What If a Fish

by Anika Fajardo

  “Fishing isn’t about fish, Tito. Fishing is about being in the moment. Now. Here.” Big Eddie wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “Speaking of now, it looks like you’ve got another one.”

  I reel in another fish, this one almost ten inches. I keep catching fish, little ones, mostly sunnies. It’s like all the fish I didn’t catch last week are lining up to be caught today. By my fourth fish, I brave its accusing eyes and remove the hook myself. It’s just as gross as I thought it would be.

  Big Eddie loops a stringer through the mouths of the perch and the four sunfish that I caught and slowly lowers them into the water.

  “Might as well string these up, leave them in the water. Keep them fresh for dinner.”

  I’m not sure I want to eat any of these fish. And I’m pretty sure Mama won’t want to cook them. But she loves Big Eddie and so she might do it for him. And I love him too, so I might eat them if I have to.

  At the railing Big Eddie unbuttons the top four buttons of his guayabera. The shirt is white with light blue embroidery. It’s from Cartagena. He wanted me to get one too, but I was embarrassed. I thought he would look weird on the streets of Minneapolis with that fancy shirt, but somehow Big Eddie looks even more like Big Eddie.

  I scan the dock and the shore, wondering who might be watching my older brother in that fancy guayabera. I catch a glimpse of purple. Cameron cut her purple hair off, so I know it’s not that. Besides, I’m not sure her dad would let her come to the dock so soon after the accident. I turn back to the water.

  “Hey,” someone says behind me.

  There she is. It is Cameron. With a completely purple head and matching purple cast on her right arm.

  “Cameron?” I can’t stop staring. Every strand of hair is purple.

  “At your service.” Cameron sweeps one arm awkwardly to the right, the other to the left. She bends forward until she’s practically folded in two.

  “Your hair.”

  “Yes, my hair. If you are wondering if it’s purple, it is. It is indeed purple. I did it myself. Between the hair and the arm—you should’ve seen my mom’s face when I Skyped with her.”

  “Nice cast,” I say.

  “Do you like it? All the cool people are wearing them this year. Looks like I’ll be starting middle school with the latest fashion accessory. Me with this; you with a new name, Tito.”

  We laugh, and then she sees Big Eddie.

  “Hi,” she says shyly. My stomach drops when she looks at him and blushes. “Thanks for everything. At the hospital.”

  Big Eddie looks up from the tackle, and she turns back to me and smiles. My stomach returns to its usual location.

  Then I show her the leeches and tell her about Mason and Ivan, and then Big Eddie teaches her how to murder them. The leeches, I mean. He explains that the fish by the shore are looking for little critters that hang out under the dock, so you have to make the leech look like something yummy.

  “You have to think like a fish.” Big Eddie snaps the container’s lid shut.

  “I like the way you talk,” Cameron says.

  “How do I talk?”

  “Like you’re from Colombia.”

  “I am. Soy Colombiano. Just like my little brother. We’re both Colombian.”

  Cameron and Big Eddie smile at each other, and even though no one is actually hugging, I feel like I’m the filling in the sandwich again. I wiggle my line. This would be a really good time to catch the big one.

  “Want to try?” Big Eddie offers the rod to Cameron. “Can you do it one-handed?”

  “I can do anything,” she says, and takes the rod in her left hand. She stands next to me. When the dock sways, our elbows touch. And when our elbows touch, my toes wrinkle. An equal and opposite reaction.

  And then Big Eddie erupts in a shout. “Did you see that?” We both look down. “That thing just ate your fish!”

  There, in the water, where Big Eddie is pointing, instead of five fish there are now four. Well, five heads and four bodies. The smallest fish has been decapitated—or whatever the opposite of that is.

  “Your fish,” Big Eddie says, wheeling around and spinning and laughing, “is bait. Espera—let’s get the others into the cooler.”

  Big Eddie dumps them into the red cooler, where they look shocked at the confined space. One minute they were swimming around among green plants and underwater weeds, and the next minute their lives are totally different. Over, actually.

  “Wait,” Big Eddie says. “Here’s what I’m gonna do.”

  My brother takes my rod from me and loops the line and hook around one of the fish that still has a body. He drops the wriggling thing into the water with a splash and hands me my rod.

  We have an audience.

  The guy with the radio shuts off his music. A few joggers pause to watch. Two little kids stand with their father, their mouths slack. Cameron, my brother, and I huddle at the railing.

  At first nothing happens.

  The crowd behind us grows restless.

  “Never gonna happen,” someone says.

  What do we care what they think? My brother is going to help me catch the big one.

  “I feel something.” Cameron grips Big Eddie’s rod tighter.

  “Hold on,” he says.

  Her knuckles whiten with the effort, then relax. “Never mind. It was nothing.”

  But it’s not nothing. We hear a splash. Then there’s a pull on my rod, the one with the fish as bait.

  I brace my feet against the boards of the dock. “Big Eddie! Help!”

  “¡ Juepucha! Hold it, Tito.”

  I wrap my hands around the cork grip. It’s black with grime left from my brother and, before him, our dad. I hang on to the handle, and Big Eddie yanks on the rod. The line reminds me of a dot-to-dot: the dock is one, and the surface of the lake is two. Somewhere down deep in the water is the fish—three.

  My brother and I both pull. Whatever is down there seems to get more determined to stay there. “Come here,” Big Eddie says to Cameron. “Ayúdanos.”

  Cameron looks at me and back at him. She doesn’t know what he’s asking. But I do. “Help us,” I translate.

