Magonia

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  And I know that’s trite. Yes, I’m a reader. Kill me. I could tell you I was raised in the library and the books were my only friends, but I didn’t do that, did I? Because I have mercy. I’m neither a genius nor a kid destined to become a wizard. I’m just me. I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we’re friendly. So there.

  I don’t need to pay attention to Mr. Grimm’s lecture. I read it already, whatever it is, in this case, Ye Olde Man vs. Ye Olde Sea.

  Obsessed guy. Big fish. Variety of epic fails. I have to wonder how many generations of sophomores have been oppressed by stories about this same damn thing.

  Why? Which of us is or will one day be engaged in a death struggle with a big fish? What is the rationale?

  I’ve read Moby-Dick, another version of Obsessed Dude, Big Fish, and taxonomies of sorrow and lost dreams.

  I know, whale = not fish. Mammalian cetacean. Still, whales have always been the prototype for Big Fish Stories, which makes all kinds of sense given how wrong humanity always is about everything.

  I even read the Moby-Dick chapters that no one reads. I could tell you anything you need to know about flensing. Trust me on this, though, you don’t want that information.

  Ask me about Moby-Dick, Mr. Grimm. Go on. Do it.

  He did do that once, about a month ago, thinking I was lying about reading it. I gave a filibuster-quality speech about suck and allegories and oceans and uncatchable dreams that I then merged into a discussion of pirate-themed movies, plank-walking, and female astronauts. Mr. Grimm was both impressed and aggravated. I got extra credit, which I don’t need, and then detention for interrupting, for which punishment, in truth, I respect him.

  I glance over at Jason Kerwin, who is ensconced in his own book. I eye the title. Kepler’s Dream: With the Full Text and Notes of Somnium, Sive Astronomia Lunaris. It looks old and semi-nasty, recycled hardcover library copy. Big picture of the surface of the moon on the front.

  No clue: me.

  I slink my hand over to his desk and snatch it to read the flaps. The first science-fiction novel, it says, written in the 1620s. An astronomer tells a story of a journey to the moon, but also he attempts to encode in the novel a defense of Copernican theory, because he’s looking for a way to talk about it without getting executed for heresy. Only later did people realize all the fantasy bits are pretty much Kepler’s code for astronomy and equations.

  I thumb. There’s a flying alien witch.

  Awesome. Kind of my kind of book. Except that I’d prefer it if I could write one of my own. This is always the problem with things containing imaginary languages and mysteries. I want to be the cryptographer. I’m not even close to being a cryptographer, though. I’m just what used to be called “an enthusiast.” Or maybe a hobbyist. I learn as much as I can learn in like fifteen minutes of internet search, and then I fake, fast and furious.

  People therefore think I’m smarter than they are. It gives me room to do whatever I want, without people surrounding me and asking questions about things. It keeps people from inquiring about the whole dying situation. I invoke factoid privilege.

  “Give,” Jason whispers. Mr. Grimm shoots us a shut-up look.

  I consider how to pacify my parents about the birthday party. I think they have visions of roller-skating and clown and cake and balloons—like the party they had for me when I was five.

  That time, no one showed up beyond two girls forced by their mothers, and Jason, who crashed the party. Not only did he walk a mile uninvited to my birthday party, he did it in formal dress: a full alligator costume leftover from Halloween. Jason didn’t bother to tell his moms where he was going, and so they called the police, convinced he’d been kidnapped.

  When the squad cars showed up outside the roller rink, and the cops came in, it became immediately clear that Jason and I were destined to be friends. He was roller-skating in the alligator suit, spinning elegantly, long green tail dragging behind when they demanded that he show himself.

  That party was not all bad.

  For birthday sixteen, though, I’m drawing a better vision in my notebook: a dead clown, a gigantic layer cake from which I burst, a hot air balloon that arrives in the sky above me. From the hot air balloon’s basket dangles a rope. I climb. I fly away. Forever.

  How much pain would this solve? So much. Except for the pain of the dead clown, who died not according to his own plan, but mine.

  Apparently, Mr. Grimm hears me snort.

