the thing about jellyfish

by Ali Benjamin

  The ticket would cost over a thousand dollars, even one way. I needed a credit card to buy it.

  I didn’t have a credit card. But both of my parents did. And as it happened, my dad paid for our Ming Palace dinners every Saturday night with a bright blue credit card.

  It happened the same way every week. There was kind of a rhythm to these nights: the fried noodles, drinks, soup. The sound of food sizzling and the neon sign flickering in the window, CHINESE FOOD, OPEN. Then later, after dinner, the way the server set down the bill. Then Dad placed his credit card on the table before getting up to wash the moo shu off his hands.

  Every Ming Palace dinner unfolded like this, every time. It was almost like waves lapping at a shore. A person could notice, or not.

  I noticed.

  After a few weeks of paying attention, I picked up the credit card when Dad left the table. I held it and counted the seconds before the server came to take the card.

  One, two, three, four . . . all the way up to forty-one

  I tried it again for the next couple of weeks. Sometimes I had an even longer time alone with the card—91 seconds, 83 seconds, 123 seconds.

  One night in December, I brought a pink index card to dinner with me. When Dad left the table, I began writing down what I saw on the card.

  The following week, I brought the index card with me again.

  It took four different dinners—all the way into the new year—to get all the information down. I copied the whole thing, every number and letter from his credit card. I wrote down the words that were in the upper left corner of his card: Chase and Freedom. I thought that was maybe what my English teacher would call an oxymoron, because you cannot truly have freedom if someone is chasing you.

  On the other hand, maybe it was not an oxymoron. Maybe what I was doing was, in fact, chasing some sort of freedom.

  I copied all of it: the four trapezoids that came together in a kind of circle, which was the logo of the Chase Freedom credit card. The good-through date and the exact way his name appeared on the card: JAMES P SWANSON.

  I wrote down everything on the back side, too, including the things that didn’t seem important. The statement that use of this card is subject to the card member agreement, the twenty-four-hour customer service number. I even drew the shiny eagle that appeared and disappeared depending on which way I held the card. I left nothing out.

  The index card was always back in my pocket by the time Dad returned to the table.

  But by January, I had it all. My pink index card was an accurate replica of my dad’s shiny blue plastic card.

  When I went home that night, I tucked the index card into the back of my sock drawer.

  I did not wonder whether I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing. My dad would understand later. After I had proved what needed to be proved—after I’d had the chance to explain it—he would understand.

  There was another thing I needed to travel to Queensland, Australia, at the edge of the Great Barrier Reef.

  I needed cash. My dad’s credit card would not be enough. I needed cash for cab fare, for food. And I thought it might be best to pay for my hotel with cash, too. That would make it a little harder for my parents to find me.

  I didn’t want anyone to find me until I’d gotten the answer I needed.

  There were a few ways to get cash. First, I smashed my piggy bank. For years, I’d been dropping money in there—spare change I’d picked up around the house, or my $5-per-week allowance that I got when Mom remembered to give it to me or I remembered to ask.

  Other kids spend their money at the mall, or seeing movies with friends. But I don’t like the mall, and I didn’t have any friends to go to the movies with.

  I counted out each $5 bill, each crumpled dollar, each coin. I was surprised to discover that I already had $283.62 saved. That was a lot of money, but it wasn’t enough.

  I needed more, so I turned to my mom.

  Each week, I took a little money out of my mom’s wallet. Never too much: If she had forty dollars in her wallet, I might take four or five of those dollars. If she had twenty-one dollars, I took three or four. A different mother might keep track of her dollars more closely, but not mine. My mom was so scattered, just barely getting to her house showings on time, always rummaging around in cabinets and closets for something she couldn’t find.

  Mom never kept track of anything too closely.

  She still gave me money for milk and a snack in the cafeteria every day, even though I now spent every lunch period in Mrs. Turton’s room.

  Adding it all together—the lunch money, the taken-from-her-wallet money the loose bills and change—might give me another $250 or so, depending on when I left.

  Altogether, I hoped to gather $500 in cash. That way, I’d have enough for taxi fares, a bunch of meals, and maybe a few nights’ stay in a not-very-nice hotel.

  It was hard to know what would happen after that. I was assuming that my parents would help me out once they found out where I was. But I wasn’t sure. Maybe they would be so angry that they would decide to just leave me there, make me find my own way home. I really couldn’t imagine what they’d do.

  The truth is, anytime I thought that far ahead, I didn’t want to think about it anymore.

  I placed the cash in a big envelope, and I watched the envelope grow.

  Taking the money from Mom’s purse felt so bad sometimes that my stomach hurt and I had to lie down. I told myself I was doing the right thing. After all, Mom was the one who’d told me Sometimes things just happen. She was the one who hadn’t understood in the first place.

  Maybe if she could have shown me that the world still made sense in some way, that there was still some sort of order to things—I might not even be doing this.

  But she hadn’t. She’d shrugged her shoulders and said, Sometimes things just happen, and expected somehow that this would be enough.

  So I didn’t exactly have a choice about taking her money.

  I did not want to be like fifteen-year-old Bridget Brown.

