Wild Blue Wonder

by Carlie Sorosiak

  I will—and I am. I’m going to put a little bit of this world back together. And then I can go out and find the sea monster.

  Which has to be real.

  For the record, 72 percent of this planet is underwater, and close to 95 percent of the deep sea remains unexplored. Scientists only discovered giant squid and oarfish when those creatures decided to enter the shallows. So it seems completely plausible—no, it seems definite—that an abundance of life exists outside of human recognition. Especially in a magical place like Winship, believing in this monster isn’t a batshit idea; it’s a scientific probability.

  Sliding my phone into my L.L.Bean backpack, my hands so cold that I have to massage them to regain sensation, I sneak through the faculty parking lot, noticing how gaga Winship High has gone for Halloween. The PTA must be stretching its budget: the front office is swathed in gauzy cobwebs and there are a million stupid orange lights blinking from the windows. By the school buses is a student-carved pumpkin display—the highlights of which include a pumpkin vomiting its seedy guts, Kim Kardashian’s face, and what probably passed for a maple leaf but is—to the well-trained eye—clearly a marijuana leaf.

  Shivering outside the senior hallway, I wait for the bell after second period and then casually slip inside, casually walk like I’m not a girl with a shaking heart. Immediately, Hana frantically waves at me next to our lockers, a hundred jelly bracelets jiggling on her wrists. She’s repurposed her otter costume as one of those Ty Beanie Baby animals—the blood is gone, and she’s added a red heart tag to her backpack. As always, her eye shadow is flawless and bold. Two years ago she started her own YouTube channel, dedicated to daytime looks and character makeup, transforming herself (and sometimes me) into women like the Black Swan, Cleopatra, and the Queen of Hearts. Every May, when she travels to Seoul—where her grandmother was born, and where her parents lived for a few years in the nineties—to visit her great-aunt and second cousins, she comes back with a suitcase jam-packed full of beauty products.

  I take off my headphones as she calls out to me, “Katniss!”

  “Still not Katniss.” Stuffing my gloves in my locker, I surreptitiously look around, checking for Mr. Leeds, our Western Civ teacher, who’s always up for giving me a lecture about arriving late.

  “You okay?” Hana asks. I notice there are tiny gold flakes in the corners of her eyes.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Because you didn’t show up for homeroom this morning, and I’m your best friend and know when you’re not okay.”

  “It’s just . . .” I stumble. On one hand, I should be able to tell Hana anything, but on the other, I see how dangerous this is. What if I say I’m fixing the boat, and she thinks that’s stupid? In my mind, the plan is unbreakable. I’m not ready to expose it to the elements just yet.

  “I didn’t sleep well,” I finally say. “I’d rather talk about how cute your costume is.”

  “Are you sure you’re—”

  “Hana, please?”

  She sighs. “Okay, okay, new subject.” Riffling through her otter backpack, she extracts her phone and passes it over. “Read these immediately.”

  The first text came in at 12:47 a.m.

  hi hana

  Hi!

  oh sorry, you’re awake

  Yep

  i just didn’t think you’d be awake

  I am

  okay

  ☺

  so i was thinking about seeing a movie this weekend and i thought maybe we could go together if you want but if you don’t want to that’s fine

  I hand her back the phone and try to push a piece of too-short hair behind my ear. “Should I know who these oh-so-smooth messages are from?”

  “No, not really,” she says, and before I can question my lack of a best friend sixth sense, she points with one sly little finger down the hall at Elliot Stamp, captain of Winship’s figure-skating team and a fierce champion of reindeer sweaters. He’s wearing one now—blue and white, with hoof prints tracking circles around the sleeves. He also happens to sit at our lunch table every single day, and yet I had no idea—literally no idea—that he was crushing on her. I thought he started eating with us two months ago because his best friend, Jeremy, moved to Baltimore, and Hana’s welcoming to everyone. But maybe there was more to it than that?

  “You can’t tell me he doesn’t make those sweaters look good,” she says, dragging her teeth across her bottom lip. “We’re going to a James Bond marathon on Saturday.”

