What If a Fish

by Anika Fajardo

  “The kids are Puerto Rican?” I asked.

  Liam nodded, his cowlick of reddish-blond hair bobbing. “Super cool. They already taught me some Spanish curse words.” Liam leaned against the bed and picked at something pink on the dinosaur’s feet. “They’re so cool, not like all the boring Minnesotans in this neighborhood.”

  If Liam’s mirror hadn’t already been covered in Bubble Wrap, I would’ve looked at myself. “What about me?” I asked.

  “What about you?”

  “I’m Colombian.” I stood up and brushed the grime from the butt of my jeans.

  “Well, not really, Eddie,” he said, tucking the dinosaur into his pocket. “You’re not Colombian Colombian.”

  “My dad was. And that makes me half-Colombian.”

  “But you don’t speak Spanish.”

  He was right. I don’t speak Spanish.

  “But,” I said, “my brother does.”

  “That’s cool. You have your Colombian half brother, and then you have me. We’re brothers for life, right?”

  He stood up and held out his fist, ready for me to bump it.

  I looked at my best friend’s hand with its freckles and the scar on the right thumb from when we fell off the sled last winter, and the nick on his pinkie from when he cut himself on a root beer can. I knew him. Or at least I thought I did. And I thought he knew me. But then how could he say I wasn’t Colombian? Papa. My brother. They were both Colombian without any doubt. Is it true that just because I don’t speak Spanish, I can’t be Colombian?

  “I gotta go,” I said, and left Liam’s fist hanging in the air like a fish out of water.

  That was the last time I saw him. And now I don’t know if we’re still friends.

  Either way, the fact is that Liam is in New York and Cameron is here.

  “My mom says if we do a good job cleaning the garage, we get fifty bucks,” I tell her. “If we do a bad job, we owe her ten each.”

  Cameron laughs. “I am at your service.” She places one sneaker-clad foot behind the other and slowly bends her knees. It might be a curtsy, but it’s hard to tell when the girl doing the curtsy is wearing jean shorts. “What about fishing poles?” she asks.

  “You mean rods?”

  She laughs. “Rods. Right.”

  “We’re in luck there, too, because my mom says we have rods somewhere in the garage.”

  “It’s going to be perfect,” Cameron says, and I hope she’s right.

  We both lean on the dock’s splintery railing and listen to the shouts of the counselors onshore.

  “What are you going to do with the prize money?” I ask.

  “Visit my mom.”

  “Where is she?”

  “San Francisco, where we used to live.” She pulls at a sliver of the gray railing. The wood is golden brown underneath. I’m worried she’s going to get a splinter in her finger if she keeps doing that.

  “Who do you live with?”

  “My dad.”

  She says the word “dad” like it’s the most ordinary, boring word in the world. Like a dad is something as tedious as a broom or a frying pan. I gaze into the murky lake water. What’s down there below the surface?

  “Can’t your dad take you to San Francisco?” I ask.

  She grunts but doesn’t answer. I glance back at the kids on the shore. They’re playing another circle game in the shade. One of the counselors watches us while thumbing at her phone. A girl whose sparkly earrings hang to her shoulders is walking onto the dock. She’s holding a pink ice cream cone, and she looks familiar. As she gets closer to us, I can see that the ice cream is strawberry. And that the girl is Alyssa Schmidt. I don’t like Alyssa or her two rotten older brothers. She stops a few feet away and pretends she doesn’t see us.

  “Nice bling, huh?” Cameron whispers to me.

  “She’s super popular,” I whisper back. “At school.”

  We watch her as she licks her ice cream.

  “Hey,” Alyssa says when she catches us staring. Her eyes flick to Cameron’s purple hair and untied Converse sneakers.

  “How do you do?” Cameron asks like she’s someone’s great-aunt.

  “Are you new?” Alyssa’s not talking to me. We’ve been in the same class every year since second grade. Just my luck. Maybe I’ll escape her in middle school.

  “I am new to Minneapolis but old to the world,” Cameron says. “I’ve been around the sun eleven times.” She spins around in a circle, and I can’t help laughing at her serious expression. Alyssa raises her eyebrows.

