Teeth(10)

But then my line jerks and lets go the same way his did. “Lost it.”

“What the hell?” Dad holds the end of his fishing line in his hand. Both the bait and the hook are gone. What’s left of the end of the line is frayed like someone sawed through it.

Or like someone bit it off.

I reel my line in as quickly as I can. The same.

“What the hell happened?” Dad says.

“Mm. We must have got them caught on the rocks and the bottoms pulled off. Cheap line?”

“Must have been . . . ” He looks at Mom suspiciously.

Then Dylan starts to cough, and he’s hacking up shit that a kid his size shouldn’t have the ability to hack up, and Mom says, “We’ll have to solve the mystery of the fateful fishing trip some other time. Inside, all right?” Dad agrees because he has to.

I say, “I’ll be in in a minute.”

“If you miss dinner, you’re getting skinned.” Sometimes my mother reminds me she’s from the South.

“No such luck. Skin Dyl in my stead.”

Once they’re gone, I toss my fishing pole into the sand and walk to the end of the dock. I don’t see him, so I chance it and yell, “Hey!”

I worry for a second that Diana’s going to hear me. Then she’ll really think I’m crazy. Yelling at no one.

But Fishboy says, “Hey yourself.”

I turn around, and there he is, just his torso bobbing out of the water, his arms crossed over his scaly chest. He has the broken ends of our lines in his mouth, hooks dangling by his chin. “So what the f*ck was that?” he says. “You save a fish from the big bad fisherman, then you stick f*cking hooks in the water to try to kill all the rest of them? What the f*ck kind of joke is that? And I thought you were interesting.”

Um. “You’re a fish?”

“What the f*ck do I look like?”

“Fiona says you’re a ghost.”

He laughs once. “Fiona’s full of shit.” He spits the hooks into his hand and buries them in the sand. “She said Ms. Yves would die at a hundred and two. I heard someone say yesterday that she’s a hundred and five. So.”

“You know Fiona?”

“I know all of you.” He smiles. “Rudy.”

I take a step back.

He stops smiling. “Is this really a surprise? What do you think I have to do all day? Spy on all you f*cking humans while you kill the fish. Yep. Great. Thanks a lot.”

I can’t stop watching him while he talks.

He says, “Are you gonna be a fisherman when you grow up, Rudy? They don’t even have to do anything, now that they have those f*cking nets up; it’s like, they can sleep all day and kill the whole population.” His face is turning red while he talks. “God, you’re even worse than them, you know? Because you walk around with your cute little family like you’re so f*cking whatever, then you come down here and start hunting all of us. Yeah, you’re such a little hero, saving the one fish and going home and eating a whole father-whatever-baby set for dinner.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Maybe he likes fish so much that he fused himself with one. Maybe that’s what happened. That doesn’t make any sense. “You’re not a fish,” I say. “You have, like, hair. And arms. Lungs.”

He seems to be agreeing with me, if a little reluctantly, until I gesture to his chest, and then he grabs me by the legs and tackles me into the water.

I’m not fast enough to close my mouth, so I taste everything: the salt, the algae, the shed scales. I never realized before how loud water is.

And mother of Christ, it’s cold. I struggle. The fishboy’s hands keep gripping my thighs, hard, like he’s trying to tear them off.

It’s the longest anyone besides Dylan has touched me since I’ve been here.

I’m kicking and it’s not working shit it’s not working. I’m going to drown. I can’t believe I moved to an island without learning how to swim. I’m choking and I’m going to die . . . .

He’s pulling me down as hard as he can, and he’s going to kill me, f*ck, my parents are going to actually fall apart, but one of my flailing feet nails him in the ribs and it startles him enough that I can scramble to the surface for a breath. My foot brushes his tail. It’s rough and ugly like a rash.

I push myself away from him, panting, grab on to the edge of the dock, and pull myself up, into the air. Safe. I’m huddling against the wood like it’s my mother. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to haul myself back onto the dock, so maybe I’ll just stay here forever. This is my new home.

He’s panting too. Probably from the kick in the ribs. He was already pretty bruised.

I say, “You’re not a fish, you’re a f*cking maniac.”

He laughs, hard, his face up to the sky. I see all his teeth. There must be a hundred of them, as thin as pine needles. He has a loud, piercing laugh, like a whistle.

I know that voice. He’s the screams at night. He’s the hours of screaming and the crying that my parents told me is the wind.

Goddamn. Either he really is a maniac, or he’s got to be the saddest fishboy in the world.

He grabs me by the front of my shirt. “I don’t want to see you around any more dead fish, you got that?”