by Karen Rivers
“Dad,” she said. “Please. It’s my birthday.”
“Whale watching boats are basically whale paparazzi,” her dad went on. “Think about it! Whale Experience Factory. You don’t want anything to do with that. Can’t imagine what an outfit like that is doing in a place like this.” He smiled his big, easy, famous smile, the one that seemed to slide over his face like an omelet sliding cleanly out of a pan. “Yep yep,” he summarized, like that was that.
“Harry bought Fruity Pebbles in town,” she told her dad.
“For real? Awesome!” he said. “Oh man, I love those things. Yeah!” He fist-bumped her, but because her fist wasn’t up, he accidentally punched her in the shoulder.
“Ouch. DAD. That hurt!”
“Oh man, I’m sorry, Natters.” He looked at his fist like it had a mind of its own. “Man, this thing.”
“Dad, it’s your fist. Just don’t hit me with it.”
He raised his eyebrow.
“Come on, Dad. This is really super important to me.”
“Oh, is it reeeeaaaallllllly super important? Well, I tell you, Natters, it’s just as important to the whales that you don’t hunt ’em down and shoot ’em, even if you’re just using a camera.”
“I don’t even have a camera.”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“I hate you,” Nat mouthed.
He wasn’t looking at her anyway. Instead, he was staring off into the distance like he was posing for a shoot. Then slowly, like he was pretending he didn’t know she was looking at him, he crossed his eyes. Nat laughed, even though she was mad.
“Everything is terrible,” she said.
“What—what now?” The hammock rocked wildly as her dad sat up. He made a sweeping gesture with one of his huge arms and then beamed, as though he personally were responsible for the enormous house, the view, the turquoise blue infinity pool, the flowering shrubs, and the gravelly hill that rolled right down to the aqua sea. “I think you mean, ‘Everything is exquisite.’”
Nat snorted. “What. Ever.” She took the brochure out of his hand. She should have gotten Harry to ask. Her dad liked Harry. Especially if he was wielding Fruity Pebbles.
“Look around!” her dad shouted. “Just look! This place is amazing! This is paradise!” He started to play a fake ukulele. One of his tattoos was her name, Natalia Rose G., written in fancy script across his chest. The G was crammed in at the end like an afterthought, or as though the tattoo guy didn’t plan it and just ran out of room for the whole Gallagher.
And there was no room at all for the Baleine, which was the best part.
The Mom part.
The part that had been deleted.
She opened her mouth to ask him why he hadn’t just asked the guy to write smaller, to include the whale, but then she closed it again.
She didn’t want to know.
The “Rose” jumped up and down on his pecs while he fake-played. (Pecs were man boobs, or at least that’s what they looked like. If she ever said that out loud, he would have corrected her. “Muscles, not boobs,” he’d say. Which was true, but a boob was a boob.) She giggled.
“The world, the world, the world is a sewer,” he sang. “Look close and you can see how it stinks.”
“What an uplifting song,” she said, sarcastically.
“It has over five hundred million views on YouTube!” he said. “America loves this song.”
“America has terrible taste.” She stuck out her tongue.
Harry was squashing his face against the glass and gesturing with his hands. The gestures meant, “Have you asked him? Has he said yes?”
Yep-yep-yep-yep, Nat said sarcastically in her head, kicking another, bigger rock. It didn’t budge. She kicked it harder and then harder again and then so hard that something in her toe snapped like a dry twig. “Ouch! Dad!”
Her dad was really getting into his solo. The hammock was swinging wildly. “The STENCH of LIFE is LOVELY . . .” he wailed. “The STENCH OF IT ALL, the . . .”
“OUCH,” Nat repeated, pointedly. “DAD.”
Her dad stopped singing and grunted in much the same way he did in Tumbleweed when he got his left foot stuck in a leg-hold trap and had to saw it off with his pocket knife, which took an excruciating seventeen minutes on the screen. Grunting was a lot of his performance in Tumbleweed. Grunting and, in one scene, drooling in a way that made Nat sick to even think about. The drool didn’t bother the Oscar judges apparently. They must have had strong stomachs.
