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A group of kids about her age ran toward her, laughing and screaming. They were followed by two women walking quickly after them. The women shouted at the kids to be quiet and to get into two lines. Angeline recognized it as a field trip. One of the women was a teacher and one was a kid’s mother.
As the class entered the aquarium, Angeline darted to the end of one of the two lines and walked in with them. Once inside, she went off by herself.
She walked down a long hallway lined with fish tanks. The hallway was dark but the fish tanks were lighted. She saw fish of all shapes and sizes, some almost as big as she was, others smaller than her fingernails. There seemed to be every possible combination of colors. And as she walked down the corridor, somehow everything was all right.
There were tigerfish, dogfish, goosefish, fox-face rabbitfish, monkeyface blenny, and the beautiful but deadly turkey fish, the most poisonous fish on Earth. And as she looked at all the wondrous fishes, she was amazed by each one. Yet, at the same time, she seemed to recognize them too, as if she knew them from before she was born. She saw clown fish, convict fish, moonfish, some bumphead hogfish, and as she stopped in front of each fish tank she seemed to say, “Oh, yes, I remember you.”
There were four-eyed butterfly fish, who swam right at the very top of the water so that their eyes were half-in and half-out of water. They were able to look both above and below the water at the same time. She saw fairy basslets, who are girl fish when they’re born, but are men fish by the time they die. There were Caribbean grammas, who live and swim upside down, and marbled headstanders, who do just that. She saw stonefish, who just lie on the sand at the bottom of the ocean, pretending that they are rocks, but if you step on one, you’re dead.
Octopuses, sea horses, barracudas. “Yes,” said Angeline very softly to herself, “I remember you.” And as she looked at each fish, peacefully swimming along or lying flat on the sand, she didn’t once think about Mrs. Hardlick or the note for her father or anything, and everything was somehow all right.
She passed a “Garden of Eels.” These eels were long and thin, like rubber pencils. They lived in the sand under the ocean, and only their heads, about three inches long, stuck up into the water. They looked like a meadow of tall grass, gently swaying in a breeze.
Past the fish known as the fat innkeeper, and the one appropriately called elephant lip, and the squirrel fish, toadfish, and long-snouted hawkfish, Angeline walked up a spiral staircase and emerged in the middle of a large round room. There was one, big, circular fish tank all around her. It was more like it was she who was in the tank while the fish were on the outside. There were hundreds of them swimming in a ring around her. They were all big fish and all went in the same direction, like skaters at a skating rink. Leopard sharks, giant sea bass, yellowtail, red snapper, bat rays, they all had droopy eyes and sad faces—but that was just the way they looked.
Angeline sat on the floor. She opened her paper sack that Christy had gotten for her. Christy was nice, she thought. She was glad she was president. She bit into her sandwich. This was her favorite place in the aquarium so far. It was like she was at the bottom of the ocean. She licked her lips. Lemon jello was her favorite.
A group of kids thundered up the staircase and piled into the room. It was that class on the field trip, with which Angeline had sneaked in.
“Ooh, look at this one.”
“Sharks!”
“How come they all look so sad?”
They spread around the room, blocking Angeline’s view in every direction. They put their faces up against the tank and knocked on the glass to try to attract the fishes’ attention. But the fish paid no attention as they sadly swam in circles.
“Don’t touch the glass,” ordered one of the women. “You’ll break it.”
Angeline laughed as she imagined the glass breaking and all the fish and water pouring out. If the glass brok
e every time some kid pounded on it…
“You can’t eat here,” a woman told Angeline. She must have been the mother of one of the kids.
“I’m not in the class,” Angeline informed her.
“Are you sure?”
Angeline nodded.
“Oh. Well, in that case,” said the woman, “eat.”
Angeline took another bite out of her sandwich. She watched a boy walk around in circles along with the fish. He seemed to be staying with one fish in particular, a giant sea bass. “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,” he said as he pushed past everybody in order to stay with his fish.
A couple of the other kids saw him and thought he had a good idea. So they picked out their own fish, too, and started walking around with them. Pretty soon everybody in the class was doing it, walking in a big circle around the room, right along with the fish. Most of the kids were laughing but some tried to frown, just like the fish.
Angeline descended the spiral staircase and continued on through the aquarium.
The Pacific hagfish slithers inside the mouths of its victims and eats them from the inside. The blind cavefish lives in caves at the lower depths of the ocean that are so dark that it doesn’t know what its eyes are supposed to be used for. The African lungfish can live in mudballs, out of water. Angeline loved them all.
She saw an albino walking catfish and remembered a joke Gary had told her about a man who had a pet fish. One day the man accidentally knocked over the fishbowl and the fish fell out onto the floor. He tried to pick it up but it kept slipping through his fingers. Finally, after at least five minutes he was able to scoop up the fish with both hands and drop it back in the bowl. Luckily, it was still alive. The next day when the man came home from work he found the fish lying outside the bowl again. He quickly put it back in. This kept happening, day after day, until finally the man decided to leave the fish out for a while and see what happened. First he left it out for thirty minutes, then an hour, then two hours, then three, four, until finally he just emptied the bowl altogether and kept the fish in his desk drawer, except when he’d take it out for a walk. One day, while he was walking his fish in the park, they came to a pond. The poor fish got too close to the edge, slipped in, and drowned.
Angeline laughed. She thought it was the funniest joke Gary ever told her. She wished Gary was with her now. She thought he’d have lots of good jokes about all the different fish. She saw a chocolate catfish. She bet that Gary would have a good joke about that one.
There were glass catfish, about the size of her pinky. She could see right through them, except for their bones. And somehow, everything remained all right.
She came to a giant fish tank filled with dolphins, porpoises, sea lions, and seals, all swimming and playing together. “Yes, I remember you,” she said sadly, as if before she was born, she once was a dolphin too.
