by Ali Benjamin
He turns toward a tree.
No, no, no.
It’s a birch tree. White bark. It’s just a few feet away from him.
Please. Please do not do what I think you are going to do.
He lifts his arm.
I suck in my breath. No.
It is all happening in slow motion now, the way he pulls his arm back, like a major-league pitcher about to throw a fastball.
The tree is right in front of him. There is a smile on his face. He winds his arm back.
He is about to kill something for no reason whatsoever.
The other kids scream and laugh at the same time.
No one is stopping this.
I look right at you then, right in your eyes. You can stop this. I feel almost certain of it.
I say your name—”Franny”—but it comes out in a kind of choke.
You cannot hear me. But you must sense something. You must feel me watching you.
You look up, right at me.
I stare at you, hard. I try to communicate everything I can.
Dylan is doing this for you, I try to tell you with my eyes. Please don’t let him do this, please don’t laugh, please don’t encourage him.
His arm is back. It is back so far.
Please. You are the girl who ran with me beneath the bats.
The squeals are even louder now.
I have seen you with Fluffernutter. I have seen you cry when people were cruel.
He holds his arm there, just for a moment.
This is not you. I know you. I know you better than any of these people.
And that is when you narrow your eyes. Ever so slightly. But it is enough.
When you do that, I see something I’ve never seen before: a kind of deadness in your eyes. You turn away, toward Dylan. At exactly that moment, he releases the frog.
You laugh and clasp your hand to your mouth like everyone else.
There is a half second where the frog flies through the air—ridiculously, cartooishly—and the there is a noise, a terrible noise. It is both a thud and a splat, both wet and dry.
It is the worst noise I have ever heard.
And then there is a chorus of “Eew” and “Oh, gross” and “Disgusting,” all mixed in with laughter. So much laughter.
I turn away from them, from you, from all of you. I have to breathe deeply to keep myself from throwing up.
I didn’t know how to stop it.
I don’t know any of the right things. I know about things like bats and glowworms. I know that pee and sweat are sterile, and that before the universe existed there was no color, no sound, no light, no air.
But these things are of no use.
I am supposed to know other things. Like how to clip a barrette to the front of my hair so it looks cute-but-not-babyish. Or how to walk in packs and how to squeal at campfire sparks and how to stand near boys with my hip jutting out.
I am supposed to know the perfect thing to say when later, you walk past me with Jenna and she sneers, “An orchestra,” as if orchestra referred to a clump of maggots crawling over one another at the bottom of a trash can. You laugh and keep walking, and it takes me a moment to even realize that you are laughing about me, about the answer I gave to Mr. Andrews.
I am supposed to know what to do later on that evening, when I hear other kids whispering and giggling in the dark. I am in my sleeping bag, and the giggles come close, really close, and then I feel someone hovering just above me.
I feel something warm and wet on my cheek.
Spit. Someone has spit on me.
Spit is not like sweat, not like urine. It is not clean.
It is not remotely sterile.
I am supposed to know how to do something other than lie there, pretending to be asleep as my former best friend—I understand now, you are not my best friend, not anymore—scrambles away in the dark, retreating in giggles as the warm saliva runs down my cheek, toward my nose, tickling my skin as it goes.
The night before my science report, I couldn’t turn my brain off.
I saw jellyfish when I closed my eyes.
Jellyfish when I opened them again and stared out into the blackness.
I got out of bed, turned on my light, and started pacing around the room, practicing what I was going to say.
I was muttering the report out loud when my door opened.
“Zu?” Mom asked. She wore a bathrobe and rubbed her eyes. “What are you doing?”
I shrugged.
“It’s one thirty in the morning, Zu,” she said. “Go to sleep.”
But even when I lay down, I hovered at the line between sleep and waking.
In the morning, I was going to speak.
In the morning, I was going to tell everyone what I understood.
And when I was done—if all went as I hoped—I wouldn’t be alone in my understanding anymore.
And if it didn’t go as I’d hoped . . . well, then Jamie really would be the only one left.
The rock lake campout was days ago. But I cannot get that frog out of my head.
I keep hearing it, the thud-splat of flesh against tree. I remember its limbs flying outward as it sailed through the air like a comic-strip image. But there was nothing funny about it.
That frog had been helpless. Completely.
And your eyes looked right at me. The moment they saw me, they changed.
You made a decision then, a decision not to care, a decision about whose side you were on now.
And every time I think about that, I want to scream.
Shoot me if I ever become like that, you said, long ago, when you swore you’d never be like Aubrey.
Send me a signal, you said. A secret message. Make it big.
I tried. I tried to call your name and I choked on it.
I tried to tell you with my eyes. You looked away.
Thud. Splat.
It is almost the last day of school.
If I’m going to send you a message, I am running out of time.
Procedure
A well-written procedure section is fairly straightforward. What materials did you use? What did you do, and how did you do it?
—Mrs. Turton
Another thing you should know: Jellyfish are stronger than we are.
