by Ali Benjamin
I glared at him.
“Agent Swanson,” he said, saluting. “Reporting for duty . . .”
How was I supposed to respond to that, anyway?
Even if I’d wanted to tell him anything, I still hadn’t found the perfect researcher yet.
What I wanted was someone who knew something about stings.
POSSIBLE EXPERT #2
Diana Nyad, Long-Distance Swimmer
64 years old but not remotely grandmotherly. Actually, she looks like she could punch a champion boxer in the face and walk away unharmed.
Short hair. Very, very muscular.
Has tried four times to swim from Cuba to Florida, but each time had to stop because she’d been stung so badly by jellyfish. There are photographs of her online, her face blistered and swollen beyond recognition.
She is training for a fifth attempt now. She is practicing by swimming in the Caribbean for up to twenty hours a day.
Advantages:
- Firsthand expertise with stings.
- Looks tough.
- Like, really tough.
- It might be good to have someone so tough helping me.
Disadvantages:
- Twenty hours a day? That will make conversation difficult.
- That means after swimming, she has just four hours left over for everything else. Not certain that would be enough time to help me.
- Do I really want to know what a jellyfish sting feels like?
- She looks so tough, I wonder if she’s even nice.
Conclusion:
- Temporarily rejected, because frankly I am a little frightened of the woman. But watch her. She’s interesting.
POSSIBLE EXPERT #3:
Angel Yanagihara,
Biochemist in Hawaii
When she was a young woman, she was stung by a box jellyfish, which is related to the Irukandji. Barely made it to shore before blacking out. Frankly, she is lucky to be alive. Since then she developed the first-ever treatment for a jellyfish sting. She is currently helping that 64-year-old swimmer, Diana Nyad, figure out how to swim from Cuba to Florida without letting the jellyfish stop her again.
Long, straight blondish hair. Almost strawberry blonde, actually.
Advantages:
- Box jellyfish are very similar to the Irukandji.
- Knows all about stings.
- Created her own treatment for jellyfish stings.
- She understands about fixing things. About ma king things right.
- She is pretty. Long, straight blonde hair and sparkly eyes.
- Maybe even reminds me a little bit of Franny?
- Perhaps that is a sign.
Disadvantages:
- ??
Conclusion:
- Maybe this is the one? Research more.
I couldn’t stop looking at Angel’s picture. She had long, flat blonde hair, almost like Franny’s. She knew everything a person would need to know to really help me.
It was practically perfect. And I almost picked her. I swear I did.
But then I found a video of her online, a clipping from a news show about her work. The video showed her injecting a mouse with venom from a box jellyfish—the same kind that had stung her. She taped the mouse belly-up to a table in her laboratory, shaved his fur off, then watched on a monitor as the mouse came nearer and nearer to death. She didn’t even wince.
I knew how it felt to inflict pain, then stand there and watch. I’d done it before.
So it didn’t matter to me that Angel Yanagihara was doing it for a good cause, or even that she swooped in at the last minute with her treatment. I wanted to stay as far from this woman as possible.
It turns out she didn’t remind me of Franny after all. She reminded me of me.
And then I saw Jamie, and I knew. Jamie was the one.
I am sitting on the morning school bus. I have been thinking about a book we are reading in fifth grade, about a dog named after a supermarket and a girl who makes friends with an old lady who had too much alcohol in her life. In the book, the old lady hangs empty bottles from a tree to remind her of all her mistakes. When bottles knock together in the breeze, they sound like chimes, and that is my favorite thing about this book: the image of those dangling bottles, all those terrible memories that somehow make music when they knock against one another.
You see, I have my own terrible memory now, one I haven’t told you about yet. That terrible memory is this: My mom and dad told me they are getting a divorce.
They told me over dinner at Elmer Suds Pub, which is the place with the curly fries and the tables that are so tall you need to sit on barstools. My mom said she helped my dad find a new apartment—”a perk of being in real estate, I guess”—and they both laughed, which frankly I thought was weird.
I am going to be one of those kids with divorced parents.
It’s bad enough that Aaron had to leave, that he is off at college having all kinds of adventures without us. It’s as if all the loneliness he left behind in the house just cracked the rest of our family in half.
I want so badly to tell you. It is the biggest news I have ever had.
But every time I’ve tried to tell you, I haven’t been able to make the words come.
You get on the bus and walk toward me, toward the seat we always sit in. And I think: Maybe now. Maybe now is the time.
But when you sit down, your eyes are dancing, and you look like you have something you want to talk about. You don’t even say hello. Instead, you whisper to me, “Who do you like?”
I don’t know what to say. Even if that were the thing I wanted to talk about, there are lots of possible answers. I like Fluffernutter. I like you. I like Aaron. I like my mom and dad, even if I am mad at them for getting divorced. I like the woodpecker that knocks against the tree outside my window. I like the moon when it’s a thin crescent and looks like a cartoon drawing of a closed eye, as if the sky were winking.
“What?”
“Boys, I mean. Who do you like?”