“I’ve really badly hurt my toe on this dumb rock.” She was standing on one foot, like a flamingo.
“Good thing you’re wearin’ shoes.” Her dad winked.
“That’s very sympathetic,” she said. “Thank you. I think I’ve broken my toe. There probably isn’t even a hospital here!”
“Are you going to die?” He clutched at his chest. “Nooooooooo.” He rocked backward on the hammock and flipped out of it and somehow landed on his feet. For a huge guy, he was very graceful. Nat sat down on a rainbow-painted chair. Her toe was pulsing like it had its own heart. “I think it’s broken, for real. I’m not joking. Can you stop being so jokey? Seriously.”
“Well, kiddo, you know what they say: Some rocks just ain’t for kickin’.” Her dad had a way of declaring things that made them sound important, like they should be embroidered on a throw pillow.
“Literally no one says that, Dad.”
“Well, they’ll start now. Some rocks just ain’t for kickin’,” he repeated. “See? I’m a person and I’m saying it, so people do say it.” He bellowed with laughter and, mid-laugh, he grabbed her foot and yanked her shoe off without untying it first.
“Hey!” she said. “Don’t—”
“Shhhh.” He stared at her face, then abruptly he pressed down hard on her toe with both his thumbs. It was so shockingly painful that she almost kicked him right in the nose. “Stop it! That hurts!”
“I just want to try something. Hush for a sec. You’ve gotta be open to it.”
“I’m open, I’m open,” she lied. He pressed some more. The pain felt like a musical note that was being played right through her. Then, just as suddenly, it muted, or at least she couldn’t feel it as much. “Oh!” she said, without meaning to. She racked her brain for a foreign or even made-up word that meant the suddenly ecstatic feeling you had when pain stopped, but she couldn’t think of one. She hid her smile behind her hand.
“Anyway, about them whales—”
“Those whales,” Nat corrected him.
“Uh-huh,” he said. Even without looking at his face, she knew that he was “squinting thoughtfully.” Sometimes he forgot to stop being an actor even when he wasn’t working. “Seeing them whales from that giant clown-colored inflatable boat, that just isn’t an authentic experience. That’s not truth. It’s not real. That’s like . . . taking an elevator up a tree instead of climbing it yourself.”
Harry was jumping up and down in the window. He seemed to be hurling himself against the glass, but it wasn’t making any sound. Nat held up her hand and telepathically told him, Not yet.
Harry pressed his whole face against the glass and crossed his eyes and pulled at his hair. He was not as good at listening to her telepathic messages as Tufty, the dog. People never were. She sighed.
“Dad, it’s nothing like a tree elevator, which don’t actually exist, by the way. It’s just a thing to do. It’s not a lifetime commitment to the whale watching industry. It’s just one trip. One boat. You don’t have to come! Not everything has to be so . . .” She looked around and then gestured at the sea. “Organic,” she finished.
As if on cue, a bee buzzed toward them and landed on XAN GALLAGHER’s famous wrist. They both watched it climb over his arm hair like it was traversing the surface of an impossible planet. It finally stopped at the tail of the mermaid tatt
oo that encircled his bicep and then awkwardly took off, wobbling on the breeze.
“Nothing wrong with not being the type of person who goes on ‘excursions.’” He made “excursion” sound like something that ought to be spit out before poison control needed to get involved. “How’s that toe? Better?”
“Not even a little,” she lied. “It might even be worse. This trip—and my birthday!—is totally ruined.” She looked him straight in the eye. “UNLESS we can go see the whales.” She crammed her foot back into her dirty shoe. It was filled with grit and pebbles.
“Well, kiddo, as it happens, today I was down on that beach out front and I met a guy with a boat. Good guy. Great guy. Really amazing guy. A true American hero, if you think about it.”
“He’s probably Mexican, Dad. This is Mexico.”