Consider this: A jellyfish sting is one of the fastest reactions in the animal kingdom. Their stingers are coiled like harpoons, millions of invisible weapons just waiting. When jellyfish tentacles brush a surface, even faintly, they spring into action. In just 700 billionths of a second—a tiny fraction of the time it would take a person to understand, to think, to react—the jellyfish releases those harpoons, all their poison, with the pressure of a bullet.
Jellies can sting long past their own death, long after a tentacle is detached from the rest of the body. Jellyfish are stinging machines, and their stings are as violent as anything on Earth.
But they don’t even have to think about that, about who they sting or why. Jellyfish don’t get bogged down by drama, love, friendship, or sorrow. They don’t get stuck in any of the stuff that gets people in trouble.
They connect with other members of their species only to mate, and even that happens without fuss. The male opens his mouth and releases sperm. The female passes through his sperm and accepts it. The whole affair is clean. Tidy. There is no touching or drama or passion or pain.
The parents never wonder about what happens next. They either reproduce or they do not. Their babies either survive or they do not. The babies don’t think about the parents, and no jellyfish ever longs for another.
They drift past one another. They never stop moving, never stop pulsing through the depths.
“Susy?” mrs. turton smiled at me. “Are you ready?”
It was the day of my science report.
I walked to the front of my classroom with a stack of papers and several sheets of poster board. My heart pounded so hard I could hear it on the inside of my ears.
My feet moved across th
e tile floor. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Someone shifted in a chair, and the chair screeched. It was so loud I cringed.
I took a deep breath. I hadn’t spoken to any of these kids since the last school year.
I wondered if I would even be able to speak out loud.
But I took that breath. And I closed my eyes. And I thought about Jamie.
I thought about the way he reached his hand into the swirl of tentacles, completely unafraid. About him writhing on a hospital bed in that red bathing suit, the way he let the whole world see him in the middle of his worst pain, when he felt like he was being shocked by a million electric needles.
If he could do that, surely I could do this.
I stared at the back wall. And then I spoke.
“Imagine a creature . . .” I started. Then I swallowed (my heart thumping so loudly).
“Imagine a creature so unlike other animals that scholars once believed it was a plant.” (Deep breath.)
“A creature whose mouth and butt are one and the same.” (Laughter then. Good. They were listening.)
“A creature that is dangerous to others even after it is dead.”
I glanced around the room, just long enough to notice Sarah Johnston leaning forward a little in her seat.
So I told them. I told them about jellyfish life cycles—that jellies start off almost like a plant, clinging to the bottom of the sea, and how in that phase of life, they are a planula. But when they are grown up, they break away from the seafloor and are free to pulse through the ocean. Then they have taken the form of a medusa.
I showed them a picture of a jellyfish that looks like a fried egg. I showed a picture of a jellyfish that looks like Darth Vader, and another that looks like a kindergartener’s drawing of sunshine, just a big circle with lines sticking out in every direction. I showed them a jellyfish that lights up like police flashers when it’s threatened, and another jellyfish that absorbs all the light that surrounds it.
“It’s like a living black hole,” I told my classmates, “a real live black hole inside the ocean.”
I showed them picture after picture. And when I was done telling them all the basic things about jellyfish—what they eat and where they live and how they move and how many different forms they take—I began telling them other things.
The bad things.
I explained that jellyfish are taking over the seas.
That they are taking all the food for themselves.
That they are stealing penguins’ food.
That they are driving the whales to extinction.
That many scientists believe that there are more jellyfish than ever before and that deadly jellyfish that used to be only in places like Australia are probably in other places now, too: in England. In Hawaii. In Florida. Maybe even closer.
Places like Maryland, even.
It was at that point that Mrs. Turton spoke. “I’m so sorry to interrupt, Suzy,” she said gently. “But I’m afraid you’re going to need to wrap up soon.”
“I’m not finished,” I said flatly.
“I love that you have so much to say,” Mrs. Turton said. “But we still have another presentation to go, and we’re running out of—”
“I’m not finished,” I said. I said it louder and more forcefully than I’d ever spoken to a teacher. But I wasn’t going to stop talking. Stopping now, at this moment, before I’d gotten to the most important things that needed to be explained, was impossible.
The class got very, very still then.
I stared at Mrs. Turton, and she lifted her eyebrows, surprised. Then she looked down at her lap, like she was thinking about something. When she looked up, she flashed a tight smile. “A few more minutes, Suzy,” she said. “You can finish what you have to say, but please wrap up quickly.”
I took a deep breath, and I got to the point. “The most frightening is probably the Irukandji. Deadly, transparent, and tiny—you won’t even see this animal in the water.”
I told them about the number of documented deaths. About the migration over greater distances. About the dangerously fast heartbeat, brain hemorrhage. About the cause of deaths mistakenly attributed.
And that’s when I thought they would understand.
I really did: I thought everyone would understand.
