by Karen Rivers
The trio of dorsal fins disappeared under the surface, one by one. Nat put her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun. The whales were out a little way now. Then the smallest one jumped clear out of the water and slapped down again, belly first, the sound echoing around Nat like applause.
“Wow,” called Nat. “All the wows. Wow forever.”
The sun was starting to move lower in the sky. She’d lost track of how long she’d been there. Her dad was probably awake now and wondering when she was coming back, and where she had gone. She slowly dumped the pebbles out of her shoes and put the shoes back on her feet. She didn’t even want to take a pebble back up with her. She just wanted to hold the picture of the whales in her mind, to keep looking at it again and again.
Nat picked up the phone to put back in her pocket, but then she changed her mind. She flipped it open, hesitated for a minute, and dialed.
“Hi,” Nat said. “It’s me. Guess what I just saw?”
“Hmm,” said the Bird. She sounded like she’d been asleep. She cleared her throat. “Well, in order to guess, I need to know where you are.”
“I’m at the beach,” said Nat. “We moved. I should have told you that. There’s a beach here. We are in Canada.”
“I love beaches everywhere in the world. I can hear the wind on your beach through the phone. Canada is lovely. Aren’t you lucky?”
“I guess,” said Nat, dubiously.
“I’m going to say that you saw . . . hmmm. A seal?”
“Nope,” said Nat.
“A mermaid?”
“Come on, mermaids aren’t real. Duh. I’m twelve. Not, like, nine.”
The Bird laughed. “A lot of people think mermaids are real! But you’re probably right. There are a lot of stories though, and sometimes when you hear a lot of stories about the same thing, you have to wonder, Is this real? Like the Loch Ness Monster. Did I ever tell you that I’m a marine biologist?”
“What? You are? No!” Nat closed her eyes for a second. She could see the pattern of her own blood vessels on the insides of her eyelids. When she was little, she’d thought it was something else. A scary something. She couldn’t remember quite what, but she remembered that it frightened her. She wasn’t scared now, but she was something. “I thought you were a makeup artist,” she said, opening her eyes. The something feeling was still there.
The Bird laughed again. “Why would you think that? I never even wear makeup. Wearing makeup is a lot of work. It takes so much time! Life is too short to worry so much about what you look like.”
“My mom is a makeup artist,” said Nat.
“Oh, honey. I didn’t mean . . . I thought you didn’t know who your mom is?”
“I don’t want to talk about it now,” said Nat. Her voice felt small and velvety, like a cat’s footsteps. She wondered if the Bird could even hear her. “I just wanted to tell you about the whales.”
“Whales!” the Bird exclaimed. “Well, I am happy to talk about whales all day. Every day. Whales are my favorites. What kind of whales?”
“Orcas,” said Nat. She picked up a stone and threw it into the water, where it was swallowed by a wave. She threw another. “Three orcas. They came practically right up onto the beach!”
“Orcas are my second favorite. Did you know they are actually dolphins?” said the Bird. “Humpbacks were my specialty.”
“Oh,” said Nat. She brightened up. “I like all the whales. And dolphins. My middle name is Baleine! That’s French for ‘whale.’”
“I love that! What a perfectly glorious name! You’re very lucky.”
“My first name is Nat.” She suddenly wanted the Bird to know who she was. “Natalia.”
“That’s a nice name, too,” said the Bird. “Nat. But can I call you Baleine? I like to say it. It has such a nice shape in my mouth.”
Nat giggled. “I like it, too. You can call me that.” She paused. “No one calls me that, not ever. It’s like a secret name.”
“Well, then it fits. We are like secret friends. Do you want to know my name?”
Nat shrugged, but obviously the Bird couldn’t see her shrug. She didn’t want to know the Bird’s real name. She wanted her to stay Bird (Mom) forever. Having a Bird (Mom) was better than anything she knew how to explain. But she didn’t want to be rude either. “Maybe not yet,” she said. “Unless you really really want to tell me.”
“I get it,” said the Bird. “If you don’t know my name, I can be anyone. I think maybe that’s just fine. I like the idea of being anyone. I think a lot about being someone else, sometimes. I look at people and I think, Why am I me and why are you you? Do you ever do that?”
Nat didn’t answer. She couldn’t think of what to say.
“I like thinking of you as Baleine, more than I like thinking about you as Prank Caller,” the Bird went on. She pronounced Baleine perfectly, in the French way. Nat felt something like feathers moving softly in her stomach. “Tell me about the whales, little Baleine. Let me just get comfortable. I want to hear everything. I want to hear the whole story.”
So Nat told her.
Harry
Here is a list of everything that is wrong with you, Harry typed.
He reached up and scratched his ear. His ear was always itchy lately. He thought there might be something wrong with it, like scabies or mites, or something even worse. He Googled “scabies.” Again. He was pretty convinced that was it: tiny little bugs burrowing through his skin. He scratched his ear harder. Maybe he picked them up at the library when he leaned his head down on the sofa. Or maybe on the bus to the stupid day camp he had to go to while his parents were at work.
The day camp was terrible in more ways than that. It was particularly terrible because it was a camp for girls.
