by Ken Brosky
“Fish, I gave you freedom!”
We waited. I searched the water with him. It was calm, unnaturally calm, almost as smooth as glass. I didn’t need to see his face to recognize him. I knew just by looking at his familiar broad shoulders. His tattered jeans. His pompadour haircut.
“Chase,” I whispered.
He turned, scanning the dock as if he’d heard my voice. His eyes moved past me without recognition.
Something popped up from the dark water. Above, the clouds dispersed. I could see it clearer now with the moonlight shining down. It was the fish.
The one that got away.
“What is it?” the fish asked, swimming closer to the dock. He looked bigger. Maybe it was my eyes playing tricks on me, but I swear he looked … well, fatter.
“Do you …” Chase licked his lips, tentative. “Do you know about baseball?”
“Boys hit a ball with sticks and run around with much fanfare,” the fish said dryly. “I picked up enough over the years from the safety of my horrible fish tank.”
“I want to hit home runs,” Chase said. “Every time I bat.”
“Is that so?” the fish asked. “Is it not enough that I gave you back your legs? Is it not enough that you can walk again?”
“I freed you!” Chase shouted. “You owe me!”
“Why not be satisfied with potential?” asked the fish. “Why not ask me for the ability to be great? Do you not rob yourself of something by asking for the easy way out?”
“I want to hit home runs!” Chase shouted.
“Very well,” the fish said. “Go home. When you wake tomorrow, you’ll find I’ve granted your wish.”
Chase smiled. It was a smile I’d never seen on him. It looked evil.
He turned and started walking. One of his legs seemed to go out from under him. He fell over, landing hard on the old wooden dock. When he pulled himself to his feet, he looked shocked. Then that smile returned.
I woke with a start, feeling a tear escape from my right eye. “Briar?” I called out quietly. There was no response. My room was empty, and it felt so lonely I could barely get out of bed.
“What am I going to do?” I asked, grabbing the first pair of jeans I could find. My hand hovered over my collection of violet shirts. There were more than a dozen of them hanging up, another half-dozen dirty ones lying on the floor. Was Trish right? Was I overdoing it with my favorite color?
OK. Yes. Duh. But did it really matter?
Apparently it did now. And if I wanted to keep myself from sliding down the social ladder at school, I’d have to make changes. But I didn’t want to make changes. Arrrrg! Why was my brain doing this to me? Because I was lonely. That’s why. I knew it even then as I stood in my closet, staring at my clothes. I was afraid of being alone, hovering over a sea of water.
My hand reached for the first non-violet shirt it could find: a gray v-neck shirt with short sleeves. I put it on, staring at myself in the mirror.
I realized, quite suddenly, that it didn’t really matter what I put on. I had nowhere to go. I was suspended until Monday. And I was grounded until … oh, around 2046 or so.
“Briar,” I whispered, hoping the rabbit would magically reappear. He didn’t.
OK. Steel yourself, Alice. I was on my own until the rabbit came back. What would Briar do if he were here? Well, first off he would listen to my dream. Then he would make some snide, goofy comment. Then he would research.
And I knew exactly where to start: ship speeds. I went to Google, hoping someone somewhere on the planet was also curious about the speeds of big whaling vessels that also just so happened to be around 200 years old. I tried “How fast do whaling ships go?” and found myself confronted with some disturbing facts: whaling was still happening. Not only was it happening, but the few rules governing whaling were being actively ignored by a number of whalers around the world. I ended up completely distracted, wondering why exactly whaling had been so prevalent for so long.
Here’s what I found:
1. Oil. The oil could be used in lamps and machinery.
2. Ambergris. This was found in the whale’s digestive system. It was used in perfumes.
3. Baleen. This is the hair inside the whale’s mouth that filters krill. After the whale is killed, its baleen is used to make whips and corsets.
