the thing about jellyfish

by Ali Benjamin

  “Suzanne,” she said, “I wonder if you have ever given much thought to why people speak to one another. Why speech came about in the first place.”

  Dr. Legs explained that many people believe spoken communication evolved because human societies had become so complex that hand gestures and grunting were no longer enough.

  Then she added, “But that’s not what I believe.”

  If she thought I was going to ask what she believed, she was wrong.

  Dr. Legs leaned in toward me and said, “I think it developed from our need to be understood.”

  Our need to be understood. Those words made me think of all the things I’d done wrong to make Franny understand—everything that had happened leading up to the moment when I saw her walking away from me for the last time, crying and carrying those awful bags.

  It hurt too much to think about, so I pushed the memory out of my brain as quickly as I could. Just like I always did.

  Instead, I thought about Jamie. Since my failed phone call, I’d been thinking hard about how to reach him.

  “Being understood is a fundamental human need,” Dr. Legs said. “Wouldn’t you like to be better understood?”

  I sat very still. Trust me, Dr. Legs had said in our first session. I won’t judge.

  But how could this woman, of all people, help anyone understand me?

  “Isn’t there something you desperately want to express?”

  Well, yes. I needed Jamie’s help. So I nodded.

  “Perhaps I can help you find the words,” she said. Her voice was low and excited, as if she and I were partners in some great conspiracy.

  I could tell she thought we were experiencing the kind of thing she would probably call a breakthrough.

  I narrowed my eyes to let her know this was no breakthrough.

  “Well,” she said, “whatever you want to say, I recommend you come right out and say it. Just open your mouth and tell the world what’s on your mind.”

  Jamie, help me, I thought. Jamie, you are the one.

  “Of course, with your generation,” she continued, “I always feel like I have to add this: Please don’t do it through text or e-mail or anything like that. When you need to communicate something important, speak your truth face-to-face.”

  Face-to-face. Ha. The person I needed help from was literally on the other side of the world.

  “There’s a reason I’m saying this, Suzanne,” Dr. Legs said. “Did you know that most of what we communicate to other people is nonverbal?”

  Some of us try to communicate without words, anyway, I thought. It doesn’t always work.

  It sure didn’t work for me.

  “When you say what you have to say through a computer or a phone, there are often miscommunications. But when it’s just you and someone else, and you’re right in front of them, speaking your truth, they are much more likely to understand”

  Just me. Speaking my truth. Face-to-face.

  “And I’ll bet you anything they’ll respond.”

  I imagined myself sitting across from Jamie. He was smiling at me, as if asking, Can I help you?

  I smiled back.

  Dr. Legs said, “I see you smiling. So that helps you, I hope?”

  I shrugged, which she apparently took to mean yes.

  “Wonderful,” she said. She sat back, folding her arms across her belly. “Just wonderful.”

  We sat in silence for the rest of the session. When Dr. Legs opened the door, she smiled broadly at my parents. “I think we made major headway today,” she said to them.

  They grinned back at her, all big hopes and open hearts.

  I thought a lot about Jamie as I researched jellyfish for my science report. It was hard to imagine how anybody could ever become an expert in jellies. There were millions and millions of things to learn—more than I ever imagined a person could learn about a single animal.

  For example, if you cut a jellyfish in half, it might just become two jellyfish; they can divide in the same way cells do. And if you injure a jellyfish, you might find hundreds of little clones floating about, tiny replicas generated one after another from the damaged tissue, as if spit out from a 3-D printer.

  There were more than 1,500 species of jellyfish . . . maybe even as many as 10,000. We were discovering new things about them all the time. The thought of it made me dizzy—like I could study jellyfish for the rest of my life and never run out of new things to learn.

  As I worked, Dr. Legs’s words kept echoing in my head.

  When you need to communicate something important, speak your truth face-to-face.

  I wanted to. I wanted to sit down with Jamie so badly. With each new fact I learned—box jellies have primitive eyes, even though they don’t have a brain—I wanted to sit with him even more.

