by Martha Wells
The off-campus pizza joint that we had claimed as our own during the first year of our program was packed, as always, with bodies both collegiate and civilian. Jeremy cut a path through them, making space for me to slide through the crowd unnoticed, until we came to the round table at the very back. Several of our classmates were already there—Terry of the weird plant project, Christine of the epigenetic data analysis, and Michael of the I wasn’t really sure but it involved a lot of maggots project. Jeremy dropped into an open chair. I did the same, with slightly more grace.
A shaker of parmesan was near my side of the table. I palmed it while Jeremy exchanged enthusiastic greetings with our supposed “friends.” We were all in constant competition for lab space, funding, and publication credits. Even though our fields were dissimilar enough that I would have expected us all to have the freedom to work as we liked, it seemed like we were forever stepping on one another’s toes. Only the fact that Jeremy and I were running a combined experiment—his tumors, my documentation of social changes in mice that had been infected—kept us from being at each other’s throats like everyone else.
To be fair, it helped that I didn’t actually care about any of this. My classmates were counting on long careers in their chosen fields. I was only ever counting on the sea.
Christine flashed a quick, expensive smile at me, showing the result of decades of orthodontia. “Hey, Violet,” she said. “How’s every little thing?” Her accent was landlocked and syrupy sweet, Minnesota perfect. When we’d first met, I hadn’t been able to understand a damn thing she said. Coastal accents were something I’d grown up with. Speech defects were no problem at all. But vowels that stretched like storm warnings and snapped like sails? That was something I hadn’t been prepared for.
“Every little thing is fine,” I said. “How’s every little thing with you?”
Michael groaned. “You did it,” he said, in an accusing tone. “You asked her. You asked her with your face. Do you hate us all? Is this how you show your hatred?”
“I was being polite,” I said. That was all I had time for before Christine launched into a long, detailed description of her day. Terry put her hands over her face. Michael dropped his head to the table. I smiled, looking attentive and like I actually gave a damn, all the while unscrewing the container of parmesan and tipping cheese out onto the floor.
Getting the test tube out of my pocket and transferring its contents to the cheese container was more difficult, since I couldn’t risk anyone noticing my moving hands. There were some things that my fellow grad students accepted unquestioningly, such as when Michael had spent an entire week wearing the same Hawaiian shirt, “for luck,” or when Terry gave up all fruits and vegetables that hadn’t been harvested according to Jainist standards. Replacing their favorite powdery cheese-based condiment with a mixture of my own creation was not on that list. There would be questions.
No one would like my answers.
Christine was still talking when I finished doctoring the cheese. I cocked my head to the side and waited for her to take a breath. Then, quick as a striking eel, I asked, “Did we want to order a pizza?”
Everyone started talking at once. Jeremy pulled out his phone and began taking notes, trying to work out how much pizza we would actually need, and what the optimum mix of toppings would be. I demanded mushrooms, as always, and took advantage of the chaos to slip the cheese back onto the table. No one noticed. No one ever did. I had been pulling this trick on this group of people for three years, and not once had I been caught, which spoke more to their remarkable self-centeredness than it did to my incredible skills at sleight of hand and misdirection.
When the pizza arrived, everyone dumped parmesan on it like the stuff was about to be outlawed. So as not to stand out, I did the same. I just used a shaker I had swiped from another table, combining it with the excuse that I didn’t want to wait for Terry to be done. She liked cheese so much that sometimes she ate it directly out of her palm. Monitoring her dosage had been a nightmare, and now that we were moving into the final stage, I had given up. Let her have as much as she wanted. I had my data.
The pizza tasted like tomato sauce and garlic and charcoal, the bottom burnt black by the speed with which this particular parlor pumped out their pies. I ate enough to be sociable, then put down my half-consumed slice and smiled winsomely at my classmates, my comrades, the people who’d defined my grad school experience. We weren’t friends. We could never have been friends. But out of everyone in the world, these were the people who understood what my life had been since I’d arrived at Harvard, a shy biology student from U.C. Santa Cruz, whose academic career had taken her first very far, and then very close to home.
“I wanted to ask you all for a favor,” I said. They went still, curiosity and suspicion in their eyes. I never asked for favors. That wasn’t my role in the social group. I performed favors, giving selflessly of my time, my intellect, and my snack drawer, when Terry inevitably forgot that she was a mammal and couldn’t photosynthesize like her beloved plants.
“What do you need?” asked Jeremy. Then, brightening: “Did you want us to vet a potential date?”
“What? No. Ew. I told you already, I’m not interested in dating.” I was interested in marriage, but there were specific ways for that to be arranged, very particular forms to be observed. My parents would have forgiven me for a sticky, ill-considered tryst while I was away at school. I would never have forgiven myself. “You all know my grants run out at the end of the semester…”
As I had expected, they all began talking at once again, trying to offer solutions, some practical, some ridiculous. I said nothing. It was best if I let them run themselves down, talking themselves into the inevitable silence.
