Willa and the Whale

by Chad Morris

  “Yeah, short for ‘Megaptera Novaeangliae.’ Sometimes humans shorten names for their friends.”

  “Oh, I see.” I watched her dive down just a little, then resurface.

  “Sure,” she said. “I like the idea of having a human name and a human friend. It’s a pleasant surprise.” And she sang it just to prove it. “And I do love pleasant surprises.”

  I think I’d probably sing more if my song could travel thousands of miles through the ocean like hers.

  “When you first spoke to me,” Meg said, “you said today was special. That you needed me to appear today. That you needed to remember something. What were you talking about?”

  More stings. Lots more.

  “Willa,” I heard my dad calling, searching for me. That was the last thing I wanted right now. It definitely wasn’t every day I got to talk with a live humpback. But he was my dad. He had brought me out here trying to cheer me up. He was trying.

  “My dad’s calling me,” I told Meg. “So I’ve got to go. I really don’t want to, but I have to. Can we talk about this later?” Right after I asked it, I realized I didn’t know if there could be a later. “I mean, is there any way I could talk to you again?” I asked. “I would really love it.” And I totally meant it.

  “I will be around for a while,” Meg said, rolling a little onto her back. “And again, I can hear from long distances away. Now that I know your voice, if you just get close to the water and call out, I’ll be listening.”

  That could work? I mean I knew humpbacks could talk to each other when they were hundreds, even thousands of miles apart, but I had no idea one would be listening for me.

  I got chills just thinking about how amazing that was. I lived a quick bike ride away from the ocean. Lots of people do when you live on an island.

  “You’re the best humpback whale ever,” I said.

  She laughed a song. “That would also be a pleasant surprise,” she said.

  “Who are you talking to?” my dad asked.

  I totally jumped. I knew he was coming, but he still surprised me.

  “I was . . .” I turned back out to the ocean, but Meg had swum away. I scanned the rolling water, but couldn’t find a trace of her. She must have dived deep and fast. “I was just talking to myself,” I said.

  He wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

  Willa Twitchell, Journal #5, three and a half weeks ago

  The Gulf corvina fish can be the loudest fish in the world. When a few million guy corvinas get together off the coast of California and are all trying to get the attention of all the lady corvinas, they are loud. Like deafening loud. Literally over a million of them gather and researchers have recorded volumes at 150 decibels. That’s louder than a jet taking off. It can shake the ships that float by. And it can damage other sea creatures’ hearing.

  I think my dad’s and my stepmom’s house is louder than a million corvina fish.

  “Get that spatula out of your shirt,” my stepmom, Masha, said. “And take it to the sink. I’m going to have to wash it again.” She let out an exasperated sigh, staring intently at Caleb, my seven-year-old stepbrother.

  “But my back itches,” Caleb said, as if what he said was somewhere close to a good reason to have a spatula up his shirt. Caleb was cute, but dumb as a mola mola fish. Thankfully though, he wasn’t nearly as huge and awkward. Caleb scratched his back under his Star Wars shirt a few more times with the spatula, his dark eyebrow curling with satisfaction. “It works really good.”

  “Well,” Dad said. “It works well.”

  “See,” Caleb said, pointing up at my dad, “Jason thinks it’s a good idea.” My stepsiblings all called my dad by his first name. That was weird but probably less weird than them calling him Dad.

  “I didn’t say it was a good idea,” Dad said. “I was correcting your grammar.” His brown beard moved as he spoke. Masha thinks his beard makes him look handsome. I think it makes him look like a lumberjack or a bristly toadfish.

  “I want to try,” Nadia said, reaching out for the spatula. She was a few years younger than Caleb and her blonde hair somehow always looked messy even right after she took a shower and brushed it out.

  Neither Nadia nor Caleb seemed to care about Dad’s grammar lesson.

  “Just put the spatula in the sink and sit down for dinner,” Masha said, blowing her blonde hair out of her eyes. Her hair looked clean, but by the end of the day it was a little crazy. She had made breaded chicken and homemade fries. It smelled good. Masha was a better cook than my mom. Maybe the only thing she was better at.

