A Possibility of Whales

by Karen Rivers

  Nat felt for the phone in her back pocket. It was there. She liked the idea that no matter where she was in the world, the Bird was with her, even though she was actually in LA. She always answered, no matter what time it was. She always wanted to talk to Nat. Basically, she was Nat’s number two person, right after her dad.

  Even though she was a stranger.

  Harry was her number three. She wondered what number she was on his list. She probably didn’t even crack the top ten.

  She frowned.

  They weren’t friends.

  Maybe they weren’t anything.

  Maybe he was just here for the free trip to Mexico.

  Her heart did something funny in her chest that made her think of a skipping rope churning through dust. She coughed.

  “Fine,” Harry repeated. “Water is universal. Whatever.” Nat couldn’t see his eyes behind the glasses, but he seemed mad.

  She stared straight into the sun for a second. She imagined it burning a hole right through her shirt, and then her skin, right into her heart. “I’ll have a Jarritos,” she conceded. “If it’s really important to you.”

  “I don’t care what you drink!”

  Nat’s holey heart made a thlurping sound. Her legs hurt from stand-pedaling. If Harry weren’t there with her, she’d be lying in the hammock with her dad, reading a book. Or letting him teach her how to surf. Again. (She never seemed to quite get it, even though he’d started taking her out on his board when she was just a baby.) They’d maybe be singing something silly in the kitchen while they made frozen drinks from organic bananas and some rare fruit that her dad had discovered in a local’s yard and learned about after talking to the owner—his new BFF—for forty-five minutes. She suddenly had a yearning for her dad and their regular-together life, a life without extras like Harry or the Brasches.

  Without complications, like needing to have a BFF.

  She just wanted one.

  One BFF who would get her and who she could talk to about stuff and hang out with without wondering if she was doing it right.

  “Ugh,” she said out loud, by mistake.

  Harry didn’t even say “What?” for a change, because he was busy ignoring her.

  “We should go back to—” Nat started to say, but then they turned a corner and they were in an empty parking lot at a SUPERMARKET. That’s what the sign said in huge, bright white letters. In smaller letters underneath, it said MERCADO. “Why is that sign in English?” said Nat. “Weird.”

  “Is it open?” Harry sounded doubtful. “It looks like one of those stores in Japan that was abandoned after the tidal wave. We should have brought a camera and filmed this stuff. I bet it would go viral on the Internet.”

  “Huh.” Nat hoped it was not abandoned and that it sold water. Her mouth was as dry as the road, the sand, the sky, all of Mexico. On the other hand, Harry sounded really happy about the possibility that it was empty. “Maybe.”

  On Harry’s bedroom wall at home, he had a bunch of photos of abandoned theme parks. Nat thought they looked spooky, but he seemed to really like them. She wondered how it made him feel to look at those falling-over roller coasters, the bumper cars rusted into place. It made her feel sad and hollow. But he must have felt something better than that, or he wouldn’t have tacked the pictures to his wall.

  Harry was deep.

  Nat liked that about Harry.

  She liked kind of knowing what he was thinking, but she also liked that he had dark, secret corners that she couldn’t see into.

  She wanted to know. That was the difference between Harry and, say, Heaven. She had a feeling that Heaven’s dark, secret corners were full of scary clowns and probably spiders, not that she cared. It was just that Heaven was the opposite of Harry in every way. She was like a photo negative of him.

  Yet she was the most popular girl in the class. One day, maybe after she graduated from high school, Nat hoped she would understand what made a person popular and what made them not popular. It almost never had anything to do with being kind, that’s what she’d observed so far. Sometimes the kindest kid was the most popular. But sometimes it was a mean girl. And anyway, who decided these things? Was it the person themselves? Maybe I should decide to be popular, she thought. Then I’d have tons of friends and I wouldn’t have to think about it so much.

  On the other hand, being popular also seemed like a lot of work. Almost like being famous, but on a different scale.

  Popular kids had to always be “on.”

  Nat didn’t think she had the energy to be always “on.”

