Waking Storms

by Sarah Porter

  There was one huge question pressing up in Dorian, but he didn't know how to ask it without sounding insane. If Zoe hadn't burned herself, if it had been someone else, then why was she still sitting there with human legs folded under her? Why hadn't she let go of her human life and flowed away into the sea with the other broken girls, with Luce and Dana and Nausicaa? Zoe watched him for a minute.

  “I bet you want to ask who did it? My stepdad. He's gone now, thank Gawd, but my mom keeps taking him back. They've split up like a million times already.” Her tone was sassy and hard, but Dorian could hear the slight wavering hidden inside it. She was back to tugging at the bedspread, staring down at it as if nothing could be more fascinating.

  “At least he's not around to fuck you up now.” Dorian wanted her to look at him again, but he didn't want to admit it. Now that he was paying closer attention to her, maybe there was something in Zoe's face, a kind of wounded defensiveness, that reminded him of the mermaids' faces. “But that isn't what I was wondering, actually.” How could he say this? The urge to know pulsed in him, painfully strong. She must have felt something, some hint of the transformation, but for some reason she hadn't given in to it. Why?

  “Yeah? What is it, then? You want to know if I liked it? You think I'm one of those masochists who gets off on that stuff?”

  She was being deliberately bitchy. Trying to provoke him. Dorian's shoulders heaved a little as if Zoe's words were something gummy and awful sticking to his body. “Zoe, cut it out.” It was odd to hear how weary his voice sounded.

  “What?” In spite of the pissy tone she was looking at him again, and there was a sharp flash of frightened expectation in her eyes. He couldn't help thinking that she was hoping he would say something important and afraid at the same time to let herself really hope for anything. For half a minute they just stared at each other.

  “When your stepdad did that...” Dorian tried, then paused. “This might sound crazy.” Zoe's eyes were rounder than ever, waiting. He tried to remember exactly how Luce had described it. “When he hurt you, like when it was the absolute worst, did you ever feel ... like this cold feeling? Almost like your body was turning into water and you could just flow away? Get out and forget everything?”

  Zoe was quiet for several seconds, but the hard front she kept up was completely gone. She looked as soft as dough, hungry and wondering. Dorian half imagined that he could see a cloud of dark sparkling hinting at itself in the air around her head. “How can you know about that?” she asked at last. Quietly, almost ashamed-sounding. Her eyes flicked over his body, obviously wondering if he was also hiding scars. “Was it ... Like, were you...”

  “Not that way.” Dorian shook his head. “I'll tell you some shit sometime, but I never ... I just heard about how it feels.” He hesitated. “From my girlfriend.”

  Zoe hardened again, but the toughness had something pitiful in it. “Steve said you pretend you still have some girlfriend back in Chicago. You thought that was such a great idea, right, telling him so he'd tell me?” Her head was tipped back now, her gaze narrowed. “I know it's bullshit, okay?”

  “It's not—”

  “It's just some Mr. Sensitive crap so you don't have to hurt my feelings. It hurts a lot worse to be lied to, though.” She glowered at him. “Just say you don't want me.”

  Dorian felt angrier at this than he could quite explain to himself. “Then how do I know about the whole turning-into-water thing? You've never told anyone about that, have you? And I'm telling you exactly how it felt for you. You didn't give in to it. But I know what would have happened if you had...”

  Zoe lowered her face; Dorian thought that she was trying to hide her fascination. “Oh, yeah?” The bratty tone was back. “Because whatever it was also happened to your girlfriend?”

  “Yes.” Dorian still felt angry, volatile. If Luce couldn't be bothered to keep her promises, then why shouldn't he say whatever he felt like? Still, there was the question of how ridiculous it would sound.

  “Awesome. What would have happened? This way the next time that bastard shoves a cigarette into my arm I'll know what my choices are.” She sounded like she was joking, but her eyes contradicted the blithe tone; they were worried, eager, and guarded, as if she was afraid that Dorian actually knew the answer.

