Wild Blue Wonder

by Carlie Sorosiak

  On the Fourth of July, there was a belly-flop competition in the cove (Reed won by a landslide with his Flying Squirrel Jump), followed by a clambake in the fire pit. We had Boston baked beans and corn on the cob, and painted campers’ faces in the mess hall—stars and stripes across their cheeks. “Here, let me do you, too,” Hana said, brush in hand. She swooped delicate lines of red, white, and blue just below my eyes. “Superwoman’s got nothing on you.”

  Nana had bought a “crap ton” of fireworks and cruised out in a small speedboat to the middle of the cove. When the sky faded to blackish-blue, everyone lit sparklers and lined up on the shore, watching the fireworks sail from the speedboat and fizz in the humid air.

  “This is so perfect,” I told Fern, who’d sidled up next me. She smelled of coconut sunscreen and her favorite strawberry lip balm.

  “I guess,” she said. In the loudness, her voice sounded like nothing at all.

  After the fireworks, Nana extended lights-out so the campers could make s’mores—and so the counselors could test-run the maze. Besides his work at the university, the maze was Dad’s crowning glory. The first time he talked about constructing it, I was six years old. And now, here it was, two acres fully grown: twists and turns of Virginia roses and elderberry bushes, seven feet high and planned just so. Dad was like a little kid, so proud that he draped a red ribbon over the entrance, told us to “have fun” as he pushed us through.

  You, me, Fern, and Reed stepped in first, each of us with a flashlight in hand.

  Fern said, “We need to think about this methodically.”

  Reed said, “Let’s just wing it. Meet you on the other side.” He took off, Fern on his heels: “Don’t leave me in the dark!”

  And then it was just me and you, Dylan, ambling the wrong way—around turns where fireflies and tiny moths fluttered through patches of undulating shadow. “We’ve got nothing but time,” you said, so I told you about octopuses. How they can solve mazes, how they’re as smart as dogs.

  You smiled. “I love it when you nerd out.”

  And I said, “Thank you.”

  I didn’t tell you that octopuses blush in a dozen hues, that my insides were quickly turning red. But I did lower my voice and say, “So how was the kiss with Fern?”

  You paused in your tracks, your grimace lit up by the flashlight. “You know about that?”

  I saw that. “It’s Fern. She tells everyone everything.”

  Your sigh was so loud, it whooshed right through to the other side of the maze. “Man. It was . . . I didn’t know what to do. Course I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but it was really weird. When I pulled away that quick, she gave me this look, like she was going to cry or something, and I . . . I’ve tried to talk to her about it, but every time I get close, I’m not sure what to say other than You’re like my little sister.”

  And I’m not?

  The question tumbled through my chest.

  And I’m not?

  And I’m not?

  “I don’t think that’s what she wants to hear,” you continued. “What do you think?”

  I trailed my fingers along the shrubs. “I think she just might need some time. Bringing it up again might embarrass her even more. Just act normal, I guess?”

  “I guess.” You gave me a strange look. “But once something’s out in the open like that, it’s hard.”

  Are you still talking about Fern or something else? “I bet.”

  “I mean, in eighth grade, imagine if I’d said I had a crush on you.”

  I stopped. “You had a crush on me in eighth grade?”

  You bit your lip. “Oh man. Yeah. Remember our Scooby-Doo Halloween? It was that Daphne costume.”

  “I spray-painted my hair red, but I kept touching it—and then accidentally touching my face. I looked like a poison ivy victim. It was horrible.”

  “It was adorable.”

  I tried to follow my own advice. Just act normal. “So what happened? With . . . you liking me?”

  “Oh, you know.” You ran your free hand through your curls. “Just got over it . . . like a cold or something.”

  It was a joke, right? But there it was.

  There it was.

  “I think I’ll go this way,” I said, rushing around the next hedge. “I’ll . . . I’ll see you later, okay?”

  Your voice shuddered through the leaves. “Wait, Sawyer, come on. I was just . . . Sawyer?”

  But it was dark, and I was walking as fast as I could.

