The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  “I guess so,” Orion said quietly. He gestured at the shrimp. “You can bring those down after you finish dicing, okay?”

  With that, he left. Boris trailed after him, woofing in disapproval. First day, and I’d managed to offend even the dog.

  It took me an embarrassingly long time to dice the shrimp. I found Orion downstairs at the touch tank with one arm in water up to his elbow. Boris lay at his feet with his head on Orion’s sneaker.

  “I didn’t know with the shells…” I said, placing the bucket beside him.

  “You did fine,” he said. With his bare hand, he took a shrimp between his fingers like a cigarette and returned his hand to the water. The rays flocked to him, flapping at the tank’s lip, splashing water over the side with their wings. They’d been the Eeyores of the sea world an hour ago, but now, with Orion, they looked almost mammalian, like a pack of tail-wagging golden retrievers.

  “They love you,” I said, standing next to him awkwardly.

  “They’re fish. They only love me for my food,” Orion said shortly. I’d known him only a few moments, but I recognized thin skin when I saw it. I’d grown up with my brother, after all.

  “About what I said…this seems like a great place to work.” God, even when I was trying, I sounded sarcastic. My mom was right: I did have to work on my tone.

  “I’m sorry,” I tried again. “I think I’m really nervous.”

  Not perfect, but better. Truer, at least.

  “It’s cool,” Orion said in a detached way that indicated just how deeply uncool I’d been. “I want to study marine biology in college. So. This is a good place to start. And money’s tight, but we’re applying for grants and stuff, and Joan’s been really supportive of me. She doesn’t let on, but she’s kind of a bigwig in the science world. She’s gonna write me a rec for college.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yup.”

  We watched the rays in silence. Boris thumped his tail. The bubblers in the tanks whirred; upstairs, I heard Joan’s footsteps creaking. Talking with a new person was so hard without a drink.

  “Do these guys have names?” I finally asked.

  “Not officially.”

  “But unofficially?”

  Orion finally looked up from the rays.

  “You really want to know?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay,” he said, inhaling, a little hesitant, maybe a little embarrassed. “The darker guys are bat rays. That’s Billy Ray Cyrus and Rachael Ray. That big tan one is Ray Charles. She’s Raven-Symoné.”

  “Who’s that far one? Ray J?”

  Orion shook his head. “Sting.”

  I laughed so loud that Boris yelped. Orion patted him on the head.

  “Who’s this guy?” I said as a large sandy one silked near us—indistinguishable, as far as I could tell, from Sting and Raven-Symoné.

  “This is Link Wray.”

  “Like the guitarist?”

  “You know Link Wray?” Orion sounded impressed. Good. Thanks to an appreciation for bad wordplay and my dad’s record collection, I was beginning to climb my way out of the hole.

  “You can pet them,” Orion said. “Two fingers. That’s what we tell the kiddos.”

  My fingers had barely skimmed the surface, when Billy Ray and Rachael Ray scattered. Sting all but pulled a U-turn to avoid me. I tried not to interpret ray rejection as a sign of how I’d fare with Orion.

  “You need one named Famous Original Ray’s Pizza,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A New York thing. They’re all over the city, in different iterations. People kept stealing the name, wanting to pass off Ray’s pizza as their own. Ray’s Original. Ray’s Pizza. Ray’s Famous. Original Ray’s.” I could keep going. Pizza had been my favorite drunken delight during my Year of Wild.

  “Some urban mimicry right there.”

  “Come again?”

  “Mimicry. Like, a striped octopus mimics the sea snake. For protection, not selling pizza, but the idea’s the same. I’ll show you a video sometime.”

  He lowered another shrimp in the water; either Rachael Ray or Billy Ray swooped toward him. I studied his inner arm, the small tattoo that was half-submerged in the tank: five horizontal lines, crossing through an open circle. I had my own stick-and-poke UFO on my rib cage, done by a friend in her kitchen in Brooklyn while her mom made us tacos.

  “Is your tattoo a whole note?” I asked.

  “Oh. Yeah.” He wiped his hand dry on his jeans.

  “And Link Wray—are you into music?”

