Cora’s eyes fluttered shut as sleep reclaimed her, and in the soup of bubbles and slowly cooling water, she slipped under the surface, down to where it was warm, and sweet, and welcoming. She was a mermaid, after all.
All she needed was a little more time, and she’d be going home.
2?ECHOES OF THE UNHEARD
CORA KNEW THAT THERE was nothing wrong with her. She’d been hearing it since she was in preschool, and when you hear a thing often enough, you start to understand it, even if you’d rather not. Sometimes she thought she would have been happier if there had been something wrong with her, if there had been something she could chase after and fix.
But no. There was nothing wrong with her. She was the inevitable result of generation after generation of people struggling to live through starvation, to keep the fat from their rare times of plenty on their bones for long enough to coax a little more living from a land that was all too frequently hostile to their needs. She had been a chubby baby, and a chubby child, and the first time someone had called her “fat” in the tone of voice that made it perfectly clear they were trying to insult her more than they were trying to describe her, she’d been barely five years old.
She’d gone on her first diet when she was eight years old. All the books she’d read since then said children shouldn’t be on diets when they were still growing, that all she’d done by trying to fix the shameful reality of her existence was slow her own metabolism and make her fatness even more of a foregone conclusion, but she’d been a little kid. She’d been lonely, since the other kids were getting more and more reluctant to play with her, as if fat was somehow contagious, and she’d been scared—not of her size, which was normal and natural and didn’t slow her down in any way, but of the way the world was responding to it. She’d heard one of the student teachers talking to a playground attendant in the low, hushed voice of an adult who assumed she wasn’t in earshot, saying that what her parents were doing to her was child abuse.
Cora came from a loving home, but she knew what happened if someone accused your parents of abusing you. She even knew why it had to happen, because Johnny from her kindergarten class used to come to school with bruises shaped like boots in the middle of his back, black and purple and terrifying. But she didn’t want to be taken away because someone thought her body was broken and didn’t bother to ask her what she ate at home before they made a phone call that set a terrible thing into motion. So she decided to take the problem into her own hands.
Everyone said losing weight was just a matter of eating less and moving more, and so for three weeks she’d skipped breakfast by dragging her feet through the process of getting ready for school, thrown her lunch away, and then spent dinner moving the food around her plate with a fork, rather than putting it into her mouth. And she’d spent recesses and lunch racing around the blacktop like a wild thing, waiting for the fat to fall away and the slim, beautiful girl she dreamed of being to emerge.
Instead, she’d collapsed in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday of the third week, too exhausted and malnourished to move, and the call to child services had been made anyway, by the school nurse, who assumed her parents had been starving her.
Her mother’s expression of genuine shock and horror when she arrived at school had probably gone a long way toward keeping Cora’s feared consequences from materializing. Instead, she’d received a thorough checkup, a firm order to eat her dinner from now on, and a referral to a therapist who specialized in childhood eating disorders.
There was nothing wrong with her diet. She ate healthy foods, in reasonable amounts, and sweets and candies, in the same amounts as her peers; she just had a body that wanted to hold on to things a little tighter, keep them a little closer, in case of some future famine or struggle. She was active on the playground and in youth sports when her parents enrolled her, finding joy first on the soccer field and then on the swim team, where her size was nothing compared to the strength of her arms and her ability to propel herself through the water.
There was nothing wrong with any part of her. She was healthy, and happy, and fat, something which everyone who met her was quick to point out, some in tones of gleeful disgust, others in tones of shameful condemnation. Did she not know that she was fat, perhaps? Had she missed that essential fact of her own physical reality, and needed it explicitly explained to her? There was nothing wrong with her, but she was smart enough to know that everything was wrong with her, and even the fact that her parents and her doctors said that dieting would only do her harm didn’t change the fact that if she didn’t find a way to magically become thin, she would never be accepted.
Even people who were quick to say that certain words shouldn’t be said because they were like throwing rocks at people over things they couldn’t help were happy to laugh when the fat kid fell down on the blacktop, even if she stood up bleeding. “You could choose not to be fat,” they would always say, when she called them on it. “If you just had a little self-control, there’d be nothing to make fun of you for. We’re doing you a favor.”
So she’d eaten less and less, even as her doctors and parents tried to get her to eat more, she’d learned to sit so as to take up as little space as possible, and when the laughter and the cruelty had echoed so loudly in her ears that she couldn’t hear anything else, she had given herself over to the water, which had only ever cared for her, had only ever welcomed her home.
When she had filled her lungs with water and felt her body start to drift away on a sweet, liquid tide, her last thought had been that she was finally going home, finally going to a place where everyone would be able to see that there was nothing wrong with her. Then everything had gone black, and when she had woken up again, it had been, not in a hospital bed, but in the tangled kelp forest of the Trenches, and everything had changed.
“See, that’s how we know you really went through a door, and didn’t just have a near-death experience that felt like going through a door,” Kade had said, when she first came to the school, still unsteady on the legs she no longer thought of as her own, unable to shake the feeling that she was going to suffocate in the endless emptiness of the open air. “The other lifeguards at the beach where you went into the water told everyone your body was swept away by the current.”
Cora had seen their Facebook updates about the “tragedy” of seeing their “beloved classmate” drown. Some of them had managed to make digs at her weight and how ridiculous it was to think the currents could work fast enough to disappear her enormous bulk, even as they’d claimed to have been her closest friends and confidants. She was reasonably sure that if she had actually had that many friends, she would never have tried to drown herself.
“The Trenches would have found another way to have you if you’d been happy enough to keep dry,” Sumi had said, practically, when Cora had confessed her suicide attempt. “My door tried to get me three times before I finally pushed it open, and it would have kept on trying for as long as I was suited to Confection. They know what we need.”
“But how?”
Sumi hadn’t had an answer to that one.