  Now, this is Hana Chang we’re talking about here—I’ll date in college; high school boys are idiots Hana Chang—so this should be a big-ass deal, and I have no clue why she’s treating it so lightly. “That’s awesome.”

  “Yeah, if we can manage to talk to each other. You know that in person it . . . doesn’t work. He asked me how to conjugate a verb in German yesterday, and I think he nearly passed out.”

  “So the kid’s a little shy. . . . How long have you liked him?”

  She raises her shoulders up and down. “A while.”

  And I’m about to press it when a guy with reddish-blond curls closes his locker door, and I see his ripped gray T-shirt and the crooked ridge of his nose where he broke it snowboarding and it can’t—

  It can’t—

  It can’t be. Dylan?

  On second look, his hair’s not reddish at all. The boy turns, gives me a strange look, and walks away.

  As I blink back a tidal wave of sad, I hear Hana saying, “Okay, he’s coming over. Right now. . . . No! Don’t look.”

  We wait until he’s right beside us before I say, “Oh, hey, Elliot.”

  “Hey, Quinn . . . Hana. Hi, Hana.” It always catches me off guard—how deep his voice is when he actually speaks. Besides the sweaters, Elliot’s other claim to fame is his parents own Winship Dinosaur Park, the town’s only amusement park. Plastic pterodactyls aplenty. “So I bought tickets for Saturday,” he says.

  This is the part where Hana should be talking, or doing anything besides dead-bolting her mouth—but the in-person silent act works both ways.

  I step in, coming up with something off the top of my head. “Great. . . . Hana was just telling me that . . . um . . . there should be a TV show like Game of Thrones mixed with The Hunger Games.”

  Hana responds slowly, “Yeah . . . Hunger Thrones?”

  “Except with a title that doesn’t sound like a brand of industrial toilets.”

  Elliot cracks up.

  “How’s German going?” I ask them, struggling for commonalities. I don’t know how we do this every day at lunch.

  Hana says to me, “Ja. Ich bin ein Raumschiff.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “‘Yes. I am a spaceship.’”

  “Of course, because you have to learn the important phrases first.”

  As the bell rings, Hana and Elliot make the (mostly silent) walk toward their class while I head to English, where my grades have taken a nosedive of epic proportions. It might have something to do with the fact that I haven’t handed in a single assignment between September and mid-October and spend 75 percent of class time with my phone in my lap, adding delightful images to my “Ocean Life & Cats in Hats” Pinterest board. Most teachers forgive my there-but-not presence in class, all things considered.

  But not Coach Miller.

  It’s easier to read his serial-killer handwriting in the front of the room, and since my back is to everyone, I can pretend that whispers don’t heat up my skin, that everyone doesn’t look ready to suffocate me with couch cushions from the teachers’ lounge. Usually I sit by myself in the first row.

  But today there is someone in my seat.

  Not someone. Him.

  The boy from last night—wearing skinny jeans and a very un-Maine dress shirt, his black hair swept messily to one side. If I had to describe his glasses, I’d say they were . . . grandfatherly? Big, round, tortoiseshell. When he spots me hovering in the classroom doorway, his dark eyebrows pinch together in
a question: Wait, are you one of the girls who trespassed in my yard last night?

  Well, crap, I think.

  But then he smiles. It’s this curious little half smile (part nervous, part friendly), and as I plunk my backpack two desks to his right and slide into the seat, I return it—just for a second.

  That’s the best I can do.

  In my peripheral vision I can see him fiddling with the collar of his shirt. Poor guy. High school’s shitty enough without being the new kid—and he’s definitely new in town. Trust me, Winship has a greater population of lobster than people, and everyone’s grandfather’s grandfather attended the same bonfires. There are insiders, and there are outsiders—but either way, we all know one another’s business: the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.

  Speaking of very ugly . . . I take out my Moleskine notebook, open to a blank page, and start drafting a rough timeline for the boat repair. Early November, remove dry rot and sand it back. Mid-November, find the correct-sized propeller. Late November . . . New boy has a notebook on his desk as well—no, a sketch pad? I watch him pick up a blue pen, his hand moving slowly and purposefully across the page. He’s left-handed, his right arm blocking my view of the drawing—if it even is a drawing. Is it a drawing?