So there. Whales were hunted by the captain and then their “stuff” was sold off to merchants who used it to make whips, corsets and perfumes. Good thing, too. What would we have done without those items in our daily lives, right?
And then the captain used the money to repair his old ship. His sailors, cursed and unable to escape, did the captain’s bidding while the shadows clung ever tighter to their bodies.
“Focus!” I scolded myself, going back to Google. I tried “How fast does a pirate ship go?” this time, and—surprise, surprise!—it turned out a lot of people were curious about how fast a 17th or 18th century pirate ship might travel.
The answers on each web page varied, but they all gave me a rough estimate of 8 knots per hour for a ship from the early 19th century. That was enough for me to go on. Now I just had to figure out how the ship was traveling, if it was indeed making its way from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Michigan to catch the magic fish.
I searched for “Distance from Atlantic Ocean to Lake Michigan” and got a lot of hooey … until I came across a site for the St. Lawrence Seaway. Not only did the site show exactly how a ship traveled from the Atlantic Ocean and through The Great Lakes, it gave me the nautical distance from the city of Montreal to Milwaukee: 1909 kilometers.
“Holy crud!” I exclaimed. I was doing it. I was figuring this all out on my own. “Now … uh, what the heck is a knot?”
I searched for a definition and got it simply enough: one knot is equal to 1.852 kilometers per hour. Which meant 8 knots was about 14.8 kilometers per hour.
“This would be so much easier if we learned kilometers instead of miles,” I muttered, clearing my calculator so I could do one more calculation:
1909 kilometers divided by 14.8 kilometers per hour.
About 129 hours.
I raised my arms in celebration. Oh, how my junior-year algebra teacher would scream in triumph if he could see me now. I was using math. I was using math to track down a terrible whaling ship with a Corrupted captain who had every intention of capturing a magical fish.
OK. So maybe I wouldn’t be able to tell my math teacher everything, but if I ever passed him in the hall I would at the very least thank him for drilling basic math skills into my brain.
The phone rang. It was Seth. I grabbed my phone and hit the green “talk” button.
“Hello!” I exclaimed.
“Woah. Why are you so excited? You’re suspended.”
“I just used math!”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Wait! What’s going on?”
“Oh nothing,” he said. “Just wondering if you’ve … um, you know … talked to Trish at all.”
“Not really,” I answered. “We talked a little right before that idiot Joey Harrington tried grabbing my hair. We were arguing about who I should date.”
“She didn’t …” He cleared his throat. “Um, she didn’t mention if she was dating anyone, did she?”
Oh crap. My mind raced. What to say? I couldn’t lie to him. He was my best friend. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, either. And what if Trish wanted to keep it a secret?
“Look,” I said, swallowing hard. “You and Trish are both my friends. I think you guys should both leave me out of it, OK? Otherwise, I could end up with just one friend or no friends, and I don’t want that.”
There was silence for a moment. Finally, Seth sighed into the phone. “You’re right. I’ve gotta just deal with this on my own. It just totally sucks, that’s all. And I can’t even come visit you because you’re under arrest.”
I laughed. “I have a job for you, if you want.”
“Yes. Definitely. Anything to get
me thinking about something else.”
“I need you to go to the Washington High baseball game tonight.”
He made a gagging noise. “What for? Wasn’t it bad enough I had to sit through the hour-long pep rally this morning? Seriously, you’d think Chase was some kind of rock star or something the way they played up his triumphant return.”
“That’s why I need your help. I have a feeling he’s …” Oh geez, how to explain this one? “I have a feeling he’s under the spell of a Corrupted.”
“What? Weird! What kind of Corrupted?”
“A fish.”
“Oh. That’s not as scary as I expected.”
“Will you please just ask him?”
Seth laughed. “Ask him what, exactly? Whether he’s under the spell of a fish?”
“Yes.”
He was silent a moment. “If someone overhears, this is totally going to eliminate what little social status I have. Can’t you just call him?”
