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People. Others. Humans.
“I wanna go home,” I whispered to Crowjack. “I feel sick.”
And I did. I ducked under the whitecaps for a minute to get my head on straight.
“What are you talking about? We just got here! I’m not even buzzed yet.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, you are, dumbass. You’re such a lightweight.”
I was only teasing. But you can’t tease anybody who writes plays about their father. Crowjack hauled off and punched me in the eye. Punched! Not slapped. Closed-fist. Like he meant it. Like he’d been holding that in. Well, fuck that for nothing. Bye, bye, Crowjack. I wasn’t in love with him anymore, anyway. He cried almost every time we had sex. And I was a far better sw
immer. With a couple of kicks, I got well away from that cliché little scene. A couple more and I could hardly see him. Only a little shape in the waves, flailing his arms and yelling that he was sorry. Who cares, lightweight? I might like a bruise or two in good fun—I look tough as hell with bruises. But back then, I didn’t take that action from anybody. I swam and swam, ducking down below and popping up again, feeling my strength, feeling my speed. I was pretty hammered by then, I admit. I wasn’t paying attention. I got too close to the island. One of those people-shadows saw me and stopped moving around. Then, for absolutely no goddamned reason, it jumped into the water and started swimming after me! I should have just gone down bubble, but I was too shocked and drunk to move. The shadow turned out to be a man, a big, nice-looking man with a good beard and thick hair the color of the sun. He grabbed me around the neck and started hauling me to shore.
“It’s okay!” the man yelled back. “I got you! You’re gonna be fine!”
“What? Stop! Hold on!” I coughed and spluttered. The way he was dragging me, I kept getting wind up my nose.
“Good thing I saw you! I thought you were driftwood for a minute,” he went on, panting with the effort of saving me. “Or a seal. But better safe than sorry! You almost drowned!”
“This is ridiculous,” I snarled, and squirmed out of his grip in one quick duck-and-twist. “I don’t need your help! Do I look like I need your help?”
I don’t believe John Heron really saw me before that moment. He was in Burly Savior Noble Guardian of Life mode when he grabbed me. All he saw was a girl in the water. But he sure saw me then. Six long feet of green crystal scales and blue switchblade-fins and really almost pornographically suggestive gills and bruised cheekbone and half-shaved-off red hair. But I saw him, too. He had the warmest green eyes and the kindest way of holding his mouth, even when he was dumbfounded and gawking like a damn fool. Those muscles didn’t hurt, either, even if they were a weird brownish color. He was handsome as hell, and most importantly, he didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met in my life. He looked new. We treaded water in total silence for, well, god knows how long. Finally, he said:
“Are you a mermaid?”
“That’s racist,” I snapped. My head was starting to spin. Crowjack was right. The air was amazing up there.
He backpedaled immediately. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it; I don’t . . . What happened to your eye?”
“Bad boyfriend,” I answered, and touched my face. Still tender.
Then it happened. I couldn’t help it. I laughed in this weird way that had nothing to do with me, this soft, coquettish, flirty laugh like a fucking sea lion in heat. Gross. It’s the air, you know. Everything that came after, I blame on that stone-cold bitch oxygen. She hates me and wants me to suffer. I loved him. I loved him like breathing. I loved him because I was breathing. I was reeling on the whiskey-wind, my vision gone to oil and honey as I pounded shot after shot of pure unfiltered sky.
We screwed under the stars on the beach below his lighthouse. It wasn’t very good for me. He didn’t vibrate the water with his legs to signal his interest. His torso didn’t flush that delicate shade of blue that really gets me going. He didn’t clack his swim bladders against each other to make the secret song of Atlantean sex. He didn’t even have claspers or a cloaca. We had to do it his way. It took forever. But it certainly was new. I straddled him and clacked my swim bladders deep in my throat and I could feel the blue coming on in my chest, lighting up his dumb handsome face with the light of another dimension. Afterward, we swam out together so I could sober up. He told me about himself. He was an orphan, found screaming on the shore by Angus Heron, the old man who ran the lighthouse, and raised to keep that light on like it could save the world. It was romantic. Like a fairy tale. Like a song written by someone other than me. I told him about my music. Sang him a bit of “Lemuria Calling.”
“I have a secret,” he said, floating in the shallows, little harmless green jellyfish glowing along the strand like stage lights.
“Don’t we all?”
“I want to tell you mine.” He looked at me intensely, through his long wet gold hair. He looked at me like I was the answer at the back of a math book. “I . . . I can talk to fish. Not just fish. Dolphins and whales and seals and eels and scallops and crabs. I can talk to them, and when they talk back, I understand everything they say.”
I laughed. “So? Who can’t?”
John looked hurt. He actually blushed. “Well, pretty much everybody on the planet but me, actually. The truth is, I’m . . . I’m a superhero. People call me Avast.” I crooked one crystal, scaly eyebrow. “I fight . . . you know . . . injustice and villainy. I’m part of a group. The Union. With a bunch of other guys. Kid Mercury, Grimdark, the Insomniac, the Unstoppable Id, Chiaroscuro.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. I didn’t care about any of those stupid names. They sounded like particularly shitty scene bands. “I’m on the planet, John.”
But he was still in a huff because I wasn’t impressed by his little party trick. “On the planet. Not under it.”
“That’s such a mammalian thing to say,” I sighed. “?‘The planet’ is seventy percent water, you know.”
John’s face broke apart. He gave in. He cared that much what I thought. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can talk to fish. Fine. Can you breathe underwater? Or at least hold your breath for a really long time?”
Slowly, John Heron nodded. I narrowed my eyes. My catch of the day was starting to smell suspicious.
“How old are you?”