Thinking about it gave him the elevator-stomach feeling he hated, where it felt like your body separated from your head somehow when an elevator went too fast. The elevator in the building at his dad’s old job in Victoria, where they used to live, did that.
Harry scratched his ear again, so hard it was probably bleeding. It was just a coincidence that it was the same ear that got hurt the year before when a group of boys in his class decided it would be funny to beat him up.
They beat him up because they hated him for knowing who he was.
That is, they beat him up because even though some dumb doctor said he was a girl when he was born, he was really a boy.
The boys who beat him up were not the kind of kids who understood things like that.
No one in that town was.
Maybe no one anywhere was.
Only on the Internet did people get it.
So moving was a good idea, for sure. The trouble was that his dad moved with them. Obviously.
And so did Harry’s “issue.” That’s what his dad called it.
Harry deleted everything that he’d typed and started a new list. He wrote the day at the top of it, which was Tuesday. A list of all the things that were wrong with him would take too long. He’d stick to all the things that were wrong with Tuesday. It was easier.
Harry scratched his ear.
Tuesday:
1. Everything
2. Itchy ear
3. Day camp
4. School starts back next week
5. GENDER—having to explain
6. Shut up shut up shut up shut up shutup shutupshutupshutuppppppp
Harry stopped typing. The day-of-the-week list was a dumb idea. Everything was wrong, every day, and mostly the same things were wrong, and the same things were itchy.
Harry was suddenly too bored of the topic of himself to try writing another list.
He wanted to scream.
Lists put things in order and made him feel like he had a handle on things, but he didn’t actually have a handle on anything at all except for pretty
much every Mario game ever. Maybe he’d have a handle on everything else the next day.
Maybe nothing would be itchy.
Probably not, though.
A good list always made him feel better. But a bad list, not so much.
He deleted the whole list and shut off the laptop and turned on the PlayStation instead.
This is better, he thought. Video games never hurt your feelings. Video games never looked at you funny when your dad called you Harriet, loudly, at pickup time or when you were the only boy at a girls’ day camp. Video games never had so darn much to explain.
The game beeped and played a song. Harry leaned forward to see it better. “Yes!” he said.
His character ran across a tightrope and swung down a tunnel. “Gotcha!”
Cod Is Terrible
Dear Solly, Nat wrote.
She was lying on her bed.
“Now you’re tired,” said her dad from the doorway, which he more than filled with his enormous self. He had to stand sideways. “We have to time our naps better, yep yep.”
“I’m not napping! I’m writing to Solly. I don’t nap. Napping is for losers! And babies.”
“Nah! Napping is the best. Man, you have to try it. One day, I’ll talk you into it and you’ll be like, ‘Dad, how come you never told me how great naps are?’”
“I promise I will never say that.”
“Yeah, you will!”
“Whatever. I won’t though.”
“Will so.”
“Will not!”
“Will so.”
“DAD. I’m trying to do something here!”
“Oh! I’m trying to do something, too.” He made a face. “How was the beach?”
“It was beachy. There were . . .” For some reason, the whole story about the whales didn’t want to come out of her mouth. That’s weird, she thought. “I saw . . .” She shrugged. “It was kind of cold,” she said. “Lots of seagulls. And rocks. I slipped.” She showed her dad her knee. The blood was all dried now. It didn’t look like a big deal.
“Ouch. Are you OK, Natters?” Her dad came into the room. Her room, like all the rooms in the trailer, was tiny. It just had her bed, which was basically a shelf, and that was it. There was no room for anything else. All her clothes were in a tiny closet and in the drawer under the bed. Her dad filled up so much of the non-bed space, she felt like she needed to scrunch her body into a corner of the bed in order to breathe. At least sitting down he wasn’t so gigantic.
He sat.
“I’m good,” she said. “I’m fine. My knee is fine. It’s no big deal. Did you have a nice nap? Did you have happy dreams?” That was another one of their jokes. At bedtime, he always said, “Night night, happy dreams, fun tomorrow.” No matter what. And in the morning, he said, “Did you have happy dreams?” And if she hadn’t, he’d mock-punch her and say, “I told you to have happy dreams!”
“Did I ever!” he said. “The Canadian air makes me sleep like a baby!”
“I hear babies are terrible sleepers. That’s why they have to nap during the day, too,” said Nat. “Did you cry a lot and poop yourself?”
Her dad threw back his head and laughed, nearly smashing his head on the shelf that ran along the wall where she kept all her books.
“That’s true about babies,” he said. “You were a good baby though. You slept like a log. I had to keep checking to see if you were dead!”
“Spoiler alert: not dead.”
“Not dead,” he repeated. “Thank goodness. Anyhoo, I’m going to take the scooter into town for groceries. We need cod!”
“Dad, I hate cod. Please, no. You hate cod.”
“I was joking about the cod!” He laughed again. There had been an article on the Internet the year before called, “XAN GALLAGHER EATS MORE IN A DAY THAN YOU DO IN A WEEK.” The Internet went nuts for it. People tried to eat like him. One guy got really sick and gained five pounds in a week. “He didn’t work out!” Nat’s dad had said. “What a dummy!” The article said that XAN GALLAGHER ate two pounds of cod every day, which he had been doing, when the reporter had asked him. It was his Cod Phase. “I can’t ever face cod again.” He paused. “Their faces are really tiny.”