  “Yeah. Let’s talk about your training.”

  Tattoo = highly classified information. Noted, no pun intended.

  “I’m gonna start you off in the gift shop,” he said. “Can you work a cash register?”

  “Sure,” I lied. I didn’t want him thinking I was any more of a dumb turista than he already did. How hard could it be?

  In my first day at the gift shop—which was a fairly slow day, I might add—I interrupted Orion eight times for help. Eight. I didn’t know how to run a credit card, nor did I know how to take the membership discount. No, I didn’t know if we had those Louise the Lobster sweatshirts in other sizes, let me ask Orion. I accidentally charged a beleaguered dad three times for a stuffed clown fish, then somehow managed to lock the register with his credit card inside it.

  “So, when you said you could work a cash register…” Orion said, punching buttons to fix my mistake. The small child screamed.

  “Excuse me,” the dad asked, “but where’s the penguin exhibit?”

  Orion, for his part, was the prince of the aquarium. From my perch at the cash register, I learned he had an endless well of patience for questions: did horseshoe crabs have stingers (“Nope—they use those tails to flip over if they get knocked on their backs”), or did sea monsters really exist (“Never say never”), or why didn’t the aquarium have sea otters (“Man, I wish we had them, too! They’re so cute!”). He showed kids how to pet the rays just as he’d shown me, and even held up one tiny boy who wasn’t tall enough to reach.

  In the afternoon, I spilled a fresh cup of coffee on a new box of stuffed sharks.

  “Shoot,” Orion breathed. “C’mon. I’ll show you where the mop is.”

  It is not an exaggeration to say that the most enjoyable part of the day was cleaning at the end of our shift. Orion put on Sam Cooke, one of my dad’s favorites, and whistled as he went about his closing tasks. I mopped like I’d never mopped before, scrubbing what felt like years’ worth of grime from the floor to songs I knew by heart. Maybe work wouldn’t be a complete disaster. At least I knew how to clean, and at least Orion had good taste in tunes.

  “Can I do anything else?” I asked Orion after I’d finished mopping.

  He was counting the money in the gift shop register, mumbling under his breath. The music was louder in the gift shop. Sam Cooke was singing about how his baby done gone away and left him. I wondered, briefly, if my mom missed me.

  “Orion?” I repeated.

  He turned and held my gaze. In his green-gray eyes, the evening took sudden shape. He was going to offer me a ride home. We’d stop for milkshakes, and he’d tell me the story of his tattoo. We’d engage in some strictly platonic and wholesome activity, like fly-fishing, or a trip to the hardware store. Shoot, he’d say, laughing at my hardware-themed puns, that was a good one.

  “Did you reset the totals on this drawer by accident?” he asked.

  Oh. Just kidding.

  “I’m not even sure I know what that means,” I admitted.

  “Never mind. It’s cool.”

  “I can help,” I said. I wanted so badly to be useful.

  “No, really,” he said. “You can really just go home. Really.”

  He didn’t have to say really a fourth time.

  I arrived home to find Toby hunched over his Wizard of Oz puzzle. “Care to lend an eye?” he asked, sweeping a hand over the heap of pieces.

  I sho
ok my head. My back hurt from mopping. My dreamy, off-limits superior thought I was a dope. I thought I was a dope. I missed Sam. I missed my parents. I didn’t want a puzzle: I wanted salt and limes and somebody else’s body. I wanted to forget myself the way I normally did—only, I was supposed to be different.

  “I might go for a walk on the beach,” I said.

  “Flora and fauna can be a balm.”

  The beach was no balm. It was low tide, smelled like sewage, and was littered with rusted cans of Polar Seltzer and smashed Shipyard beer bottles, plastic bags plastered to rocks, one water-swollen Nike sneaker. The beach had never been pristine, but the water had always been clean enough for underwater tea parties and breath-holding contests. Sam and I got so cold our skin turned blue, but Mom could swim all the way out to the buoys and back. “Hardy New England stock,” Dad said from shore, pulling his sweater tighter around him. He’d moved a lot as a kid—his explanation was always “my dad worked for General Motors”—but he’d lived the longest in Jacksonville, Florida, famous for strip malls, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and, apparently, the smell of paper mills. Whenever we complained about New York, he’d say, “Just remember, you could’ve grown up in a town that smells like sulfur and diapers.”

