The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  I’m going to fly, I think.

  The tech helps me into the harness, thinner than I expect, but sturdy and complicated, crisscrossed with nylon straps and thick buckles. John complains the harness chafes. The tech’s hands are a blur, buckling here, threading there, and then I’m strapped in, ready to fly.

  Some of the Lost Boys and Tiger Lily’s tribe are funneling out now, with their moms or their nannies, watching me, confused, because they’ve been told a thousand times that flying’s only for principals, it’s not a toy. Isla and I wave to each other. Milo’s with her, too. He’s sixteen and plays Michael. The three of us have been hanging out more.

  The wires I’m connected to are sturdy, thick metal. As soon as I got cast, Sam got a book out of the library on flight, because that’s what he does—he reads. We both love da Vinci’s ornithopter, a flying machine based on the ribbing of bat wings. The da Vinci drawings are sketchy, red and brown ink. Flimsy and pretty. None of them worked. These cables that I’m clipped to now aren’t pretty, but when you look close, they’re made of thinner moon-silver cables all twisted together like a ropy medieval braid, or DNA, and when the lights hit the wires a certain way, there’s a definite sparkle there—

  “You can hold on to the wires,” the tech calls from the wings, “they’re not going to break.”

  One tug—

  I hover, gripping the wires—

  Two tugs—

  I hold my breath, like I’m diving—

  And then I’m zooming up, into the sky, the stage lights are suns and the seats are mountains, I’m Icarus with metal wings, I can stay up here as long as I want; Isla waves, I can see the part in her hair, and the Lost Boys are really lost now—

  I swing left and right, the harness pinches but who even cares about the chafing—John’s such a whiner! I point my toes, hold my legs in an arabesque, the buckles click-clack and it’s the best noise I’ve heard. I land on the mantel like Peter (I really have memorized the aerography)—

  Isla whoops in the audience and I let go of the wires. I’m holding on to nothing now. I’m seized with a sudden urge to sing, so I do. Peter’s song, my voice, my song, bursts out of me, and the near-empty theater explodes with music and words of soaring, and flying, and higher and higher, and if I had my choice, I wouldn’t ever come down. The last words I belt in a breathless rush:

  follow all the air ’cause I’m about to disappear I’m flying

  My toes skim the stage floor, my knees weak like when I got caught in a riptide last summer. The director looks at me like it’s for the first time. Then he smiles and says, “You’re going to make audiences very happy one day.”

  When I meet up with Isla, she kisses me on the cheek and tells me I’m a star, that I should’ve seen the look on Milo’s face.

  That’s when I know: my performance will dazzle my family into happiness.

  Opening night, an unseasonal heat wave strikes. The radio issues warnings for the elderly, citing last year’s death toll. I worry about my parents. Sam is even more irritable than usual. Mom thinks he has reverse seasonal affective disorder. The school called last week about an outburst. They’ve been calling about my grades, too.

  The theater is a blistering inferno. They use special primer for our makeup and an extra-strong hair spray. The twigs’ll take years to pull out. Isla and I watch the audience gather on the TV screens downstairs. She’s started touching me more, bumping my hip, telling me where to get waxes. I like her in the worst way, where I want to crawl into her skin.

  “Violet. Break a leg.” It’s Milo. We’ve been talking more. He just got cast as Anna’s son in The King and I, but made me promise to keep it secret.

  “Somebody likes you,” Isla whispers. “He’s cute, too.”

  Isla’s lips on my ear set off faraway whistles. I shiver.

  Two Lost Boys sprint by. One of them has a ring of chocolate around his lips, leftover from that disgusting pudding. The other one Isla has a crush on. She even told me he had a cute ass, which I didn’t even know was a thing you were supposed to say.

  “Isla,” that one says, “you gotta come see. This kid is like freaking out upstairs. Like screaming and pounding the floor and shit. Like, he won’t move and they can’t get the show started because he’s blocking the aisles. They’re calling security.”

  There’s a plummeting in my body.

  “Come on, Violet,” Isla says, but I stay.

  I’ve seen that show enough times to have it memorized. My mom’s wrong: this isn’t just middle school, and life will not be easier after Peter Pan.