I could. I had. The truth was I’d called him a dozen times without an answer. “Just keep an eye on him,” I offered. “Don’t ask him anything. Just make sure nothing weird happens.”
“And if something weird does happen, I’ll just step in and save the day,” he said with more than a hint of sarcasm.
“I know you’re ready to take this risk. Thanks, Seth.”
“Yeah. Oh hey, wait! Have you seen Briar? I’m worried about him.”
My heart sank. “He hasn’t been around for a few days.”
“Yeah, it’s weird. We were going to play Risk and eat marshmallows this week, but I haven’t seen him.”
“You two play Risk together?” I had to admit, I was a little jealous.
“Just let him know I’m, um …” He paused. “Ah, crap. I’m a little lonely.”
I nearly cried. He sounded so sad that it was jarring—I hadn’t heard Sad Seth in years and years.
“But don’t tell him I’m lonely,” Seth added. “Because then I’d seem like a total dork. Just tell him I want to play Risk.”
“I’ll tell him. I promise.”
I hung up and looked down at my crude map I’d drawn of the Great Lakes. It was possible the ship could be anywhere. I needed to figure out how much time I had. I needed to get aboard. I needed to take down both of these Corrupted somehow. Maybe I could trick the captain to catch the fish for me … or maybe I could corner Chase and convince him to …
To what? Give up his wishes? Go back to the wheelchair just so I could kill the fish? Gawd, the entire situation was already insane enough. How would I explain to Chase that maybe his wish to walk again wasn’t such a good idea after all? That I might be the one to take it away from him?
That evening, my parents had calmed down enough that I could at the very least make it through a dinner of beef stew without getting grilled about whether I was transforming into some sort of deviant gang leader. Mom was less hysterical. Dad seemed genuinely regretful about yelling at me; not enough to un-ground me, though.
And so I was forced to wait. In my room. With nothing but homework to keep me busy. I put the finishing touches on my paper on Thomas Jefferson, then spent a solid hour studying Genetics.
My mind wandered again and again outside my room. Somewhere, Chase was no doubt playing some of the best baseball of his life. But was there some kind of catch? When the captain of the Leviathan caught his fish, would the wishes be reversed? Briar would have had answers.
“Briar,” I whispered, staring out the window. Outside, brown leaves fluttered across the lawn.
The phone call came at nearly eleven o’clock.
“Well, I’m officially an outsider,” Seth mumbled instead of a “Hello.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I’d given up on finding a man-sized rabbit scurrying between the houses, instead burying myself in Genetics. I returned to my bed, tugging nervously on a stray hair.
“I mean Trish is totally ignoring me, none of her friends will even look at me, and it’s entirely possible that the baseball team plans on beating me up at some point in the near future.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, nothing. I just made the mistake of trying to talk to Chase before the game started. Apparently that’s, like, really bad luck. If you ask me, they should be thanking me given how he played.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He batted four times. He hit four home runs. I’m not sure how up-to-date you are on sports, but four home runs in one game is pretty ridiculous awesome.”
“His wish came true,” I whispered.
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Thanks for trying, Seth. I’ll call you soon.”
I hung up, anxious for once to get to bed. I needed answers. I needed more details. I couldn’t get the image from last night out of my head: Chase, walking down the pier … and collapsing.
Chapter 6
When I finally drifted off to sleep—after about two hours of tossing and turning—I found myself once again at the docks in Milwaukee. I floated south, moving through each of the warehouse buildings along the lake. Small waves lapped at them and splashed water upward in a wide arc. I tried to will my feet to touch the ground but they refused, and I found myself floating toward the very same old wooden pier at the south end.
Chase was there again.
“Fish!” he called out, clutching the last support beam of the dock. He was still wearing his baseball jersey. His number—12—was cut in half by a streak of dirt.
“Chase,” I whispered. “Don’t do it. Something’s not right about all this!”
This time, he didn’t turn around. “Fish!” he called out again.