  Would I have been different if I’d grown up there?

  In March, I’d been caught smoking weed during the school day. Not on school grounds, but close enough that it mattered. Immediate suspension, and that went on my permanent transcript. Colleges looooove that. My parents, who’d been pretty preoccupied with Sam, who sometimes called me their “little experimenter,” did an about-face. Cue curfew, tattoo discovery, room cleanout. Screaming. Door slamming. All three of us trying to get the doormen on our team (Hector accepted my brownies, only to tattle on me that very night).

  And every night, March, April, May, Sam lurked in my doorway with some dumb excuse. “Do you have a pencil sharpener?” “Have you seen my watch?” Like I didn’t know exactly what he was after. He really thought he was going to make me feel better? Downtown was the only thing that made me feel better.

  “No,” I said. Then I closed the door so I wouldn’t have to see his face.

  I didn’t have to baby him anymore. He was doing better. He’d gained weight. He played Magic with that one kid—Tim, I think? He was crushing his classes, though that was standard. He’d talked about joining stage crew. What a turnaround, we all thought, right up till his big date with Tylenol.

  Sam had really needed the limelight, but my parents had their beam swiveled my way. And I was too busy throwing their love back in their faces to notice anything else.

  I took my shoes off to wade, but the ocean was too cold and too gray, too weedy. How had Fidelia survived this water in March, let alone walked from the beach to town? I stared out at the ocean, imagining her ship somewhere beneath. I wondered which wreck felt worse: hers or mine.

  Something in the sand caught my eye, opalescent and clawed. Abalone? A pearl? My breath caught. Maybe there was treasure on this beach. Maybe Sam and I hadn’t been wrong to think so. I dug with the edge of a mussel shell, taking care not to cut myself on its razor edge. Even just a pretty shell, maybe. All I wanted was one tiny, pretty thing.

  It was a tampon applicator, half-buried in the sand.

  Toby had passed out on the living room couch. I moved the blender/guinea pig combo, put a blanket on him, and left him a note: Violet would like to be alone right now but she wishes you luck with the puzzle. Tell her mom she’ll call her later. Signed, a ghost. PS that cinnamon bun was freaking delicious.

  THE WREXPERT

  The next morning, Joan was pissed about the coffee-covered sharks. Gift shop sales, particularly stuffed animals, brought in most of the aquarium’s money. I offered to pay, but she just shook her white-haired head at me.

  “Just ask for help with the register next time, okay? Me—Orion—anyone.”

  “I asked Orion.”

  “And he didn’t help you?”

  “No! He did.”

  “Not enough, then,” she said skeptically.

  “No, no, he was extremely helpful. I’m just inept.”

  Joan frowned. “Violet, some professional advice. ‘I’m inept’ is a phrase I never want to hear from an employee. I’m sure most bosses would agree.”

  She, Orion, and Boris spent a good twenty minutes in her office after that. I busied myself with the crossword and prayed no one would come in, because I still didn’t know the price of a ticket.

  “Did I get you in trouble?” I asked Orion when he reappeared.

  “Nah. I should have trained you better. Let’s go over the cash register, okay?”

  He taught me. The lesson was disappointingly professional. He was so upset. I bet he never got in trouble.

  “Don’t let the man get you down, Orion.”

  “Joan’s right. And I’m pretty sure I am ‘the man.’”

  “Wanna arm-wrestle for it?” I elbowed him, but he just looked down at my puzzle. I had the upper left, but after that, I was stuck. This was the point, normally, where I’d ask my mom or Sam for help.

  “If you know one, shout it out,” I said.

  “You should probably…like…save that for your break,” Orion said. “You can read the info packet if we’re slow, okay?”

  I slipped the crossword into my back pocket. Truly, the least I could do.