  My mom and Sam miss opening night. Onstage, we build a lovely little house for Wendy, and with the rest of the Lost Boys, I step-ball-change with brooms and help make a sloppy bed. Peter rhapsodizes about pockets, and I fluff fake-moss pillows. We won’t be lonely anymore. I don’t miss a single, meaningless beat.

  We build the same stage-magic house we build every night, this fake house full of fake shit that I, stupidly, foolishly, believed would save my very real family.

  I’m supposed to go meet my family upstairs, but I’ve still got all these twigs in my hair, and I’m wondering if it’s really possible to run away and join the circus when I hear my name. Violet. It’s Milo, sticking his head out of a dark dressing room. He’s holding Mrs. Darling’s mug. “C’mere,” he says.

  Mrs. Darling’s mug is full of vodka. Milo and I take turns drinking from it, sitting on a couch in the empty dressing room dark. We drain the whole thing. My lips sting. My scalp hurts from the twigs. Vodka feels like the faint hum of bees in my throat. I keep licking the edge of the mug, not for the taste, which is horrible, but for the sting. I like the sting. Milo doesn’t notice. He won’t stop yammering about The King and I.

  “Being small for your age is a real advantage in this business,” he says, like he’s the authority. “No offense.”

  None taken. I already know I’m too tall, too big. The costume manager binds my boobs before each performance. Nothing to be done about my hips, she said. Everything about me is wrong wrong wrong. I lick the edge of the mug.

  “You could play…like…”

  “I don’t give a fuck about theater,” I say. Isla says that sometimes, and it’s funny, but from my mouth, it sounds mean.

  “I mean…” Milo’s scrambling now, and I like it. Watching him flounder makes me feel powerful. “You’re, like, gorgeous. You don’t even, like, need theater. You’re that kind of pretty.”

  “Shut up,” I say. “Really?” What I don’t ask: I don’t even need theater for what?

  “Uh-huh. Everyone says so. Even Captain Hook.”

  I can tell I’m supposed to find this flattering. Captain Hook has the hairiest arms I’ve ever seen. I imagine him sitting next to me instead of Milo and feel a little scared.

  “Violet,” Milo says, “can I kiss you?”

  “Sure,” I say, rolling my eyes like I’ve done it a million times, even though it’s my first.

  Then we’re kissing. First one. That’s it? I open my eyes and almost laugh because he’s so dumb-looking he should see his own face. He tries to put a hand through my hair but can’t with the twigs, so he just kind of cradles my head like a helmet. I tell myself to feel. I think about Isla and the overturned glass, but that’s wrong, don’t want to think about her, she’s too special, she belongs in another brain, a second brain for all my sacred thoughts.

  The kissing starts to feel good.

  I like kissing Milo. I like it a lot.

  Kissing Milo feels, like, really good.

  I want more. I want years and years and years of this.

  I’m on top of him then, flattening the length of my body against his, like I studied once in a movie, only the girl was meant to be on the bottom. My hips make hula-hoop circles, a mind of their own. I want this, I want more.

  And then I’m away from him so suddenly that Milo kisses air with his eyes closed, looking dopey and vulnerable.

  “I’m twelve,” I say. In m
y memory, I’m sitting now, hugging my knees, but the thing is I don’t remember moving. All we did was kiss. So why am I so scared?

  Milo scrambles up to sit. He doesn’t like what he’s heard. “I thought you were Isla’s age,” he says, like I’ve betrayed him.

  “I’m almost thirteen.” I sound scared, too. I’m shaking. But I don’t want to stop. I want to keep going. I think.

  “You’re twelve,” he says, “and you kiss like that?”

  Milo wipes his mouth with the back of his hand because kissing like that is not a good thing. Kissing me is gross and weird.

  “I have to go,” he says. He sounds even more scared than I am. I scared him.

  “Bye,” I say, like I’m cool.

  Alone, I run my hand around the inside of Mrs. Darling’s mug and lick my fingers, trying to get the sting back. I’m twelve, and I kiss like that. How would it be different if I were thirteen? Seventeen? How was I supposed to kiss?

