Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (11 page)

* * *

SOPHIE LOOKED AROUND
for a place to talk with Ella on the phone. Their house was only so big, and the phone was a cheap piece of plastic, growing staticky when you walked it too far from its base. Sophie wished she had her own phone, a
cell phone
, and that she had a real room to take it into, a proper bedroom with privacy, not the glorified walk-in closet attached to her mother's bedroom. She looked in on
Andrea, already passed out on the couch, a milky cereal bowl before her on the coffee table. The television was blaring some news program, and the loud hum of the fan spun coolness onto her mother. This was the most privacy she was going to get. Sophie figured it was enough.

On the other end of the phone Sophie could hear the cacophony of Ella's home. People hollered in dueling languages for the girl. Sophie could hear Ella's younger siblings calling for her, excited and important to be delivering news of a phone call; older voices, her mother and her aunts, were a steady roar of talk. Sophie could imagine them circling the dinner table, eating cookies and drinking coffees. She felt a pang of loneliness at her own empty house, her tired mother already asleep with the sun still shining, creepy television newscaster voices intoning darkly through the apartment. Sophie wished Ella would invite her over, but knew it wouldn't happen.

“Hello?” Ella was breathless at having run through the house.

“Hi!” Sophie said. “What's up?”

“Nothing, just a million people over here as usual, a girl can't get any space. I'm dying to get
out
of here.”

“Are you having a nic fit?” Sophie asked. Never having smoked, Sophie didn't know what a
nic fit
felt like, just that her friend claimed to have them, and once she started having one it was all she thought about, all she talked about, until she smoked a cigarette. Sophie thought nic fits were strange and boring.

“No way, my house is so smoky with everyone over here, I just had a cigarette right in my bedroom and no one even knew!” Ella sounded
proud, having found away to make the chaos of her home work for her. “I got
burned
at the beach today. It was hot, huh?”

Sophie had forgotten about the beach. She was surprised to feel not a single pluck of envy at having missed something. “How was it?”

“How do you think it was? Awesome. There were so many cute guys. One gave me the rest of his pizza—he was
soooo
wicked cute.”

“What's his name?”

“Junior. Which is crazy, right, 'cause I'm a junior, like my mother's name is Ella, and
he's
a junior, 'cause he's named after his dad, like his real name is Tony or something. But I was like, Junior! That's got to
mean
something.”

Sophie paused, waiting for Ella to bust up into laughter. Was she joking? She sounded like an airhead.

Listening to herself talking to Sophie, Ella could hear how dumb she sounded, but she couldn't help herself. There was something exhilarating about giving herself over to such talk and feelings. The boy's attentions had electrified her, his steady dark eyes and his husky voice as he traded his pizza for a cigarette. She could feel another girl rising inside her, dumber in some ways and smarter in others, haughty and confident, a flirt. She supposed she'd flirted with the boy, and it had
worked
—he'd seemed both flirtier and shyer when he'd left, after smoking his cigarette down to the filter and tossing the butt into the frothy waves. Ella's body buzzed from the interaction like a hive of yellow jackets swarmed through her, beating their tiny wings. The rash her last scrubbing spell had left upon her was minor, no one
noticed it, she could pretend it was gone and that the girl who'd done it was gone, too, that she was through with all that, and she wouldn't let such craziness overtake her again.

“Okay.” Sophie laughed. She sounded almost nervous. “Well, ah, I was at the dump all day.”

Ella had forgotten to stay mad at her friend for telling their secret and getting herself punished. She'd missed her at the beach, at first, but then, later, when the boys showed up, she'd been grateful Sophie wasn't around. How could Ella have tried on this new personality in front of Sophie, who knew her so well? Sophie who knew she was a nerd, scared of most everything, had never exchanged a germy kiss with anyone. Sophie would have kicked her with her foot and crossed her eyes at her, and the boy would have decided they both were freaks, and he would have been right. Ella felt guilty to be glad about her friend's punishment, but she was. “That sucks,” she said unconvincingly. “What, did you, like, hang around in trash all day? What even happens there?” Ella shuddered at the thought, feeling the incoming crave of another nic fit.

