“This is boring,” Jane sighs. “All the good ones were here earlier in the season.”
“We could go home and watch that movie,” I suggest.
“Ugh, no, it’s Friday night! What about him?” Jane says, pointing to a handsome guy who’s holding a girl’s hand, in line to ride the carousel.
“He’s with her,” Anne answers.
“Yeah…” Jane sighs. Their rule is, they don’t use their powers to trick boys who are in love. Maybe it’s too many romantic comedies and sappy novels, maybe it makes them feel like what they do is perfectly okay, but they’ve held their ground on that one, Anne more easily than Jane.
Anne begins to roll her eyes, but before she’s finished, Jane reaches over and grabs her hand. Anne yanks it away, irritated.
“Don’t do that!” she snaps. We don’t use our powers on one another, and thus we try to avoid touching—but it’s a rule Jane has always found more flexible than Anne or me.
“Come on, it’s easier than wandering around all night. What did you see?” Jane asks.
Anne glares at her for a moment but finally reveals what she saw in Jane’s future. “There’s a tall guy somewhere, green shirt, I think. He’ll take us to that fondue place, if you want to go.”
“I hate that place,” I say, and the truth is, I think Anne and Jane do, too—they just like that it’s expensive. I’d be happier with a three-dollar hot dog from the street vendor.
“Everyone loves that place,” Anne argues. “Come on, let’s find him.”
“I’ll catch up later,” I say. Anne and Jane look at me, then each other, like I’m turning up my nose at an amazing adventure. When we were little, we were interlocked, like the three strands of a braid—pull one, and the others fall apart. But now, even though Anne is always reminding me that “we’re stronger together,” I can’t help but feel differently. They’re stronger without me. Sure, maybe I’m weak, maybe I’m nothing without them, but to be honest, I’m pretty sure I’m nothing with them, too.
“Fine,” Anne sighs. “We’ll see you at home, I guess.”
I’ll give it to my sisters—they want me to be one of them. The third piece to their matching set. But wanting is not enough, so while they wander off in search of a target in green, I weave through a row of food carts and toward the coaster, toward the pier.
The pier juts off a short cliff and is eerily dark compared with the Pavilion—its old lights can’t conquer the enormous blackness of both the sky and the nighttime ocean. A few lovers look out over the sea, a guitarist with an open case for tips sings a song I don’t recognize, and a handful of fishermen tend to their lines. I look down at the water. The tide is massive tonight, the perigean tide, if my memories from astronomy class are correct. As I go farther and farther toward the pier’s end, the sound of the Pavilion fades, replaced by the powerful noise of the ocean.
We’re from the middle of Georgia, a tiny landlocked town and a house full of siblings—all brothers, save me, Anne, and Jane. It doesn’t make sense that I feel most myself when I’m alone by the ocean. Maybe it’s because I think the ocean is like me. It knows the past. It’s seen yachts and ships and pirates and a time before people. It has secrets, secrets you don’t know just by watching the surface.
I look down the beach, which is illuminated only by moonlight and the glow of the Pavilion. This isn’t a swimming section—it’s too rocky. Most of the houses at the bottom of the little cliff, right on the sea, were abandoned a year or so ago when a hurricane battered them beyond repair. There’s an old church, a single-room building with faded graffiti—cheap spray paint doesn’t last long against the ocean’s spray, so it looks like the church has a pastel hue.
The guitar player wanders near me, still playing and singing under his breath. He’s wearing a shirt that’s real vintage—it has a few tiny holes, and the sleeves are stretched out. I can’t tell if he’s handsome or not, but I want to keep looking at his face, thin lips and deep-set eyes. I don’t have any money and hate to give him false hope for tips, so I turn away, back to the water. I wonder how deep it is. I wonder how deep it is everywhere.
The guitarist stops playing, I hear something like running or stomping. I turn around, eyebrows raised, just in time to see it happen.
He trips on an uneven plank. He tries to catch himself but throws his weight backward to keep from falling forward on the guitar. Everyone is watching, no one is moving. It happens so fast—he’s off balance, hits the railing of the pier at just the right angle. The right angle to fall into the blackness, into the ocean.
CHAPTER TWO
Lo
We don’t want to go to the surface.
We linger under the water, down deep, where it’s cold; it makes us feel the most alive. Only the new girl wants to go up. Her skin is still a little pink, like it remembers the sun, whereas most of ours are pale, with places tinted the light purples, blues, or greens of seashells.
It’s nice that we look the same, that we are the same. It means we are safe, because there are dozens and dozens of me. When they move, I move; when I move, they move. It has long stopped surprising me, the speed at which new girls forget their first names. You don’t need a name when everyone is you and you are everyone.
I’m still on my second name, Lo, the sound the water makes during a thunderstorm when you’re deep beneath the waves. But eventually, I’ll forget this one, too. I’ll move on to a third, maybe even a fourth, until I’ll give up on names altogether, like the oldest of us have.
The pull of the tide gets stronger; the full moon is rising. The new girl looks up through the softened wooden planks of the Glasgow’s deck, and the tiny bit of moonlight streaking to the depths illuminates her face. She looks sweet, kind, gentle. Human. She lifts, releases the rock she was holding on to, and starts toward the surface.
“I suppose it’s time,” Key says, lingering just outside the cracked ship’s hull. She and I came to the ocean just a few months apart. Her name used to be Julia. I don’t know why I can remember her old name but not my own. Key sighs and pushes off the ocean floor; sand blossoms around her bare feet as she swims upward. She never wants to surface. Whatever happened in her human life, she was more than happy to forget it long ago—I don’t think she even tried to remember, to be honest.