  I still didn’t really know what to feel about Masha. She was nice to my dad and they seemed okay together. That was good. But she was living in my old house and kissing my dad, which was . . . eww. She was on her phone a lot, which was annoying since she had kids to take care of. A lot of kids. She was pretty much a guppy. Guppies can give birth to as many as two hundred babies at a time. Masha didn’t give birth to them all at once, and she didn’t give birth to two hundred, but four kids was a lot. She brought the older three with her when she married my dad two years ago. And then had another one. They all seemed like their volume dials were turned up way too high. It was like they had to talk over each other to ever be heard. So in general, I just don’t say anything and retreat to my room whenever I can.

  And that’s strange. Usually I’m a talker.

  Years ago, in this same house, it was just my mom, my dad, and me. Three people. We talked a lot, but not constantly. I used to be able to hear the refrigerator hum while I was working on my homework. Or the crickets at night. But now we had seven people in our house. We more than doubled. And I had to share space with Masha, Caleb, Nadia, Garth, and baby Hannah. Hannah was only one year old, cuter than a mandarin fish, and louder than a barking sea lion.

  I wanted my mom back more than ever. She never shouted. She just wasn’t that type. Masha shouted every day. Things like, “Dinner!” or “Brush your teeth!” or “Get that spatula out of your shirt!” And there was something about seeing Masha that made me miss my mom more. It was like she was a reminder of what I used to have.

  Things were different with my dad too. When it was just mom and him, they both worked, so neither one of them had to work crazy hours. But now that it’s just him (Masha doesn’t work) and a million people in this house to take care of, he’s gone all of the time. He’s an accountant for the city but takes late-night jobs doing other people’s taxes and doing books for some companies. I mean, he’s still around, but I miss him. And he’s just different. Quieter. Less fun. No magic tricks. I don’t know if it’s because of problems I don’t know about or what, but he’s not the same guy I left here three years ago. I don’t think it’s Masha’s fault—he smiles when he sees her—but I can’t put my finger on what it could be.

  “Open up,” Masha said, trying to get Garth to eat his chicken.

  He shook his head. “It’s gross,” he said. His voice would have been adorable if he didn’t talk like he thought we were on the other side of the island. How could anyone be so adorable and completely annoying at the same time?

  “Is not,” Nadia said, a little louder than Garth. As if we needed anything louder.

  “Is too,” Garth said, even louder. I think he was trying to win the argument by blowing out our eardrums.

  “Not!” Nadia screamed.

  “Quiet,” Masha called out, louder than them all. “You two have been fighting all day and I’m done with it.”

  Definitely not like my mom.

  The table went quiet.

  Like the eye of a storm.

  “We saw a humpback whale yesterday,” I said, trying to change the tone of the meal. And trying to get back to my talkative self.

  “What’s a humpback?” Caleb asked. Again, dumb as a mola mola fish.

  I tried not to show my annoyance at having to expla
in what a humpback whale is to a seven-year-old. I mean, who trained this kid? “It’s one of the coolest creatures in the world,” I said. “It was bigger than a bus and weighed tons and tons. If it landed on this house it could squash us all flat. Here, I got some video. Let me show you,” I started to reach for my phone. It wouldn’t be as cool as showing it to Meg, but they should still be impressed.

  “Was that on the special boat ride Jason took you on because your mom died?” Nadia asked with a smile. A huge, cornbread-in-her-mouth-but-she-just-couldn’t-keep-from-talking smile.

  I froze. Stings. A septillion of them.

  I’m sure Nadia didn’t mean to send them, but she did. Masha or my dad must have told her about it.

  “Yes,” my dad said, and then couldn’t seem to say anything else.

