Whale Fall

The girl can’t see the cracks in the ice when she walks out onto the lake. She can, however, hear the creaking beneath the whistle of the wind through the looming, judgmental pine trees.

The girl takes another step. She is bold. She is thirteen. She doesn’t care if things break.

“Come back right now I mean it!” Fear makes her aunt’s words crowd together like sheep in a field.

There are no fights in the world that can’t be fixed by running headlong into danger. That’s what the girl thinks now, as the ice squeaks beneath her sneakers.

She spreads her feet out a bit and looks down at the dark surface. Beneath her feet, the fish are dreaming prophecies of a world covered by one great acidic ocean and the warped, bioluminescent creatures that live in the underwater lobbies of skyscrapers. The bottom of that ocean glitters with the scales of generations of fish that live brief, euphoric lives and die and decompose back into no one.

The cold air smells metallic, and she can feel frost in her nostrils when she breathes. She jumps once, like a guess, and she hears her aunt scream. The girl is a quarter of the way across the lake. Her aunt won’t follow her this far.

Because she is a coward, the girl thinks.

Her thirteenth year has not been what she wanted: She hasn’t taught herself Mandarin or how to build a ham radio; she hasn’t written a book; she hasn’t done anything, in fact, but watch the first season of multiple canceled television shows; her favorite teacher, Ms. Thomas, is moving away; acne has sprung up across her forehead like a minefield; and not a single thing about her is interesting.

She knows it is stupid to complain about any of that. And yet there’s an anger in her like a pilot light. It illuminates her eyes from the hollows of her dark circles. She loves everything in the whole wide world and none of it loves her back.

And part of her knows that if the ice breaks, she will fall.

She starts walking again, more slowly. One step, two step, skip-shuffle.

There is a myth that a child who walks all the way across the lake will grow gills and scales and become a fish. This is not something she heard; it is just something the girl is thinking could be true.

She loves everything in the whole wide world and none of it loves her back.

Ms. Thomas told her once about a whale fall. It happens when a whale dies, and their body falls all the way to the bottom of the ocean, a miraculous event that can fuel the sustenance of a whole new ecosystem. A human girl is not a whale, not even a fish. And yet.

The girl thinks about her teenage body and all the things it could do. She touches the skin just below her jaw, feeling for the flaps and ridges that would mean she’s changing. Nothing.

“I’m sorry, please come back,” her aunt says, but it almost sounds like she is telling her to go on.

I am happy. I am sad. I am selfish. I am resilient. I am depressed. I like boys. I like girls. I like no one. I love life so much I will burst.

She tests the ideas to figure out what is true. Nothing feels certain.

She slips and falls hard on her hands and knees, the light dusting of snow biting into her palms. Her heart is hammering in her chest as she realizes that if she stands again, the ice just might break, it just might, and here she is, stupid, all alone in the middle of a lake that is just deep enough to swallow her until spring.

She begins to crawl, and as she inches forward, the tears run down her cheeks.

When I am your age, will I be the world? she wants to ask her aunt.

As she scrapes along, her nails feel like they are tearing. Her neck is bare and cold from the haircut she tried to give herself in the bathroom mirror. It was, she admits now and only to herself, a terrible mistake. Which still doesn’t mean her aunt was right.

When she is three-quarters of the way across the lake, her aunt is just silent, circling, waiting at the shore, because there is nothing she can do.

The girl stands and begins to walk, then runs the final stretch of distance. The ice is cracking beneath her feet, and frigid water seeps through her sneakers and her socks, but she is already laughing. She feels buoyant. Her fingers stretch with delicate webbing, and her skin is covered in silver scales. And when the water closes over her head, she believes that she will know how to breathe underwater.

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