“Salt-of-the-earth guy . . .” he went on. “Salt-of-the-sea, too.” He laughed. His laugh made her think of giant beach balls being tossed around a crowded pool, ricocheting off people’s heads. “Ouch!” she imagined them yelling. “Stop it!”
Nat picked flakes of paint off the rainbow chair that she was sitting in, in the right order: red, then orange, then yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. She lined up the flakes on her knee. The sun was as warm and thick as honey. Her legs were hot in her jeans. Her head was burning.
“I need sunscreen,” she interrupted.
“—thing is with guys like him, they just understand about the vibrations in the water—” Her dad was still talking. “—and the whale music. They’re in tune. It’s a true symphony, that’s what it is. It connects to the soul of the fish and all them scallops and shrimps and lobster, and even cod . . .” He didn’t seem to notice whether or not she was listening, which she was not. She was searching the horizon for evidence of whales. Come to me, she told them, telepathically. Come now. Harry was practically climbing the glass now; he was splayed out against it like a starfish. “. . . and the beach absorbs it and the waves contain it. It’s a dance, nature in perfect harmony! Think about it!”
“Those. It’s those scallops. I’m probably getting skin cancer as we speak.” Nat pressed her finger hard on her forearm and examined the white fingerprint it made on her skin.
“It isn’t anyone’s God-given right to pay some outfit to take them to see whales up close, to look into their huge ancient eyes and . . .”
The not-listening was what happened to people after they’d been in movies, after they’d been on magazine covers, after they got used to people taking their photo in the grocery store. It made Nat sad to think about how her dad went from being a normal kid—a boy named Alex who once broke his arm falling off a rope in PE class in the fifth grade—to being an actor to being XAN GALLAGHER, King of the Twitter Hashtag #yepyep, #nonlistener. Nat wondered what his fans would think if they knew he was using Twitter on a laptop from the 1990s and not what they probably imagined was the newest, best phone available. Of course, his fans knew all about his feelings about cellular phones. They still used them, but they must know he didn’t.
She sighed.
“What do ya say, Natters? The real thing, or some plasticized, packaged junk you could see on the TV?”
A hummingbird hovered in front of them, staring, like he wanted an answer from Nat, too. She was tempted to mention that her dad’s movies were frequently also on TV. Were they “plasticized packaged junk”? The hummingbird’s wings made a whirring sound. XAN GALLAGHER raised his hands and took a pretend photo. “Insta-perfect,” he said, furrowing his brow. The bird, who had no idea that XAN GALLAGHER was a famous person, zoomed away, straight up into the now-blue sky.
“Yeah, OK. Whatever.” Nat brushed the rainbow of paint off her knee. It floated down to the ground like very tiny, colorful feathers. “Whatever,” she repeated, hitting the word harder, so that he understood that she didn’t care, even though she did. She gave Harry a big thumbs-down with both hands, but she couldn’t see him anymore. Maybe he gave up. Maybe he knocked himself unconscious on the glass. Or, more likely, maybe he was just watching them whales on TV.
Those whales, she corrected herself.
“Yep yep,” her dad said. “That’s my Nat-a-Tat.” The hammock started swaying again, back and forth, back and forth. He closed his eyes.
“I love you,” she mouthed. He was a weirdo and had whackadoo ideas about pretty much everything, but she couldn’t help loving him anyway. He was lovable, not just to her (and she shared his genes), but to the whole world.
There was plenty of proof of that.
His eyes stayed closed but they crinkled at the corners. “I love you, too, kiddo,” he said.
He made his hands into the shape of a heart.
“Yeah, you do,” she said.
“Yep yep,” he said. He opened one eye. “Tell Harry I’d love some of that cereal.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Whatever.”
Harry
Harry didn’t bring his laptop with him to Mexico, and writing lists without a computer was hard. He couldn’t remember the last time he had handwritten anything for fun. He didn’t write postcards, like Nat told him she did. He never wrote letters. He just wasn’t a person who wrote stuff.
He typed stuff.
He was a typer.
He had a lot of things he wanted to write down about Mexico. Like, observations.
