the thing about jellyfish

by Ali Benjamin

  So I could have told my dad about those things, but I didn’t. Instead, I listened to the sounds around me—the rumble of ice from the drink machine, the ding of a cash register, the murmur of voices, and the occasional burst of laughter from nearby tables. I liked these sounds. They were better than any dumb old words.

  Dumb old words that don’t mean a thing.

  Dumb old words that fill up too much space.

  Dumb old words that sometimes end friendships forever.

  “What, aren’t you speaking to me tonight?” Dad laughed, like it was a joke.

  That’s when I thought, What if I never made small talk again? It seemed like a good idea: Either say something important, or say nothing.

  Dad made a grumpy face. “Okay, Suzy,” he said. He sounded exasperated. “You just let me know when you’re ready to make conversation.”

  But I had already decided: I wasn’t going to make conversation. Not that night, and maybe not ever again.

  And in the four weeks that had passed since then, I hadn’t.

  The night we got home from seeing Dr. Legs, I began my research. I found a bunch of jellyfish experts, actually. I found a guy in Rhode Island who studies how jellyfish move through the water. A grandmotherly lady who studies jellyfish populations near Seattle. A guy in Washington, DC, who studies how they evolved. I clicked on researcher after researcher, ruling out one after another—one just because he didn’t list an e-mail or any contact information, another because she wrote articles filled with words I didn’t understand, words like pharmacognosy, methanolic, and eosin. The grandmotherly researcher looked like an older version of my mother, and I didn’t want to imagine my mother growing old.

  Then I found someone I thought might be interesting.

  I pulled out my notebook and began to write:

  POSSIBLE EXPERT #1:

  Dhugal Lindsay, Japan

  Glasses and brown hair. Works at a lab where scientists send remote-control vehicles into the deep sea. He discovered a never-before-seen jellyfish in the darkest part of the ocean. It had a red part inside the bell that could crumple or expand, just like a folding paper lantern. Named it the Paper Lantern jellyfish. I like how literal that is.

  Writes haiku poetry about things he sees. Here is one:

  soap bubbles

  westward to nirvana each

  carrying nothing

  Well. That is not nearly literal enough.

  Advantages:

  - Face looks nice. Soft eyes. Not-mean.

  - Discovers new things, which means he knows there is more in the world than what has already been discovered.

  Disadvantages:

  - Very far away.

  - Does not seem to write about Irukandji or any sort of venom.

  - Might ask me to read his poetry.

  Conclusion:

  - Rejected for reasons related to poetry.

  Before every science class, Mrs. Turton always spent a few minutes telling us something about the world that she thought we might find interesting. We might get ideas for our science reports, she said.

  Or, she added with a grin, we might just get ideas.

  On the day after our aquarium visit, we walked into Mrs. Turton’s classroom and saw a quote on the blackboard: a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

  “Settle down, settle down,” Mrs. Turton said as we took our seats. “First of all, if you have not yet picked a topic for your science report, please, please come and talk to me after class. You should be well into researching it by now.”

  She placed her hands on a desk in the front row and said, “Let me repeat myself.” She looked right at me, and I knew then that I was probably the last person in the class to pick a topic. “It’s time to begin your research.”

  I stared right back at her without blinking. I finally knew what my research project would be.

  “Are there any questions?” she asked.

  Nobody raised their hands.

  “Okay, so before we begin, I want to take a few minutes and journey back in time,” she said. “Christmas 1968. Most of your parents haven’t even been born. There’s no Internet, no e-mail, no texting or video games or cell phones. But there are spaceships, which are so brand-new that they seem like the stuff of science fiction.”

  She paused. The whole class sat still.

  “A few days before Christmas, the spacecraft Apollo 8 leaves the planet. Then, on Christmas Eve, the astronauts send this image back to Earth from outer space.”

  She clicked a button on her remote control, and a photograph appeared on the screen at the front of the room. I’d seen the picture before: Earth rising above the surface of the moon. The planet looked like a giant swirling blue marble, half a marble, really, surrounded by blackness.

  “I know you guys have grown up with this image,” she said. “But I want you to try to imagine what it must have been like to see it for the first time. To be the first humans alive, ever, to see our Earth, in full color, from the outside.”

  I stared at the image on the screen. Earth looked alive, vibrant. The moon was desolate and gray by comparison. Mrs. Turton clicked the remote control again, and the image disappeared. In its place was another photograph of outer space. This picture was mostly dark, with just a few pale brownish rays of light streaking across.

  “Now,” she said. “Here’s a different view.”

  She pointed to the middle of one of those rays, at a tiny, faint dot. A bunch of kids had to squint and lean closer just to see it.

  “That, right there, is us,” she said. “That’s Earth.”

  Justin Maloney leaned so far forward that he knocked his books and folders off his desk. Lined notebook paper sprayed across the floor.

  “This photo,” Mrs. Turton explained, “was taken more recently, from about three billion miles away.”