A little glowing head popped out of the dark water in front of the pier. It was the fish, all right, but something was different—not only did his head look waaaay too big to fit in the little bowl in my closet, it look misshapen, too, as if he’d been made out of clay and then dropped onto a tile floor.
“Now what is it, boy?” he asked.
“I want to be the best baseball player in the entire state,” Chase said.
“Oh really?” the fish asked. “Why stop there, boy? Why not be the best baseball player in the world? Oh, but then of course there’s always the chance of some other planet’s team to threaten your superiority, no? So why not be the best baseball player in the universe?”
“Just do it,” Chase said in a low growl. “And remember who freed you.”
“I remember,” the fish said, nodding his misshapen head so that it bobbed in the water. A big wave rolled over him, hitting the end of the dock with a frightening clack. A terrible wind was blowing in from the east. “How can I forget? You pester me so. Very well, boy. Your wish is granted. Will you be able to find peace now?”
Chase turned away from the end of the pier, walking past me with that same terrible smile on his face.
“Will you be satisfied now?” the fish called out. “With all that you have? Or will you desire more and more until your selfish desires consume all that you’ve stood for?”
Chase stopped. His knee buckled and he nearly fell again. The evil smile melted away and, for just a moment, he looked terribly afraid.
I tried to moved closer but my body refused, lifting me high into the air. I began floating quickly over the water, leaving behind the eastern shoreline of Milwaukee. In just moments, I was alone again with nothing but the lake in every direction. The cool wind rushed across my face.
I was alone. Again. Boy, if ever there was a metaphor that fit my life at that exact moment …
“Can’t I at least have the moon?” I called out breathlessly, searching the dark water below for the reflection of moonlight. Just a hint that there was something else. Because that’s what we need. We need hope. Hope can give us strength even when we’re surrounded by dark water.
It was another handful of tense, solitary moments before something popped up on the horizon. A light. Then another. Then more. I felt myself slowing down as I flew closer and close
r. I could make out a dark object in the water, and its shape was recognizable enough.
The Leviathan.
Her—ships are always girls, right?—bowsprit was pointed at me like an accusing finger. On one side were two smaller boats, hitched to the ship. The two tall masts jutted up to the sky. One was slightly crooked, as if it had been damaged at some point and then repaired in a hurry.
The ship was “parked” at a dock that ran parallel with the shore. Lights hanging from the exterior of the large warehouses beside the docks bathed the ship in a yellowish glow. So the Leviathan docked somewhere. But where?
I landed on the deck of the ship. Hard. I used the railing of the bulwark to pull myself to my feet, then immediately stepped aside as one of the shadowy sailors walked past. He narrowed his pitch-black eyes at me, skulking toward the hold.
The sails were tied tight to the masts. Long, thick ropes were tied around the bulwarks, tied down to the pier below. A wooden plank connected the deck of the ship to the pier, and a section of the bulwark had been removed so the shadowy men could step off the ship.
They walked quickly. I stood beside the plank, watching them take turns grabbing wet, woolen sacks of fish that were pulled up from the open hatch in the deck. The iron winch had been pulled away from the port side of the ship and was now beside the hatch, pulling up each sack of fish. The shadowy figures took turns grabbing a sack, hefting it over their shoulders, then walking down the plank onto the pier. When they moved past me, I could hear the fish shifting inside the sack. More than a little foul-smelling water leaked out from the bottom, running down each sailor’s back.
“Make way!” one of the sailors called out from atop the captain’s cabin.
I turned back to the pier. A middle-aged man smoking a cigarette stepped onto the wooden plank, walking cautiously up to the deck. The pier looked new, made of smooth concrete that was soaked wet in a few places by the sacks of fish that were being carried ashore and into a well-lit warehouse with the number “7” painted above its loading doors in bright red paint. Floodlights illuminated the warehouse’s exterior, but the port looked otherwise deserted.