  He looked up sharply. Her choices. He hadn't thought about that, but that was obviously the most important issue. Just because Zoe had stayed human so far didn't mean she would next time!

  Zoe tried harder to cover her emotion. “Spill already! I'm waiting. You get so cold inside you feel like you're melting. Then what?”

  Dorian kept his face hard so there was no way she could think he was kidding. “You change. If you go with the feeling, then you change. And you can't take it back, either.”

  “You change?” Zoe didn't exactly sound as if this came as a surprise to her; more as if it confirmed something she'd sensed all along.

  “Into something else.” Now Dorian was afraid she might decide he was lying, playing games with her when she was already so hurt. The idea stopped him for a moment.

  “Okay.” She actually smiled now, though there was something grim about it. “Like what?”

  “You can't tell anyone, Zoe.”

  “Like what?”

  Dorian gazed at her for a second. Maybe he'd sound like an asshole, but she needed to know the truth. It was horrible, he thought, that the girls who made that choice didn't know what they were getting into. Proteus tricked all of them, made them think that they were going to be safe and free when really they were trapped into becoming murderers; even worse, they were trapped that way forever, cold and lost and lonely. But maybe, just maybe, he could protect Zoe from that. If her stepfather came back...“A mermaid. The girls where that happens to them. They become mermaids. And ... they kill a lot of people, Zoe.”

  What did it matter if it sounded ridiculous? Dorian thought angrily. It was true. He was telling Zoe the truth, and there was one thing certain: nobody else would. At least she'd know what she was facing.

  “Mermaids. Like your girlfriend? That's what she is?” Zoe was obviously trying to make fun of him, but she couldn't quite manage it. Dorian stared flatly into her awkward smirk. She was struggling not to accept the truth, he thought, but she couldn't keep herself from partly believing him. “She's the one you're always drawing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What's her name?”

  Dorian hesitated. But it was a harmless enough question, really. “Luce.”

  “Is that short for Hallucination?” Zoe asked, deadpan. Then her lips curled into a sly smile.

  Dorian couldn't help it: he cracked up laughing and soon Zoe was laughing, too. They were both leaning forward, their laughter wild with a strange kind of shared relief, tears brightening Zoe's round hazel eyes. Dorian felt like he was being a little disloyal to Luce, laughing at a joke about her. But it was funny—funny, he thought, in the way of things that are just a bit too true. Luce herself was real, of course, but her life in the sea sometimes seemed to Dorian like some kind of acted-out fantasy, with its queens and battles and shipwrecks. Not a hallucination exactly, but a willful waking dream that never ended. As if Luce was avoiding something.

  “Actually,” Dorian said when he could finally talk again, “it's short for Lucette. I don't know what her last name was, though..."

  Something about that brought Zoe up short. She stopped giggling abruptly and wiped her eyes with her sleeve, staring at him. “Lucette? That's a pretty unusual name.”

  “It is unusual, yeah. But it's totally beautiful.”

  Zoe's eyes sparked with annoyance for a moment, then turned cautious and darkly curious. “I've only ever heard that name one time before, actually.” She was examining Dorian's face, checking for his reaction. “Have you heard about that girl Lucette Korchak? From Pittley?”

  Dorian wondered if she was trying to change the subject. Why would he want to hear gossip about some other girl with the same name?
“Um, no. What about her?”

  “Lucette Korchak? She committed suicide like a year ago. Early April. She threw herself off a cliff by the sea.” Zoe was staring at him, and Dorian could feel something in his face starting to unfold, to blossom with realization. “Or some people up there think her uncle murdered her. He's this total drunk-ass creep, and there were rumors like maybe he was beating on her or something. They found her clothes scattered at the top of the cliff, but ... they never found the body...”

  Dorian reeled back against the bed's footboard. “Last April?” A whole year ago, now, even a little more. It had to be her. And he'd been living in Chicago with Emily and his parents then, not imagining anything crazier in his future than becoming a big-deal comic book artist. Definitely not suspecting how soon his little sister would die...