  Her finger still on the dot, she said, “That, my friends, is your home. That is where you live, your place inside this solar system. Your whole life—the lives of everyone you will ever see—will likely unfold on this one speck, which a famous cosmologist named Carl Sagan once called ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’”

  I thought about what Mrs. Turton was saying. Here I was, just one out of seven billion people, and people were just one species out of ten million, and those ten million were just a tiny fraction of all the species that ever existed, and somehow all of us fit onto that fleck of brown dust on the screen. And we were surrounded by nothingness. Just a whole lot of lifeless, lonely nothing in every direction.

  And that’s when I got a little panicky, a little sick to my stomach.

  I liked the view from 1968 so much better. In the 1968 view, we mattered. I wished we hadn’t gone any farther out, that we hadn’t tried to see ourselves from the outer edge of the solar system. I wished we hadn’t seen ourselves as a speck of dust, surrounded by so much nothing we were barely even visible.

  “Food for thought,” Mrs. Turton said. She flicked off the screen. “And now to our lesson. Today, my darling seventh graders, will be your first day working in the laboratory. The lab is a bit like space, in a way. It is where humans become explorers. It is where scientists push the boundaries of knowledge. And to start you on your journey, we will be studying pond water from our own valley.”

  I knew about labs, knew we would be studying cells and life systems this year, and that by midyear, we would dissect an earthworm.

  “Your first task,” Mrs. Turton said, “is to pick your lab partner. Pick wisely, because you’ll be together all year. Groups of two, please.”

  Dylan grabbed a boy named Kevin O’Connor, who also has a reputation for being good-looking but not very nice. For a moment, it looked like the new girl, Sarah Johnston, was coming toward me. She even looked right at me, and I swear she might have smiled, so I got a tiny bit hopeful. Then Aubrey grabbed her and linked her own elbow in Sarah’s. I stood there feeling stupid as my classmates paired off, until only one other person was standing alone.

&n
bsp; And that person was Justin Maloney.

  I sighed. If Justin is good at anything, it is messing up. Once, he took a bunch of squares of butter, lifted his shirt, and rubbed the butter all over his belly. Then he ran down the hallway and took a flying leap and landed in a belly flop on the floor. He’d been hoping to slide down the hallway, but instead he rubbed a bunch of skin off his stomach and spent the rest of the day holding the shirt away from him so his belly wouldn’t burn.

  As Mrs. Turton explained the lab—observe pond water and tap water, and test pH of each—Justin and I looked at each other. He wore a stopwatch around his neck, and his hair was buzzed almost all the way down to his head.

  “Hey, Suzy,” Justin said. “I guess we’re partners?”

  When I didn’t respond, he looked down. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll go get the pond water. If that’s okay.”

  I shrugged.

  When Justin scooped the water into a jar, drops splashed everywhere. I filled up another jar with tap water; then together we walked to the back corner of the room.

  When we sat down, the stopwatch around Justin’s neck started beeping. He pushed the stop button, reached into the pocket of his jeans, and pulled out a pale orange tablet. He blew some pocket lint off it, placed it on his tongue, and then swallowed without any water or anything.

  Then he looked at me and shrugged. “Breakfast of champions. Or lunch of champions. Whatever.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he explained. “ADHD,” he said. “If I don’t take it, my brain goes all wacko.”

  I wasn’t sure he should be taking medicine in class, but Justin has never exactly been a rule follower.

  I shrugged and returned to work. After a few minutes of dipping pH strips in water and noting our observations on paper, Justin looked up.

  “Listen, Suzy,” he said. “I know I’m probably not your top pick for a lab partner.”

  Probably?

  “But I won’t mess it up for you, okay?”

  I searched his face for any kind of sarcasm, but he looked genuine. “With this new medicine I’m on, I’m doing a lot better. I’ll work hard, I promise.”

  When I didn’t respond, he returned to writing, mouthing the words as he wrote.

  Walking out of class that day, Mrs. Turton stopped me. “Suzanne?”

  I stopped.

  “Do you have a report topic?”

  I nodded.

  “You do?” She sounded surprised.

  I nodded again, this time looking right at her.

  “That’s great, Suzanne. What is it?”

  Even when you are a not-talker, there are times in life when you have to say something out loud. This was one of those times. In instances like these, it’s best to say as little as possible—even just a single word if you can get away with it.

  “Jellyfish,” I mumbled.

  She leaned in like she couldn’t hear me. “I’m sorry?

  I frowned and said it louder. “Jellyfish.” I knew I sounded annoyed, and I felt bad about that. But once you’ve committed to not-talking, it can be hard to say anything out loud, let alone repeat yourself.

  I guess my tone didn’t bother her, though, because she brightened. “That’s a terrific topic. There are so many things to learn about any one species—the animal’s habitat and range, eating and hunting behavior, its relationship to humans. You let me know if you need any help finding information.”

  I nodded and started to walk toward the door.

  “Suzanne?” She stopped me.

  I looked at her.

  “You do know that the report is an oral report, right?”

  I waited.

  “What I mean to say is that you’ll have to present your report in front of the class. You can read it if you want—it doesn’t have to be off the top of your head. And I’ll help you practice if you need that. But public speaking is an important part of the grade.” She looked at me intently. “Do you understand?”

