gun in a violent movie. Maggie’s fragile body shook, both hands holding the wall for support.
“I’m sorry.” The apology barely escaped her lips as a squeak.
“You’re not sorry. You’re sorry I said no. If I’d said yes, you’d bounce off to the mall and then come whining back to me in another week with something else you want.”
Something was glistening on my sister’s cheek. She looked so small — her shoulders and legs crumpling under my father’s words.
This is the part where he gets on one knee and puts a hand on her shoulder.
Both Maggie and I had landed ourselves in trouble plenty of times. That was part of being a kid. Dad had never called us names before, though, and was never cruel. But Mom didn’t swear at us either. But It would be okay. After we got in trouble, Dad would get on one knee and tell us he still loved us and was proud even when we made mistakes. Then he would put both arms out for a hug and squeeze us tightly until the tears stopped.
This is the part where he makes it okay, I thought again, waiting to see the shadow over my sister move.
The shadow did not soften, but instead slipped away entirely. Footsteps moved outside, leaving Maggie alone in the hallway. Her face glistened with tears that had not been blotted on the soft cotton of Dad’s shirt.
They were supposed to be wiped away.
Deep, Deep Ocean Page 6