So instead of typing it, he wrote everything he knew about Mexico down, but in his head.
Which was really so much better and easier anyway. You couldn’t mess up stuff you wrote in your head. It always worked perfectly. It was when you tried to write it down that it started sounding dumb.
Observations about Mexico, he wrote, smoothly, in his imagination.
1. Hot
2. Dry
3. Nice ocean water
4. Good surfing (looks good from the beach)
5. Nice people
6. Being rich would be good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Harry added a whole row of mental exclamation marks after that one. The house where they were staying was so nice. It probably cost more for a night than their house at home did for a year. He couldn’t figure out why Nat and her dad lived in a trailer. They could afford a palace, probably. They could even build this exact same house overlooking French Beach and be the envy of pretty much everyone. Not that they weren’t already, but still.
7. Mexican hot salsa is way hotter than Canadian hot salsa.
Harry had requested spicy salsa at lunch and so had Nat, and he had nearly stopped breathing, it was so hot. His throat had slammed closed, and for a second, he had forgotten how to breathe. Nat had eaten all of it, scooping great mouthfuls onto her chips like it was nothing. “Is your tongue deaf?” he had asked, and then they had both laughed so hard, they got the hiccups.
“Is your tongue deaf?” she kept repeating.
He stopped writing his list and whispered it to himself. “Is your tongue deaf?” He snorted and laughed again. Still funny, he thought. It was a good thing he wasn’t really writing it down, because if he was and someone saw it, they would probably think he was weird, and he wouldn’t be able to stand it.
8. Is your tongue deaf? ☺
9. Cool cereal boxes
10. Learn to surf?
Harry sat up.
Maybe he could ask XAN GALLAGHER to teach him how to surf. He lay back down and closed his eyes. He could imagine it happening. XAN GALLAGHER was super friendly, and Harry was positive that if he asked, XAN THE MAN would sweep him up into a huge bear hug and drag him to the beach, and maybe even hurl him into the water like a . . . coconut or something. (There were no coconuts in Mexico—it just looked as though there should be.)
He didn’t want to be thrown into the water.
On the other hand, being taught to surf by XAN GALLAGHER would be so rad. Beyond rad. Whatever word was bigger, cooler, and more
amazing than “rad.”
Seth would die of jealousy.
Maybe Harry’s dad would see Harry surfing with XAN GALLAGHER and he’d realize how cool Harry was, too.
“I should have brought my laptop,” said Harry, but he was sort of glad he hadn’t. It was nice to not have to feel like he needed to be writing a book or making a list or explaining something to someone about who he was.
It was nice to not have to think about an answer and to just be.
He got up from his bed and walked around his room. His room at home could fit into the closet of this room. This room was huge. Just to see if it would echo, he shouted the word “DUDE.” It did sort of resonate. Harry shook his head. “This is crazy,” he said to himself. He was suddenly so glad to be there, in this weird fancy house, with Nat and her dad.
He unpacked his swimsuit and changed into it. He’d see if Nat wanted to go for a swim in the pool. It was OK to be really good friends with Nat here in Mexico, even if it wasn’t so much OK at school. No one would see him. He could still be in with Seth at home, but here, who cared? He grinned.
In the bathroom, he carefully rewrapped his chest with an Ace bandage so it wouldn’t show through his swim shirt. He made a face at himself in the mirror. He couldn’t wait to be an adult who could make his own decisions about his body.
And his boobs.
And he wouldn’t have to ask his dad about it.
He wouldn’t have to explain it to anyone.
He looked out the window at the pool. No one was in it, and it looked like something you’d see in a commercial for lottery tickets. It was huge and still and the perfect color blue. It had an infinity edge, which made it look like you could swim off the side and through the air and into the ocean in a single stroke.
This place was seriously amazing.
“Dude,” he said out loud, again, which pretty much summed it up.
Then he went out of his room to find Nat. The house felt so vast and empty around him, he suddenly knew what it must be like to be a fish in an aquarium, except this was a house with proper furniture and not just, say, a plastic diver who blew bubbles and a plastic log.