  Orion more or less monosyllabic’d me for the remainder of the week, which was fair. Left to my own devices, I learned a lot about the Bermuda Triangle from the info packet and named the cash register Scrooge McDuck.

  Friday night, I cleaned extra hard and slow, resisting my release into the world. It was my first real weekend in Lyric, and I had no plans and no friends. In New York, Friday night meant a flurry of texts and a train ride downtown, for sake-bombing, maybe, or concerts in Brooklyn, or to the bar that didn’t card. Maybe we’d meet some NYU kids and they’d invite us back to their party. The beer was bad, but that wasn’t the point.

  I didn’t miss any of it, but I also missed all of it.

  I sprayed Windex on the glass History of Lyric display and wiped down the photograph of my great-great-great-grandparents. Their clean, shiny faces stared back at me, young-looking but wise. I leaned in close to them, and whispered: “What do you think, Fidelia? How long did it take you to feel happy here?”

  “Who’re you talking to?”

  I whirled. Orion had crept up on me.

  “No one. The photograph. Can’t a girl commune with her ancestors in peace?”

  “Ancestors?”

  “They were my great-great-great-grandparents. Didn’t Joan tell you?”

  “She did not,” Orion said. His eyes were suddenly wide. “You’re related to them?”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “That’s sort of awesome.”

  “I had nothing to do with it.” I resumed my cleaning, embarrassed to have been caught talking to a plaque.

  “Hey. Listen.”

  I looked back, and Orion was fiddling with the carabiner on which he kept his keys. I wondered if he rock climbed, or if he just had it to look cool. Who was I kidding? Of course he rock climbed.

  “Are you doing anything tonight?” he asked.

  I almost dropped my Windex. I beg your pardon? How did we move so swiftly from “Can you please save your crosswords for your break?” to “Hey, Violet, let’s hang”?

  “I have this friend. She’s super into Lyric history. You wouldn’t want to come meet her, would you?”

  How silly of me. Orion wanted to impress a girl. Of course.

  Even though I was lonely, I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be paraded around as show-and-tell to help Orion get laid. Then again, my alternative was puzzling with Toby, who started so early at the bakery that he’d be asleep by seven, leaving me alone with my terrible drafts to Sam.

  “She’s really nice,” Orion said. “And for what it’s worth, I’d really appreciate it.”

  “All right.
Fine. But Fidelia and Ransome are pretty much just names to me. If your friend’s looking for insider info, I’ve got nothing.”

  “Totally fine,” Orion said. “Your presence will be more than enough.”

  I wished he didn’t look so good when he grinned.

  Allow me a quick primer on the history of Lyric, Maine—at least what I knew before Orion introduced me to his friend Liv Stone.

  Most of my information was family lore, recited anecdotally by my parents and gathered over many years. My parents themselves had relied on my grandmother’s stories and the town’s general knowledge, which is all to say I wasn’t provided with a bibliography for the following.

  Nevertheless: In 1885, my great-great-great-grandmother on my mother’s side, Miss Fidelia Rudolph, née Hathaway, boarded the steamship Lyric for passage from London to Boston. A March nor’easter sank the ship off the Maine coast. Fidelia was the wreck’s sole survivor, though it took a while for that to actually be revealed.

  See, when Fidelia washed up on shore, she didn’t go running into town screaming, “Guys, I’m lucky and I persevered!” Instead, she disguised herself as a boy and found work running errands in the house of Ransome Rudolph, my soon-to-be ancestral grandfather. I suppose he eventually discovered she was a woman, because, next thing you know, they were married. Together they made the town official, naming it Lyric after her sunken ship. Then they started laying the groundwork for their long line of descendants, that pesky shipwreck gene popping up every now and then.

  Since the Lyric sank, there had been a few efforts to locate the ship. Theories held that the wreck lay in the outer islands somewhere, but what with unpredictable tides and lack of funding, there hadn’t been any serious attempt at discovery. The Lyric may have mattered to this one town, but the wreck wasn’t exactly the Titanic. Frankly, no one really cared that much. Their Love Was Our Beginning was where the story started and ended for most people.

  Except my brother and me, ages seven and eight; and Liv Stone, age seventeen.