  Maybe she preferred to be “off.”

  The SUPERMARKET mercado

  The door was the push-open kind, not automatic like grocery stores at home, and inside it was the exact same temperature as it was outside, only not at all dusty. It smelled like pine-scented cleaner. “The air-conditioner is broken,” the girl behind the counter said, without looking up from the book she was reading. She was sitting on a high stool and her feet were on the counter.

  “Thank you,” said Nat.

  Harry nudged her. “Should we whisper?” he whispered. “She’s reading.”

  “Don’t be dumb,” said Nat. She rolled her eyes.

  Nat and Harry started walking up and down the aisles. In aisle three, there was one other person. She was an old lady, wearing a bright pink, off-the-shoulder blouse. The blouse, and the pinkness of it, gave Nat the impression that the old lady was a dancer. Nat smiled at her. The lady was slowly putting things into her cart and taking them out again, inspecting each item carefully. When she noticed Nat, she gave her the stink-eye. Then, in slow motion, she put a tin of something back on the shelf and slapped it so hard it fell off and rolled a few feet, landing at Nat’s feet.

  “Oh!” said Nat. “Sorry.”

  The old lady looked like the next thing that she wanted to slap was Nat.

  “Harry.” Nat touched his arm. “Let’s go.”

  “No way! We can’t go now! This place is awesome!” Harry whisper-shouted. “This stuff is seriously cool. Check it out.”

  He pointed. There were all the regular kinds of cereal, but the packaging looked different. It looked old-fashioned.

  “This cereal box looks like it’s from 1977,” said Harry. “Vintage. Do you think it’s stale?”

  “That cereal is made from sugar and sugar and more sugar and some sugar,” Nat told him. “Sugar doesn’t really go bad.”

  “I’m going to buy this. This is amazing. I could probably sell it on eBay for a hundred dollars. How much is it?”

  Nat shrugged. She could clearly see the price marked on the shelf that said 52 pesos, but if she could see it, so could he. Harry’s mom had given him Mexican money when they left, as well as some American dollars, “Just in case!”

  Nat’s dad always forgot that people have to pay for things. He was above money. He existed on another plane.

  “I’m sure I have enough,” said Harry. “How expensive could cereal be, anyway?”

  “Look!” Nat pointed to a small fridge that was stocked with Coke. She picked out a Diet Coke for herself and a regular Coke for Harry. “Mexican Coke is different from American Coke. And Canadian Coke, for that matter,” she explained. “In Mexico they use cane sugar.” She traded her Diet Coke for a bottle of water. Fake sugar gave her just as bad a feeling as real sugar, cane or otherwise.

  “Water bottles are bad for the environment,” said Harry.

  “So are Coke bottles,” she said.

  “Are they?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe. Probably.”

  “They’re glass,” he said. “It’s better. Different, anyway.” But he put the bottle back and picked up a can instead. “Cans are the best. I think. Maybe. I don’t know. Do you?”

  Nat kept bumping into moments like this, moments where she felt
like she didn’t know anything at all. The world made her feel stupid. “Pöro,” she whispered. Pöro was a word from her favorite website, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which was a bunch of made-up words for things that there weren’t words for already. It was almost, but not quite, as good as foreign words. It was a place where you could find words that should exist, but don’t.

  Pöro means that no matter how hard you try to do the right thing, you’re usually messing it up.

  “How much is it?” Harry asked the cashier, using the loud, slow, clipped voice that people used to communicate with non-English speakers. Nat shuddered. “How man-y pe-sos?” Harry enunciated loudly.

  The cashier stared at him and blinked slowly, once, twice, three times. She was very pretty. She had waist-length hair and was wearing a T-shirt that said Imagine Unicorns. She had the best fingernails that Nat had ever seen. Her nails had tiny jewels embedded in them. She put her book down. She picked up the cereal box and swiped it over the scanner. 52 pesos, the screen showed.

  Nat was so embarrassed. Money was money! It looked different everywhere, but it all had numbers written on it. You didn’t have to speak Spanish to understand that a peso was a peso!