  Behind us, murmurs are gathering from a variety of animals, vegetables, and minerals: Duke Bailey’s dressed as a cactus, complete with green face paint; Sarah Jackson’s confusing her centuries with mod eye makeup and a Marie Antoinette wig; Tegan Brumley—my former swim teammate and fellow camp counselor last summer—is tossing around words like “where’s he from?” in cat ears that match Fern’s.

  The swish-swish of Coach Miller’s track pants entering the room (along with the rest of Coach Miller, obviously) breaks through the whispers. Last year, one of Reed’s friends started a rumor that the polyester pants—and the noise they make—cover up the fact that Coach Miller has one glass testicle, which makes a tinkling sound. This is, in all likelihood, completely false. At the very least, he would need two glass balls to generate the alleged sound.

  Coach Miller tips his head at me, as he does every class, a subtle gesture that gently says: Get it together, Quinn. We need you on the goddamn swim team. Since Winship lost its best relay member (me), the team totally sucks. But I’m sticking to what I told him in the locker room last month: No. Swimming. Ever. Again.

  Coach Miller claps his hands together and declares, “Before we move on to Moby-Dick, we have a new student!” The way he says it, it’s very much like we’re preparing to eat him. “Can you go ahead and stand up”—reading from a paper on his desk—“Alexander Ko-sto . . . Ko-stop . . . ?”

  “Kostopoulos,” New Boy says, rising slowly from his seat. He’s not that tall, but not too short, either—and he’s . . . British? Greek? Definitely has an English accent.

  There’s a barrage of twittering from the back of the classroom. We’ve barely had any new students, much less foreign ones. In the cafeteria, there’s a CELEBRATE DIVERSITY banner in big bold letters—a huge joke, because what diversity? Besides Hana, who’s second-generation Korean American and always selected for the first row of field-trip photos, showcased proudly on the school’s website, Winship High is one big cesspool of homogeny.

  It suddenly occurs to me that it was Greek music I heard coming from the house last night—the kind Nana obsessively played after visiting Athens when I was eight years old.

  Coach Miller says, “Excellent. Tell us about yourself, Mr. Kostopoulos.”

  I feel so bad for him. Really, this is like being fed bite by bite to hungry bobcats.

  Alexander rubs the back of his neck with one hand, blue ink stains on his fingertips. I glance down and see he’s wearing blue suede shoes. Ha! Like Elvis. Does he know those are going to get absolutely slaughtered in the snow?

  His gentle voice bumbles around, as if trying to stand up on figure skates. “Right . . . hi . . . I’m Alexander. I . . . uh . . . just moved here, actually. From London.”

  “And what brings you to America?”

  “That’s a . . . that’s a really excellent question, but . . . uh . . . right.” He pushes up his tortoiseshell glasses, which are at risk of sliding off his nose. “If I had to say one thing, it would be the . . . food portion sizes?”

  His answer is so unexpected that I laugh out loud. I’m not sure that anyone else knows it’s a joke. Slowly, I sink back into my seat, feeling the burn of twenty sets of eyes on me.

  Coach Miller clears his throat. “Okay, great. You can go ahead and sit down. Everybody, let’s make Alexander feel right at home, okay?” In this town, that’s practically an invitation for guys to shove snowballs down his pants in the lunch line.

  Coach passes back some quizzes and for the next hour runs over our long essay assignments for Moby-Dick. Duke the Cactus can’t stop snickering because ha, dick, that’s so funny, ha. I finish the rough schedule for repairing the Chris-Craft, and when the bell rings, on go my headphones.

  I slip out before anyone else.

  One of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda, has a line that reads: “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved / in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” And at first, that’s the way I loved marine biology—in empty coves, just the tidal pools and me. Our whole lives, Nana’s said that “Sawyers are fierce individualists,” so when I fell in love with marine biology after spotting a humpback whale off The Hundreds’ coast, I kept it a secret; marine biology was Dad’s thing, which meant it couldn’t be mine, too.