  Zoe watched the emotions tearing through his face. “You really hadn't heard of her, had you? You're totally surprised.”

  “So?”

  “So you weren't just using her name, to make me think ... And that means, maybe...” Zoe seemed almost frantic now.

  “Where did you hear about this?”

  “My friend Bethany's mom is seeing this math teacher from Pittley. Mr. Carroll. And I was over for dinner at Bethany's house, and Mr. Carroll started tripping out about that Lucette girl and how guilty he felt, like he knew she was having a shitty time and there were these sick rumors and he should have done more to help her. Me and Bethany kept getting more and more weirded out. But maybe—”

  “Lucette Korchak didn't die!” Dorian shook his head. It was too bad they couldn't tell this Mr. Carroll the truth, though maybe the truth was still terrible enough that it wouldn't make him feel any better. Luce had lived, but she had also killed, and she was still lost in a cold sea. “Her uncle didn't murder her, but the part about him beating her is true. And then he tried to rape her...” Zoe flinched, hard.

  “She told you this?” Zoe's voice buckled.

  “Yeah. She told me the whole thing. How she changed...” Zoe's expression had altered completely since the start of the conversation. It was wounded and open, shining with a kind of surrender. Dorian knew that she believed him completely. “God. Dorian ... Where is she now? Luce?”

  “I don't know.” Saying it made Dorian feel a little sick. How long could he go on insisting that Luce was still his girlfriend? She'd proved before that she would take insane risks and that she didn't care enough about being with him to keep herself safe.

  “You mean ... How can you not know?”

  “She had to leave. Because of the ice. And I've been waiting every night, but she hasn't come back yet...” Dorian grimaced as he said it.

  Something in Zoe's face shifted again. “The ice has been mostly gone for like two weeks already.”

  “I know that,” Dorian snapped. “I've been sitting on the beach freezing for hours every night, okay? It's not like I haven't had time to notice.”

  “If she really loved you, maybe she wouldn't leave you waiting around like that.” Zoe stared at him uncertainly, and Dorian could almost feel the words hovering on her lips. He was sure she would leave them unsaid, swallow them down in embarrassment. She exhaled hard, then risked it: “I wouldn't.”

  Dorian looked away, flushing. But he still wanted to know. “Zoe...”

  Suddenly she looked angry. “Whatever. You don't have the balls to say it!”

  “No, I mean, what I want to know ... You felt the change starting, right?” Dorian asked gently. The heat inside him was soft and hopeful. Maybe it was really too late for Luce, maybe she would never leave the sea, maybe she was even dead. But it wasn't too late for everyone.

  “I felt it.” Zoe looked down, hard and morose. “Just like melting into really cold water, like you said. Right on my bedroom floor.” She looked up, her face agonized, but somehow there were still flickers of humor in her eyes. Dorian couldn't help admiring the strength of that. “I wouldn't have believed anything as retarded as this mermaid bullshit, okay? But I did feel like ... I mean, I basically knew I could change. Into something.”

  “But you didn't.”

  Her pink hair trailed, and Dorian felt an impulse to stroke it back from her face.

  “No. I didn't. I don't know how it worked. But I pulled back. Like, there was this moment where it was up to me...” Zoe's voice faltered.

  “Why? That's what I need to know, Zoe.” He was somehow closer to her now, and she was sitting with her legs folded under her, halfway kneeling. “Why didn't you do it?”

  “Well, because ... That's a tough question.” She tried to smile at him. “Like, if being human is a problem for me ... it's still a problem I have to deal with. You know what I mean?”

  Dorian stared. “Totally.”

  “And so, like, my mom sucks, and my stepdad's an evil bastard, and there's all this crap ... But I want to do a better job than they have?”

  “A better job of being human?” Dorian asked. They were both grinning, but the room in front of him was warped by his tears.

  “Yeah.”

