We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(33)

a seal.

He is nearly the same color as the sunlit sea, camouflaged in its depths.

Keep looking and you see

the same seal, several more times, so that the painting tracks his passage through the water.

On the right side of the painting,

a boy climbs out of the sealskin, still underwater.

It’s clearly Tatum.

Same coffee curls, same freckles, but he looks maybe ten years old.

The far edge shows the sealskin having drifted to the bottom of the frame, while the human boy’s head is above the waterline.



* * *



—

Hours after dinner, the boys and I sneak out again. We take the scooters to Aquinnah, where the Plum Road Estate is between renters. We swim in the estate’s enormous heated pool, looking up at stars. Steam rises off the water as it connects with the cold night air. My hair floats around me.

Next morning, June takes me out to pick wineberries, deep into the property by a groundskeeper’s cottage. We bring the berries back and make jam, together with Meer. That night, Brock returns from a jaunt to town with a cooler full of oysters. June skips dinner, but the four of us stand around the kitchen island and eat them with hot sauce and lemon, opening them with a single special knife.

On the beach, while the rest of us lay out big cotton blankets, and while the rest of us eat our way through a wicker hamper of potato chips and strawberries, and while we slather ourselves in sunscreen and fuss about with the rusted blue beach chairs, Tatum always throws off his sweatshirt and walks directly into the water.

He wears goggles. He swims straight out to the horizon, like the ocean doesn’t seem dangerous to him. Like it’s his home.

We lose sight of him quickly. He goes off to the left or to the right, and much farther out than I’d ever want to go.

I wonder what he’s running from.

I also think he’s a bit of a jerk, just ditching what the rest of us are doing, acting as if his swimming is important somehow—a priority that no one else can really understand.

I miss my phone, but as days pass, I begin to lean into the rush of the ocean and the voices of the boys. I’ve found a book to read, a Narnia fantasy that Meer says is Kingsley’s favorite from the series. I barely remember it from when I was younger, but it’s good. In it, a boy becomes a dragon and he’s miserable. Trapped. He can only turn back into a boy by having his dragon skin painfully ripped off by a lion.

The boy is Eustace Scrubb. The name on the note I found in the kitchen drawer.

The story also makes me think of the tale about the donkey skin burned to release the trapped human inside. And of Brock’s escape, and the way it captured Kingsley’s imagination.

When I’m tired of reading, I write game ideas in my sketchbook, or tell the boys the plots of video games I’ve played. They listen like we’re sitting around a campfire and I’m a counselor telling ghost stories. While I’m talking, Meer draws ornate patterns on his own skin, or makes other people do it. He is mapped over with bubble-letter sentences and dolphins and skulls and pinups both male and female. The new entries are dark and black, and the old ones beneath them just a delicate blue.

One day, while Tatum is in the ocean, Brock interrupts me explaining the plot of Luigi’s Haunted Mansion to say that the internet told him Sharpies contain neurotoxins.

“Shut up,” says Meer. “Tell me good news only.”

“I’m serious,” says Brock. “I don’t know what neurotoxins do, but what if they make you so you can’t have sex or something?”

“Well, that would suck,” says Meer. “But probably strawberries have neurotoxins, too.”

“Strawberries are pure and good,” says Brock, popping one in his mouth.

“You don’t know that for sure. They could be a silent killer.”

“Strawberries make you virile.”

“Liar.”

“Okay, I made that up. But they don’t have neurotoxins. Don’t try and ruin them for me.”

“Let me draw on you,” says Meer. “Let me make you pretty.”

“I’m already very pretty,” says Brock. “You drew on me yesterday.”

“You’ll be even prettier.”

“Fine. Neurotoxin me up. When I die, the internet will be like, he kicked Ritalin but he was done in by an overdose of permanent marker.”

He flops over on his belly and Meer writes bubble letters across his back. LOSER.

“You look gorgeous,” I tell Brock.

“I can read with my back skin,” says Brock. “I know what he wrote. Meer, why are you such a little butt?”

“It’s my nature,” says Meer.

As the sun lowers in the sky, Tatum finally comes out of the sea. He flops down next to me, wet.

I’m in my green bikini with a baseball cap shading my eyes. My head is propped on a rolled towel and I’ve been explaining how in Luigi’s Haunted Mansion, there’s a level of this creepy building that’s a garden, with water lilies and grass growing out of the floor, vines and flowers everywhere, taking over.

“Is there food?” Tatum asks. The water forms droplets on his shoulders where there’s still a bit of oil from the sunblock. He’s breathing hard.

“We ate everything but the cut-up apple,” says Meer.