When they quieted, I said, “I’m going to miss you too, but this is for the best, honestly. The experience always mattered more to me than the degree. Now I want to give you something in return. My parents want me to come home for spring break, and they’ve invited me to bring you all along. There’s plenty of room at the inn, so to speak.”
The silence remained intact. It was well known that my parents operated a bed and breakfast in the sleepy little seaside town where I’d been born. Miles from anywhere, sheltered by natural cliff walls, surrounded by the sea, it was the perfect place to raise a family. We didn’t get many tourists, but the ones who came for a season always went home raving about our hospitality, our food, and the incredible clarity of the air. Why, sometimes, it seemed like the air was so clean that the stars didn’t even glimmer. It was the perfect place, as long as you were prepared for its little… eccentricities.
I had never been shy about where I came from, but I had also never extended an invitation home before. Certainly not for the entire group at once. I could see the calculations in their eyes, the war between curiosity and caution playing out all over again. I picked up my pizza and gnawed idly at the crust, feeling the crunchy dough press up against my gums and ease the ache there a bit. I was running out of time. If my friends didn’t agree to my proposal, I would need to find a way to convince them.
The idea was not appealing. Some experiments only work if the rat enters the maze willingly, and I have never been a fan of using physical force when a temptingly waved piece of cheese will do.
“I hate to ask, because I’m sure it makes me sound cheap, but… would your folks be expecting us to pay for rooms?” Christine’s cheeks colored red. “I know, I know. It’s just that most of my cash is already spoken for, and I really can’t afford a seaside getaway. No matter how nice it sounds.”
“All expenses paid,” I said soothingly. “My parents aren’t rich—” lying had gotten so much easier in the time I’d been at Harvard “—but they own the bed and breakfast free and clear, and if they have to cook anyway, it doesn’t really cost them anything to feed my friends. You’ll have to bring your own beer. That’s the one thing they won’t be providing. They just want to thank you for being such good friends to me, and m
eet you all at least once before we’re not all together.” I let my voice break, just a little.
That was all it took. “Oh, Violet,” said Terry, her eyes suddenly bright with tears. “Of course we’ll come. We’d love to meet your family.”
“Yeah,” said Jeremy. “It’ll be fun.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you all.”
It might not be fun. But it was sure going to be something.
***
The mice ripened in their enclosures, tumors swelling and bursting under the skin. Terry’s fruits ripened on the vine, and she fed them to us, a rainbow of sweet flesh and seeds like jewels, and twice as precious in the eyes of the woman who had nurtured them. She grew black tomatoes and beans the color of bruises, and I stole what I could for the gardens back at home. Mama would love watching the black fruits grow and darken, like the water before the storm, and we always needed something new for the table. There wasn’t much variety for the landlocked, who tired of fish yet still wanted to stay close to home, where they could be helpful if the need arose.
Presumably Christine and Michael had their own means of marking the passage of time, something involving genetic drift and maggot pupation, but I didn’t care, and so I didn’t ask. What I cared about was that they continued to meet us at the pizza parlor twice a month, and kept pouring powdery cheese over their already cheesy meals. Christine had started licking it off her fingers, a quick, compulsive gesture that she didn’t seem to realize was happening until it was over. Michael wasn’t so obvious, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him blink. According to my notes, it had been over a month.
Dutifully, I wrote down the results of the mouse studies I was conducting with Jeremy in one notebook, and the results of the studies I was conducting on my classmates in another. My handwriting was better in the first, and filled with excited ink blotches and misspelled words in the second. It was hard to dredge up much enthusiasm for mice, considering how close my real work was to coming to an end.
It would have been easy to charter a bus to take us home, but that would have meant leaving all the cars on campus. Terry didn’t drive, but Michael, Christine, and Jeremy did. That many abandoned vehicles would point far too quickly to us having left as a group, and might raise questions when classes resumed and half the life sciences grad students didn’t reappear. No. Better to give everyone a gas card and say that my parents wanted my friends to have the freedom to explore the coast at will. Better to lie a little now, and make the big lies easier down the line.
Jeremy watched as I lugged my things out to his car. His expression was torn between amusement and dismay, finally tipping over the edge when I came out with my third suitcase.
“You’re coming back at the end of the break, right?” he asked. “I know your funding extends to the end of the semester. You’ve told us that often enough. We might still have a breakthrough that could pay for the rest of your education.”
“I’m not giving up, Jeremy,” I said, shoving the suitcase into the backseat. “I want to finish my project as much as anybody. But I also want to be realistic. If that means offloading a few things I don’t need to have regular access to, in order to make moving out easier, I’m going to do it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said, sounding distinctly uncomfortable. “I just… I really want you to finish your research, that’s all. You’ve got a brilliant scientific mind. You shouldn’t wind up rotting away in some little seaside town just because your family didn’t have the money to keep you where you belonged.”
I had long since learned to see the digs people made at my family as pitiful attempts at complimenting me. I wasn’t “like” the other girls who came from small coastal backgrounds. I wasn’t the hick my background told my peers to expect, and so they heaped praise upon me for overcoming my early limitations. It was insulting. It was wrongheaded and cruel and for a long time, it had been enough to keep my feelings from getting in the way of my work. But they meant it—all of it—in the nicest, least offensive way possible.