  If I could sit down with Jamie, he could tell me all the things I’d never think to ask on my own—things about ocean currents, and water temperatures, and what we know about where Irukandji syndrome has shown up in the world. Maybe he would plug all sorts of numbers into a spreadsheet and then say, “Yes. Yes, you are right, Suzy Swanson. You figured out what happened to your friend. You are the only one who did.”

  If I could sit down with Jamie, I’d tell him things, too. I’d tell him about a biologist I read about, someone who lived a long time ago: He was walking on a beach soon after his wife died. He saw a jellyfish in a tide pool, and the swirl of the tentacles reminded him of the swirl of her hair, and then he spent the rest of his life painting pictures of jellyfish.

  I would tell Jamie all about Franny—about how she was here, and then she was not, and how I saw the swirl of her hair inside those tanks.

  Meeting Jamie would be impossible. It would mean flying to a different continent, which would be insane. Cray cray, as Franny would say. It couldn’t in a million years happen.

  But what if it could?

  After the day at lunch when I talk about pee, I keep my mouth shut. I sit at the table with you and those girls, but I don’t say anything.

  Nobody says anything to me, either.

  A few weeks go by like that: I sit down and watch the rest of you talk. Then one day, I sit back down at our old table. You don’t join me, and when you sit with those other girls, your back is to me.

  Weeks go by. Then a month. I read books while I eat. I do homework. I listen to the noises in the cafeteria—the clamor of kids, the slam of lockers, the crumpling of brown paper bags, the shouts from lunch monitors: “No running,” “Pick up your trash, please,” “Cafeteria trays are not to be used as weapons, please.”

  I wait for you to come back.

  We don’t see each other on weekends anymore. If I call, you tell me you and your mom are shopping together. Or you’re visiting your great-aunt Lynda. You have a math tutor, because factorials are really confusing to you.

  One day, an unusually warm day in spring, I get an

  idea: I will ride my bike to your house. I will apologize

  for being weird at lunch, for talking about how pee is

  sterile. I’ll promise not to be weird anymore, if we can

  just start over.

  I have lived for eleven and a half years, which is 4,199 days if you include two leap years, and that is 100,776 hours, which is over six million minutes, but only on planet Earth.

  On Pluto, which takes almost 250 Earth years to revolve around the sun, I would still be a year old. On Mercury, on the other hand, I would be forty-five.

  But on Earth, I am eleven and a half, and that is old enough to not be weird.

  I stop my bicycle on the sidewalk across from your house. I hear voices. Girls’ voices.

  There are three girls in the yard, and they are spraying each other with a hose. And they look almost like teenagers, the way they are squealing in the wet spray. I watch for a while, until one of them, the one with strawberry-blonde hair, seems to look up.

  You look just long enough to see me there. Then you turn away, return to squealing.

&
nbsp; I become intensely aware of my cutoff shorts, the fact that I’m wearing a faded Hilltown Realty T-shirt—HILLTOWN REALTY: TURNING YOUR DREAMS INTO AN ADDRESS!—the one my mom wears when she’s gardening.

  I see myself as you just did. As someone who is out of place in this world.

  The temperatures dropped. Girls started wearing their jeans tucked into sheepskin boots. Frost appeared on the windows. Mom grumbled about how nobody ever buys a house when the weather gets cold.

  Before long, students began presenting science reports in Mrs. Turton’s class. A bunch of the science reports were interesting—Molly did her report about scoliosis; she held up X-ray images of her sister’s back, showed us how her sister’s spine bent in slow curves like a lazy river. Jenna did her report about dolphins, whose hearing, she said, is ten times better than humans’.

  Justin did a report on mutated cats. He showed a picture of a cat with two different faces.

  “See, Frank and Louie here have two faces, two mouths, two noses, and three eyes,” he said. “They even made it into the Guinness World Records book!”

