by Mary Amato
My face burned. Instead of finding a flaw in her, I now had scuba-diving prowess thrown in my face. How lovely.
Each blog entry was a photo of something she saw on this trip to Cozumel or that trip to Costa Rica — like a shell or a jellyfish or whale tails — with an explanation of why it was so beautiful.
Winter Break. Sunset on the Pacific Ocean.
Two humpback whales break the surface and submerge in a paired arc. I loved capturing this moment. Their bodies are as graceful as ballet dancers, the flap of their flukes against the orange sky like their final jeté before disappearing offstage.
As if anybody needs your little metaphor, Cassie. Let nature speak for itself.
9
THE FIRST GIG
FIN AND I SPLIT the cost of overnight bronze self-tanning lotion and slathered it on each other’s faces the night before the big day.
I enjoyed a restful slumber and then I woke up to a horrible smell. My first thought: A cancerous rodent had crawled under my bed and died. Panicky, I got up and looked around and then realized the aroma was coming from my own hand. My palm was streaked with a brownish-orange color and smelled like death.
I ran to the mirror. My face looked like a decomposing pumpkin. I called Fin.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked, his voice racked with anguish. “I already tried washing it. Seven times. It’s not coming off.”
“Do you smell like a corpse?”
“Yes! What is up with that?” he screamed.
“We can’t go,” I said.
“Yes, we can. It’s not so bad,” he said. “Once we have our wigs and costumes on, we’ll look fine.”
And so … off we went to Get Happy headquarters with radically unnatural complexions. When Joy saw us walk through the door, she dropped the box she was holding. “Son of a biscuit, what happened to your faces?”
Fin and I looked at each other. Son of a biscuit. If the universe couldn’t give us nicely tanned skin, at least it gave us Joy’s fake profanity.
Cassie and Hayes were already there.
Cassie laughed and then said, “Sorry.”
I didn’t know how Hayes was reacting because I was too embarrassed to look at him.
“We look like oompa loompas, don’t we?” Fin laughed and started singing the oompa loompa song.
“This isn’t funny!” Joy cried, and glared at us.
We put on our costumes and hustled into the van just as it started to lightly snow.
Hayes’s party was first. When the van stopped and Hayes got out, Joy yelped, “Leave your coat in here! Your characters do not wear coats!”
As Hayes threw his coat back in the car, Cassie hopped out. She gave him a hug and straightened his bolo tie. “Break a leg, Hayes.”
“She is so sweet,” Joy said.
My house was next. When we pulled up, a mom waved from the doorway. “The girls are all so excited,” she called. Fat snowflakes were coming down. She opened an umbrella and came out to meet us. I jumped down from the van and she looked at my face. “Oh.”
That’s what she said. Oh.
“Get under that umbrella, Minerva, so you don’t get your costume wet,” Joy said.
“I’m a mermaid fresh from the sea,” I said. “I absolutely adore precipitation.”
Joy shot me a look. She wasn’t sure if I was being facetious or getting into character.
The mom led me into one of those big family rooms that rich people have, facing the back of the house. A table was piled high with gifts. Ten girls were watching some tweeny-bopper, boy-band concert movie on the largest screen in the Western Hemisphere.
“Look who’s here!” The mom turned off the TV, and the room erupted in protests.
“Wait … the best part is coming,” one of the girls said.
“But it’s time for the big surprise.” The mom held out her hands toward me, still standing in the doorway. The girls turned and stared.
Silence.
The script I had spent all week memorizing was for four-year-olds. These girls looked like they wanted to cut me in pieces and throw me into piranha-infested waters.
Even though I knew it was ridiculous, the script was all I had, so I smiled and said my first few lines. “Hi. I’ve been swimming around all morning searching for a birthday girl to see. I know there’s one here.… Who could it be?”
Dead silence.
“Here she is,” the mom said. “It’s Samantha!” She tried to pull her daughter to her feet.
One girl said to another, “Why is her face orange?”
I wanted to turn and make a run for it.
“Hold on. I have to record this.” The dad walked in, holding his cell phone up, video rolling. “Look, it’s Ursula!”
“Ariel,” the mom corrected him.
“Hi, Samantha,” I said. “Happy birthday.”
The girl whispered something to her mom.
“No, not yet,” the mother whispered. “We can turn it back on later. This is going to be fun.”
“Wow!” the dad said. “A real mermaid! Why did the mermaid cross the road?”
Cavernous silence.
“To get to the other tide!” The dad laughed. “Are you from the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean, Miss Mermaid?”
Not knowing what else to do, I kept going with the script. “How many of you know the Get Happy song?”
No hands.
“It’s easy. I’ll sing and you can join in. I have some instruments.…”
“Oooh, instruments!” the dad said.
There’s this fake voice that grown-ups use with kids that should be against the law. Gosh, kids, isn’t this fun? The answer is no. People who use this voice should be locked up. Samantha’s parents were world-class fakers, and I was committing the crime right along with them.
I passed out the plastic maracas and sang through the song and announced the game.
“Mom,” Samantha whispered again into her mother’s ear. The girl’s face was turning a brighter shade of red every second.