  I’m starting to feel a little sick. Bees are prickling in my brain. Is this what they mean, when they say buzzed? I list things in the room to remind myself where I am. I’m holding Mrs. Darling’s empty mug. I’m in my street clothes. These are my shoes. There are sticks in my hair. I’m steady. In the mirror, I look the same, even though I know I’m different. My insides are a twister. I change the settings on the vanity, I get so close up that my face fuzzes out.

  My parents are waiting for me upstairs. We’re going to miss our dinner reservation. That’s fine. Sam won’t eat anything anyway. Soon he’ll up therapy to three times a week, start on meds, ace his classes. Come fall, I’ll hang out with Isla once or twice, but she’ll bring her boyfriend, and it’ll be so awkward that I’ll cry in the bathroom and make some excuse to go home early. I’ll bounce back strong, start going to parties where people are left breathless by the way I kiss, people who don’t wipe their mouth like I am an ugly curse.

  My hair looks kind of cool with those twigs.

  I hate Milo. I hope he gets hit by a bus.

  “I am Oz, the great and powerful,” I say, lips against the mirror. “Ozzz.”

  I buzz like a bee, because I’m alone, and I’m mean, and I can. In the mirror, I pull my face steady, ice cold, and in a blink, I’m a marble statue, like at the Met. I make another face and I’m a blue-and-gold night, smeary constellations. Tourists will crowd around me and fight to take my picture, flashes like galaxies. Another face, another, another—

  I’m me again. Sort of. I’m me and all the things, too. Me, boy, girl. Him, you. Powerful beautiful it. I kiss like that, like it’s a gift and a curse. I leave behind a wake of splintered wood and broken buildings and scared, know-nothing boys.

  TREASURES OF ATLANTIS

  Orion didn’t bring up singing again that week, and I was grateful. Instead, I had him arrange my meeting with Liv, following up on Mariah’s tip about the supposed Lyric porthole. Saturday afternoon, Liv was waiting for me outside Treasures of Atlantis to investigate. It was kind of fun, getting together without a phone: each time we actually met up seemed a small miracle.

  “Shall we?” she said. She pushed open the door, the bell tinkled, and I squinted like a reflex against the barrage of crystals and clutter and the silver science whirligigs. The Wonder Emporium was a just-as-crowded, fancier version of Toby’s house, part new age, part antiques, and you could spend a lot of time and money here. My mom hated it.

  “Friends!” Felix’s voice came from the depths. “May you find everything you didn’t know you needed! I’m back here, with the ship shit!”

  “How does he know it’s us?” I asked Liv.

  “He’s probably been saying that to everyone who’s come in for the past hour,” she said.

  We twisted through slim aisles, careful not to knock anything over, until we spotted Felix, among lights in brass cages with red and blue lenses, an actual steering wheel—a helm, rather—and rusted metal bells that came up to my hip, all dredged from the sea. Felix pointed above a Liv-size wooden mermaid that leaned haphazardly against the wall, and there was the golden porthole labeled NOT FOR SALE.

  “My dad’s luckiest find. He was metal detecting at Seal Cove. Now, admittedly, we are amateur historians—and, like, don’t go spreading it around, because metal detecting at Seal Cove’s illegal—but we believe this comes from the Lyric. The make is consistent with what would have been found on the ship.”

  The porthole was a perfect brass circle. This had been on the ship with Fidelia. Maybe she’d even looked out this window, watched the blinding wall of white bear down on her, rubbed off condensation from the peculiar haze. I’d considered showing Liv the letter, but reading it had felt so personal. I wanted it to be just mine.

  “We have to go to that beach,” I said to Liv.

  “And do what? Deep dives to the bottom of the ocean?”

  “Maybe there’s more debris!”

  “I can get you the shop’s metal detector,” Felix offered. “It’s a little wonky, but…”

  “You just said it’s illegal,” said Liv.

  “But if it’s illegal to look there, maybe the ship’s been hiding in plain sight, for years, like that Revolutionary War ship you mentioned. Seriously! It doesn’t hurt to look. Another artifact could confirm the ship’s location. Why not? Next weekend?”

  “You’ve created a wreck-hunting monster, Liv,” Felix said.

  “This is what I get for asking people to consider things a metaphor,” she muttered, but I could tell she was pleased.