  I couldn’t get over Nadia’s gigantic smile. Everything inside me felt like the opposite of a smile, but there she was just beaming. She wasn’t sad about my mom. She didn’t even know her. I looked at everyone at the table. None of them except my dad even knew her. None of them were sad. And my dad had divorced her. He let her leave to the other side of the world. And he didn’t visit us once in Japan. There was no way he missed her like I did. I was the only one trapped in this bloom of jellyfish. The stings, like harpoons, jabbed me all over.

  “I’m sorry,” Masha said, apologizing to me for Nadia. “And we’re really sorry about . . .” Just then Hannah reached for Nadia’s drink and sent apple juice splashing all over the table. “Oh, Hannah!” Masha nearly screamed. She grabbed her youngest daughter out of her chair before she could get drenched in dripping juice. Dad got up and rushed for some towels. Caleb laughed and Nadia told him it wasn’t funny.

  I couldn’t take it. And I wasn’t hungry anymore. I slipped out of my chair, put my dish in the sink, and in all of the confusion, slid out the front door.

  I didn’t tell them any more about Meg. They were worried about the spill.

  And they would probably never remember to ask about my video. My spectacular video.

  My mom would have wanted to know all about it.

  I was supposed to ask before I left the house, but I hadn’t done that in a while. Almost every day this week I’d snuck out after dinner. Well, I actually wasn’t that sneaky. Just nobody was watching. They probably assumed I was doing homework or looking at my ocean books in my room.

  And with all the loud kids and loud Masha, no one noticed.

  Or they didn’t care.

  Willa Twitchell, Journal #5, a week and a half ago

  Lots of fish and sea creatures live in large groups called pods. Some of these pods are huge. A cruiseship captain once saw a dolphin pod that he estimated had 100,000 dolphins in it. 100,000! I wish I could have seen that. Fish can swim in pods of so many that nobody could possibly count them all.

  But then there are rabbitfish. They don’t look like rabbits at all. Well, I guess their mouths kind of look like rabbit mouths, but that’s it. The most common type are mostly yellow with a black-and-white-striped face. They don’t usually live in huge pods or schools. They just have one really good friend. They look for food together and explore the ocean as a team. Just two.

  I’m more of a rabbitfish than a dolphin. And Marc Antonio Mendoza used to be my buddy rabbitfish. We were inseparable when we were younger. I cried and cried when I had to say goodbye to him to go to Japan. We texted a little for a while, but I hadn’t talked to him for almost a year when I came back to the island and saw him again. I was pretty nervous. He was older now, and I was too, but he had made other friends while I was gone. I’m not sure he needs me anymore. I’ve only been to school a week and a half and have talked with him a few times, but our conversations were awkward. I’m not sure if he even wants to be friends again.

  I tossed my phone between my hands before I got up the courage to do something risky. Something that made my palms slimy like eel skin.

  I texted Marc. I still had his number.

  I don’t know why I did it. Maybe all the stings were getting to me and I needed a friend.

  One time I texted my mom, complaining about Kimi, this spoiled girl in my science class in Japan. She invited me to her party, but I didn’t want to go. She was really annoying. And my mom texted back,

  At first, I thought she was talking about Kimi, and I think she was, but then I realized she was also talking about me.

  I needed more friends.

  I’ve read that text about three thousand times. I read all my mom’s texts over and over. My mom would want me to get friends. Maybe that was part of why I texted Marc too.

  Okay. There was no maybe about it.

  So I took a deep breath and pressed the little arrow to send the text.

  As soon as it was sent, I reread it to make sure that it didn’t sound too needy. Why did I always do that? It would be so much more helpful to reread it when I could actually change it.

  Not too embarrassing.

  Marc and I first started hanging out in the third grade. When he was new, our teacher, Mrs. Loose, assigned me to show him around. He was really nice and funny and after a couple of recesses, that was it. We’d been hanging out ever since. We did a project in fourth grade together where we had to make puppets of important historical figures and tell their story. I picked Jacques Cousteau. He was a French explorer who practically invented scuba diving and then filmed a bunch of awesome creatures in the ocean and showed them to the world. He also stopped people from dumping waste in the ocean. Seriously amazing guy. Marc chose the guy who invented Mario and Donkey Kong at Nintendo—Shigiru Miyamoto. Not as cool as Jacques Cousteau, but still cool. Marc’s a bit of a video-game fanatic.