  Dylan did his about lightning, which was dull, because lightning isn’t alive, and besides, all he did was explain what different kinds of lightning looked like.

  The reports were scheduled three per day for a week and a half; I was scheduled for the last day. With each presentation, I felt my own getting closer.

  Now we are eleven kids away.

  Now ten. Now nine.

  Now Sarah Johnston was standing in front of the class talking about zombie ants.

  “A fungus takes over the ant’s brain,” she explained. “It begins to control the ant’s mind, making it do things that no ant would do otherwise.”

  Insect mind control. It’s a pretty good topic for a report, actually.

  “The ant stumbles away from the colony like a drunk,” she continued. “Until now, everything the ant did was for the good of the colony. But not anymore. It goes to a precise location, like it’s guided by a GPS. Then it dies, and a stalk starts growing out of the ant’s head.”

  She pointed to a photograph of a desiccated insect with a stick emerging from its corpse—it was gross, but kind of fascinating, too.

  “Then one day,” she said, “that stalk explodes and sends spores down onto the new colony. So new ants get taken over.”

  Justin’s head had been down on his desk for most of Sarah’s presentation, but he lifted it at that comment. “Sounds like middle school,” he said dryly.

  I saw a flicker of a smile on Sarah’s lips, but Mrs. Turton gave Justin a warning look.

  “Sarah, I’m curious,” Mrs. Turton said. “What made you choose this topic?”

  Sarah hesitated. “Well,” she said. She bit her lip and thought. “I saw it on a television show. And I just thought it was so cool. But also really, really scary. Like, the idea that something like this could happen—something could just control your brain.”

  “Does it seem less scary now that you know more about it?”

  Sarah shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s still scary. But it’s still cool. Creepy cool.”

  Mrs. Turton laughed. “Creepy cool,” she said. “I like that. Thanks, Sarah.”

  As Sarah returned to her seat, the rest of the class applauded politely. Now we were one report closer to mine.

  Without knowing why, I opened to the back of my notebook. I began to write.

  Jamie, if my report goes well, people will do more than applaud. They’ll feel something. They’ll feel how I do when I think about how the oceans are changing in all the worst ways, and how jellyfish will starve even whales. I want them to understand that the world is so much bigger than the Eugene Field Memorial Middle School, and how much there still is to figure out.

  Once they understand this, they’ll know what a big deal it is when you and I prove what happened to Franny.

  I can do it, Jamie.

  I think I can do it.

  But, oh man, I wish I didn’t have to speak in front of the class.

  Late spring. we are at the sixth-grade campout at Rock Lake.

  Our class has done a ropes course and zip line. We’ve linked arms and crawled one at a time through a Hula-Hoop, without breaking arms. We’ve led one another, blindfolded, through the twists and turns of the forest. Girls have run from simple spiders, boys have tackled one another in the grass. One of our chaperones, Mr. Andrews, who is a sixth-grade homeroom teacher, has shown everyone how to build a campfire, starting with sticks placed in the shape of a teepee. Soon we’ll cook hot dogs and smother them in ketchup, then roast marshmallows over the fire until the marshmallows burst into flames and turn black.

  On the bus ride here, I sat alone. You walked past my seat and plopped yourself next to Aubrey. If I turned around, I could see your back as you leaned across the aisle to gossip with Jenna.

  You and Molly are wearing matching barrettes at the front of your hair, clipped just so. Somehow, those barrettes manage to make you look older, not younger. You’re both wearing lip gloss, and in your half-zipped sweatshirts and jeans, you look a little like twins. The boys are running in and out of the woods, throwing sticks and small logs into the fire. The larger logs send sparks up into the air, which makes everyone cheer. Then Justin picks up a stone, lifts it over his head, and hurls it right into the center of the fire. The sparks scatter everywhere, fast, and several girls jump back, screaming.

