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The dolphins seemed excited and were jumping and cavorting all around us, frightening some of the others, but I couldn’t lie, every fiber in my being begged me to dive into the water and play with them. Their black, shiny eyes, like a doll’s eyes, seemed to focus on me as I looked down at them. When I laughed aloud at their antics, they opened their toothy mouths and seemed to laugh back at me and jumped even higher, splashing all of us with cold sea-spray and causing everyone on board to scream and squeal. My stepmom smiled indulgently at me as I leaned way out and stretched a hand to them, feeling their same enthusiasm. I was eager to touch their smooth, wet skin. The sun was like a balm spreading over me and every drop of ocean water that touched me felt like a soothing caress.
My mother and I were on vacation, having booked this short trip to Tybee Island, a barrier island some eighteen miles east of Savannah, Georgia on the Atlantic Ocean. At that time, I couldn’t remember ever being out of Tennessee or ever even seeing the ocean, though my father said I’d been born in Greece, and we’d come to America when I was a baby. I didn’t remember any of that, so this was a special treat.
Now that I knew what I was missing, though, there would be no going back. Since we arrived late the night before, neither of us went out to see the ocean, though we looked at it from our beachfront window. I lay awake all night long, the anticipation keeping me from being able to sleep. What I couldn’t wait to do was just go wading out in the waves, but we had arrived so late, it hadn’t been an option. This boat trip into the waters of the Atlantic, however, was turning out to be the most exciting day of my life. My soul felt like it was vibrating inside me.
Suddenly…and I mean out of fucking nowhere, the skies darkened, huge clouds rolling in from the open sea. Waves started thrashing against the boat, causing it to rock dangerously. The crew of the boat yelled at us to sit down and be sure we were wearing our life jackets, but I hesitated too long, watching the dolphins disappearing, diving deep into the ocean water that only moments ago had been a beautiful blue. Now, the waves were murky gray and dangerously choppy. I checked to make sure my stepmom had her jacket on and sat down.
The captain turned the boat back in the direction of the docks, though we were still a good way out. A few passengers were clinging to their kids and holding onto them tightly. It didn’t help much—the kids screamed louder, and everybody got a shocked, scared, seasick look on their faces as the small boat was tossed about in the waves.
With horror, I watched a huge wave smash into the side of the boat, nearly toppling it completely over. As soon as it righted itself, a set of parents who had brought their young child with them on the trip began screaming wildly. Their little girl was suddenly gone, swept overboard by the huge wave.
Without thinking, I dove into the water after her. I had been the best swimmer on our swim team at school. Since she had thankfully been wearing her life jacket, she was easy to spot. She was gasping and choking though, and totally panicked, so I scooped her up and returned to the boat, handing her up to her parents, before I tried to climb back in myself. With me kind of proud of myself and feeling like a hero, the waters around me began to grow rougher—nothing I couldn’t handle—but even more choppy, not to mention dark gray and wild. The waves were trying to tear me away from the side of the boat, no matter how much I struggled against them.
The captain slung a makeshift rope ladder over the side. Someone threw me a life preserver, and everyone was yelling encouragement at me. But just as I managed to grasp the rope ladder, something wrapped around my ankle and yanked me down beneath the surface. Deeper and deeper, twisting and turning as I struggled against it, I lost all sense of direction—wouldn’t have even known which direction to swim in if I could have gotten away, and I was having zero luck at that. If anything, I was getting more and more worried with each passing second.
Then I felt a rough, slimy touch on my bare leg. I looked down in horror and all the air fled my lungs in a panic. A huge, green tentacle was slithering over my leg, trying to latch on and move upward to imprison my arms. No matter how much I struggled, pushing and hitting the things with my fists, there was no escape. They were pulling me down to the bottom of the sea, and I was drowning.
I knew it and yet a sense of calm came over me. It seemed inevitable, and maybe it would hurt less just to let go. But I stubbornly continued to hold my breath for as long as possible. I’d heard it wasn’t a painful way to go once you finally gave up and sucked the water into your lungs…yet I still instinctively fought it. I fought to live, even when I knew there wasn’t a chance. Hell, I was way too young to die.
In the inky blackness, a pale face suddenly appeared right in front of me. It was a beautiful young man, and at first I thought I was hallucinating. He looked to be my age—with bright green eyes and hair the color of seaweed. Not the dead, ugly brown seaweed I’d seen washed up on the beach, but the lovely green jewel tones of the living plant. Its long strands wrapped around him all the way to his waist. I stared right into those beautiful eyes of his, and I noticed the exotic slant of them, along with his high cheekbones. The apparition moved even closer and palmed both my cheeks. His eyes met my own oddly shaded blue-green ones, and it must have been a hallucination brought on by lack of oxygen because I thought I could honestly feel him probing my mind, like he was searching out my thoughts. Then he spoke to me. Not with his voice, but inside my head.
I heard a husky voice whispering, “Take a breath, Kailar. It’ll be fine. I’ve used my magic to help you in this form. Just breathe it in. I promise you all will be well.”
