Page 3 of Crashing Tides

Gretchen is silent a long moment, mulling over her next words. She never wants to talk about the tumor, just my mom. “She’d be proud of you, you know. You got that degree and graduated a whole year early. She used to brag about how smart you were when you were little.” She grins, and I catch the corners of my mouth lifting involuntarily.

I finished my bachelor’s degree in three years, mostly because I took summer classes despite being one of the worst students to cross campus. I wanted to be done so fucking bad. Mom was proud, but I always felt like I let her down with my GPA.

It’s nice to talk about Mom before she got sick. About the woman she used to be before cancer stole everything from her.

“She was exaggerating,” I grumble, but my face heats anyway. After everything, it’s reassuring to hear.

“Did she ever tell you about that college she went to? The one with the funny name? I tried to look it up once. I don’t think it exists anymore.”

I blink at Gretchen. She’s hyper-focused on sorting piles of medical paperwork, moving with the efficiency of a machine. “I know she went to community college.”

“No, she went somewhere after that and got a bachelor’s, and then she got a master’s,” says Gretchen, nodding to herself.

“Oh,” I say, because no, I didn’t know.

I know almost nothing about Mom. Not really. Sure, I know her favorite color and her favorite foods, her likes and dislikes. But her past? It’s all a big, black hole. All the rules she made me swear to abide by, even after her death? No fucking idea why.

And Mom was neurotic. No baths, no swimming pools, no playing in lakes or rivers, no hot tubs, and certainly no ocean. When she was at her sickest, a few days before she died, she grabbed my hand and made me swear that I wouldn’t go to the coast, that I’d never set foot in the ocean, never even see it with my own eyes. “Pictures and videos will be enough,” she insisted and I agreed, because she was sick and dying, and I didn’t know what else to do.

When I was little, I yearned for the water. Watched as my friends took swimming lessons, spent their summers by the pool, or the lake, or on cruises.

At first, Mom said we were too poor. We couldn’t afford the community pool, let alone a vacation to the coast. And I couldn’t go in the water because I could drown, because she couldn’t afford anyone to teach me to swim.

But my continued protests were quickly met with rage—lost privileges, broken toys, nights without dinner. By the time I was eight years old, I was terrified of the water. My showers only lasted two minutes, if that. “You can drown in half an inch of water,” she told me once. I knew it wasn’t logical. I hadn’t done anything that should lead to drowning, but her fury was my terror, so I spent years reading about all the ways water could kill a person. Dehydration, dry drowning, water intoxication, brain-eating amoebas, parasites.

By the time I was sixteen, I realized that almost nobody died from these things outside of survival situations and freak accidents. Luckily, we were inland—I was almost never invited on anything more than the occasional camping trip, and most of my friends’ parents were perfectly understanding when I said I was afraid of the water, even the tiny streams that carved through hiking trails, or the waterfalls dribbling out of the rocks.

If we’d lived by the beach, I never would have been allowed to do anything.

At seventeen, I waded into a swimming pool for the first time, wearing a pair of my friend Aiden’s swim trunks. I half-expected to burst into flames or find myself immediately overpowered by the water, but nothing happened. I stepped into the pool, overwhelmed by the cold water, the strange resistance around my ankles, my calves. The smell of chlorine filled my nostrils, and I did not die.

When Mom found out, she took my car for a drive and totaled it.

It was easier to just go along with her neuroses. I wasn’t a swimmer. I’d never been to the ocean, couldn’t afford to go even if I’d wanted to. I had no real reason to go swimming in the summer, even if it was hot and my friends ribbed me endlessly about my hydrophobia. They theorized endlessly as to why, loudly speculating about everything from a third nipple to a micropenis, and I had to grin through it all like I wasn’t totally humiliated and also terrified of my mom, of her reaction if she found out I’d even considered going into the water.

It was almost like she thought some terrible Eldritch horror might snatch me away and drag me under. Or worse, that I was the Eldritch horror, to be transformed by a single drop of water, never to return to my human form again.

We had screaming fights about it. “Why can’t I swim?” I’d shout, and she’d scream right back at me, “Stay. Away. From. The. Water!”

For a time, I wasn’t even allowed to drink water. She bought me Gatorade and Pedialyte and argued that I would be better hydrated if I drank them instead. My fifth-grade teacher put a stop to that, insisting that sugary drinks were not allowed in class. Mom reluctantly backed down after the school nurse informed her that I didn’t have a qualifying medical exemption.

I jolt back to reality when Gretchen speaks.

“It had a such a funny name,” she muses. “That school.”

Mom’s tuxedo cat, Jolene, winds around our ankles, lets out a pitiful meow, and jumps onto the table. She settles on top of a pile of paperwork and starts purring like a lawnmower. I stroke up and down her back absentmindedly.

“I didn’t even know Mom went to college,” I admit. I’m not even curious. Mostly, I’m just defeated. Why the fuck didn’t she tell me anything? Why did everything have to be some big secret?

“Oh, it was that fae school,” said Gretchen, waving her hand. “I just can’t remember the name of it.”

I blink. “Mom went to a fae school?”

“Well, of course she did! She was smart, and you know, her dad was fae⁠—”

“Grandpa was fae?!” The Walmart receipt in my hand flutters to the floor. Jolene watches it with wide, green eyes.

“Well, yes,” says Gretchen slowly. “Remember, your mom and I have different fathers.”