A Possibility of Whales

by Karen Rivers

  She looked for whales’ fins in the waves.

  Every single day, since the day the whales had come, she’d gone down to the beach to sit and wait for them to come again. But they hadn’t.

  Not yet.

  Today she didn’t even feel like going down there. Too much had happened.

  School had happened.

  XAN GALLAGHER, outed as her dad, had happened.

  And Harry was once called Harriet.

  Harry, Harriet.

  He was Harry. He was 100 percent Harry.

  Harriet was a mistake, that’s all.

  A mistake that clung on to school records and in the minds of people who didn’t get it. But Harry wasn’t Harriet.

  “Harry, not Harriet.”

  She said that part out loud, partly to try it on for size, and partly because it was almost a tongue twister. “Red leather, yellow leather,” she said.

  She tore open the envelope. The thing inside along with the folded paper was a bracelet. It was made from string that was the color of a brown paper bag. It was tied into knots. There were three beads on it. One said B. The next said F. The third was another F.

  BFF.

  But were they? Still?

  After what Solly did?

  “I don’t think so,” said Nat. She threw the bracelet into the bushes. It got hung up on a branch briefly, and then it fell out of sight. She felt bad about that for a split second, and then she didn’t.

  Nat unfolded the letter and began to read, even though the wind kept flapping the paper in her hand and her hair into her eyes, like it was trying to demand her attention.

  Sooooooo Natters,

  Guess what?

  Some BIG things have happened since you left. Why did it take you so long to send your address? I was going CRAZY.

  The things are Super Huge Things (SHTs).

  The hugest.

  The MOST HUGE things to ever happen to a person, short of being murdered in the woods. LOL! Not that being murdered in the woods would be funny, but you know what I mean.

  Anyway, the first SHT is that I kissed Evan Walker at the pier. We were just hanging out, you know? (His mom is my mom’s new BFF. They met at hot yoga.) (His mom has had her entire face filled with fat from her own butt. She looks like a wax museum person who was too close to the heater and who has started to melt. Not kidding.) Sooooo, we were like walking and talking and then he was standing right next to me, pointing at some boat or something, and then BAM his lips were on my lips! It was weird but so good and good and weird. I don’t even like-like Evan Walker. But I like-liked kissing him. It is ever complicated, like you’d say.

  The second even bigger thing is that I got my period. The very next morning. AFTER THE KISS. I went to the bathroom and THERE IT WAS. Did the kiss make me a WOMAN? I can’t wait to see how big my boobs are going to be. If they are bigger than Mom’s, she’s going to freak.

  I feel TOTALLY different. Like GROWN UP. You know?

  Do you have your period yet? You’d tell me, right?

  There was a big scribbled-out sentence here. Solly had crossed it out every which way so it was impossible to read. There was only one letter that Nat could make out, which was a capital L.

  The scribbled-out bit was the worst part of the letter.

  Mom is having surgery on her face to make her lips bigger now. She is going to look so stupid. In related news, Mom is still terrrrrrrible. The worst. She says hi!

  I have to go. The whole class is going to the market today. We have to buy four different kinds of vegetables and then make it into soup for homeless people. I’m going to buy beets so my soup will be gloriously pink.

  I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

  Love,

  Me

  PS—Now that I’m a woman, I’ve decided that from now on, I’m going to use my full name, Soleil. Pronounced “Sol-yay.” ☺

  SMOOCHES, BABY!

  Soleil (SolYay!)

  PPS—Write back and tell me all the SHTs that have happened to you.

  Nat carefully refolded the letter, making each crease doubly sharp with her fingernails. She wanted to call Solly and shout at her. She wanted to say, “What is with this dumb bracelet? We aren’t even friends now!”

  She took the phone out of her pocket and looked at it.

  She had had the phone for exactly one year.

  A lot can happen in a year, she thought. Sometimes, too much.

