Teeth Read Free Page B

not to Dad, and rub a few circles on Dyl’s back. He hides in my arm for the rest of the coughing, because we’ve fucking embarrassed him, fantastic. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “We’ll go home soon.” He relaxes a little.
    Ms. Delaney clears her throat and says, “It really is amazing what the Enki fish can do. We came here when I was fourteen, when the cancer”—she waves the word away like it’s a fly—“was close to killing me. My grandfather had written us letters about the place before he died, but we had no idea the effect the fish would have. And since I’ve lived here, I haven’t been sick a day. My grandfather lived to be a hundred and sixteen.”
    My parents talk recipes and legends and I take advantage of the white noise and my brother buried deep into my shirt to lean across the table and say softly, “Is the other stuff true?”
    Diana raises her eyebrows. “Is what true?” She looks much older than me with that look on her face.
    I mouth ghosts , and she shakes her head. “Not ghosts like you’d think, anyway,” she says. So I try mermaids ? and her eyes widen, and she looks my age again.
    The adults aren’t listening to us. Ms. Delaney says, “And this is some of the best-quality fish we’ve had in a long time, this year. It’s amazing the properties it has. I eat as much as possible.”
    “Me too,” Diana says, but she makes a bit of a face. Shespears her fork through a bite of fish and turns it over on its end to rock-walk it across the table. “Right, Dylan?”
    He sticks his tongue out the side of his mouth.
    “Yeah, I know.” She laughs, and he smiles.
    I feed Dylan and listen to his chest loosen, and he looks up at me, like, “Am I well yet?” And sometimes it eats me up inside that I’m dying for Dylan to get well, but less for him than because I want to be done with our miracle cure and go home, and that makes me a really horrible brother.
    “Where are you from?” Diana asks me.
    “Michigan.”
    “Mmm. Like Song of Solomon .”
    “I haven’t read that one. We did Beloved instead.”
    “I had a tutor for Beloved ,” she says. “He kept slipping up and saying Alice Walker wrote it. Wishful thinking on his part, I think. It would have been so much more subtle.”
    “Walker, um. The Color Purple ?”
    “Have you read it?”
    I shake my head. “Do you have it?”
    “I have eeeeverything.” She rolls the word around the back of her mouth, and fuck, it’s not like I didn’t know I was easy before, but apparently a few months and a few smiles and the promise of a few books is enough for me to want to rip my clothes off right here at the table, parents and little brother and nice tablecloth be damned. Come on, Rudy.
    Ms. Delaney is still going on about the fish. “They’re getting harder and harder to come by. The fishermen are catching fewer every month, and they don’t know how to explain it. They’ve been working so hard not to overfish; they keep their fishing methods secret to ensure they have control over the population . . . . There should be plenty. It’s almost like the fish have discovered how to avoid the nets.” She laughs, this high nervous thing.
    “Maybe they’re being hunted,” Mom says. “We had a whole skunk population back home that—”
    I say, “I saw something. In the water.” Something covered in scales. Something that made Diana’s eyes get big. “Maybe he’s hunting them.”
    Mom says, “He?”
    “Well, it. Whatever. It looked like a boy.”
    Ms. Delaney’s head jerks up. “Where?”
    “In the water. He had scales all over him.” He looked like he had a tail. “He was a really fast swimmer. He looked, like, feral.”
    “Probably just a boy from the other side of the island,” my dad says.
    “He was a teenager. There are no other teenagers.”
    “What about me?” Diana says. But she’s giving me a funny look, with her eyes narrowed. “A teenager? How old, would you say?” She looks like she’s about to start