  “Care to enlighten us, Miss Ray?”

  Why do they always use this phrase? Rest of the class is taking a quiz. They look up, relieved to be legitimately distracted. Jason smirks. There’s nothing like trouble to make a day pass faster.

  “Do you really want enlightening?” I ask, because I’m working it today. “I was thinking about dying.”

  He gives me an exasperated look. I’ve used this line before in Mr. Grimm’s classroom. It’s a beautiful dealbreaker. Teachers melt like wet witches when I bring it up. I kind of enjoy Mr. Grimm, though, because he sees through me. Which means he’s actually looking. Which is, in itself, weird. No one looks at me too closely. They’re afraid my unsustainability is going to mess them up. That plastic bubble I lived in when I was little? It’s still there, but invisible now. And made out of something harder than plastic.

  “Dying, in the context of which literary work, Aza?” he asks. No mercy.

  “How about The Tempest?” I say, because there it is, on the syllabus, looming. Everything is ocean this semester. “Drowned twins.”

  “The drowned twins who don’t really drown are in Twelfth Night, not The Tempest,” he says. “Try it again, Ray.”

  Embarrassing. I’m at a loss, unfortunately.

  “Play it again, Sam?” I say, illegally using Mr. Grimm’s first name. Then I embark on my traditional method: one-fact-that-makes-them-think-you-have-all-the-facts. You can learn the oddest little items from a wiki page.

  “Except that that’s a misquote. ‘Play it, Sam,’ it should be, but people want it more romantic and less order-givey.”

  Grimm sighs. “Have you even seen Casablanca? Ten more minutes till pencils up. I’d do the quiz if I were you, Aza. And don’t call me Sam. It’s Samuel. Only people who don’t know me call me Sam.”

  He’s won, because he’s right. I so haven’t seen Casablanca. That fact was all I had. I cede the field and pick up my pencil to navigate old man and marlin.

  Samuel. Who names their kid Samuel these days? I consider making a remark about pen names: Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, and Life on the Mississippi, recently read, but I don’t. Last time we did this it became a duel, and there’s something about my chest right now that makes me uncertain whether I can properly duel without coughing.

  There’s a storm kicking up outside, and trees are whacking against the windows. The blinds are rattling like crazy, because this building is a leaky, ancient thing.

  Jason flips a note onto my desk. Mr. Grimm is vigilant about phones buzzing, so we go low-tech. Giant squid, it says. Tomorrow, five o’clock. Your house.

  We were supposed to watch the footage a couple of nights ago, but I was coughing so hard I had to go to the hospital. Which sucked.

  I had to have a scope and when I revived all the way from the anesthetic, the surgeon was looking at me with the usual whoa, never seen that before look.

  Mutant, I scribbled on the notepad they’d given me in case of complaint.

  The surgeon looked at me, and then laughed. “No,” he said. “You’re a special young lady. I’ve never seen vocal cords like yours before. You could be a singer.”

  If I could breathe, I wrote, and he had the grace to look mortified.

  In solidarity, Jason didn’t watch the squid footage without me, though he attempted to convince them to put it on in the ER. He couldn’t get permission from the nurses. They’re hard core in there.

  Speaking of ocean and big fish in it. This is the first footage of a giant squid ever taken in which the squid
is swimming around in its own environment. Imagine this sea-monstery unbelievable thing with eyeballs the size of a person’s head, and a body and tentacles twenty-five feet long. As long as a school bus. Now, realize that no one’s ever seen one moving around down there before. It’s a pretty huge miracle, and if this exists, maybe there are things in Loch Ness too. Maybe there are things everywhere, all over the place. Maybe there is . . . hope?

  Because every time someone finds a new animal, or a new amazing thing on earth, it means we haven’t broken everything yet.

  Up till now there’s only been video of really dead or really sick giant squid, but a scientist went down in a submersible and found one and filmed it.

  Someone Jason knows has a hack on Woods Hole, the oceanographers in Massachusetts, and he caught wind of expedition communications. He snatched the video from a server four days ago, and hasn’t stopped crowing since.