  I wanted to be prepared.

  On the day of the earthworm dissection, Justin and I sat in the science lab, staring down at the tray in front of us. There were some knives for slicing, and a bunch of pins with colorful plastic heads. There was a magnifying glass, plus a little bowl of sterilizing fluid.

  In the middle of the tools, a dead worm just sat in a Pyrex cup.

  I stared at it. Justin watched me.

  “You’re going to need me to do the slicing and dicing, aren’t you?” Justin asked.

  I nodded.

  “Don’t worry, Belle,” he said. He patted my arm. “I got this one.”

  He picked up the dead earthworm with tweezers and laid it out on the table in front of us. It looked just like every other earthworm I’d ever seen, except that it lay there like a limp piece of string.

  It reminded me of Angel Yanagihara’s mouse. And of that frog that Dylan threw against the tree last year. The smell of preservatives filled my nose.

  Justin picked up a knife. He poked the worm gently.

  Then he hesitated.

  “You know what? I think we should give this guy a name,” he said. “He should have some dignity.”

  I liked that idea. I smiled.

  “How ‘bout Moe?” he said. I made a face. “Evil Peter the Soil Eater?” I shook my head. “Thor?”

  Thor. A big name for such a little guy. I smiled, just a tiny bit. But it was enough.

  “O mighty Thor,” Justin said, looking down at the worm. “You may be small in size, but your legless little life is a great gift to our understanding of the scientific method. And also our ability to pass seventh grade.”

  Justin kept right on talking as he made a clean slice down the middle of the earthworm. “Hey, speaking of names, isn’t Belle the real name of Snow White?”

  “Beauty,” I said.

  He looked up, surprised. Then he grinned from ear to ear.

  I’m not sure what m
ade me decide to speak to Justin. Maybe it was the fact that he didn’t need me to, that he was perfectly content to keep up the conversation all by himself. Maybe it was because I didn’t have anything to lose anymore—in a few days, I’d be gone.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “She does talk.”

  “I can talk. When there’s something to say. And it was Beauty.”

  “Beauty?”

  “And the Beast. Her name was Belle.”

  “Oh.” He thought for a moment. “So does that make me the Beast?”

  I shrugged.

  “The Beast was a bad guy, right?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “He was okay. He just scared people who didn’t know him, that’s all.”

  “Huh,” said Justin. “That sounds about right.”

  Justin carefully peeled back the sides of the earthworm to reveal the gray gizzard, the glistening reproductive parts, like miniature white beans fresh from the can. I took notes as he moved the parts of the worm around.

  Right in the middle of the dissection, Justin’s stopwatch went off and he had to put down the scalpel. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his pill.

  I held out my hand, palm open.

  He hesitated. “Um, I don’t think you should take that, Belle,” he said.

  I made a face at him—of course I wasn’t going to take his stupid medicine—and he handed it to me.

  I turned the pill over. On one side, there was a hexagon with a line coming off one end. It looked like a six or a nine, or maybe a geometric snail. I handed the pill back.

  “What’s the difference?” I asked.

  “The difference?”

  “Before you take it and after.”

  “Ah.” He furrowed his brow. “Well . . . before I take it,” he started slowly, “it’s like everything comes in at once, so fast I can’t quite grab on to any of it.”

  “What things?”

  “All of it. Everything.” He looked around the room. “Like, the clock ticking, and the colors of kids’ clothes and the lists I make in my head and all the talking and the homework I forgot to do and the hard seat and the fact that next we are going to PE and maybe we’ll play volleyball but maybe we’ll play that freeze-dance game, and the fact that my arm itches and there’s sleet falling, and all of it. It’s all just kind of jumbled together. And it’s loud, too. All those thoughts are so loud I can’t quite make sense of any of them. But then I take my medicine, and even though I don’t feel any different, it’s like the world around me has changed.”

  He bit his lip and tried to explain more. “Everything just gets less . . . confusing. Like there’s space between all those things. It’s less noisy, somehow.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s really hard to describe.”

  Then he looked at the pill in his hand. “Bottoms up,” he said. He tossed it into his mouth and swallowed.

  “Like an orchestra,” I said quietly.

  “Huh?”

  “Like the difference between hearing random noises versus hearing an orchestra,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, like he was thinking out loud. I could hear that he was surprised. “Yeah, that’s exactly right.”

  When I looked up, he was looking at me, kind of admiring. That made me uncomfortable, so I just said, “We should finish this.”

  And actually, finishing the dissection wasn’t too bad. It was more interesting than horrible.

  Before the class was over, Justin spoke to Thor one more time.

  “Thank you, mighty Thor,” he said, “for showing us your seminal receptacles. May you rest in peace now.”

  In early february, just a week dance, I sat with Dr. Legs again.

  “Anything you feel like talking about today, Suzanne?”

  I shook my head.

  We sat in silence for a long while. In my head, I reviewed the lists of all the things I would need on my trip.

  I had almost everything at this point: an envelope of money, phone numbers for two different taxi services—the Cairns Cab Company and the Coral Sea Coach shuttle service.

