Nothing.
Nothing at all. I rise a little farther out of the water, but it doesn’t help. The pier is empty—it’s late, I can tell by the tide. I look at the church ahead. Maybe if I go there…
At night, you can’t see the red of the blood in the water, but I can feel it. It’s warm compared with the waves, a slicker liquid. The shoes Celia gave me will help, but I have to make it to the church first. The tide isn’t entirely out, but it’s still a long distance. I squeeze my eyes shut and run.
Swords shoot through my heels, lodge themselves in my legs, stick into my knees. I collapse in front of the church, let tears flow for a few moments while I watch the white sand by my feet absorb the blood. It looks black in the moonlight, thick like the oil boats sometimes leave behind in the water. I reach into the church and pull out the shoes, the dress. Re-create everything just like it was before, try to remember. The shoes hurt my sliced feet, and the dress clings to the water on my skin. I don’t remember it feeling this strange before, I don’t remember it hurting so badly. I look over to where Celia was sitting, remember what she said. What color was the dog?
Nothing. Nothing at all. I can’t even remember how big the dog was now. I only remember the dog existed because I can’t remember what it looked like.
I can’t do this alone. I try to stifle the tears that flow faster now, pull my knees to my chest and try to ignore the throbbing in my feet. It would have been easier if I’d never come back. If I’d let Naida go. Even if I remember the dog, I won’t have a soul. I won’t have my old life. I won’t ever be Naida again.
“Are you all right?”
I jump—or rather, I jump the way I would if I were in the water. When there’s air where the ocean should be, I tumble to the side and fall into the sand. I hear the voice calling to me, but all I can think about is how clumsy I am here, how it’s hard to move when the space around you can’t hold you up like the ocean does. I finally lie still, panting, feet aching from pressing into the ground as I tried to escape.
“Relax, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” the voice says. A male voice, I realize. I turn around to look.
The moon catches on the boy’s cheekbones, his shoulders, his chest, but can’t quite make it to his eyes. He’s holding his hands up so I can see them; the left is dotted in calluses along the tip of each finger, like Molly’s.
“I’m fine,” I say. My voice sounds garbled. I sit up, try to act normal, even though I want so badly to run for the waves and dive deep. I can’t let him see that, though; I have to wait till he leaves….
“Do I know you?” he asks, voice rising a little.
“No.”
“Are you sure? You look familiar,” he says. He doesn’t sound certain; he sounds hopeful. Like he wants me to say yes but knows I won’t. He kneels in the sand, keeping his hands where I can see them. The new angle means the moonlight just catches his eyes—yes.
I know him. And he knows me, in a way.
“My name’s Jude,” he says slowly. “Maybe you just have a familiar face.”
Jude, the boy I saved. The boy Molly sang to, but the boy I pulled from the waves. He’s looking at me intently, the same way he looked at me when he was in Molly’s arms. Like he needs me, like I can save him even though we’re not in the water anymore.
Jude, the boy Celia loves, even if she doesn’t realize it yet. Jealousy flares up in me, but I force it down.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks again.
“I’m fine. You just startled me,” I answer swiftly. I try to make my voice sound like Celia’s, but it doesn’t work—I still sound like the other ocean girls, almost like I’m speaking a different language than Jude is.
“It’s almost one in the morning. I can understand not expecting someone,” Jude agrees, nodding. “You’re crying, though. You’re not about to run into the ocean and end it all, are you?”
I laugh at the truth behind his statement, though I doubt he’d recognize the expression as laughter. “No,” I answer. “I just came here to… think.”
“So did I,” he says, leaning back against the church. “I almost drowned here. I’m trying to get over it.”
“Are you afraid of the water?” I ask, looking at him. He’s staring out at the black waves, eyes intense.
“Yes,” he admits. “I was always sort of afraid of it, though. I can’t really swim, and then I fell off the pier…. It was horrible. I needed to breathe, and there was nothing, just more water. I felt myself dying—” He stops short. “Sorry, person-I-just-met-whose-name-I-don’t-even-know. Yes. I’m afraid of the water.”
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” I say fondly. “You just have to remember that it doesn’t care. It doesn’t want to kill you, but it doesn’t love you, either. That makes it dangerous, but it also makes it reliable. You can trust the ocean because it’s always the same.”
“That was beautiful. Like a song,” Jude says, looking a little surprised. “I wish I had my guitar—it’s at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, since I was wearing it when I fell.”
“You can’t get another?”
“I can,” he says, “but I’d had that one for ages. Every song I’ve ever written, I wrote on it.”
We wait a long time in the silence. I keep waiting for him to notice that my skin’s the wrong color, that I look strange, but it’s so dark that I guess he thinks it’s just the moonlight. He thinks I’m human. The idea makes something burn in my chest, a light that spirals up through my heart.
He sighs. “Anyway, I’ll leave you alone,” he says, smiling at me. He starts to rise.
“You don’t have to,” I say quickly. “You weren’t bothering me.”
He stops, pauses for a few beats, then lowers himself back into the sand. “Can I know your name, then, if we’re going to be late-night beach partners?”
“Lo.” I say it fast, easily—should I have said Naida?
“Lo. Nice to meet you.” I like the way it sounds when he says my name.
And then it’s quiet again. I can tell he wants to ask why I’m crying, what I’m doing here, where I came from, but he doesn’t. He sits, staring at the water, his hands, the water again. I want to answer the questions he isn’t asking, but I can’t. I can’t tell him about my sisters, I can’t tell him what I am. But even though I want to answer him, I also don’t want to reveal the truth. He thinks I’m human, and I can’t bear the thought of changing that.