  I look over at Jason to smile at him, but he’s deep in his book. I lower my head to get down to the quiz, when out the classroom window, over the top of the iguana terrarium, I see something in the sky.

  It’s only for a second but it’s weirdly familiar, something I dreamed, or saw in a picture, maybe.

  A mast. And a sail.

  More than one sail—two, three. Tall-ship style. Big, white, flapping. And out of the storm comes the prow of a ship.

  Which . . .

  I’ve hallucinated before, but nothing in this category. I read something recently about mirages in the sky, fata morgana, that’s what they’re called.

  Someone once saw Edinburgh hanging in the sky over Liverpool for half an hour. But what’s this—this boat reflecting from? We’re inland. Deep inland.

  I reach out and tug Mr. Grimm’s sleeve. He looks at me, irritated. I point.

  He looks, and for a moment, he doesn’t move, staring hard out the window. Then he takes off his glasses and glances again.

  “Shit,” he says.

  “What?” I say. “You see it? Do you see it?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Storm,” he says, and yanks at the blinds.

  As the blinds clang to the bottom of the sill and the room goes back to just being a room, I hear a whistle, long and high. Not exactly a whistle. More than a whistle.

  Let me correct that. Much more than a whistle.

  Aza, it says, the whistle. Aza, are you out there?

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  None of this is real, Aza Ray Boyle, it is not real.

  That’s what I’m muttering to myself.

  This is a new one, this kind of bad. The kind having to do with my brain.

  My mom looks at me over the kitchen table, rumpling up her blond-gray ponytail and wrinkling her forehead.

  “Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t sound okay. Remember last time you hallucinated? You had a fever.”

  Once she looks at you, you’re done. There’s no room for fake around my mother. She’s spent all day in her lab. She’s an immunologist, and most nights she’s out late and involved with mice.

  Today, she’s home relatively early, eleven thirty. Her experiments have been miserable of late. She has no tolerance for the thing she refers to as “flimflam,” in this case, me telling her I’m fine and don’t need to go to the doctor.

  “Greta,” I say. “I’m as fine as I ever am.”

  “Greta,” she says. “Is not what you call me, Aza Ray.”

  “You don’t have to call me daughter,” I say. “You’re allowed to call me by my name.”

  She doesn’t even dignify that, but starts calibrating dosages, then sticks a thermometer into my mouth.

  “Okay, daughter,” she says, and smiles at me as though I deserve it. My mom has a smile that is simultaneously loving and blistering. The dominant emotion is just a matter of degrees.

  So—I’m getting away with nothing in the realm of faking fine.

  “You’re a hundred and two,” she announces. “So, there’s your skyship.”

  I usually have a fever to some extent or another. I’m used to it. Clammy or boiling. Whatever. My mom wraps a blanket around my shoulders. I shed it as fast as I can. (Death-foreshadowing blanket? No, thank you.) I tug my particular million-pocketed hoodie on. The snick of the zipper is not allowed to remind me of a body bag.

  “Take a breather, Aza,” says my mom.

  I give her a look. “Breather? Really?”

  “Take a breather on your freak-out, because freaking out helps nothing, and here’s a pill,” and even as she says it, the pill’s in my mouth, and I swear, I’m apparently a dog, because she gets it down my throat before I notice she’s literally pilling me. Other hand has a glass of water at the ready, so bam, I’m washing the pill down.

  That’s Greta for you. She’s quick. What’s the point in resisting?

  Besides, the pills seem to help.

  They said, when I was two, that I’d be lucky to make it to six. When I was six, they said I’d be lucky to make it to ten. When I was ten, people were bewildered, and so they said sixteen.

  And here comes sixteen, moving swiftly toward us.

  So now, when I’m rushed to the hospital, my family has a full procedure to deal with things we’re unwilling to talk about. We actually wrote them down, just in case. My mom thinks this will make it somehow less problematic, the whole major-concerns-over-dying thing.

  I have, for example, a written apology from her for the time she spanked me when I was five and I gasped and wheezed my way into a brief coma. I forgive those things. They aren’t even things. But she insists I have to carry the paper if I need to go to the hospital anyway.