  I nodded. If I wanted to pass seventh-grade science, I was going to have to speak out loud.

  We are supposed to be learning about explorers. Instead, we’re holding hairbrushes and dancing around your room.

  Now that we’re in fourth grade, we have tests, and for our next test we have to memorize fifteen different people who helped map the world. You had trouble remembering them, so I started thinking of tricks that could help.

  We remembered that Magellan circumnavigated the world by thinking of him as Ma-Jell-O; his body just wiggled and jiggled all over the globe. We remembered Hernando de Soto, who was the first European to explore what is now the southern United States, as Hernando de Soda: It was so hot down south that he needed a soda. We remembered Erik the Red, the Viking who founded the first European settlement on Greenland, as being color-blind; he wanted to name the landmass after himself, but he got confused and named it Green. To remember Captain James Cook, who sailed to Australia, we just needed to remember him as the cook in a restaurant that catered exclusively to koalas and kangaroos.

  We decided to take a break after that one. Now we are jumping around and singing like rock stars onstage. We take turns dancing on the bed, then leaping off.

  I wave like a princess, my nose high in the air.

  “You look like Aubrey,” you tell me, and I make a face.

  Yesterday on the playground, Aubrey announced that she was the most popular girl in fourth grade, which might be true but shouldn’t be. It’s true only because when it comes to popularity, pretty matters more than whether anyone actually likes you.

  I continue to wave, imitating Aubrey now. I say, “I am the most popular girl in the world.”

  “Ugh,” you say. “Shoot me if I ever become like that.”

  I stop waving and look at you. “I’d never shoot you,” I say.

  “Well, do something, okay?”

  “But you’d never be like Aubrey,” I say.

  “Yeah, but just in case. Send me a signal. Like a secret message.”

  “What kind of message?” I imagine holding a giant sign that says DON’T BE LIKE THAT.

  “Something. I don’t know. Make it big. Something that really gets my attention.”

  I shrug. “Okay.”

  “Like, in a major way. Make it serious.”

  I think about that for a bit. I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but I like the idea of a secret message, some code understood only by you and me. I say, simply, “Sure, it’s a deal.”

  When the song ends, you say into your hairbrush microphone, “Introducing . . . the great . . . Mizz Frizz!!!”

  I wrinkle my nose. “Mizz Frizz?”

  “Yeah,” you say. “Because of your hair.” You press Play, and on comes a song I love so much, one my mother used to play for me. It’s about waking up surrounded by ten million fireflies, which is something I like to imagine. Ten million fireflies blinking on and off around my head, as if all the distant stars had come down to Earth just to say hello.

  “I love this song!” I say.

  “I know, dummy,” you answer.

  I hop on the bed and belt the words toward the ceiling: “ ‘I’d like to make myself belieeeeeve that planet Earth turns slowly . . .’”

  Then you leap up on the bed next to me. I say, “And let’s welcome Strawberry Girl, ladies and gentlemen . . .”

  “Strawberry Girl!?”

  “Yeah, because of your strawberry-blonde hair.”

  “Oooh, I love it!”

  Then you sing into that hairbrush, “‘‘ Cause everything is never as it seems

  One of your arms is stretched out wide, and your chin is tilted upward. Your eyes are almost entirely closed, and your lips are pulled into a smile.

  You look so happy.

  I say to you then, “My mom says when she sells that big house on Laura Lane, she’ll take us out to the House of Gasho.” The House of Gasho is a restaurant where chefs cook the food on the table right in front of you.

  “Cool,” you say. You are still
swaying to the beat.

  There is a knock on the door, and before we can scramble off the bed, your mom pops her head in.

  “Girls,” your mom says. Her voice is serious, but her face looks like she’s trying not to smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing homework?”

  “We took a break,” you answer. You are standing frozen in a kind of rock-star position, leaned over toward the hairbrush.

  “Well,” says your mom. She is smiling now, for real. “Maybe it’s time to take a break from your break.”

  “Okay,” you say.

  “Okay,” I say.

  She winks at us and closes the door.

  We turn the music off, and suddenly we are back to

  being Franny and Suzy, just regular kids instead of rock

  stars. We pick our books back up and return to Ma-Jell-O,

  to de Soda, to Captain James Cook and his restaurant

  for kangaroos.

  I’d never have guessed how many people spent their lives thinking about jellyfish. And not just biologists, either. There were NASA engineers who studied jellies’ jet propulsion. Performers who brought enormous jellyfish puppets to concerts and other events, making the night sky look exactly like the sea. There were researchers who studied jellyfish anatomy. Ecology. Evolution. I took notes on some of them, writing down the most important facts, then folded those pages into the back of my science notebook.

  Before one of our labs, I flipped through them. Justin peered over my shoulder. “What’s that?”

  I quickly shoved them into the back of my notebook and slammed it shut.

  “Oh,” Justin said. He looked startled. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy. I just—”

  Then he started laughing. “I dunno, they looked like FBI notes or something. Are you, like, an undercover agent or something?”