  It took three years before that dark thing transitioned from shadow and soul to out in the open, but in that time, I managed to nurture a profound hypocrisy. My siblings and I got part-time jobs at Leo’s Lobster Pound. Yeah, yeah, it’s tragically cliché and tragically ironic: the girl from Maine who wants to be a marine biologist ends up watching sea life get slaughtered en masse. Two summers ago, Dylan and I did sneak out in the middle of the night to cut the rubber bands off their claws, tossing some of them back into the sea. He wanted to rent lobster costumes from the party shop and dress for the mission, but I thought that would render our operation slightly more conspicuous.

  It’s not like I’m the girl who lowers them into the boiling abyss, though. Mostly I just man (or wo-man) the wood-paneled gift shop. Our bestseller is a T-shirt with a cartoon lobster peering into a pot, where his friend floats facedown; the caption reads: How’s the water, Bob? Bob . . . ? BOB?!?!

  “It’s actually kind of morbid,” Hana says, scrutinizing the cartoon in her red-and-white waitress outfit. It’s five p.m. on Halloween Monday, so the restaurant’s pretty dead. For the past hour, we’ve been ridiculously bored—crowding around the space heater and watching condensation billow from the colossal lobster pots outside, plumes twisting into animal shapes that chase each other through the frigid air. Reed works the steamers, and usually he’s alone—but today, there’s Charlie. Charlie with his nice jeans and his red puffer jacket, his swoopy brown hair that cowlicks in the back. He’s a rock-climbing and mountain-biking instructor in town, and it’s entirely possible that he’s great. But the two of them are out there nuzzling in the haze, and all I can think is: How dare you, Reed? It hasn’t even been fourteen weeks.

  Charlie is my brother’s first real boyfriend.

  When I was thirteen, Reed came out to me at the Winship Aquarium. I was already dizzy with excitement because I’d gotten to pet a stingray and hold slippery creatures in my hands and eels—those eels! We were leaning over an imitation tidal pool with bursts of vibrant green algae, and I was thinking about how—to a fish, especially ones so small—the world must feel supermassive, almost infinite, and he just blurted it out: “I like boys!”

  We were the only people in the aquarium except for the security guard, but Reed’s ears still flushed as his voice echoed around the space—“I. Like. Booooys.” A muscle feathered in his neck.

  “Okay,” I said tentatively. My friend Elsie had two moms, and Dylan’s cousin Parker was gay; as far
as I was concerned, it was a distinct nonissue, but I knew it was my job to be supportive. I didn’t want to get the words wrong. “It doesn’t change anything.”

  Reed sighed—and I couldn’t tell if it was out of weariness or relief. “Except that it changes everything.”

  I’m thinking about that now as Hana is motioning to the decks of Trapped in Maine playing cards, moose key chains, loon magnets, and ceramic black-bear-snot egg separators (you crack in the egg, and the whites come out its nose). “Who buys this stuff?”

  Behind the register, I’m half finished with sketching the Chris-Craft’s outline in my Moleskine notebook. “Everybody.”

  “They should bottle their melted butter,” Hana says contemplatively. “I’d buy that.”

  “No lie, I’d take a bath in that.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  She tilts her head from side to side, ponytail swishing. “Yeah, probably.” Stepping away from the T-shirt rack, she curves around the freezer of lobster ice cream (made with bits of real lobster—can you hear my retching noises?) and plunks her elbows on the register, chin in hands. I don’t want to explain about the boat sketch, so I put away my Moleskine and extract Moby-Dick from my backpack instead.

  “How’s the book?” she asks.

  “Don’t know. Haven’t started. Although it was so much fun hearing all the dick jokes in class today.”

  “Blech. I hate that word.”

  “There really is no comfortable word for penis.”

  “Gentleman’s area?”

  “That’s two words,” I say. “And worse.”

  Our manager, Bennet, rounds the corner into the gift shop—tufts of white hair windmilling his head like a seaweed fan. He’s in his late fifties and really nice, but he always bursts in as if he’s the sole witness to the Hindenburg disaster, desperate to spread the news. “Hana,” he says, out of breath, voice panicked. “Customers at table seven.”