  December

  Bonnie and Clyde

  That Saturday night, after the silent car ride back from Mousam River, I stay up entirely too late reading Moby-Dick for English, because 1) Fern’s gone again, 2) I’m trying to distract myself, and 3) I’m pretty much Captain Ahab reincarnated. Except, instead of an old-timey ship, I have a Chris-Craft. I keep expecting Ahab to find this damn whale, but the book is, like, eight thousand pages long and by two thirty, with a bazillion pages left, he still hasn’t tracked it down. Fern cracks open the window at the exact moment that I chuck Moby-Dick to the foot of my bed, as I’m terrified that Captain Ahab is going to fail spectacularly.

  Fern doesn’t say anything.

  I don’t say anything.

  I put on my headphones and press play; Indigo’s speaking about how the world is full of magical things that are very much true. Something hits me, something I’ve never thought about before. What if . . . none of the magic in Winship is real? What if all our stories—of ghosts and doe-eyed sea monsters—just serve to cover the fact that this is a town with a lot of demons? Real-world demons, of flesh and blood.

  On the first episode of The Sunshine Hypothesis, Indigo explained where the title came from.

  So here’s the thing: To me, it’s all about sunshine. The deeper in the ocean a creature lives, the more likely it is to be strange—totally different from other life. This is where we find our monsters.

  I pause the podcast, and later—much, much later—fall into an uneasy sleep.

  I’m up early Sunday morning to work on the Chris-Craft. The boat needs one more coat of varnish—just one more thing—and then it’s done. Thirty-four days of hard labor, complete. It should feel like an accomplishment.

  So why are my palms sweating as I hold the paintbrush?

  Nana’s gliding her eyes across my face over and over again, like she’s willing herself to speak. As far back as I can remember, she’s worked wordlessly—threading needles, fixing appliances, washing my and Fern’s hair in the bathtub when we were little—and that’s usually okay. But today the silence seems so . . . silent.

  Finally she says, “Why do you think I’ve kept these unfinished boats around for all these years?”

  That wasn’t what I was expecting. “Because . . . they’re valuable?”

  “How are they valuable?”

  “Because they were Grandpa’s?”

  “Exactly. I could sell some of them—get a good chunk of change. But these were Grandpa’s. In my mind, these are Grandpa’s. All around us, this is my grief. And my grief fills the entire barn.”

  Something about the way she says it sucks the breath out of me. “Nana . . .”

  “I’m sorry about yesterday at the farm. I just can’t stand the way things are going between you kids. You’re each feeling grief—and I understand that. Oh boy, do I understand that. I just wish you were feeling it together.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek.

  “I promised myself that I wouldn’t ask.” She blows out a lungful of air. “But I think I need to know what happened. I mean, I know what happened that night . . . but what happened?” I think she sees it on my face: how deep this question cuts—not just beneath my skin but also to the core of me—because she drops her paintbrush and says, “Oh, Cookie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, shh, shh, it’s okay.” She brings my head to her shoulder, burrowing my face in her sweater.

  What happened? isn’t the right question.

  It’s: How did I become such a monste
r?

  Hana arrives halfway through the varnishing. I try to suck it up and act normal. She picks up a paintbrush, happily chattering about her newest character makeup video.

  “I turned myself into the Evil Queen last night and it was awesome. And our Mystique video already has, like, two thousand hits, which is amazing. I even got my dad to watch it. He was impressed!”

  As the varnish dries, we venture to the house to wash the stickiness off our hands, but before we can make it to the porch, Dad emerges from the garage. “Oh, good!” He says. “Reinforcements for the fairy light brigade!”

  I show him my hands. “We’re kind of . . .”

  “Go on,” he says. “But hurry back. I could use some help.”

  “Help” means sorting through approximately five hundred boxes of Christmas lights. Dad’s a fairy light guru—something that he brags about with actual pride—and every year, he strings them up all over camp. You can see The Hundreds from Jupiter. I’m sure that, as we speak, neighbors a mile away are prepping their blackout curtains.

  At the sink, Hana says, “I swear his beard gets longer every time I see him.”

  “Scary, right?”

  “He’s like one of those Chia Pets.”

  We head to the garage and scoop up as many armfuls of twinkle lights as we can carry. We begin at the main hedge near the driveway, unraveling the longest strings of lights and winding them into the spiky branches. I suggest that we spell out something confusing like HAMSTER or PUDDING, just to keep the neighbors on their toes, but Hana vetoes it on difficulty level alone. Fair enough.