“Just start the game,” the dad said. “I’m sure Sammy will join in. Sammy, your mom went to a lot of trouble for this.”
“John, that is not the point,” the mom snapped.
I was supposed to do this whole intro to the game, but I set out the props and cut straight to the rules. “So you get a starfish and you try to throw it into the empty bucket. If you get one in, you’ll get a prize.”
“What do we get?” a girl asked.
The prize — a cheap necklace of fake beads — wasn’t going to win them over, so I told them that I’d hand out the prizes after everybody played.
“This will be fun. Who wants to go first?” the mom asked.
Amazingly, a round-faced girl closest to me raised her hand. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to take her home with me. I wanted to hire that tweeny-bopper boy band to lift her up in their arms and sing a pop song about her.
One by one, each girl stood up and played the game, Samantha last. The girls took the gold, silver, and green necklaces from me as if they were strands of rotten sea kelp.
“Put them on! We’ll take a picture. We’ll post it on Facebook so all your cousins can see it.”
The girls put on the rotten kelp, and the mom made them gather around me.
“Smile and say, ‘Mermaid’!” the dad said.
I imagined how my orange face was going to look, captured for all time, and posted online.
“Mermaid,” I said.
Snap.
“SO … HOW was it, Minerva?” Joy asked.
Hayes was already in the van. He tipped his cowboy hat and said, “Howdy,” in an adorkable way.
“It was great,” I said, and then mouthed the word terrible to Hayes as I passed him on my way to the backseat.
“Well, that’s good,” Joy said.
Hayes smiled. “Mine was actually okay.”
“Two for two,” Joy said.
My mom had left seven messages on my phone, asking how the fi
rst gig went. I texted back: Great.
Cassie was next.
The temperature had warmed up, and none of the snow had stuck. As Joy pulled up to the house, the sun burst through the clouds.
“Hallelujah,” Joy said, turning off the engine. She glanced at her watch. “She should be done any minute.”
My stomach growled and I was seriously considering asking Joy if she might have packed any snacks for a hardworking mermaid, when the front door of the house opened and Cassie floated out, surrounded by five-year-olds. The mother tried to get the girls back into the house, but they followed without their coats on.
“It’s okay,” Cassie said to the mom. “We’ll have one last good-bye.” Quickly, she lined up the girls and waltzed down the line, giving each child a hug and a tap on the head with her wand.
“Thank the Lord.” Joy sighed. “Look at that. She’s a natural.”
Cassie daintily pulled up her gown, ran to the van, turned, blew kisses, and got inside.
“Wait!” The dad came running out the front door with a pink cupcake and a ten-dollar bill and handed them through the window to Cassie before waving good-bye.
Joy was beaming. “They loved you.”
Cassie handed the tip to Joy.
“No. Tips are yours to keep.”
Cassie smiled. “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.” She turned to Hayes and me, her face glowing. “Isn’t it great?”
“Yep,” I said. “It’s a barrel of monkeys.”
She broke off a piece of cupcake and put it between her ruby lips. “Yum. Want a bite, anyone?”
I was dying for a bite, but I shook my head and lied: “I had, like, ten pieces of cake at Samantha’s house.”
Hayes took a bite. Cassie chattered away, filling us in on all the details of the amazing job she did, and filling up the car with the sugary smell of frosting. Finally, we picked up Fin.
Just seeing his orange face and funny fake dreadlocks as he climbed into the van cheered me up.
“Children are savages,” he said. “That was the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done in my life. CUPCAKE?” He looked at Cassie. “I didn’t get anything.”
“Here.” Cassie handed him her last bite.
“How did it go?” I asked as he stuffed it into his mouth.
“They were horrible. They laughed at my song. So I ditched the script and made them walk the plank.”
Joy’s head snapped around. “YOU WHAT?”
“I picked the two beastliest boys to be crocodiles and told them to lie down. Then, one by one, I made the others jump off the chair, and when they landed on the floor, the crocodiles got to bite their little ankles. They loved it.”
“Son of a freaking biscuit! Do not go off script,” Joy said. “Somebody could get hurt.”
We both started to lose it.
“Whatever you’re laughing at back there, it’s not funny,” Joy said.
10
THE BLOG
CASSIE LOTT’S BLOG was like a Dead-Sea-salt-induced itch that I had to scratch. I was simply curious, I told myself. Just a bit of harmless, mildly jealous snooping.
Subscribe! Follow me on Twitter!
Follow me on Facebook!
She had 2,433 followers and was following 1,112 people and organizations.
She hadn’t posted anything new — perhaps she was too busy with her volunteer work or all her extracurricular activities, I thought — so I resorted to looking at previous entries, when a photo she had posted in August jumped out to bite me in the jugular: a seahorse.
A Glimpse in the Wild
Whenever I dive, I keep a close lookout for seahorses to photograph for the SOS (Save Our Seahorse) survey project, which is collecting data to document the lives of seahorses, but most are tiny and shy and hard to find. I got lucky today and spotted this Pacific seahorse off the coast of Monterey. The Pacific seahorse is the largest species. This one is about five inches.