  Dorian sat quiet for a minute, thinking about what Zoe had said. He loved Luce, and he knew she was incredibly courageous: brave enough to confront a whole tribe of enemies out for her blood, brave enough to race out through orca-infested waters to save Nausicaa. But in a way her exploits seemed like the adventures of a child's fantasy life, dreamy, removed from the problems of the real world. She'd run away, where Zoe had stayed...

  Zoe, he thought, was even braver than Luce. Zoe was the one taking the chances that really counted. And she would face growing up, awful as that could be.

  She slid closer to him, grinning widely. “Hey, Dorian?”

  “Yeah?”

  “'Well, aren't there...” Her soft, funny, completely un-magical face was only inches from his now. “Aren't there some really heavy drawbacks? To having a mermaid girlfriend? Don't you get frustrated?”

  Dorian looked into Zoe's hazel eyes; he liked her, a lot, but still she was being unkind by asking that. And answering her out loud would be a huge betrayal of Luce. He couldn't do it. “Zoe...”

  She was already straddling him, pressing him back onto the bed. Her hands were on his face, pulling up his shirt, warm and sweet and earthy, and her breath curled on his ear. “Maybe you should try a real girl.”

  23. Breaking Voices

  The water purled around her, glittering with sunlight, as Luce lay in wait on the pebbles of the seafloor. She was a few feet away from the beach where her father sometimes came for fish, concealed by a patch of loose seaweed and by the brilliant glinting of the sun. It was her third day spent lurking under the surface waiting for him to appear. It was hard not to feel a bit depressed, to keep circling back to the same anxious thoughts. The plan she'd made might not work at all. The hours went by, the sun dashed blades of brilliant green light through the water, and Luce slipped up for air as rarely and stealthily as possible. And still he didn't come. She hadn't heard so much as a trace of muttering winds for days. What was he doing? Had he given up on this beach entirely? She knew she had to stay still, but it took constant concentration to keep her tail from lashing with impatience.

  Then through the soft distortion of the water, Luce heard it. A girl's voice, high and tender: “...none of Peter’s business!” the voice sighed. “Mom loved you!”

  Luce remembered that conversation exactly. The voice was hers, but hers from more than two years before. Even as Luce's heart started thudding she still shook her head in disbelief that she had ever sounded so innocent, so cared-for. She couldn't repress a spasm of envy and resentment directed at that younger girl, the one who'd felt so secure in her humanity, who'd been loved and safe...

  She fought to clear her head, to keep herself from being sucked into a whirl of painful memories. The only thing that mattered was the present: the moment directly before her, now, and everything that might still be saved in this moment if only she could make herself be quick and wise enough. If the voices were on the b
each, then her father probably wasn't far behind. Luce tensed, ready to spring.

  Footsteps. The slow crunch of pebbles, dragging and lifeless. He was there, walking closer, and the windy gibbering grew louder and more eager. It was awful to hear how vital and happy the voices sounded in contrast to her father's weary, defeated shambling. Closer, still closer. Through the veil of the water Luce could just see two dark blots at the sea's edge: his feet swaddled in dirty fur. Luce was almost choking, suddenly terrified to move. If she failed now her father might truly kill himself.

  Luce gathered her determination and shot up out of the waves. But she was careful not to look at Andrew Korchak at all, keeping her eyes fixed instead on the murmuring disturbance all around him. “I need to talk to you!” Luce announced loudly, aggressively. “Now!”

  Luce knew that her younger self had never once spoken to anyone that way. She had always been shy and gentle. That was the point.

  She had to be as different as possible from her father's memories of her.

  He stumbled back from the water's edge in shock, but to Luce's infinite relief he didn't take off running inland. Instead he sat down hard twenty feet from the water, his mouth open and his eyes bright with pain. But he was still there. Still watching, and still listening ...

  “You voices, whatever you call yourselves, lost hopes,” Luce snapped. “Get over here! You heard me.”

  Up on the beach her father began to moan a long, low note, holding his head. The voices babbled, gusting back and forth in astonished outrage.