  Instead of dialing Solly though, she pressed the contact button for Bird (Mom). She wanted to tell Bird (Mom) about Harry. Bird would know the right things to say. She would probably understand.

  She wanted to tell Bird (Mom) everything.

  And she didn’t want to tell Solly anything at all.

  Harry

  Observations on the First Day of School, Harry typed on his laptop. It would have been fine, but Dad told the teacher that he had to call me Harriet and then it got stupid fast, and I’m stupid so I panicked.

  Note to self: Panicking is stupid.

  Dad is stupid.

  Everything is stupid.

  Harry read what he had typed. It wasn’t bad in that it was true, but still, it wasn’t good either. If his dad saw it, he would kill Harry. Harry started hitting the backspace key and watched the word “stupid” disappear, one letter at a time.

  One day, he was going to write a whole entire book about what it was like to be a boy who had been identified as a girl—“transgender” was the word for it, according to Google, not like he had an expert around to ask or anything—and then everyone would understand.

  Maybe even he would understand.

  But he didn’t quite understand the why of it. Particularly the why me part. It’s just who he was.

  He just wanted to be a kid. To play video games. To learn new tricks on his skateboard. To have a group of boys to hang out with and to just do stuff.

  The thing was that sometimes a thing could happen to you, and sometimes it could be really personal, but you couldn’t explain why. You didn’t know what it was, what misfired when, or if it even was a misfire or if it just was, like having brown eyes or curly hair. Personally, he didn’t think it was a bad thing. If he could change anything about himself, it actually would be his hair.

  But he would, eventually, be able to do that.

  Sooner or later, he’d be able to just go ahead and cut his hair short, without his parents having to approve it.

  That’s what he’d say in his book, The Book with All the Answers, in a non-annoying way. What he wrote would make other kids feel OK in their own skin.

  If he were to write a book, it would 100 percent not be annoying.

  It would answer everything to everyone’s satisfaction.

  No kid would be in trouble ever again for being who they were! They definitely wouldn’t get bullied about it.

  It would make it OK, not just for kids like Harry, but for dads like Harry’s dad.

  Basically, it would be a magic, miracle book.

  “Duh,” Harry said out loud. “As if.” Then he mentally crumpled up his own idea and threw it away. Why would he be able to do this thing?

  Writing a book was hard.

  Impossible, even.

  Writing lists was easier.

  He highlighted everything that he’d typed and erased it. Then he started a new list.

  Goals For This School Year:

  1. Don’t freak out.

  2. Make friends with boys (Best friends) (OK to be friends with girls but just acquaintances, sort of).

  3. Always use the bathroom before leaving home so you NEVER have to use the GIRL’S bathroom at school. DUH.

  He underlined the “DUH.”

  That about summed it up, he thought.

  Harry closed his laptop and turned the Xbox on. His short-
term goal was to play through all the new levels of this video game in record time. That was an easier goal than, say, writing a book to explain inexplicable things.

  “Kapow,” he said.

  The Things You Find When You Aren’t Looking

  The first time Nat went to Harry’s house after school, she found a collection of magazines in the downstairs bathroom cupboard when she was looking for a roll of toilet paper. The magazines were wrinkly, and some of them were really old. They were pretty much all celebrity magazines. Her dad never bought these magazines or let her buy them, not that she wanted to. She’d seen the covers on the newsstands; she’d read the headlines. If she reached for one, he’d give her that look, let out a belly laugh and make a face and say something like, “If you want an interview, Nat-a-Tat, I’d be happy to give you one. Yep yep. Or even my ortograph.”

  When she was little, she didn’t know how to pronounce “autograph” and now it was one of their inside jokes.

  She liked having inside jokes with her dad more than she wanted to read the magazines.

  Nat picked up the whole pile of magazines, took them out of the cupboard, and fanned them out on the counter. Some had pretty actresses on the front. Some of them were people she knew. Some of them were friends with her dad.

  There were even some that featured XAN GALLAGHER.