He laughed at his own joke, bending double in the middle. Everything he did, he did BIG. The books shook on the shelf.
“DAD!”
He stopped laughing. “Nat, I solemnly swear . . .” He put his hand on the book she was sort of reading. His hand was bigger than the book. “I swear on this book that my Cod Phase is over.”
“Cod is gross,” Nat agreed. “No more Cod Phases allowed. Like, ever.”
“I think I’ll get salmon, yep yep,” he said. “They have great salmon here. Maybe this will be my Salmon Phase. Drumroll, please!” He drummed on her leg with his hands.
“Ouch! Stop. Sure, Dad, whatevs.”
“‘Whatevs’ is not a word.”
“Is too.”
“Is not.”
“DAD, don’t you have fish to cook?”
Nat’s dad spent two hours every day preparing massive amounts of food and then even more time eating it. He ate about ten times what a normal person ate; fifteen times as much as she, a kid, ate. They had a special fridge installed in the trailer that took up most of the kitchen wall.
Cooking, eating, and working out was his full-time job, when he wasn’t doing a movie. And this year, he hadn’t even done one.
He was taking a break.
But he never took a break from cooking, eating, and working out.
After he cooked all that food and ate it, he worked out in the Other Trailer.
The Other Trailer was also an Airstream, but it was full of gym equipment. There was even gym equipment attached to the outside of it for the massive, weird elastic-band exercises that he couldn’t do inside a small space. In San Francisco, he had used the famous director’s home gym, but here they did not have access to a famous director’s house and gym equipment. The second trailer they called “Mini-Me” even though it was pretty much the same size as their main trailer.
XAN GALLAGHER was serious about his body. Too serious, Nat thought privately. She wondered if he wouldn’t probably still be just as famous if he ate a normal amount of food and went for a jog once a week or something like normal dads.
“I’m trying to write to Solly!” she said. “Go away!”
“I love you,” he said.
“Yeah, you do,” she said.
She waited until she heard his scooter start up, putt-putting up the long gravel driveway, before she started writing again. She looked down at what she had so far. “Dear Solly” seemed too formal. She put that one at the bottom of the pile of identical postcards and got out a new one.
Hey, she wrote. Canada is cool! It’s basically like America but the money is more colorful. Ha ha. I saw whales on the beach today. They were really close. School starts in six days. There are about 10 people in this town, so it should be weird.
She stopped writing and lay back on her bed. Sweat trickled into her hair. Her dad had the fan blowing, but it was still hot—way hotter than down at the beach. He didn’t believe in air-conditioning. Something about the refrigerant gases destroying the atmosphere. Sometimes the inside of the trailer was exactly like the inside of a solar oven. She got up. She took the pen and the postcard outside to where her dad had set up the hammocks in the shade of some gigantic trees. His was huge and hers was little. It looked silly next to his, like a toy, like when girls put outfits on their dolls that matched their own.
She climbed into his hammock.
It was covered with needles from the trees and some sticky sap.
She stuck her fingers in the sap and stuck them together, and then wished she hadn’t. Sap was hard to get off.
Then she sap-glued the pen between her fingers so she’d be
forced to finish writing.
Lying in her dad’s hammock was like lying in the sail of a boat. She held on to the pen and swung back and forth for a few minutes, and then she reread what she’d written so far. There were actually about thirteen thousand people in this town, but Solly would know she was Exaggerating For Dramatic Effect. That was something that they did. She stopped swinging. (EFDE), she added in parentheses, in case Solly had forgotten. Sometimes she felt like Solly had mentally deleted all their inside jokes the very second Nat left San Francisco. Purposely. Like she needed to empty out her brain space to make room for a new friend’s inside jokes.
I hope you have a good first day at school! (Wear white socks for gym.) You probably will already have had it by the time you get this.
Her writing was messy because it was hard to write lying down. Besides, she had run out of room and had to write the end of the last sentence in tiny letters around the address part. She filled in Solly’s information, which she knew from memory. She made the o in Solly’s name into a heart and then colored it in.
Then in even tinier letters, upside down, across the top, she wrote her new address, which was a post office box, not an actual house number. Then she put a star beside it.
She turned the postcard over. Luckily, there was lots of white space on the Canada flag. *This is TOP SECRET. Do not share this with anyone, especially p_zzi, I’m not kidding, I will NEVER talk to you again.
That filled up the whole area around the maple leaf. She drew a frowny face on the leaf itself, and then she felt bad. She hoped she hadn’t desecrated the flag or something. She hoped Canada wouldn’t be mad.
Solly would probably laugh at it and show her new best friend, whoever that was going to be, and they would laugh together about what a nerd Nat was and wonder how such a dorky kid could have such a cool dad.
(“Overrated,” Nat heard Solly say, in her mind.)
Suddenly, Nat felt so tired. She closed her eyes. She would think about mailing the postcard the next day, or maybe never, or more likely she’d just leave it on the table and her dad would mail it for her.