  Just then, a boy with bright yellow sneakers makes a splash as he falls into the weedy water at the shore. Two of the counselors wade in after him. Alyssa rolls her eyes. “Can you imagine having to go to Kamp Kids? I mean, I used to go when I was little.” Alyssa makes a face like she just tasted expired milk.

  Cameron and I exchange glances, and my stomach clenches. I’m glad our nametags are hidden. And I’m glad I only have six more days until my brother gets here. No more day care—I mean camp—after that.

  “So, mate,” Cameron says, this time in an Australian accent, “what are you doing this fine afternoon?”

  “Hanging,” Alyssa says, her earrings tinkling as she shrugs her shoulders.

  I look around. The only thing hanging right now is the lure from the line of a guy fishing down the dock from us.

  “What’s your name?” Alyssa asks. But before Cameron can be a smart aleck, Alyssa’s strawberry ice cream comes loose and tumbles into the greenish water.

  We lean over the railing.

  “Whoa.”

  If a cluster of fish is called a school, what appears out of the lake’s depths is less like a classroom and more like a raucous recess. The fish are all different sizes. Big ones, little ones. Iridescent and dull-colored, brown and gold, shiny and scaly. Some have rounded faces, and others are sharp and pointy. So many fish. These are the fish I’m going to catch to win the medal. I try to count them, but they dive at the ice cream, butting one another out of the way in a frantic food fight. They crowd together like squirmy kindergartners.

  “Fish eat ice cream?” Alyssa asks, holding her empty sugar cone.

  Cameron and I laugh. Hiccup. Alyssa gives a half-hearted chuckle too, even though I’m pretty sure she has no idea what’s funny. Actually, I don’t know what’s so funny either, but Cameron and I can barely stand up, we’re laughing so hard. While we’re giggling, a berry breaks free from the blob of ice cream, and three fish battle for it. The red lump lurches and jerks from one greedy mouth to another. Alyssa is sort of shrieking now, and Cameron and I are still laughing. The other fishermen on the dock swarm just like the fish, straining to see what we’re going on about.

  And then we all see it.

  “Look at…,” Cameron says.

  “What is…,” Alyssa starts to say.

  Everyone on the dock falls silent.

  A monster. It can’t possibly be a fish. Its mouth is more than twice as big as the other fish crowded around the ice cream. Its angry jaws look like a shark’s. Of course, I know there are no sharks in the lakes of Minnesota. But when the creature opens that mouth, snapping its teeth, I have to wonder.

  The ice cream is gone in one gulp. The other fish scatter as the beast sinks lower and lower until the only evidence of the whole thing is the pink cloudy water below us. Cameron’s mouth is open as wide as that fish’s.

  My chest swells with anticipation, with hope. What if I can catch that fish?

  4

  THE BIGGEST FISH ever caught in Minnesota was a seventy-eight-inch sturgeon. I tell Cameron this as we fiddle with the lock on the garage door. “That’s six feet, six inches.” Taller even than my nineteen-year-old brother.

  Cameron grins. “You’ve been Googling fish?” she asks, elbowing me. “Me too. Then you know that sturgeons don’t live in the lakes in Minneapolis. You won’t catch that on the dock. Muskies, that’s what you want.”

  Muskies. Technically called muskellunge. In
the L-M volume of my encyclopedia, I read that a muskellunge is a type of pike. My encyclopedia has every fact you could ever need. I found the set of twelve volumes with glossy pictures and gold edges when we were packing to move. The thing about moving is that you find things you didn’t even know you had. Some of the things Mama and I found were sad, like the sketchbook, but some were cool, like the striped T-shirt I thought I’d lost, and the painting of a parrot I did in second grade. And Papa’s medal.

  When I found the set of encyclopedias in a box tucked behind the rain jackets, snow boots, and an old Candy Land game, Mama didn’t want me to keep them. “I don’t think we need these. You know, with the internet.”

  But when I saw the books, I just had to have them. I’m not sure why. I wrote my name on the box in thick black marker. Then, the week before summer vacation, Mama hired a guy and rented a truck while I was at school, and everything—including the encyclopedias—got moved into the new duplex. The set is pretty old, but Wikipedia has nothing on these books. You just open one of them up and learn something you never knew before.

  “That monster we saw was a muskie for sure,” Cameron says. “Someone caught one that was, like, fifty-seven inches. That’s four-foot-nine—just a little shorter than me.” She looks at me. “About your height.”