“There's a glass recycling place, and this person Angel operates it, and she's, like, a girl, but she looks like a boy, she's really cool. And she gave me this amazing, like, jewel—not a jewel, it's glass with a seashell in it, and there's all this tumbled glass and it's so beautiful.”

Ella found it hard to concentrate on her friend's breathless report. Her sister and her cousin were chasing each other in and out of her bedroom, and she could hear a new thread of gossip being shared
in the kitchen, the voices rising tantalizingly higher with outrage at someone's scandalous behavior. And beneath the hum of her house, Ella thought
Junior Junior Junior Junior
, feeling the sear of the boy's presence strong as her sunburn. She tried to focus. What had Sophie said, something about a girl that looks like a boy?

“What, are you working with a lesbian? Watch out she doesn't make a grab for you, Sophie!”

“Don't be a jerk.” Sophie felt protective of Angel. “I don't know if she's a lesbian.”

“Girls who look like boys are
leeeesbians
, trust me. My Auntie Bertie looks just like a boy, and she is a total les and she likes to make a grab at the girls, so you be careful!” Ella laughed. “A lesbian! The dump sounds more exciting than I thought it would be.”

“It is,” Sophie said. She couldn't tell if Ella was being mean about Angel or not, but she decided to not talk any more about it. “Anyway, I'm so bored. My mother fell asleep in front of the television again.”

“Whooo,”
Ella made a noise. “That woman likes to snooze. I wish these people over here would take a nap. Can you hear how loud it is?” Sophie could.

“I wish we could meet up,” Sophie said, suddenly longing for her friend.

“We could sneak out,” Ella said. “Later?”

Sophie bit her lip. She was already in so much trouble, banished to the dump all summer. She was conflicted over how she should behave as a result of this punishment. Should she be contrite and rule
abiding to show her mother—what? That she was sorry? She wasn't sorry, exactly. She didn't think her punishment fit her crime. And if she was already punished for the duration of the summer, why should she behave? Sophie realized that if she
didn't
sneak out to see Ella she could forget about having a best friend. Ella would never, ever, ever come to the city dump, and look how different she already was, after just a single day at the beach without her? If Sophie let go of her, Ella would wind up—what? Sophie pictured an even tanner Ella, her dark skin oily and coconut, her long hair teased out Chelsea-style, cigarettes stuck into the hairsprayed mess of it like barrettes. Ella would wind up vapid, uninteresting, and pregnant. Pregnant? Sophie felt like it was a betrayal of her best friend to even think such a thought, but the thought was there—Ella pregnant, by the end of the summer.

“Let's meet at the creek,” Sophie said. “Where we met last time.”

Ella didn't like the thought of that place, with its condoms and filthy water and the memory of her friend's face-plant in the muck. But she could think of no where else to go. Street corners were patrolled by cops and cluttered with kids. Parks were locked, and too easy to get busted sneaking into them. The creek was pretty perfect. Ella wished they could just go back to the beach, and sit on the wall in the dark, straining their eyes to see where the black sky met the black ocean on the black, black horizon. Maybe Junior would be drawn back, too, looking for her. She tried to shake the boy out of her head, stay the Ella she was for Sophie, not the Ella she was that day at the beach. “Okay,” Ella said. “I'll meet you there once the sun goes down.”

Chapter 8

T
he trick to doing something you're totally not supposed to do is acting like it's the most natural thing in the world, like you have every right to be doing it, whatever it is. Sophie pushed her feet into her Vans and passed her mother, asleep on the couch. Her heart pulsed at the sight of Andrea in her work clothes, her head at an odd angle on the couch. It had to be uncomfortable. The woman had to be truly exhausted to have fallen asleep in such an awkward pose, oblivious to the blare of the TV. Sophie thought of turning it down, but then maybe the noise was keeping her mother asleep. What was it about the way Andrea looked, her sleeping mouth open, drool wetting the corners? She looked vulnerable. It gave Sophie a strange, sad feeling. She clicked the door closed gently before she left, praying that her mother wouldn't stir awake at the sound.