I wrinkle my nose. I say, “No one.” Which I know is what girls say when they don’t want to tell people who they like, but in this case, it is true. I don’t like anyone. Not like that.
You frown at me, and I feel the chance to tell you about my parents slipping away.
“But you have to like someone,” you say. “We’ll be in middle school soon.”
I turn those words over in my brain. I have to?
There are some things I have to do; I know this. I have to eat. I have to drink water. I have to breathe. But beyond those things, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything else on Earth that I really have to do, even the things my mom says I must—things like clearing the table, or showering more now that I’m getting older.
Still, I don’t say these words aloud. I know that if I say them, you will roll your eyes. You’ve started doing that lately, and, frankly, I don’t like it one bit.
From the back of the bus, I hear a group of boys laughing, the way boys do when they are in a big group.
So I ask, “Well, who do you like?” It comes out sounding a bit like an accusation.
“I like Dylan,” you say, and you blush.
Well, that about floors me.
“Dylan!?” I whisper. “Dylan Parker!?”
You blush deeper now. “Yeah. Dylan Parker.”
“Tell me you’re kidding.” And I know I don’t sound very kind when I say that, but this doesn’t exactly seem like the sort of thing I should have to be kind about. Nobody should have to be kind about Dylan Parker, because Dylan Parker himself is not kind.
You shrug, almost apologetically. “I just think he’s cute.”
And that’s when I know: Everything is about to change. It’s about to get knotted up in the worst possible ways.
I think about my hair, about the tangles I battle every morning. I have spent so many hours of my life trying to brush out tangles. But no matter how carefully I try to pull the individual strands apart, they just get
tighter and tighter. They cinch together in all the worst ways, until they are impossible to straighten out. Sometimes there is nothing to be done but to get out a pair of scissors and cut the knot right out.
But how do you cut out a knot that’s formed by people?
I don’t like where this is going at all.
Jamie is not what you might think. He’s not how you might imagine the hero of a story.
He is old, first of all. Not as old as Diana Nyad, maybe. But at least as old as my dad, and my dad is going to be fifty next year.
He looks like a dad, too. He has lines around his eyes and on his forehead, and his lower jaw is tucked under the rest of his face like a drawer that’s been pushed in a teeny bit too far. There are lots of gray hairs on his head, and when he wears what he calls his stinger suit—a nylon wet suit that protects him from jellyfish stings—he kind of looks like a toddler wearing tight pajamas.
Jamie—Dr. Jamie Seymour, professor of biology—works in a lab at James Cook University in Cairns, which is a city in Queensland, which is a state in Australia, which is both the world’s largest island and the world’s smallest continent.
In Australia, people have seen spiders eat birds, centipedes eat snakes, snakes eat crocodiles, crocodiles eat children. There are killer ants that lunge at humans. An octopus that contains enough venom to kill twenty-six humans. Birds with such terrible claws they sometimes rip the insides right out of full-grown people.
You have to be crazy brave to live in Australia.
I watched a lot of videos of Jamie. In the first video I saw him in, Jamie jumped into water that was swarming with deadly jellyfish—I’m talking about jellyfish that could kill him in three minutes flat—like it was nothing at all.
Jamie grabbed one of those jellyfish with his bare hands. Ten feet of tentacles swirled all around. All casual, he told a TV reporter that the jellyfish he was holding contained enough venom to kill fifteen humans.
I could see how nervous the reporter was. The reporter tried to smile nonchalantly. He cracked a joke, as if saying, Ha-ha, yeah, all part of the job. But I could see the way he leaned back, away from the animal, and couldn’t really think of what to say.
I could see the fear in his eyes.
In another video, Jamie got into the water, and even though he was covered head to toe in a stinger suit, there was just a tiny little part of his face that was exposed. That was all it took. He was brushed on the lower lip, ever so slightly, like a kiss from a tentacle he never even saw.
He was brushed on the lip by an Irukandji.
An actual Irukandji.
Jamie had been filming for a television show when it happened, and they caught the whole thing on camera. I watched their report of the incident.
After Jamie was stung, he writhed in pain for two full days, which is almost three thousand minutes. When I calculated that, I tried pinching myself as hard as I could for exactly sixty seconds.
Try that, and then multiply it, if you can, by three thousand, and you still won’t have even the slightest sense of what Jamie went through. The whole time, Jamie lay on a hospital bed, wearing only a red bathing suit. He cried, he curled into a ball, he vomited. He knew the cameras were on him, and he let them record it all.
Later, Jamie said that as he lay in that hospital, he was convinced he was going to die.
He wasn’t like Angel Yanagihara, who stung a mouse, then watched as it got closer and closer to death.
He was the mouse.
The weirdest part of the whole video came after he was out of the hospital, though. Because as soon as he felt better—like, the very instant—he got right back into the water. Just like that, he went back to those jellyfish. He laughed and joked, as if those two days hadn’t even happened. He didn’t even seem mad.