  Just last night, I’d gone online and made a two-night reservation at the Tropicana Lodge Motel, the least expensive motel I could find.

  I’d been tracking exchange rates and weather reports (it was summer on the other side of the world, the days long and warm). I’d looked at transit maps and locations of Laundromats, in case I was there long enough to run out of clean clothes.

  I’d memorized Australian phrases and learned that a blue is a fight, to make a blue is to make a mistake, and a bluey could either mean “dog,” “jacket,” “equipment,” “redhead,” or “Portuguese man-of-war.”

  I knew how to get from the airport to the motel, and how to get from the motel to Jamie’s office.

  I had planned so much, and I could picture the whole thing.

  I mean, I could see myself there, starting from the moment I stepped off the plane into the warm Australian summer. I could picture shaking Jamie’s hand, walking with him to the edge of the ocean. I could imagine calling my parents to tell them what I’d figured out.

  The only thing I couldn’t imagine was actually leaving home.

  I glanced at Dr. Legs, who was doing that thing she does, where she folds her hands in her lap and stares out at nothing.

  “I have a question,” I said. At this point, so close to leaving, what did I have to lose by asking one question?

  She seemed startled that I’d said anything, but she recovered quickly. She looked at me and smiled. “I’ll be happy to answer it, Suzanne.”

  “How . . .”

  I hesitated. I wanted to know how I could do this, how I could make this trip—how I might be able to walk out of my house, get on that plane, leave behind everyone I knew without hurting their feelings.

  I tried again. “How . . .”

  I shook my head. It was so hard to explain.

  “Just ask, Suzanne,” said Dr. Legs. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

  “How . . . does a person say goodbye?”

  It wasn’t exactly the right question, but maybe it was close enough.

  “Oh, Suzanne.” Dr. Legs looked at me for a long time, and her face got soft. I swear, I thought she might cry, the way she was looking at me. “Are you ready to say goodbye?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s been, what, about six months?”

  Six months since what? What was she even talking about?

  And then I realized. Oh. That.

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head, all the while keeping those soft eyes on me. “Saying goodbye is important,” she said. “It’s what allows us to begin living again.”

  I shifted in my seat. She wasn’t exactly giving me instructions.

  “There really are no magic words,” said Dr. Legs. “There’s no single right way to say goodbye to someone you love. But the most important thing is that you keep some part of them inside you.”

  I tried to imagine bringing some part of my family with me—all I could imagine were miniature versions of my mom, dad, Aaron, and Rocco, like tiny dolls that I could place in my pocket.

  “In the end, Suzanne,” Dr. Legs continued, “it’s a gift to spend time with people we care about. Even if it’s imperfect. Even if that time doesn’t end when, or how, we expected. Even when that person leaves us.”

  Even when that person leaves us. But, of course, I was the one leaving. I imagined my mom coming home to an empty house. My dad waiting for me at Ming Palace, drinking his Rolling Rock. Maybe it would be a relief to all of them. They’d get a break from all my not-talking. Just for a little while, they wouldn’t have me there smothering everything with my silence.

  Dr. Legs narrowed her eyes and tilted her head. “Does that make sense, Suzanne?”

  I really didn’t know what made sense anymore.

  Dr. Legs kept looking at me, which made me uncomfortable. So I said, “Sure. Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’m so pr
oud of you, Suzanne,” she said. “You’ve really come so far.”

  I haven’t been anywhere, I wanted to say. I haven’t been anywhere at all.

  But that was about to change.

  On the last Saturday before my trip, my dad and I sat down in the pink vinyl booth at Ming Palace just like we always did.

  I was not like Bridget Brown. I’d done my research. And I had learned four things:

  1. Tuesday around 3 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, is the best time to find affordable airfare for international flights.

  2. Flights that leave on Wednesday or Thursday tend to cost less than those that leave closer to weekends.

  3. As it happened, my mom had an early-morning house showing this Thursday.

  4. The moment I purchased my flight, it would be on my dad’s credit card balance. And since I didn’t know when he got his credit card statements, I needed to be careful. I needed to buy my ticket as close to the departure date as possible.

  All of this meant that I would buy my ticket this Tuesday, 3 p.m. I would leave on Thursday morning.

  I would be in Australia by Friday night, just as my classmates arrived at the Heroes and Villains dance.

  By this point, I’d sat through twenty-one Ming Palace dinners since I’d started not-talking, which, at about an hour each, worked out to roughly 350,000 jellyfish stings.

  And by this time next week, I’d be on the other side of the world.

  I was just starting to wonder if they even had Chinese restaurants in Australia, when Dad said, “Oh, hey. I just read about something you might be interested in.”

  These days, Dad spoke to me the same way Rocco quoted dead writers—into the air, as if it didn’t matter if anyone was listening at all.

  I dipped a fried noodle into the little white bowl filled with duck sauce.

  “Apparently there’s a place not too far from here where they have real dinosaur tracks,” Dad continued. “Hundreds and hundreds of footprints. Some guy driving a bulldozer discovered them by accident, and they built a whole museum around them.”

  He popped a crispy noodle into his mouth. “I thought maybe you and I could visit sometime.”