  “What’re you up to for the rest of the day?” she asks.

  “Finishing Moby-Dick. My dad also said something about going over to the college this afternoon. You’re welcome to come.”

  “Can’t. Mounds of calculus homework. I kind of like calculus, but it takes so. Freaking. Long. Especially when you have to kick one of your brothers out of your room every five seconds. . . . Actually, you’re right, we should go for HAMSTER. Let’s totally go for HAMSTER.”

  We finish in less than twenty minutes, even though Dad will probably be out here for hours. There’s an art to it, he says. These things can’t be rushed. Hana tells me she has a teensy bit of time, so we grab some sweet potato chips from the pantry and watch The Perks of Being a Wallflower on my bedroom floor. It’s sad, but kind of in a good way? It’s the first time I’ve seen it. Now I understand why Hana has a We accept the love we think we deserve sticker on her laptop.

  “Ugh, calculus calls,” she moans as the credits roll.

  We say goodbye, but I stay on my bedroom floor, hoping Dad will pop his head in soon, because I kind of don’t want to be alone. After ten minutes, I make my way to the garage, where he’s untangling a long line of lights.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, kiddo?”

  “Do you think we could go to the college now?”

  “I just have to . . . get this darn thing . . . Damn it.” He sets the lights down on a box. “Know what? Let’s go.”

  Winship U’s so quiet on a Sunday. In the library, I return two marine biology textbooks I borrowed with Dad’s faculty card and, out of curiosity, browse for any books about cryptozoology, the study of hidden and undiscovered animals. Way, way, way in the back of the folklore section, I find a thick gray tome entitled Cryptids: A Study. There’s a whole chapter on sea monsters—reports in the early 1800s of a giant serpent in Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts; a chronicle of the giant squid discovery; and of course, alleged pictures of the Loch Ness Monster. When the book starts to somersault my stomach, I wind back toward Dad’s office. The maintenance crew is buffing the halls—an acrid, waxy smell trailing from the library, past the sports complex . . .

  The sports complex. Really it’s just a fancy name for some rubber mats with dumbbells, a couple of treadmills, and an indoor pool, but I’ve always felt lucky that, for such a small town, we have a pool with eight regulation lanes and a high dive. The swim teams for the high school and the middle school practice here, and I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent beneath the speckled white ceiling, my swim cap and goggles on, gliding through the clear blue.

  The door to the pool deck’s open.

  I step a foot closer to it, the chlorine scent beelining toward my nostrils. It stings. It didn’t use to sting.

  “Quinn?” my dad calls from the other end of the hall.

  My neck snaps toward him. “Yeah?”

  Twenty feet away, he’s taking in everything about this scene—the way my body’s angling toward the open door, toward the water; I can tell because he’s pianoing his fingers on his pants. “You still want to grab some coffee?”

  I’m not stupid. I know he wants to ask something else, like: Do you want me to go in with you? Are you thinking about swimming again? But his lips remain cinched.

  In his office, we drink bad coffee in small sips. Aerial views of the Mariana Trench—all poster-sized and framed—line the wall space above his desk. Younger versions of Fern, Reed, and me grin from his bookshelf. Happy. Uncomplicated lives.

  Keyboard clacking, Dad’s pulling up something on his computer. “Have you seen this yet?” He spins his laptop toward me. On-screen is a floating creature—barely bigger than a seahorse—in the wildest, most majestic red I’ve ever seen. It is, to use the technical term, friggin’ sweet.

  “Ruby sea dragon,” Dad explains. “First time they’ve gotten footage of it in the wild.”

  “Where’d they find it?”

  “Off the coast of Australia. Cool, huh?”

  “Cool’s an understatement.” Eyes wide, I finish watching the YouTube video, then scroll through all twelve pictures. The next series of images is of deep, deep-sea life: chillingly scary lantern fish, eels with razors for teeth. “Hey, Dad?”

  He’s removing lecture notes from the file cabinet. “Yeah, kiddo?”

  “What do you think qualifies as a monster?”

  “Where’d that question come from?” I turn the laptop back around, give him a glimpse of the lantern fish.

