“Why are you following me?” Molly bursts into the fading memory. Her words aren’t hateful, actually, not even spiteful. They’re irritated. Like I’ve interrupted something.
“I want to talk to you,” I say slowly. “About the past.”
Molly looks at me for a long time. Nothing softens, nothing welcomes me, nothing suggests this was even remotely a good idea.
“About my past?” she finally says.
“And mine.”
Molly exhales, still steely-eyed. “My past is gone. I’ll never get it back.” She turns, retreats through the doorway. I slowly follow, peer into the room. There’s a bed frame, the rusted springs of a mattress, a tipped-over lamp. I want seeing them to spur another memory in me, but they are nothing, just things in the water. Molly reaches out, wistfully touches a pile of something—shoes—clumped in the corner.
I swallow, speak. “Do you remember—”
“Yes. I remember everything,” she hisses, and I can’t tell if she’s telling the truth or if the claim is just a desperate lie. “Everything I won’t ever have again.”
“You’ll be happier if you forget,” I tell her instantly, a well-rehearsed line, one we all say to the new girls. As it leaves my mouth, I wonder if it’s true. Molly looks at me, blinks, stares hard. I regret saying anything, regret encouraging her to forget when suddenly I can’t bear the thought of doing so.
“Everyone would be happier if they forgot,” she says. “Humans, us, angels. Do you remember how we changed? Why we changed?”
I shake my head. “Nothing before the angel bringing us to the ocean, like everyone else.”
Molly smiles a little, but it’s cold. “Ah. The angel. Of course.” The way she says it is dangerous. It’s fine for the very, very new girls to question the idea of angels, but girls Molly’s age should know better. We would never cast a girl out, of course, but doubting what happens after we grow old might as well be exile—none of us wants to talk to someone with doubts, none of us wants to be upset by someone’s unproven ideas and lies. Even now, having remembered my name, Molly’s tone makes me uncomfortable. She must see the concern on my face, because she pauses, then moves on quickly. “Well, I still remember what happened before that. Just barely. Why it was us instead of some other human girl, and how it all happened. It was terrible, you know.”
“Tell me,” I say, breathless.
She looks at me, shakes her head. “You said it yourself. You’ll be happier if you forget. Everyone else is.” Her words are daggerlike, and I feel my chest spark with frustration. I want to know. She has to tell me….
Molly rises, turns her back to me. She traces the top of the bed frame, lets her hand drift to where pillows might be if they hadn’t long decayed. “Drowning the boy wouldn’t have been so bad. It’s a terrible way to die. But death is nothing compared with what happened to us.”
I close my eyes as Molly settles in the spot between the shoes and the bed, pleased with herself. She remembers. We could have helped each other remember. She knows how we became ocean girls; she knows a part of my past that I don’t.
I shake my head at Molly, back away. Past the picture frame, down the hall, back to where the water isn’t still. When I reach the open ocean, I gasp, let the sweet electric feeling that links me and my sisters flow through and overwhelm me. This is easier, so much easier than remembering, I think as the ocean current swirls around me, supports me, loves me. So much easier than trying to remember a life that’s been shattered into a million tiny memories, impossible to put back together.
But in the back of my mind, I hear Naida. I pity her. A girl I once was, a girl who I mourn.
I can’t forget her now.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Celia
It’s Wednesday, time for my triple date with Jude. Anne and Jane are giggly and ecstatic—they make me change clothes four times until I’ve achieved what they call “the perfect combination of heroine and girl-next-door,” which apparently means my oldest jeans and one of Jane’s ultragirly tops.
The Landing is a touristy shopping center with an alligator adventure park and a bunch of carts that sell things like airbrushed T-shirts and shot glasses with palmettos on them. That said, the Thai place here serves lunches cheap enough that we can afford them on the allowance our uncle gives us, especially when Anne and Jane are getting so many of our other expenses paid for by their conquests. We park near the back of the lot to avoid the sea of SUVs up front, bypass the long line for the ice-cream shop, and find seats on the Thai place’s patio. The heat is bad, but we’ve always enjoyed watching yachts ease through the canals, imagining which one we’d like to own one day.
“Where is he?” Anne says, looking at her phone to check the time.
“We’re early,” I say. “He’s always running late.” He was even late to his stepfather’s funeral, according to his memories, though that might have been intentional—I couldn’t see it clearly.
“Celia!” Anne and Jane exchange puzzled glances, then we all look in the direction the voice came from. On the Landing’s center strip, where the vendor carts are set up, is a much drier, happier version of Jude than the one I saw the other night. And he’s wearing a hat with foam palm trees shooting out of it.
“Is that—” Anne begins.
“Oh my god, he’s one of the cart people,” Jane says, but she looks delighted anyway.
Jude, apparently, is manning a cart that sells annoyingly wacky hats—ones with dolphins, sea turtles, or beach balls shooting out of them. He pulls down the canvas sides of the cart, ties them up, and jogs toward us, lightly jumping over the railing that separates the patio from the sidewalk. As drowned and soggy as Jude looked in the hospital, he looks the opposite now. His hair is a mess, and he’s wearing jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up; I can see the tattoos covering his arms disappear under the fabric. He arrives at our table, sweating from the heat and still wearing the palm-tree hat. I can’t tell if Anne and Jane are entirely charmed or entirely horrified. He doesn’t look at them, though; he stares at me, lips curled into a smile.
“Strange,” he finally says. “I remembered you being brunette, not blond.”
I try not to cringe as I think about Naida’s chocolate-colored hair. So he does remember her.