  I considered the porthole, tugging on the watch around my neck. I’d been wearing it since I’d found it in my mom’s jewelry box, fiddling with the charms when I was thinking.

  “That’s quite a necklace, Violet,” Felix said.

  “It was my mom’s. It’s lucky, supposedly.”

  “Emeralds are usually cursed,” Felix said.

  “Oh. I meant the watch. And it’s not an emerald. It’s fake.”

  “Trust me,” Felix said, tapping the space beneath his eye. “I know glass, and that is not glass.”

  “No way,” Liv said.

  Horrified, I ripped the necklace over my head. The green jewel knotted tightly in the chain sparkled back at me, looking suddenly realer and heavier that it had before.

  “Holy shit,” I said, “I’ve cleaned tanks in this necklace.”

  “Can I see?” Felix asked, holding out his hand.

  “Definitely.” I wanted to get that necklace as far away from me as possible.

  “Tarnished,” Felix said, clucking his tongue. “But there’s a great design under here. You want me to polish this for you?”

  “That’d be great.”

  “For a price.” He looked at me hopefully. “One tea-leaf guinea pig?”

  The last thing I wanted was an amateur clairvoyant poking around my brain, discovering my failed romantical foray with Orion. Liv claimed she wasn’t interested in him, but my non-kiss with her nonboyfriend wasn’t exactly a moment I wanted to advertise.

  “I’ll do it,” Liv offered.

  “I did your tarot a few weeks ago,” Felix said. “You’re not supposed to overdo someone’s future. It dilutes the power of the reading. Besides, Violet, didn’t you use to steal shit from the store? You owe me.”

  I groaned. “I really hate tea.”

  Felix clapped and disappeared through the aisles. “I’ll put the kettle on,” we heard. Liv pawed through a nearby tin of old postcards.

  “Jesus,” I said, “I really had no idea that was an emerald.”

  “Lucky you, I guess,” Liv said. Her voice was a little brittle, I thought—or maybe that was in my head. She passed me a stack of cards. “These are silly,” she said.

  I flipped through them: women dressed as mermaids and posing on rocks, women swimming underwater, 1950s pinup girls with red lips, glistening scaled tails, and butter-yellow bathing suits. There was a note on the back of one in faded pencil.

  Dear Stan, Caught this show at Weeki Wachee, hope Minnie’s fe
eling better, we’re sending you our love. Lois and Bill.

  “I always thought mermaids would be more vicious,” Liv said, passing me the tin. “Green skin. Sharp teeth. Not quite so…”

  “Hot?”

  “Sure,” she said, betraying nothing. There were a few more Weeki Wachee postcards, and I took them, plus a few extras to send to Sam, my parents, maybe. Maybe to Toby, when I got back this fall.

  “What does it say about me, that I’m a sucker for ladies with scales?” I said.

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “Maybe I’ve just developed a fish fetish after all that time in the aquarium.”

  “Maybe.” Liv cleared her throat. “Violet, can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Forgive me if I’m prying…but…would you say you’re…”

  Let me be perfectly clear: I knew exactly what Liv wanted to ask. I knew the moment she passed me the picture of the pinup mermaid. What was more: I wanted her to ask. Because I wanted to ask her the same question.

  “Would I say I’m…” I prompted.

  “I mean. How do you orient yourself? Toward others. In terms of attraction?”

  “Are you asking me men or women?”

  “If I’m prying…”

  “I’m teasing you.”

  “Oh. That’s very annoying. What’s next, pulling my pigtail?”

  She looked surprised at herself and quickly became busy straightening the lamps on a shelf into a neat row, dusting them with her fingertips.

  “I’m whatever,” I said. “Mostly boys in New York. But if a girl like that came along”—here I gestured to the mermaid—“ten out of ten. Who wouldn’t?”

  I watched Liv’s face for a hiccup—a turn toward me, a turn away—

  “I know plenty of people in Lyric, Maine, who wouldn’t,” she said, betraying nothing.

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s fine. I’m not mad at you.”

  She might not have been mad, but she was right. I was lucky. I went through life assuming that everyone else was in my boat. My comparative yacht, I realized, thinking guiltily of the emerald.