The Girl Who Pulls the Tides - ONC 2021

chapter 12

Warm days and drowsy nights blur into weeks as May melts into June. Flowers blossom in gardens and trees soak up sunlight; wych elms shed their yellow fruit, and hawthorn trees bloom, their white flowers falling to the ground beneath them like a fine layer of spring snow. Butterflies emerge from their cocoons and leap from flower to flower, their colorful, patterned wings delicate as petals. It's finally warm enough to leave windows flung open at night or wear shorts to school. Days grow longer and people get tanner (or, in my case, just more freckled), and hair gets all blonde and sun-bleached. My leather-bound journal gets fuller and fuller each day, brimming with notes and thoughts and facts about Evyana (accompanied by the occasional doodle along the margins.)

With every passing day, I know a little more about Evyana, and she knows a little more about me.

I ask her the big questions about her life and her beliefs. I ask about family, and she tells me about them: her mother Pallas (Evyana says her love is as tender as it is tough), and her father Aliya, who looks just like her; her brother Paval, whose skin is deep blue like indigo dye, and her sisters Anastaja and Mirelda, who are both light-green, the color of seafoam. She asks me if humans are all different colors. I say yes, but not green or blue. Not that I know of, at least.

I also ask her the small questions--my favorite kind of question--about her favorite color (yellow) and her favorite song (the one they sing on blue moons) and, if she could go anywhere, where would she go ("Norholm," she answers. "I'd walk the streets of Norholm.")

I ask her about what Nereids eat. She says that they feed off the energy of the ocean. I ask if she has a digestive system. She says she doesn't know.

I say: we'll find out.

I ask her what she wants to do with her life. She says, "I want to do what all my ancestors before me have done; protect the oceans." When she asks me the same, I say, "I just wanna write."

I get to know other things about her, too, like the way her eyes light from silver steel to platinum when she's excited, or the way she tilts her head down when she laughs, hair falling into her face, hiding the high-pitched giggle and crinkled nose behind the curtains of black. I know the intricacies of her accent, the way she speaks new words slowly as if savoring them, and how she sometimes fills in gaps with words from her own language. I know her smell and the softness of her skin when her leg brushes mine. I know that she doesn't like to be still—she's always doing something with her hands, whether it's flicking a drop of water from palm to palm, or fidgeting with her dress, or sifting her fingers through the sand, or idly braiding bits of my hair.

We talk every day, sometimes for hours.

But I still haven't found the words to ask her the question that's sitting deep inside me, wedged between my heart and my ribcage, growing larger and louder with every breath.

What happened to my parents?

☀︎

I'm just about to turn the corner of a street leading away from school and heading downtown, I feel a hand grab my wrist and pull me back. I turn around to face Mabel.

She does not look happy.

"What's up, M?" I ask, my heart picking up speed. "Is something wrong?"

"You tell me," she says, her voice all wavering and breathy. She only sounds like this when she's upset. "Have you been avoiding me?"

Oh, that's it? I breathe a relieved chuckle, "Of course not."

Mabel's green eyes bore into mine. "It's not funny. I feel like you've been ignoring me all week. First, you blew off our study session. Then you made up a stupid excuse to get out of going to the movies with me yesterday. Are you mad at me or something?"