  Even at four-foot-nine, I can still yank open the garage door. Cameron makes a face as the pulley screeches.

  “It’s a mess in here, Eddie,” she says.

  She’s right. The garage is so filled with junk, Mama has to park her car outside in the driveway. Boxes stacked two and three high make a lopsided skyline. Mama’s old canvases, most of them painted over with white house paint, are propped along one wall behind a mechanical lawn mower, the kind without an engine. There’s a big red cooler on wheels that Mama used to bring to the beach at Lake Mad when I was little. There are bottles of blue windshield wiper fluid, and yellow ones filled with the coolant Mama has to keep adding to the car. A microwave sits on the cement floor waiting for its next bag of popcorn. Along one wall is a row of empty metal shelves, where all this stuff needs to go.

  “That’s why we’re getting fifty bucks for organizing it,” I say, stooping over the nearest box. “Keep an eye out for fishing gear. My mom says it might be in here.”

  “Ten-four,” Cameron says, opening a box at her feet. “That means ‘okay’ if you’re on a shortwave radio.”

  In Spanish “okay” is “vale.” I learned that from my brother, who called last night. He and Mama talked about when we were going to pick him up from the airport and when his university orientation is. Five more days until he arrives, and I can’t wait. When Mama handed me the phone, I told him that we’re going to go fishing.

  “You know how to fish, right?” I asked. I didn’t tell him about the tournament, because I want to surprise him.

  “Sure,” he said in English. “I’ll see you in one week.”

  “Okay.” I couldn’t tell if he was as excited as I was.

  “Say it in Spanish,” he said. “Say ‘vale.’ ”

  “Ball-eh,” I repeated.

  “Eso.” I could hear the smile in his voice. I can’t wait for him to get here. For him to help me fish, to hang out.

  “Yours?” Cameron holds up a pair of little green mittens connected by a string of green yarn.

  “Mine,” I say, taking them from her and slinging the string over my shoulders.

  “What’s the string for?” she asks.

  “The string goes through your coat sleeves. Didn’t you have mittens like this?”

  “I lived in California, remember? No snow?”

  “Right. Well, it’s a good invention. The string keeps you from losing one of your mittens. Keeps the two of them together.”

  These are the mittens Liam’s mom, Sarah, left in my cubby at Little Tykes Preschool the day she drove me to the hospital. I sat in the backseat of her car, pressing my palm against the cold window and watching the brown and red leaves whip past the spaces between my fingers. It’s funny the things you remember.

  “This goes here, then.” Cameron heaves the box of mittens and scarves onto the shelf near the door. She moves on to another carton. “This whole box is baby clothes,” she says. “Why is your mom saving all this stuff? Is she planning on having another baby?”

  I shake my head. “My dad died when I was little.”

  I don’t tell her about the sharp smell in the hospital corridors. I don’t tell her about holding Mama’s hand or about not recognizing the man under the smooth white sheets. Until I saw his mustache. Eduardo Aguado León always wore a thick mustache. I reach into my pocket and make a fist around Papa’s medal.

  “Oh,” she says, in that quiet, respectful way people do. She looks down at the box, avoiding my eyes. We let a silence sit between us.

  When Liam and I were seven, we were in his room playing with his Star Wars Lego set. I had the Luke Skywalker minifigure and said that Luke had a dead dad just like me and Liam.

  “But Luke’s dad isn’t dead. At least, he doesn’t die until later,” Liam said, rummaging through the box for a Stormtrooper head to go with its white body. “He’s just on the Dark Side.”

  I knelt next to Liam on the floor, searching for a lightsaber.

  “Found it.” He shoved a helmet onto his minifigure. “Have you seen a blaster?”

  “It’s in there. At the bottom.”

  Liam started digging again. “Anyway, my dad isn’t dead either,” he added.

  I gripped the plastic Jedi and listened to the crackly sound of Legos hitting each other as Liam dumped bricks onto the floor.

  “Aha!” he said, holding up the blaster and snapping it into the Stormtrooper’s hand. “My dad lives in Chicago, remember? I just never see him. Like Luke never sees his dad.”

  I knew that but had forgotten. I looked at Luke and wished I could find his lightsaber. He needed something to protect himself.

