fuonlyknew

Midnight is the perfect time to eat a turtle.

Submerged in an icy river, I focused briefly on the thought, then let it go. My brother should be close enough to hear, and it would make him come running, so to speak. Mentally, I grinned.

My lungs craved air, so I flicked my hind flippers to propel me upwards. As my head broke the surface, I spun to scan both sides of the forested shore. No human faces peered back in the moonlight, but I pivoted in the water to check again as I sucked in a breath. Not that a nighttime fisherman would see anything odder than a seal poking her nose out of a coastal Maine river—which wasn’t a totally crazy sight, though most seals kept to saltwater—but it wasn’t random humans I was worried about. It was the other kind, the kind who knew what I was. The lying-in-wait kind.

But if anyone lurked in the shadows, I couldn’t see them. Or, I noted as I drew another breath, smell them. So I was safe. Probably.

Letting my muscles relax, I lifted my nose further into the air so the crisp breeze could ruffle my whiskers. I spun in the water again, this time for fun. Despite the danger, I loved these nights, these escapes. For a while I could lose myself in motion and instinct, forget the problems waiting for me ashore. Here, I didn’t have to pretend to be a normal teenage girl, didn’t have to smother my anger and growing desperation. Here, weightless in the river, the world felt right. For a moment, at least.

The water around me shifted, and my brother surfaced two feet away. The seal version of my twin was darker than my dappled cloud coloring; he was gunmetal spotted with shadow, his eyes round wells of midnight as he huffed out a breath.

Cass, you can’t eat turtles. Outrage tinged Brennan’s thought. What would Nicky say?

Nicky was the snapping turtle Brennan had found injured in a pond when we were in middle school. He’d taken him home and kept him in the basement bathtub for a week until his leg healed. Now whenever we met a snapping turtle, Brennan claimed it was Nicky’s uncle, or grandmother, or sister-in-law.

Nicky can’t talk, so he wouldn’t say anything. I dove, abandoning the moonlit surface. Water pressed against my fur and skin; from below came the faint clicks and rustlings of crayfish scuttling over rocks. The bottom of the river beckoned, a fascinating murky dark, and as always a part of me wanted to paint it. But if I tried, the result would look like a squid threw up on canvas—oils could never capture the life and motion of an inky midnight river.

In any case, I didn’t paint anymore. Not even in human form. I’d won schoolwide awards for it freshman year, but now I wouldn’t touch a brush for all the fish in the sea.

Brennan fell in beside me as I swam upstream.

Maybe turtles can talk. Like we do.

Mind-speaking reptiles? I snorted, bubbles betraying my mirth. I started to tell Brennan how ridiculous that was, then paused. Three years ago, when I thought I was just an ordinary high school freshman, I’d have called the idea of creatures like us ridiculous too.

They can’t talk to us, I pointed out instead.

Brennan swam above me, a shadow against the pale surface, then butted my shoulder with his snout.

Well, in any case, selkies don’t eat turtles. Weaving through the water, he sped on ahead.

I frowned. Says who? Not our parents, for sure. Trapped on land, they found the ways of our people too painful to talk about. And in the two and a half years since Brennan and I discovered the truth about ourselves, we’d never met another selkie.

Without opposable thumbs, how would they get through the shell? Brennan’s logic floated back to me as he somersaulted through the water.

They could eat them while in human form. Turtle soup is a delicacy in France, right?

Gross. Brennan paused to nose under a submerged log. I surfaced for another breath, then ducked safely down before continuing upriver. My whiskers caught vibrations through the water: I sensed fish milling about below, tasty swimming morsels, but they’d get a pass tonight. It was late.

After another thirty seconds, I realized my brother had fallen behind. I twisted in the water, but moonlight only penetrated a few inches; I couldn’t see him in the darkness. The river’s weak current tugged at me, the flow undisturbed by another seal-sized body nearby.

I sent a thought out like a beacon: Come on, Brennan, let’s go home. Tomorrow’s shift is going to suck even more if we don’t get any sleep. We were scheduled to work the Sunday brunch rush at The Golden Fish, our older brother Declan’s restaurant. I’d rather roll in needles, but skipping wasn’t an option.

In my mind, I heard a monumental sigh. Then, hardly more than a shudder of a thought:

What if we just left, tonight?