And that’s one of the reasons I liked him. I liked him because he had been stung and it hadn’t changed him.
He had a sense of humor. He was fearless. He could forgive.
Best of all, it seemed like Jamie was the one person who was crazy enough not to think I was crazy.
I felt certain he could help me prove that sometimes things just happen isn’t actually a reason for anything.
And if he could help me with this, he’d be helping with something else, too. He’d be helping me write a new ending, a better ending, to the story of my friendship with Franny.
An ending in which I’m one of the good guys. Not the villain.
Variables
Scientists are ultimately exploring cause and effect—how changes to one part of the world can cause other things to change. But cause and effect are not always easy to measure. So well-designed research studies will have clearly defined variables—independent, dependent, and controlled—that help scientists identify what’s changing and what’s causing the change.
—Mrs. Turton
The next thing i want to tell you about jellyfish is this: They are taking over.
Did you know that? Not many people do. It’s our own fault, but no one is even paying attention. People pay attention to other things. They pay attention to videos of cats playing pianos, or to which movie star is in rehab, or to who stole who else’s boyfriend. They pay attention to shades of eye shadow and online games and which angle makes them look best in photos.
But meanwhile. Out there in the sea. Jellyfish blooms are on the rise.
Isn’t that a pretty phrase? Jellyfish blooms, like garden flowers opening up to the sun.
There are more jellyfish than ever. At least, that’s what some scientists say.
People are the problem. We take other fish from the ocean—too many fish. We send them to factories and press them into breaded sticks and patties. We truck them to Red Lobster and Long John Silver’s. We fill supermarket cases with their flesh, all slick and gleaming on heaps of ice.
When we do these things, jellyfish blooms grow bigger. Jellies have less competition for their foods now. They grow in number, move in massive groups, devouring everything.
The seas are warming, which is terrible for almost everyone. They are also filling with chemicals. Huge sections of the seas today dont’t have enough oxygen. But jellyfish love a warm ocean, the chemicals don’t hurt jellyfish one bit, and they carry all the oxygen they need right inside their watery selves.
There are now so many jellyfish that power plants around the world have been shut down when hundreds of thousands of the creatures have clogged their seawater cooling systems. Jellyfish populations are getting so huge, they are stealing the food supply from animals you’d never expect—even penguins in Antarctica. One scientist believes they might someday starve whales to extinction.
Nobody knows this. Nobody thinks about it or talks about it. I mean, this is some of the biggest news around, and when was the last time you even saw a jellyfish on television?
But they’re out there, I’m telling you.
They are out there right this second. They are moving silently, endlessly, all of them, through the darkness of the sea.
Eeverthing changes. It starts changing almost instantly after you tell me you like Dylan Parker, and by the summer before sixth grade, it is all different.
The first thing I notice is the way you tug at your clothing. You might put on a dress that’s just a little short, which isn’t a big deal on its own. Except then you seem to spend the rest of the day thinking about it. I can tell you’re thinking about it, too, because you keep touching your hem. You tug at it, pull it down, like maybe you have decided you actually want to cover your knees after all. Or you just keep smoothing the dress out, over and over, even though it looks exactly the same before and after.
And all that tugging and all that smoothing makes me think about your dress, too, wondering if it is too short or just right.
That is what bothers me most. Because I don’t want to think about your dress. There are so many other things to think about. Important things.
Months have passed now, and I still haven’t told you. I still h
aven’t told you about my parents.
I want to. I want to invite you over to my dad’s new apartment, show you the big television he just got, which is exactly the kind of thing my mother would have called “a waste of good money.” I want you to see the way my mom spread her stuff into his side of the closet, how it looks like his suits were never even hanging there in the first place.
But every time I start to say something, you are busy smoothing your dress or looking in the mirror. You look in every mirror, any mirror, no matter where we are. I won’t even realize there is a mirror there until I see you eyeing yourself from different positions.
Once you see yourself in that mirror, whatever conversation we were having is over.
“I hate my hair,” you say, smoothing down a portion of your bangs. I don’t understand what’s to hate about your hair. I’m the one whose curly hair won’t smooth down, and if I don’t mind mine, there is no reason at all you should mind yours.
But then you start worrying about my hair, too.
“You know,” you say, and I think you are trying to be helpful, “I’ll bet with the right product, we could actually make your hair look almost cute.”
Cute. You use that word all the time now.
“Omigosh,” you might say. “I saw the cutest pair of Chuck Taylors at the mall.”
“Who’s Chuck Taylor?” I ask. I imagine tiny look-alike toddlers in baggy pants—Little Chuck 1 and Little Chuck 2.
“No, dummy,” you say, rolling your eyes. “Chuck Taylors are super-cute sneakers. Don’t you know anything?”
I do know things. I know lots of things. I just don’t happen to know very much about types of shoes, that’s all.
I know, for example, that time and space are the same thing, and that it is possible that all moments in time exist simultaneously, which means I am just born and a kid and an old lady and just plain dead and have never even existed, all at the same moment, right now.