  Nat wanted to explain to the cashier that Harry wasn’t the dumb jerk he looked like, but she kept her mouth shut. The cashier’s smile went nowhere near her eyes; it stayed firmly down around her teeth in a grimace. “Give it to me,” she said to Harry, using the same slow voice that he had used. She took the whole stack of cash from his hand.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Nat felt so greng-jai, she wanted to cry. (Greng-jai was a Thai word for the feeling you got when you were putting someone out.) “Count your own money!” she mouthed at Harry.

  The cashier counted Harry’s money out slowly in Spanish.

  “Gracias, señorita,” he said. His accent was fine, but there was something about the way he hit each syllable too loudly that made Nat want to walk away. She didn’t understand why he was speaking Spanish when the cashier clearly spoke English.

  It was condescending.

  Nat nudged him.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she mouthed. “Never mind.”

  “I can’t hear you,” he said.

  Nat made a face.

  “What?” he said, again.

  The cashier put the cereal into a bag, the kind of plastic bag that sea turtles often mistake for jellyfish and die eating. Nat took it out again. “We don’t want a plastic bag,” she explained. “Sorry. But they kill turtles.”

  “How can I carry it without a bag?” said Harry.

  He put it back in the bag.

  “There is a turtle’s blood on your hands now,” Nat told him.

  He shrugged. “There’s no basket on the bike!” But he gave the bag back to the cashier. She didn’t say anything, but she sort of looked like she wanted to punch them both, or maybe that’s just what Nat would have wanted if it were her. The cashier shrugged instead, the universal body language of “Go away, you are bothering me.”

  Backpfeifengesicht—a face badly in need of a fist, Nat thought. It was a German word. The Germans had a lot of great words for things; words that just nailed very particular feelings. She had to stop herself from saying it out loud. It was her own face that was backpfeifengesicht in this scenario. “Sorry,” she said, making it worse. She tugged on Harry’s arm. “Let’s go!”

  The old lady in the pink blouse started slamming her cans and bottles onto the counter. One. At. A. Time. She was wearing sunglasses on her head that were exactly like Harry’s.

  “Well, bye!” Nat said to the cashier in her friendliest voice. “Thank you!” She wanted the old lady to know that she was a good person. A friendly person! Practically Canadian! Not a monster who deserved to be slapped like a can of beans and left for dead in aisle three.

  “Wait!” the cashier blurted. “I have something for you!” She reached under the counter and she passed the brochure around Nat and put it into Harry’s hand.

  “Gracias,” he said again, too crisply.

  “Terrible,” Nat mumbled. The cashier gave her a look that may or may not have meant, “Your friend is terrible.”

  “Yes,” Nat said to her, which she realized didn’t make sense as soon as it left her mouth, but there it was, her “yes” floating out of her mouth and over the counter to the cashier, who turned her back on it, leaving it hanging there like an unanswered phone call.

  The worst.

  The old lady immediately started talking rapid-fire in Spanish, probably about how Nat and Harry were terrible, which Nat agreed with 100 percent, without fully knowing why.

  Nat unscrewed the cap from the water and drank it in three huge gulps while sending the old lady a telepathic message, which was, Sorry, sorry, sorry.

  “Are you coming, Nat?” said Harry. He stuffed the brochure into his pocket and tapped her on the head with the cereal box.

  “Let’s go. I mean, yes. I’m coming. YES.” She said the last “YES” loudly to reclaim the “yes” that went unanswered. She put the empty bottle of water in the garbage can and rushed out the door, just as the old lady yelled something. Do they not throw away empty bottles here? Pöro! Pöro! Nat thought.

  “Hey!” Harry followed her through the door, shoving it open with his elbows. “Hold the door! You could have broken my nose!”

  “Never lead with your face.” She held up her arms. “Use these.”

  He rolled his eyes. Did he pick up that habit from her? She got it from Solly. Maybe that’s how these things spread, one person to the next. Contagious, like the flu. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Sorry!”