My stomach clenched. Whirling, I swam upstream without answering. Maybe Brennan hadn’t meant me to hear, and didn’t realize I had—sometimes the line between musing and directed thought was thin. Usually we laughed at apparent non sequiturs from stray thoughts, but this one wasn’t funny.

Selkies belonged at sea. I knew that. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to bid Granite Harbor, Maine, a thoroughly un-fond farewell. Frankly, staying on land blew chunks. Big, slimy ones. It meant rules and bargains and danger, and being forced not to spit in faces that desperately deserved it.

But selkies couldn’t become their true selves without their sealskins, and my parents and older brother were trapped apart from theirs, forced to stay ashore in human form. Until two-and-a-half years ago Brennan and I had been trapped too; we hadn’t even known of our true natures then, so we’d grown up like normal kids, or near enough.

Now that we knew the truth, and had our sealskins—a gift with a price I hated to think about—we should be at sea. It was unnatural for selkies to stay on land. But though Brennan and I were free, the rest of our family wasn’t. I couldn’t leave them behind, not without a fight, and despite his possibly-unintentional comment, I knew Brennan wouldn’t either. If I looked back, he’d be following.

He’d better be following.

When I reached the stretch of bank where we’d left our clothes I finally turned to check, but no torpedo-shaped shadow darkened the water.

Brennan? I called mentally, but there was no response. My heart seized. Brennan? For an agonized second I thought he’d left us behind after all, but then there came a faint snap, as if of teeth.

Just let me eat this catfish, will you?

At my brother’s happy distracted tone, relief surged in like the tide. Brennan was my twin, and my best friend. My only friend, if you wanted to split hairs; we couldn’t trust any of our classmates with the truth about ourselves. Brennan still went to parties, but I found it next to impossible to socialize with classmates when my paranoid side branded the word THREAT invisibly on their foreheads. If any of them found out what we really were … Disaster. So if Brennan ever did leave, I’d be alone in my fight.

But he was still here, and I exhaled a bit, bubbles trickling from my nose up to the surface. I let Brennan enjoy his fish; I’d make sure the shore was safe.

Edging toward the bank, I raised my head from the water and scanned the woods carefully. This was always the most dangerous part of our nighttime swims. What if someone had come across our haul-out spot while we were downstream? What if they’d found our clothes? What if they were waiting for Brennan and me to emerge and change back into human form so they could snatch our sealskins?

It wasn’t so far-fetched a notion: after all, that’s what happened to our parents.

I inhaled deeply, my nose sorting scents: tangy pine needles, rotting fall leaves, a faint trace of fox scat. Nothing human besides our own belongings. I counted silently to thirty, but heard nothing beyond the normal rustling of small birds. As far as I could tell, we were alone. Time to trudge back to my landlubber life.

Bracing myself, I started the change.

Bone-deep hurt stabbed everywhere, stretching and cracking and reshaping my limbs and flesh. When I was ten I’d broken an arm, and it felt like that—except all my bones at once, while sandpaper raked my skin. I kept going, and after an agonizing eleven seconds—Brennan and I had timed each other once—my form solidified into one with legs and arms and breasts and hair.

And, thank God, thumbs. I used my lovely thumbs and fingers to grasp my sealskin, now floating like a cape beside me. Still underwater, I wrapped it around my torso before kicking my legs to take me to shore. The shallows here were little more than a two-foot-wide submerged ledge between the deeper part of the river and the earthen bank. I pulled myself up onto the ledge and crouched on the slick rock, water lapping at my shoulders. Steadying myself with one hand on an adjacent boulder, I stood.

Heavy. That first moment out of the water always felt like being saddled with a backpack of granite. Though the thigh-deep water would turn a normal human’s toes blue in twenty seconds—it was October, after all, and winter showed up early on Maine’s doorstep—I stayed stock still. My gaze raked the shadowed underbrush for dangers I might have missed from the water, and my ears strained for the sound of a footstep. My muscles tensed, ready to hurl me back into the river, but the night remained quiet. All clear.

Bending over, I found two smooth river stones and rapped them four times against each other underwater—the signal to let Brennan know it was safe. Our mind-speech only worked in seal form. As I clambered onto the dirt bank, Brennan surfaced mid-river, whiskers gleaming white. Waving, I slipped behind a thick, squat fir tree and found my backpack, nestled among the branches close to the trunk. I pulled out my clothes, then reluctantly unwrapped myself.

Once I was dressed, my fingers lingered on my damp sealskin, this strange key to my secret self. Growing up, my sealskin—and I—had been another’s possession, but it was mine now. I was mine now.