We’re so proud of you for being better than the people who bore you, raised you, and loved you enough to send you out into the world when they could easily have kept you home for your own good.
We’re so impressed that you were able to grow up with a focused intellect and the ability to tie your own shoes, considering the obstacles you had to overcome.
We’re so amazed that you can speak properly and dress yourself, since you should have been a babbling, half-naked cavegirl.
I smiled at Jeremy, showing him my natural, slightly uneven teeth. They had been slanting subtly for weeks now; I was pushing them back into their sockets every morning before I went outside. The signs were all there, for people who knew how to look for them; people who hadn’t privately filed the marks as folk nonsense and fairy tales, better left forgotten. Better left to seaside hicks.
“I promise you, no matter where I wind up, I won’t rot away,” I said. “Are you all packed and ready to go?”
“I’ve just been waiting for you.”
“Then let’s go. I want to get there before the others; the last thing we need is for them to wander off into town because they get tired of waiting.”
Jeremy laughed. Actually laughed, like this was the funniest thing I’d ever said. Hatred kindled in my chest, surprisingly bright given how much time I spent finding ways to bank it back, to tamp it down. “Oh, like there’s that much town for them to wander into,” he said.
I shrugged, feeling the fluid shift of muscles under my skin. I was running out of time. Soon, I would have all the time in the world. It wasn’t a contradiction. It just looked like one when viewed from the outside.
I wouldn’t be viewing it from the outside for much longer.
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Innsmouth has a way of sneaking up on you.”
***
There was a time when Innsmouth was isolated, unfamiliar, even forbidden, blocked off from the ceaselessly searching hands and eyes of men by the shape of the land, which curled around our coves and caverns like the hand of a nurturing parent, protecting and concealing us. But the cities spread, and the roads reached out in fungal waves, seeking the points of greatest weakness. They grew across the body of Massachusetts, poisoning it even as they connected it to the rest of the continent. My parents liked to talk about the days when it was a long voyage from “civilization” to our doorstep.
It took Jeremy ninety minutes. It would have taken an hour, but there was traffic. There was always traffic getting out of Boston, which attracted cars like spilled jam attracted ants.
“This is why you never go to see your family, isn’t it?” he asked, after the fifth time we were cut off by an asshole in a Lexus.
“One of the reasons,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t entertaining pleasant fantasies of murder. The asshole in the Lexus would have opened like a flower after the correct sequence of cuts, blossoming into something beautiful. Best of all, the beautiful thing he could have become would never have cut anyone else off on the highway. Beautiful things had better ways to spend their time than behind the wheel.
Then we came around the final curve in the road, and the Atlantic was spread out before us like a gleaming sapphire sheet, and I stopped thinking about murder. I stopped thinking about anything but the sea, and how it was already a beautiful thing, no knives or bloodshed required.
“Wow,” breathed Jeremy, and for the first time I was in total agreement with him about something that didn’t involve the poisonous kiss of the great god Science.
We drove down the winding road that led into Innsmouth, playing peekaboo with the shoreline all the way. Trees blocked our view about half the time, keeping us from seeing the waves break against the rocks. My ancestors had planted many of those trees, designing this stretch of road as carefully as Jeremy and I had designed the mazes we used to keep the mice distracted and happy. Men were happy when they could see the sea, as long as they never saw
too much. When they saw too much, they began to understand, and when they understood…
There were realities the human mind was never meant to withstand, pressures that it was never meant to survive. Knowledge was like the sea. Go too deep, and the crushing weight of it could kill you.
“Wow,” said Jeremy again, when the road leveled off and we cruised into town, past the old-fashioned houses and the wrought-iron streetlights that graced every corner. It was like driving into the past, into an age a hundred years dead and buried. He was gaping openly, twisting in his seat to get a better look at the shop windows and the elegant curves of architecture. “Are you sure people live here? This isn’t, like, Disneyland for tourists?”
“Welcome to Innsmouth,” I said. “Founded in 1612 by settlers who wanted a place where they could live peacefully and raise their families according to their own traditions, without worrying about outside interference. Unlike most of the coastal towns around here, there was never a refounding. We’ve been living on and working this shore for four hundred years.”
Jeremy took his eyes off the town long enough to give me a questioning, sidelong look. “Boston was founded in 1620,” he said. “Your town can’t be older than Boston.”
“No one’s ever told the town that,” I said. “You can find our land deeds and our articles of incorporation at Town Hall, if you’re really curious.”
“I guess that explains your accent.”
I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“It’s just…” Jeremy took a hand off the wheel and waved it vaguely, encompassing everything around us. “You’ve always said that you were from Massachusetts, but you don’t have any accent I’ve ever heard before. I figured you might have had speech therapy when you were a kid, or something. If this town is really older than Boston, though, it makes sense that you would have grown up with a different regional accent. This is, like, someone’s graduate project, right here. I bet you have linguistic tics that are so population specific that no one even hears them anymore.”