  She grabs the rod too, even though she only has one hand to do it with. Cameron, Big Eddie, and I are stationed along Papa’s rod, each of us gripping and pulling. We are a new dot-to-dot. Friend, brother, me. Together. My worries slip away as easily as a fish off a line.

  But this fish isn’t getting away. It flies out of the lake. Everything is a blur of water and slime. Thrashing tail. Bent rod. Stomping shoes.

  A magnificently ugly fish flails on the dock. It’s grayish brown with a mean face. Its scales shimmer, and a rank, prehistoric smell wafts up. A northern pike? Every word I’ve ever read in my encyclopedias drains out of my memory as if my brain is a leaky bucket. Whatever the creature is, it’s big. Bigger than three of Big Eddie’s shoes end to end. Or twice that.

  And this fish isn’t done being alive yet. The front of Big Eddie’s white guayabera is now brown with fish gunk, and his arms bulge with muscle. The fish thrashes and bucks like a bull. It makes a squeaking, squawking sound, its mouth opening and closing around the hook.

  Big Eddie shouts, “Get me the cooler!”

  I scramble to the cooler and drag it to where the fish lies panting on the wooden slats. Big Eddie kneels down next to the creature. Now, it might be hard to believe, but that fish actually lunges at him.

  When I first saw the photograph of Papa and Big Eddie and the fish, this wasn’t what I imagined catching one was like. My brother reaches around the monster’s gills to yank out the hook. The teeth are lined up like soldiers ready to fight.

  Then they do.

  “The thing bit me!” Big Eddie jumps back. Red blood adds to the stains on his shirt. But he’s laughing, panting, shouting. “Damn!” Big Eddie’s words come out in a mix of Spanish and English, and I can’t understand either but I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of swearing in both languages. Cameron’s
taking pictures one-handed, kneeling in the muck on the dock. Despite his bleeding finger, Big Eddie hugs the fish and leers for the camera. I lean in too, our heads touching. We’re two half brothers making a whole picture.

  “Help me get this thing in here, Tito.”

  I shove the cooler closer to the beast.

  “You can’t keep that thing,” someone in the crowd on the dock says.

  “No way,” the guy with dreadlocks says.

  A woman in yoga pants says, “I don’t think you’re allowed to take it home.”

  Big Eddie stops lugging the dying fish to the cooler. He looks at the crowd. “Watch me,” he says, and grins wider than I ever thought possible.

  Big Eddie tosses the smaller fish into the water to make room for the big one. He heaves the northern into the cooler. The head flops awkwardly over one side, the tail over the other.

  The crowd parts for us and our fish. Or maybe everyone is done watching the spectacle. The guy with the radio switches the music on again.

  Cameron salutes me with her right hand. “You did it, Tito.”

  “That’s a good-size fish,” the dad with the little kid says as we pass.

  It is a good-size fish. Not quite as big as the fish Papa and Big Eddie caught in Colombia. But big enough, maybe, to prove to Big Eddie that Minnesota is a fine place to be, that having a little brother is a good thing. Big enough to prove to myself that I could have won the tournament just like Papa. I reach my hand into my pocket and then stop. I glance at my brother. I don’t need a medal to know that I carry a little bit of Papa around with me all the time.

  In the fading orange light of late summer, we head home. At the corner, we wave good-bye to Cameron, who salutes with her good arm and then looks both ways before crossing the street. The rods swing on my shoulder. Big Eddie carries the tackle box. Between us, we pull the cooler, the fish like an emperor in a chariot. It feels like the setting sun might hang in the sky above us forever—the summer, the fall, maybe even our whole lives stretched out before us like a vast ocean.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the early readers who believed in Little Eddie’s story, especially my fabulous editor, Amanda Ramirez, at Simon & Schuster and my lovely agent, Thao Le, and the University of Minnesota Press, which published my original Eddie story, “Fishing,” in Sky Blue Water: Great Stories for Young Readers.

  Thanks also to these people and places that were instrumental in some way in the creation of this book: Erik Anderson, Karlyn Coleman, Adrianna Cuevas, Linda and Al Dieken, Nancy Duncan, Renzo Fajardo, Marcela Landres, Las Musas, the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Fishing Museum, the Minnesota State Arts Board, Regan Byrne Palmer, #PitchWars, and Jen Vincent.

  I am especially indebted to my daughter, Sylvia, who helped me work through exactly what could and should happen in Little Eddie’s world and inspired many of his adventures; to my Colombian family and our Cartagena adventures; and to my husband for supporting me in all the possible ways a writer must be supported.

  Finally, this is in memory of Sally, my own Abuela.

  About the Author

  Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota. She wrote a book about that experience, Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family, which was published by the University of Minnesota Press. A Writer, editor, and teacher, she lives in the very literary city of Minneapolis. What If a Fish is her debut middle grade novel.

  Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Anika-Fajardo

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Anika Fajardo

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2020 by Paola Escobar

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  Book design by Lizzy Bromley

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fajardo, Anika, author.

  Title: What if a fish / Anika Fajardo.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2020] | Audience: Ages 8-12. | Audience: Grades 4-6. |

  Summary: “Eleven-year-old Eddie Aguado is convinced that winning the 14th Annual Arne Hopkins Dock Fishing Tournament (once he actually learns how to fish) will bring him closer to his dad, who died when Eddie was only five”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019024567 (print) | LCCN 2019024568 (ebook) | ISBN 9781534449831 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534449855 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Fathers and sons—Fiction. | Brothers—Fiction. | Grief—Fiction. | Fishing—Fiction. | Colombian Americans—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.F3475 Wh 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.F3475 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024567

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024568