  He’s still hesitant, beginning slowly. “Well, the scholar in me says that monsters are a result of the cultural imagination. . . . Whenever humankind can’t deal with what’s right in front of them, they turn to fantastical metaphors: zombies, vampires. But creatures like that?” He points to the fish. “I’m not sure what makes them monsters. They’re just out of our ordinary, out of our human experience. You know, I’m reading this book that you might like, about barely imagined beings. There’s an argument that ‘monsters’ like that can . . . how did he phrase it, exactly? Something like: ‘make us think about what astonishes us, and how we percieve beauty.’”

  I want to ask more questions, but I don’t want to give myself away. I’m still wondering if all this talk of “magic” in Winship is just a cover-up—a sweeping-under-the-rug of everything that picks at us, all these little misfortunes tacked onto the big. Does calling monsters magical make them more bearable? Is that how we survive?

  Closing the laptop now. “How’re your octopuses?”

  He grins. “Bonnie and Clyde?”

  “The Dynamic Duo.”

  “Come see.”

  Around the corner from his office is the small research aquarium. In the center of the room sits a table and desk chairs, and on each wall are tanks of glittering blue. It almost feels like traveling underwater.

  I peer into Bonnie and Clyde’s tank. They’re common octopuses, not like the ones I’ve been hearing about on my podcast: the miniature but extremely venomous blue-ringed octopus, the almost-transparent glass octopus, and the amazing Wunderpus, which—with its psychedelically patterned brown and white stripes—absolutely lives up to its name. Bonnie and Clyde are still awesome, though, even if they’re not as rare: rich orange bodies with fifty million neurons inside each of their tentacles.

  “Any more midnight trips out of the tank?” I ask.

  Dad taps the secured screen on top. “Not anym
ore. The crabs are safe for now.”

  Clyde’s smart, but Bonnie is brilliant. It’s one thing to know that octopuses can differentiate between symbols as well as a toddler, and it’s another thing to see the lab’s nighttime video footage of Bonnie climbing from her tank, moving the desk chair closer with one of her tentacles, and ascending into a nearby tank to gobble down all the crabs. Before he viewed the footage, Dad just couldn’t figure it out; in the morning, when he’d return to work, Bonnie would be safe and sound in her tank, looking up at him like, Who, me?

  “You know, I was thinking, kiddo . . .” Dad massages his beard, running both hands over it like he’s filing it into a point. “I have some friends in the biology department at UMass—they teach in the marine science PhD program, and the undergraduate courses are great as well.”

  I have a letter from their swim coach, too, wedged in with my bathing suits. “I don’t swim anymore, Dad,” I say absentmindedly, watching Bonnie pick up a shell and dig in the sand.

  “I know, I know. But you’re more than swimming. . . . This isn’t about swimming. I know you love science the way that I do, and if you want, I could pull some strings.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  I blink up at him. “Sorry, what?”

  His forehead wrinkles in concern. “Where were you, Quinn?”

  Well, I was thinking about something I heard on The Sunshine Hypothesis: how the average life span of the common octopus is less than a year. Even the big ones don’t live any longer than five, which means that all of them die right after their kids are born. They don’t pass a single thing on to the next generation—no memories, no culture. In a way, shouldn’t humans feel lucky? Shouldn’t I feel lucky, that we get longer than that?

  “Nowhere,” I say. “Forget it.”

  Thankfully Dad lets it drop.

  On the way back in the car, he says that we should make a pit stop at Waffle Mart before dinner. “Just don’t tell your mother. I’ve been eating way too many alfalfa sprouts lately, and I’m about at my limit. Sometimes these things can only be counteracted with bacon.”

  We park outside the boarded-up Rosebay Café, home of Winship’s saltiest saltwater taffy, and tread past the beach supply store, the old-timey games outlet, and a cluster of souvenir shops. In winter, downtown’s a deflated beach ball, half frozen in the snow—but Waffle Mart is a little spot of light. Unraveling our scarves and stomping the ice off our boots, we plop down in a yellow booth at the back of the diner, the table so sticky that, if I press down too hard, it’s bound to take a layer of skin off my hand. I order the Big Breakfast special, even though the sun’s dipping below the tree line in golden hues.