  “What’s your problem, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” said Nat. “I don’t know.”

  “Are we fighting? This feels like we’re fighting. I don’t like fighting.” Harry shifted from one foot to another. “Like, I really don’t.”

  “Pickleflitz,” Nat said. It was a word that she just made up on the spot. It meant “Nothing sorry something I don’t know” all at once. She sat down, right there on the ground. It was hot.

  “What?” Harry plopped himself down next to her in the dust. He opened his Coke and bubbles fizzled out. He took a long sip. “Aaaaaah,” he said. “Actually, it kind of tastes the same.” He burped. The yellow dog wandered up to them and lifted his leg.

  That’s private, Tufty, Nat told him, telepathically. You could have done that around the corner.

  Tufty hung his head.

  “What did you say?” Harry repeated.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she lied. “If I did, I forget.”

  “Yeah, you said pickleflitz or something,” he said. “Did you make up that word? Or is that a real thing in Polish or whatever?”

  “You must have heard me wrong.” Nat eyed his Coke. “Is that empty yet?”

  Harry tipped the can out, and a couple of drops hit the ground and instantly evaporated. “Look, it says refresco on it. I’m keeping the can. It was very refresco.”

  He got on his bike, the can in one hand, the cereal box under his arm. The bike wobbled. “I am refrescoed!” he shouted. Tufty ran in a circle around him. “Do you think this dog belongs to anyone?”

  “I think it’s a stray.”

  “Yeah, it looks like it.” He pedaled a few times in a circle around where Nat was standing, holding her bike. She slung her leg over the seat. The bike seemed to have shrunk even more while they were in the store.

  Tufty barked three times and then ran toward the door of the SUPERMARKET mercado. He belonged to the cashier, Nat decided. Or, better yet, he was waiting for the old lady so he could walk her home, carrying her groceries in his teeth. Nat liked the idea of that. The old lady probably even had a better name for him than Tufty and even though she was the sort of old lady who slapped cans and ins
ulted children, she was hopefully very kind to dogs. That’s how it would happen in a movie, anyway.

  Harry was getting ahead of Nat. “Wait for me!” she yelled. She had to ride fast to catch up. They couldn’t talk on the way back because it was uphill, the kind of long slow uphill that made you think you might die before you got to the top. The sun had burned through the clouds and everything was blue and silvery bright, awash with heat. They had to pedal so hard that they didn’t have enough air left to waste on words. The brochure flapped in Harry’s back pocket. Nat could see a photo of a humpback whale, front and center.

  Whales were why they had come.

  Finally, she thought.

  Nope Nope

  XAN GALLAGHER ran his hand over the front of the shiny Whale Experience Factory brochure that the cashier had given to Harry. Then he squinted at Nat and shook his head slowly from side to side. “Now, Nat-a-Tat,” he drawled. “That’s no way to see whales.”

  He was swinging in a hammock on the beach side of the house, one dirty, bare foot hanging over the side. His toenails were the size of pancakes. Tiny pancakes, but still pancakes.

  “What?” Nat was distracted by the idea of toenail pancakes. Unguis pancakeus, she thought. She didn’t know the Latin word for pancake. “You should think about washing your feet. Anyway, the whole point of this trip was to see the baby grays! I promised Harry whales. He’s never seen a gray whale up close.” She was actually pretty sure he hadn’t seen gray whales from far away, either, but she left that part out.

  “Naaaaah,” he said. “Think about it! We can see them from here. With the telescope. We don’t need to pollute their sea, kiddo, with sound and oil. We don’t need to chase them around their own living room, pointing cameras and shouting.”

  Nat felt her heart sinking all the way to the ground, where she imagined it flopping around like a fist-sized fish out of water. She looked down, but there was nothing but sandy dirt, clumps of grass, and a few tiny wildflowers the size of pencil leads. She kicked a loose stone with her sneaker. Her shoe was brown with dust. You could hardly make out the eyes on the hearts, imploring her.