  “Here, Eddie. Luke’s saber.” Liam held out the little plastic sword to me. An offering.

  Now I watch Cameron drag a cardboard box across the garage. Would she give me a lightsaber if I needed one? I shake my head, trying to empty it of such a silly idea. Cameron and I don’t need lightsabers; we need to win the fishing tournament.

  Cameron wipes her hands on her shorts. “I have two stepsisters,” she says. “Two and five. It’s not fun.”

  I think of Clara as a two-year-old banging spoons on pots and pans in Liam’s kitchen while our moms drank coffee. Then my memory is interrupted by the whining siren sound Cameron is making. She’s opened another box and is holding up a sweater knitted with five different colors of yarn. “Call the fashion police!” she hollers.

  I stumble around the junk. The box she opened is filled with other clothes too, but these are bigger than my baby stuff. Out-of-style men’s clothes. Papa’s clothes, folded, packed away, as if he’ll wear them again. There’s a winter coat, one gray T-shirt. A pair of leather work boots caked in ancient mud reminds me of my fourth-grade field trip digging for fossils. It was at a county park where they let kids search for treasures in the shale and sandstone. Alyssa found a rock with the imprint of a leaf, but she threw it into the woods when everyone wanted to see it. Liam discovered a portion of a snail shell fossil in a chunk of sandstone, its perfect curves clearly visible once the dust was brushed away. I almost never push, but I shoved kids aside trying to see the fossils. For some reason, I felt desperate to see the bits of rock that had been there—hidden—in the ground for thousands of years, just waiting to be found.

  “I don’t know why my mom keeps this junk,” I say. I picture Mama crying after she found the sketchbook. Her sadness hangs around her like something you can touch. It’s like the paint she sometimes gets on her elbows. Mama can’t see the red and black stains, but if you know where to look, you can find them. Maybe when I win the tournament, I’ll be able to wash away a little of that sadness.

  “We’ll put this box on the bottom shelf.” Cam
eron drags the box over and slides it in next to the box of baby clothes. “A place for everything; everything in its place. That’s what my dad says.”

  If everything has its place, why do I feel like I don’t know where I fit?

  We work in silence for a while. Slowly the boxes from the middle of the garage are lined up on the metal shelves, fitted in like in a game of Tetris. The microwave, an old stereo that probably doesn’t work, Mama’s canvases.

  “Who knew working for fifty bucks would be so much work?” Cameron says from the back corner of the garage.

  “It’ll be worth it,” I remind her. She peeks around a stack of boxes, and her eyes squish into a smile. Is she thinking about that plane ride to visit her mom?

  As we work, I try to speed up the process by stacking multiple boxes, so I don’t have to take as many trips across the greasy stains on the floor. My arms are piled with three shoeboxes. After opening about a million to see what was in them, we gave up on that. I have no idea what’s in these, and I don’t really care right now.

  “I’m exhausted. Beat. Worn out.” Cameron wipes her forehead with the back of her hand.

  “Well,” I say, grinning, “whatever it takes to win.”

  And that’s when I trip on a rake. The three boxes tumble, their contents scattering across the concrete. Photographs everywhere. The mixed-up jumble on the floor reminds me of a collage I once made in art class. Dozens of pictures cut out of magazines. Compared to the paintings Mama creates, the hodgepodge of images didn’t look like much, but my art teacher liked it. He said it was greater than the sum of its parts.

  I kneel on the floor. The colors in the pictures are faded, the edges curled. The faces are blurry, and the clothes on the smiling people are as out-of-date as the clothes in these boxes. There’s a picture of my brother when he was a little younger than I am now. He’s wearing a navy blazer and tie—a Colombian school uniform. Another of him about my age, skinny and scowly in front of a palm tree. (Imagine living in a place with palm trees.) There’s Papa with his thick mustache, an arm around Mama. She smiles at the camera, looking exactly like she does now, blond and blue-eyed. She wears her painting smock, the one with drips and splotches. I used to look for ducks and fish and giraffes in the paint stains, like some people do with clouds. In another picture, a dark woman with black hair to her waist holds a roly-poly baby—my half brother and his mom. And there he is in Papa’s arms. My dad looks super young, but I can still tell it’s him.