  My mom has a written apology from me for the entire category of brutal sarcasm. Eli has one entitled Excessive Bitchiness, Hogging of Parental Attention by Repeatedly Being Sick Unto Death but Not Actually Dying, and Variant Category: Theft of Clothing.

  The one to my dad runs more along the lines of Things I Wasn’t Very Interested In, Parts 1-36.

  My mom’s been—for the last many years—doing a side project alongside her normal work. She’s breeding a mouse, a kind of super mouse, which in theory will be invulnerable to various inhalable environmental toxins. It’s based on an original badass Chicagoan lab mouse, which had a breathing mutation. The plan is that the new mouse breed will have a mutation that makes them able to flip their nostrils closed and reduce their need for air, at least temporarily, combined with some various invulnerabilities to all sorts of plague vectors.

  The mouse is meant to be a drug-developing step. It’s supposed to help drug companies end up with a drug that might make people who can’t breathe normal air very well figure out how to deal with it better. People like me, obviously. But there are other applications, which at least have made people willing to fund the research. If someone, for example, sets off a bomb with nerve gas? This mouse should be able to react fairly calmly, for an hour or so, which may or may not give the gas time to disperse. Originally my mom tried to make a joke about war-mice, riffing on the dormouse from Alice in Wonderland.

  War-mouse. Joke fail.

  My mom isn’t a supporter of war anything. She never wanted to do military applications for her research. Because obviously, for everyone you’d protect with a war-mouse drug (civilians, kids, teachers, anyone who is stuck in a war zone and at the mercy of a chemical attack) you’re also creating a version in which the attacking soldiers could potentially make themselves invulnerable to poisons they were pumping into the civilian air.

  Which is to say, my mom is in massive conflict all day long. All she wanted was to create some kind of asthma drug, done large, something that would help the entire category of lung problems, emphysema, asthma, Azaray. But instead, she’s stuck developing the war-mice.

  Eli’s also at the table, snipping off the bottom one-eighth inch of her hair with a pair of scissors she’s sharpened
herself on the knife sharpener. She’s precise. I don’t know how she manages it, but when she’s done, the whole thing hangs like a smooth blond sheet of paper—her ends impeccably straight.

  We look nothing alike. My hair’s black and knotted and my eyes, though blue, are navy blue with some gold and red swimming beneath the surface. Eli’s are the color of a barely-there sky. If this were a fairy tale, she’d straight up be the good sister, and I’d be the wicked one.

  “Item One,” Eli says, without bothering to acknowledge my elder-sister superiority. “You heard thunder. We all heard thunder. I heard it from algebra. Item Two. You saw clouds. Which we all also saw. It was a storm. Item Three. You hallucinated a ship, because you’re basically side-effecting and fevery.

  “There’s no way the storm spoke to you,” she concludes. “Also, there was no loudspeaker yelling your name. Just FYI.”

  Possibly I got somewhat high-pitched in Mr. Grimm’s class. Possibly a scene was caused. Possibly I am known for drama. Possibly Eli is known for her amazing unhysterical nature. Even though she’s fourteen and has every right to be out of control with wrath and what used to be known as humors.

  No. Even-keeled, Eli. She got her period last year and was like, Right, fine. She went straight to ballet class in a leotard, and there were no problems.

  I myself have never gotten my period, which I’m actually not too upset about. Postpone the misery, I say. It’s because I’m too skinny, and have no luck gaining weight.

  Clarification: by “too skinny,” I don’t mean Sexy Goth Girl in Need of Flowery Dress and Lipstick to Become Girl Who Was Always Secretly Pretty but We Never Saw It till Now. I mean: dead girl walking. Corpse-style skin, and sometimes when I cough, it’s way gross. Just saying.

  I’m not sure what happened today either. My dad had to come and fetch me from the principal’s office after I screamed a couple of words regarding liberty and self-determination and window blinds. Mr. Grimm gave me a look, and told me I knew where to go. Nurse’s office or principal’s office. I rotate.

  My dad met me, sympathetic even as we were both chided. There is an attempt being made to treat me not like a freak, but like everyone else. Meaning no special anything.