  “Sixth graders, come on over!” Mr. Andrews waves to us from beneath a tree a short distance away. He begins counting down. “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  The boys dash over, their arms and legs everywhere, tripping and knocking into one another as they go. The girls move more slowly. They walk in a pack, and they don’t care that they’re not over by Mr. Andrews by the time he finishes counting. I walk close behind those girls—close behind you—but I am not part of your slow-moving, boy-watching group. I am in a different category altogether.

  I am becoming an expert in watching other girls’ backs.

  “Ladies,” Mr. Andrews says. “Nice of you to join us.”

  Then he turns to the group and asks, “What do you hear?” His legs are farther apart than his shoulders. His hair is so short, he’s almost bald. He looks like a soldier. Or a pit bull.

  Everyone is still. Then Justin Maloney makes a farting noise, and everyone laughs except Mr. Andrews. Aubrey leans over and whispers something in your ear. You giggle.

  I wish so badly you would look at me.

  Mr. Andrews repeats his question. “What do you hear?”

  I close my eyes. I listen. After so many days of sitting alone, listening to the cafeteria noises, I’m good at hearing things. I hear the rustling of classmates. The urgent, high-pitched flutter of cricket wings, the up-and-down melody of songbirds, the first who-whooo of an owl. In the distance, from another campground, I hear somebody belting out “The Star-Spangled Banner.”From a different campground, a thud-thud, like a drumbeat from some faraway rock song.

  Those birds. There are so many out there calling. Some sound like whistles, and others sound like caw-caw-caws. Some are chattery and some are singsongy. They’re different sounds, different birds, but there’s a rhythm to them. The crickets and owl, too: They all kind of fit. It’s like music, somehow, all those pitches, all that rhythm, weaving in and out.

  Then, with a start, I understand something. It is music. I am certain—/ mean, I just know—that all these different species are playing together, calling around one another’s noises. Each of them has picked a pitch, a pattern, and they are filling in one another’s empty spaces.

  It’s a concert, and I can hear it by listening just right.

  I open my eyes. I look right at Mr. Andrews.

  “It’s an orchestra,” I say. The words come out a little breathless.

  He cocks his head. “What?”

  An orchestra,” I repeat. “Or, I don’t know. Not exactly an orchestra, but like one, anyway.”

  He just stare
s at me.

  All those noises,” I continue. “The birds, or whatever. They’re playing together. . . .” But even before the words are out, I see one of his eyebrows go up, and I know that this isn’t the answer he was looking for. It’s the wrong answer, the very wrongest answer, and now that it’s out, I cannot take it back.

  I shrug, as if to distance myself from my own words. “I mean, that’s kind of what it sounds like, anyway.”

  “Huh,” Mr. Andrews says, but in a way that suggests he isn’t really thinking at all about what I just said, not even a little bit. And that is all he needs to say. As if he’s given them permission, the kids laugh. All of them. You, too.

  Mr. Andrews tells the class what we were supposed to have heard. “While Suzy here listens to Mozart in the trees, I want you to hear something else.” He makes a rhythmic gesture with his hands, in time with the thumping bass from the faraway rock song.

  Then Mr. Andrews explains that sounds at low

  frequencies travel farther than sounds at high frequencies,

  and that is why you can always hear the beat of a drum

  from a faraway parade sooner than you can hear the rest

  of the band.

  My cheeks burn. I wish I’d thought to point that out instead.

  Later, I walk around the campground for a while. Just me. I listen to the orchestra above my head until I hear a commotion down by the pond. Dylan and Kevin O’Connor are throwing something back and forth. I think it might be a stone or a ball, but it has limbs.

  It’s a frog. They’re hurling it back and forth at each other.

  Stop.

  I think that, although I do not speak.

  You stand near Dylan. You watch him. Your hip is sticking out, and you do not take your eyes off him.

  Dylan must know you are there, because he catches the frog and turns right to you. He wiggles the animal in your face a little bit. You squeal, like you’re frightened. But also as if you like what he’s doing in some way.

  He grins and looks at the frog in his hand.