  Nat’s heart was beating funny in her chest. It felt like her blood was suddenly too watery, like it had turned into a whole ocean and was whooshing through her veins too quickly.

  As though someone else was controlling her hands, Nat separated the XAN GALLAGHER magazines from the others and made a smaller pile of just those. Then she looked at the covers, one by one. There he was with his eyebrow up on one, two, three of them.

  “XAN THE MAN.”

  “THE RETURN OF XAN.”

  “XAN COMES BACK.”

  Nat wondered what they thought he was coming back from. XAN GALLAGHER never went away. He was always there.

  She pulled one more magazine from the pile.

  XAN GALLAGHER was on the cover, wearing a tuxedo.

  The tuxedo had a wide, turquoise sash.

  That was weird. Nat looked more closely.

  It wasn’t a sash.

  It was a baby carrier.

  And there, with just a tuft of hair sticking out the very top, was her very own head.

  Suddenly, Nat knew that if she opened up this magazine, she was going to know who her mom really was. Realizing that made her feel dizzy. She sat down on the floor, which was flecked with a gold pattern that sparkled in the light. She lay all the way down on it. The walls spun and then held still. She pressed her cheek against the sparkles and held her breath for three whole minutes, watching the numbers on her phone flip from 3:31 to 3:32 to 3:33. Then she let the breath out: 3:33 seemed like it should be lucky. Next to the time, the little weather icon showed a sun, which wasn’t even true. It was foggy.

  It was almost always foggy here, just like in San Francisco.

  Nat sat up again and put the magazine on her lap.

  She needed to talk to someone. She wanted to call Bird (Mom) but she didn’t want Harry to hear her talking on the phone in the bathroom. He would think that was weird. Besides, she didn’t know what she would say.

  “Are you going to be in there forever?” Harry yelled.

  “Probably not,” she yelled back. “Maybe another minute though.”

  “Weirdo,” he said. He tapped a tune out on the door. She could hear him breathing.

  And then, finally, she heard his footsteps walking away.

  The magazine smelled musty, like it had been read in the bathtub and put away damp. The date on the magazine was February 28, 2005. That was the day after her dad won his Oscar. The headline said, “XAN THE MAN IS XAN THE DAD: XAN’S NEW BABY MAKES HER DEBUT AT THE OSCARS.”

  The idea of someone reading this very magazine in the bathtub, looking at photos of her dad and of her as a baby, made Nat feel terrible, like someone was rubbing Styrofoam against her teeth.

  Superimposed over her dad’s smiling face, there was a smaller photo of him on a surfboard, wearing a very long, striped, knitted hat. He looked silly, which made her smile, but also made her feel embarrassed on his behalf. There is a word for that in German, which is fremdschämen.

  “Fremdschämen,” Nat whispered.

  Feeling fremdschämen for her dad was not a new feeling. It happened a lot.

  She opened the magazine to the article. Her hands made the decision before her brain did, but as soon as her brain caught up, it made her slam the magazine shut again. She hadn’t read any words, but she had seen some photos. One of the photos was of her dad with a woman. The woman was beautiful and also familiar. Nat blinked. She had black hair that was blowing around her face, and she was smiling. Her eyes were behind sunglasses. Even just glancing at her chin and cheeks and the way her head was tossed back, Nat could tell she was famous. Famous people took up a different type of space in photos than people who weren’t famous. Also, they glowed.

  This woman glowed.

  She was definitely not a makeup artist.

  She was someone who makeup artists made up. Is that the right term? she wondered. “Made up”? It was a little bit like they made a new version of the person they were working on. Her dad sometimes looked like a total stranger after makeup: an old man or a monster, or worse, a stranger.

  Nat’s hands went cold and clammy.

  “You are made up,” she said to the face in the magazine, then she looked away. She didn’t read any of the small print beside the photo. She closed her eyes, but she could still almost see the face, as though it had been burned into her retinas.

  Her heart kept sloshing in a watery way, like it was murmuring a secret that it wanted her to hear.