I didn’t believe the hallucination, no matter how good-looking he was, and I didn’t follow his instructions, but I just couldn’t hold my breath any longer. I lost the battle and instinctively gasped, opening my mouth and sucking in the water. I could feel it filling my nostrils and my lungs. Death by drowning…not what I expected. Yet my brain must still have been hallucinating and telling itself stories, because the ocean water felt like a bright, shining liquid sliding throughout my body, cool and refreshing and even nourishing, like it was doing my body good. A huge smile spread across the boy’s face, and he nodded at me happily.
Not only was I not drowning, but the tentacles imprisoning me started loosening their hold one by one until I was finally free. I reached for the boy’s hand and was able to hold it for a second. We twined our fingers together and a feeling of rightness came over me. I knew this boy. I wasn’t sure how or why, but I knew him like a part of my own soul. I felt like a wanderer who had finally come back home, like Odysseus when he finally spotted the shores of Ithaca.
My lips curved into a smile at the crazy thought. I had readThe Odysseyin high school, but I never thought it had made such an impression on me. This handsome creature in front of me was someone I knew very well though—someone dear to me, whom I’d been desperate to see for so long. I almost had it figured out—who he was to me. It was just right there, dangling above us in the cold waters, just out of reach, when suddenly, without any warning, disaster struck again.
The gorgeous boy was suddenly ripped away from me. Through the murky water, I could see him twisting and turning to fight the ugly, green tentacles—monstrously huge, thick ones like the ones that had held me in their grip—they were trying to wrap around him like they had me. I screamed my fury. My savior, the boy with the beautiful, emerald eyes and hair, was being torn away from me. He reached for me, but there was nothing I could do. Even as I held out my hands to him, he was gone. The last image I had of him was a long fish tail of many colors, like aquamarine and sapphire and verdigris, swirling and thrashing behind him in the sea as he fought against his capture. The tail that had been attached to his body at the waist—as crazy as that sounded, it was true.
I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had just encountered a merman, half fish, half human.
I relaxed my body—maybe I even passed out for a moment from the shock—and I slowly drifted upward toward the ocean’s surface. I remember being surprised when my head broke through the waves, and I saw the little boat bobbing nearby, everyone on board looking frantic and excited as they shouted and pointed at me. They waved their arms desperately for me to swim toward them and I kicked toward the boat. The sea was suddenly as calm as it had been just a short time ago, before the entire nightmare had begun. But now I felt an unreasoning fear. Instead of feeling welcomed by the sea, I was now suddenly appalled by it—all the joy I had felt earlier dragged down to the depths, drowned and gone. With every stroke I was terrified I would feel those tentacles wrapping around my legs again, or hands pulling me back down.
When they finally pulled me back on board the boat, I lay exhausted on the deck, gasping for the air that now felt too rich and foreign in my lungs. I realized the boy in the water must have been some kind of dream—some last, desperate delusion from a dying brain. But that thing—that giant octopus looking thing—had been all too real.
I made myself a promise that day. I’d had a lucky escape, but I would never, ever go near the ocean again.
Chapter Two
Kailar
6 months later in Knoxville, Tennessee
After listening to woman I called the Dragon Lady explain how she’d worked incredibly hard and finally found a possible job for me, I couldn’t do anything more than just stare at her pinched lips which were painted heavily with bright orange lipstick. She had long since left her youth behind her, but that wasn’t what made her so unattractive. No, that was her personality—or the lack thereof.
She was a mean-spirited woman, who probably hadn’t felt any real joy in years, unless she was kicking puppies or pulling the wings off butterflies. She had tiny, ugly-shaped lips, so I guessed she thought that drawing on bigger ones with bright, atrocious orange lipstick improved her appearance. She was mistaken…just like she was about this latest job being a perfect fit for me. Every day for three weeks, I’d met with Dragon Lady at the State Unemployment office to discuss possible job leads for me. Every day for three weeks, she’d made it clear she didn’t believe I was employable.
I was beginning to believe she was correct.
Follow your dreams, everybody had told me when I was younger, back when my life vaguely resembled some sort of normalcy. My first dream had been to be an Olympic swimmer. I had dedicated my life back then to being the best of the best. That dream blew up in my face when my dad died—it had been more his dream than mine anyway, really, and once he was gone, I didn’t really have the heart for it anymore.
This certainly wasn’t where I’d thought I’d be at this stage of my life. My own health problems began soon after my mother and I returned from Tybee Island. We had taken that trip in the first place to try to get away from the memories of my dad, not long after his untimely death. Then after my near drowning, my own health began to fail.
Not long after we returned from Tybee, I woke up one morning feeling really ill, and worse than usual. I was like really sick, throwing up everywhere and running a high fever. I got my stepmother to drive me to the emergency room, where they ran a bunch of tests on me, but really found nothing conclusive. The best they could come up with was some kind of virus making the rounds. They treated me for dehydration and sent me home, telling me I’d feel better soon.
Except I never did.