“. . . And that is why we need to learn all we can about these fierce medusas of the sea,” I said.
I stopped speaking. I swallowed. I took a deep breath.
Then I looked up.
Mrs. Turton watched me with that same look she’d had when I snapped at her. She was thinking hard about something, I could tell.
I think I did it, I thought, and I glanced around the room at my classmates to see if they, too, were thinking about what I’d said.
Some were looking at me, and some were not, and the ones who were looking at me didn’t look like they were particularly moved.
One of the boys in the back of the room yawned.
Across from him, a girl carefully used her foot to push a folded piece of paper along the floor until it reached the desk of the girl in front of her. That girl dropped her pencil on the floor, then leaned down to pick up both the note and the pencil. She unfolded the note and let out a single snort of laughter.
Aubrey glanced at Molly with the same look she’d worn last year when I talked about the pee. Molly responded with a tiny gesture, so small that most people didn’t see it. But I did; it was her moving her finger around in a circle next to her ear as if to say, Crazy.
Cray cray.
I glanced back at Mrs. Turton and understood then: She wasn’t thinking about Franny. She was concerned, but her concern wasn’t about how Franny died. Or jellyfish taking over the world.
It was about me.
Somehow, in this report, the most important words I’d ever spoken out loud, I’d done something wrong.
“Suzy,” said Mrs. Turton finally, “that was incredibly thorough. I can see that a tremendous amount of hard work went into your presentation.”
She turned to the rest of the class. “I’m afraid that puts us off our schedule, so I’m so sorry, Patrick, but you’re going to have to go tomorrow.” Patrick, a boy who is always doing his homework for the next class during whatever class he’s already in, said “Yessss!” and pumped his fist like a motor.
And then everyone returned to normal, like I hadn’t even spoken.
That’s it? I wanted to say. I felt like saying No, no, you didn’t understand. Didn’t you listen? Did you really listen?
You don’t understand that one of us might already have been taken by jellyfish?
And that maybe someday these animals will overtake us all?
I dropped some papers and looked straight at the floor as I gathered them. My hands were shaking.
Someone in the back of the room did that thing where you pretend to cough but you’re really saying a word loud enough for everyone to hear.
The word was Medusa.
Everyone laughed. I turned around and saw Dylan looking at the ceiling, all innocent.
Then, when I turned back to the board, I heard it again, and this time I knew for sure that it was Dylan.
And then everyone started coughing like that.
“Medusa!”
I suddenly saw myself from the outside, as if I were watching from a corner of the classroom. I didn’t see a girl who had just convinced the world of something important. Instead, I saw a weird, frizzy-haired girl with trembling hands and a blotchy red face. A girl with no friends. A girl whose face was screwing up in the ugliest way, tears starting to stream from her eyes.
Once the tears started, I was powerless to stop them.
“Medusa!”
“That’s enough,” said Mrs. Turton in a sharp voice.
The class quieted down, but I knew that from now on, my nickname would be Medusa.
“Go ahead and sit down, Suzy,” said Mrs. Turton quietly. I nodded, and I rushed back to my seat.
I didn’t wan
t to just sit there and cry, not in front of all these kids. So as Mrs. Turton reviewed that night’s homework, I opened my notebook and picked up my pen.
I wish I could meet you, Jamie. I wish I could meet you and you could tell me you understand. Because nobody else understands.
I tried, but they didn’t see what I saw.
I know you would understand, because I have seen your picture. I found so many pictures of you online. In one, you’re holding a jar, and inside that jar is an Irukandji, ghostly and transparent. Your eyes are soft as you look at it. In another, you are staring through a tank at a box jellyfish. The jellyfish is in the top of the tank, and you are beneath it, looking up. There are flecks in the water that look like stars in the night sky. And because your image is hazy through the glass, and you are on the other side of the water, you are the one who looks like a ghost.
And here is the thing that I find so interesting. There’s never any anger in your eyes. There’s never any disgust.
You don’t even look at these creatures like they’re all that different from you.
You look curious, that’s all—like you’re trying to figure them out. Like maybe these creatures have something to tell us, and you care enough to hear it.
What is it about you? How is it that you care so much about the creatures that everyone else hates? I mean, I saw you in that hospital bed, almost dead from a sting. Why aren’t you the least bit angry after that?
What is it about you that makes you able to love creatures that no one else can?
Urine is more than 95 percent water. That happens to be exactly the same way people describe jellyfish, by the way—more than 95 percent water—but this doesn’t matter to me yet. Not yet. What matters now, as we near the end of sixth grade, is that freezing urine is easy.
Send me a signal, you had said. And for a long time, I didn’t know how to do that. Then after the campout, after I felt that saliva on my cheek, I did.
Make it big, you’d said.
Remember when I told you, that day in the cafeteria, that different animals use pee to communicate? That’s what I’ve decided to do. I’m going to send a message delivered the same way you delivered your message: with body fluids.