See how its tail is wrapped around the blade of sea grass? This is called a holdfast. After a seahorse is a week or two old, it finds something to cling to so that it isn’t swept away by a current. Beautiful, isn’t it?
The entry had seven comments. I should have turned off the computer. I should have listened to that inner voice that said: You don’t need to see more. Instead, I scrolled down and saw it.
Keanu Choy says:
I stood up and literally yelped — I could because my mom wasn’t home. Then I looked at the screen again.
Keanu Choy says:
Congrats! Yes, the holdfast is critical. I’m sure this blog will inspire other young divers to join in the Save Our Seahorse Project! Thanks, Cassie!
After calming down, I reasoned that, as weird as it felt, this actually wasn’t weird at all. It made sense. Cassie’s profile said she was volunteering at the Shedd Aquarium, and she was following both the Shedd Aquarium and the SOS Project on Twitter. I clicked a link to the SOS Project, and it was all about encouraging “recreational divers” to document seahorses. Her name was on a long list of “Seahorse Spotters.”
I don’t know why I was surprised. Seahorses live in the sea, and they are very compelling little creatures, and lots of scuba divers must be interested in playing hide-and-seek with them. Keanu Choy probably commented on the blogs of all his followers who posted pictures of seahorses. They were cyber save-the-seahorse buddies. How cute. How educational. How adorably nauseating.
He had shared six of Cassie’s blog entries with his own followers and had left several comments on other entries.
Keanu Choy says:
I agree. The sea slug is beautiful!
Keanu Choy says:
This is a gorgeous description of sea dragons,
Cassie!
Keanu Choy says:
I love the way you captured that moment when the sun came shining onto the reef. Well done!
On and on. The man loves his exclamation points!
I stared at the screen. I got up and paced. Then I sat down and created a new email account. Name? [email protected].
Back on Cassie’s blog.
Would you like to leave a comment?
Yes, I would.
Landlover says:
This blog is extremely uninformative. The writer obviously just loves the sound of her own voice.
Send.
I imagined how excited Cassie would be to see a comment from a new visitor and then how hurt she’d be to read it. Within seconds, though, I felt sick to my stomach. That’s the thing about being mean: You have this rush, this wicked thrill, but then it fades quickly and you’re left feeling like scum.
I texted Fin. He didn’t answer, and I remembered that he was at a cousin’s wedding or funeral in Mundelein. I have learned from experience that Irish people have way too many relatives. I wasn’t about to tell him that Keanu Choy commented on Cassie Lott’s blog, because he would tell me to immediately find out if he was my dad and I wasn’t ready for that, but I needed to hear Fin’s voice. Even if it was just in a text. I sent him three more messages.
Finally, he replied: What’s up in Minervaland?
Me: I’m leaving evil comments on Cassie’s blog.
Fin: I want to see them!!!!!
Me: She irritates me.
Fin: Perfect people are perfectly irritating.
Me: Don’t do any more Soul to Sole workshops with her. I forbid it.
Fin: I told you I’m not going back there. The studio smells like horse manure. The teacher doesn’t use proper hygiene products. Chow time. Guess what the bread basket has in it?
Me: Bread.
Fin: Biscuits!!!!!!!!
Me: Son of a biscuit.
Fin: Nummy nummy.
Me: Why doesn’t anybody say daughter of a biscuit?
Fin: Too many syllabyllables.
11
THE SQUID & THE PROMISE
NOTE: OVERNIGHT self-tanning lotion takes days to fade. Rick Rogan, the mean guy in my first-period class, had so much fu
n with me that week, he should have paid me.
Excited to have a job, I blocked him out. Nothing like walking down the hallway of high school knowing you are employed. The pukey green paint on the walls seems less nauseating, the dribble of lukewarm water coming from the water fountain seems less contaminated, the babble of voices cascading down the hallway seems less damaging to the brain.
During my classes, my teachers contributed to my well-being by doing lots of PowerPoints. Everybody knows that as soon as the lights go off and the projector turns on, nobody pays attention. I love a dark classroom and the drone of a teacher’s voice. I spent the week hunched over my songwriting journal cleverly disguised as an academic notebook, letting new song ideas spring forth and looking up every now and then to make it seem as if I were engrossed in the properties of quadratic equations or the endoplasmic reticulum of cells.
On Friday of that week, Hayes Martinelli texted during school, asking if Fin and I had any interest in taking the El into Chicago and hanging out downtown with him.
I ducked into the doorway of an empty classroom to avoid the passing stampede and stared at the text for so long my phone actually went black.
I was about to call Finnegan when he beat me to it. Hayes had texted both of us.
“Do you think he invited Cassie?” I asked. “I mean, is this like a Get Happy bonding thing?”
“I don’t know,” Fin said.
“Find out.”
“You find out.”
I texted Hayes back. Cool idea. Is Cassie coming?
His answer: No. She said she has a dance class.
A maddening answer. I would have much preferred: No. I didn’t invite her. But I actually agreed to go and we both texted yes to Hayes.