Ella's strategy was different. The coffee-drinking, gossiping relatives clustered around her kitchen table would stay there long into the
night. As distracted as they might be with their lively conversation, they were never too distracted not to know the exact whereabouts of every child in the house. Ella stationed herself with a magazine on the hall floor outside the bathroom. Tia Lucy came by first.

“What are you doing, sitting on the floor by the bathroom?”

Ella slapped shut her magazine with a sigh. “It's so
loud
in here,” she groaned. “I can't even read a stupid magazine. I keep reading the same sentence again and again.”

Tia Lucy clucked her tongue in sympathy. “I hate that,” she said. “You should go over to my house, it's empty. I got lemonade in the fridge, help yourself. You're too big to play with the kids and too little to sit with us old ladies.” Tia Lucy laughed as she slid into the bathroom. What a joker. Tia Lucy was hardly an old lady at all. She had long hair she wore in an intricate combination of braid and bun at the back of her head, the better to see the earrings swaying from her ears. Her eyes were lined in blue and she reminded Ella of a bird. Not a dirty Chelsea pigeon but a beautiful, quick bird from a tropical island.

Tia Shirley came next. “What are you doing, reading in the dark? Turn a light on! You're going to ruin your eyes!”

Ella slapped shut her magazine with a sigh. “The lightbulb burned out. And I can't read in my room because Tracy and Junior are playing in there, and I can't read in the living room because Tio Matty and my father are watching something, and I can't read in the kitchen because you all are so
loud
.”

Tia Shirley put her hand on her heart and worried her brow, as if a terrible dilemma was before them. “Ella! There has to be a place for you, too! Why don't you go to my house? Your Tio is sleeping and you can stay on my back porch with the light and read your magazine. Go—I'll tell your mother.”

“Okay, I probably will,” Ella said.

Sitting on the floor in the hallway, Ella received invitations from two more of her aunts to go and read her magazine at their home. So when she stood at the door, her hand twisting the knob, and hollered into the kitchen, “Okay, I'm going to your house to read my magazine, be back in a couple hours!” the women at the table cried back, “Okay, be careful!” in unison, and Ella walked out the door and headed toward the creek.

* * *

THE SKY OVER
Chelsea was extra dark; occasionally the landscape would shift enough for the moon to peek through, illuminating the mass of clouds suffocating its light, and then the cloud cover would spread itself again, and the sky would return to blackness. The glow of the streetlights seemed puny, throwing dim yellow halos around the bulbs but casting hardly any light to the ground. By the time she reached the hole in the chain link, Sophie was going on instinct and memory—beyond the tear in the fence, a shapeless chunk of cement; a bit further, a toppled shopping cart. For a second the clouds shifted,
and the moonlight caught on an empty bottle and shone through it to illuminate the path that wound through the tall weeds to the scabby little creek. Sophie headed out on it, wishing that she could smell the water but sort of grateful, she supposed, that she couldn't, it was so thin and dirty. They were so close to the ocean in Revere, so close to the harbor on the East Boston border, but Sophie and Ella needed the privacy of the creek, their own body of water.

Ella lived closer to the creek and was there already, halfway through a cigarette. When she hugged her, Sophie could feel the day's sun radiating off her skin. Ella smelled like the tanning oil that stuck stubbornly to her arms, and like the scented lotion she slathered on top of it. Her hair smelled like shampoo and her cigarette smelled slightly of strawberry from the gloss on her mouth. Ella smelled like a girl. Sophie couldn't imagine what she herself smelled like. She lifted her arm and huffed her armpit.

“Nice,” Ella commented wryly. “Classy.”

“I think I have to start wearing deodorant,” Sophie mused. “Now that I have a job and stuff.”