  “Are you my mother?” she mouthed to the magazine, and then she felt dizzy again and lay down on the floor. She was panting like a dog in the sun. She wondered if she was dying.

  This was why her dad didn’t want her to read the magazines.

  This was why she had to carefully separate her dad in her mind from XAN GALLAGHER.

  Nat closed her eyes again and pictured herself underwater, bubbles rising to the surface, no sounds coming from anywhere except her own heartbeat. When she thought about hearts, she thought about blue whales. Blue whales were the biggest whales in the whole species. Their hearts were big enough that another, smaller whale—like a baby humpback or an adult orca—could easily swim through their gigantic veins.

  She had been in the bathroom for a long time. Harry probably thought she was dead. She wasn’t sure that she wasn’t, but probably not. She could hear the TV was on now in the other room. Maybe he had even forgotten she was there.

  Nat put the magazine down on the floor. She took the rest of the magazines and put them on the floor, too, separately from the one.

  She nudged the rest of the XAN magazines with her foot and the pile spilled over messily, cover after cover showing itself to her.

  “XAN GALLAGHER: SEXIEST MAN ALIVE THREE YEARS RUNNING”

  “XAN THE MAN: HE’S WRITING A BOOK!”

  “XAN LEADS PIPELINE PROTEST—BUT WHO IS THAT GIRL?”

  She stacked the XAN magazines at the bottom of the bigger pile and put them carefully back in the closet. She put the one from February 28, 2005, right there on top of the pile, closed the door, and gave it a kick. The kick was so loud that the TV went quiet. Harry must have muted it.

  He probably thought she was nuts.

  Probably he wouldn’t want to be her friend anymore, and she needed a friend, she really did. She wanted to press a big “RESTART” button on this whole playdate. Even the word “playdate” was all wrong.

  They were twelve.

  They were hanging out, that’s all.

  Or they would be, if she hadn�
�t spent the whole time in the bathroom.

  She turned on the faucet so Harry wouldn’t think she was dead.

  Harry knocked on the door. “Mom says I have to ask if you’re OK in there.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, louder than she needed to. She laughed so that he would know nothing was wrong.

  Harry knocked again, harder. “What?” he said. “Are you crying?”

  “Coming!” Nat shouted, still running the faucet. “Just washing my hands!”

  Then, without thinking about it, she opened the cupboard door again and took the magazine. She rolled it up and stuffed it down the leg of her jeans.

  “What are you doing in there?” said Harry.

  “I’m coming, I said.” She looked at herself in the mirror and there she was, the same as before.

  She put her hand on the door handle and made herself turn it. She put a smile on her face. “Hi,” she said to Harry.

  “Why are you making a face?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I do that.”

  “OK.”

  “Don’t be scared,” she said.

  “I’m not!” he said. “Why would I be scared?”

  Nat followed Harry back down the tiny hallway into the room that his mom had called the playroom.

  Playroom/playdate, Nat thought.

  Both were terrible words.

  “Go down to the playroom!” Harry’s mom had said after she’d fed them a snack.

  Harry’s mom seemed perfectly, quintessentially normal. The snack was some kind of orange cheese goo spread onto celery sticks, salty crackers, and chocolate chip cookies. It was the best snack Nat had ever eaten.

  Harry was so lucky.

  The “playroom” had a sectional couch that was bigger than Nat’s whole living room and kitchen combined. There was a TV that was connected to an Xbox, a PlayStation, and a Wii U. Nat felt flattened by envy. From the side, she probably looked like a piece of paper, that’s how flat she felt. Her dad didn’t believe in video games. He believed in being outside. He believed in fresh air and trees.

  Nat liked those things, too. If she didn’t go to the beach every single day, she might not see the whales again. And the whales were a billion times better than any old Xbox. Even thinking about them made her heart feel lighter, floaty, like when you run down a hill really fast and your feet don’t even really touch the ground.