  Later that year, Marc and I took second place in the school science fair. We did an experiment to see if fish change their breathing, and even change their color as you raise the temperature.

  And then I left.

  When I came back a few weeks ago, I hoped everything would just go back to the way it was when we were nine. But Marc was taller and different. He used to be super cheerful and easygoing, but now he wasn’t as much. He was . . . different. He still smiled a lot, but sometimes he seemed thoughtful, and sometimes he maybe even looked like a black musselcracker, which I think are the grumpiest and angriest-looking fish in the ocean. He ate lunch with Luke and Nash and played video games with them after school. It wasn’t like he was trying to ignore me or be mean to me. Maybe he just didn’t know where to fit me back into his life. Or maybe he was trying to figure out if I even fit.

  I hoped I fit. I hoped he would answer my text.

  I dropped my phone in my pocket and grabbed my bike from the shed. My mountain bike was as blue as the ocean and a couple sizes below adult. I was probably getting too big for it, but it was still great to get it back.

  Zipping down the street, I was like a sailfish shooting through the water. They can swim almost seventy miles per hour and are probably the fastest fish in the ocean.

  I was that fast.

  Okay. Not seventy miles per hour, but for a twelve-year-old girl riding a bike, I wasn’t bad. My black hair floated in the air behind me, and if I happened to cry, not that I was doing that again, I was going fast enough that the wind would whip the tears right off my face.

  That’s right. I was at tear-whipping speed.

  But I didn’t feel like crying right now. No stings. I was too nervous about the text I just sent to Marc. What was he thinking right now? That I was a total weirdo? Capital-W Weirdo? Or maybe he kind of liked that I texted him. My mind alternated between the options and everything in between.

  I almost felt bad because I didn’t have stings. Like maybe I should have them all the time.

  But I kept pedaling.

  My family’s house stood on a couple acres and the closest neighbor owned a horse ranch, so I rode my bike a lot. There were little community neighborhoods close
r to town, but I was glad I didn’t live there. I’d be further from the ocean, and the kids in my class from over there had more money and were more stuck up. Except Marc, of course. Even though his family always had money, he was really nice.

  Hopefully he was still as nice as I remembered him.

  No matter how many times I had ridden this path in the past, the uneven, hard-packed dirt always had surprise bumps and dips, so I had to stand on my pedals to absorb the shock. Something about pushing forward felt good.

  Once the trees cleared, I reached the highway that stretched along the coastline. I’m always extra careful when crossing the highway. One time when I was seven, I saw a car just blow down the road and totally run over an otter that was crossing to the inlets. I don’t want to ever be that poor otter.

  I skidded to a stop on the other side of the highway and parked my bike next to a tree. I could see the ocean and hear it crash, but I still had to shimmy down a natural rock wall before getting there. There was a tricky and thin, crooked trail with a couple of difficult parts that I could take but almost never did. Climbing down the rocks was faster.

  I loved that this beach was hard to get to. It kept other people away. Out of sight, out of mind. It was like my very own beach.

  Down in less than a minute, I ran up to the ocean, standing right in front of the breaking waves. There wasn’t much wind, which was unusual for Washington. The quiet made the ocean sound even more powerful.

  In and out.

  Like the ocean was breathing.

  I was always careful around it; it was a force to be reckoned with. The ocean could crush whole cities in a tsunami. And yet it was also peaceful. Something about the deep sound and its repetition entranced me.

  Once in music class, we did this experiment where we hit a tuning fork and it vibrated and made a cool sound. Then all we had to do was put another tuning fork next to it and it vibrated too. We didn’t even have to hit it. It recognized the sound waves and resonated with the first tuning fork. They affected each other. They sang the same song.