I’d never give that up again, not for anything.

To the untutored eye my sealskin looked like a dark, misshapen towel. The skin side was rough but supple, the reverse sleek and padded with guard hairs. There were no claws or a face or anything creepy like that, just an amorphous shape roughly twice as long as it was wide.

Home, I thought. My sealskin was home to me, more so than my bedroom in my parents’ house, or even the ocean. Contact with my sealskin made me feel strong. Cleared my thoughts. I’d been anxious and tightly wound this afternoon, in a mood Brennan classily termed megabitch, but now that I’d had a good swim I felt steadier.

I folded my sealskin, smoothing down the guard hairs possessively. My whole freedom was tied up in this thing. It killed me to part from it, to stow it in one of a dozen hiding places we’d found in the area, but we couldn’t take our sealskins back to the house. It wasn’t safe.

Slipping my sealskin into my backpack, I returned to the riverbank. Was Brennan getting dressed? I heard nothing from behind the holly bush where he’d hidden his backpack of clothes, and the dirt beside the water was dry except for my damp footprints.

I peered into the depths just beyond the ledge.

“Come on, Brennan.” The water would distort my voice, but Brennan would hear. How long did a catfish take to devour, anyway?

I inhaled, but my nose now caught only the overwhelming scent of pine. My senses were always sharper in seal form, except perhaps for touch. My human skin, without the guard hairs that covered my other self, was definitely more sensitive. And delicate—I’d nicked myself on a thorny bramble earlier, and I stretched out my hand to inspect it. The pad of my thumb, which had sported the wound, was pristine again. Changing healed little injuries, though it didn’t, sadly, maintain things like manicures. I hadn’t bothered to paint my nails in over a year.

A shadow in the river caught my eye. Finally. Brennan was … coming up too fast.

“Wait,” I yelped, but before I could move Brennan exploded out of the river, leaping into the air right beside the ledge and flopping down again. The wave of wet hit me nearly full-on. Sputtering, I shrieked a curse as Brennan disappeared underwater. Surprise cannonballs had been my brother’s signature move at the public pool when we were younger—his and every other boy’s.

My twin surfaced ten feet offshore for my reaction. My jeans were drenched, my sweater half-soaked. Not that it really mattered—my long dark hair dripped down my back anyways—but getting mad was part of the fun. I stamped my foot and cupped my hands around my mouth.

“That’s it—I’m making turtle soup out of Nicky’s cousins!”

Brennan blew out his breath in what amounted to a seal laugh, then submerged. I hastily backed up, but when Brennan reappeared he only pulled himself onto the ledge. I settled on a tree stump to wring out my hair, averting my eyes while Brennan shifted forms and wrapped his sealskin around him.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Brennan said, out of breath from the change. It had only taken him seven seconds; I wasn’t sure why he was faster than me. I rolled my eyes as he pushed himself upright. In human form my brother stood two inches taller than my five-foot-eight frame, his driftwood-colored hair lighter than my dark brown waves. But we shared the same blue eyes, and our mother’s narrow nose. And, of course, our selkie genes.

Still grinning about his prank, Brennan jumped up onto the bank and headed for his holly bush to swap his sealskin for his clothes.

As I finished wringing out my hair, my thoughts returned to our trapped family. They were admittedly never far from my mind, but although swimming cleared my head and calmed my nerves, it always brought home exactly what our parents and older brother were being denied. We’d been trying for two years to get their sealskins back, but so far we’d failed. Sometimes it felt hopeless.

“What are we going to do, Brennan?” I said, my humor gone.

“About what?”

“About our parents.” As if I could mean anything else.

“We’re doing everything we can.” His muffled voice was not nearly as urgent as I’d have liked.

“It’s not enough.” An understatement. Last week our latest attempt to find the sealskins had gone belly up, just like all the rest. The fresh failure cut at me like the icy night breeze.

I heard a sigh. “Give it a rest, will you?”

My mouth went flat. A rest. That’s all Brennan said lately. Remembering his possibly private thought, I wondered if he’d given up entirely, if he was just biding his time until I gave up too. Anger twined through my voice.

“They’ll die here if we don’t free them.”

Brennan stepped out of the shadows and shouldered his backpack.

“Melodrama alert.” Seeing my face, he hesitated. “Let’s sleep on it, okay?”

I wanted to tear into him, but getting into an argument now wouldn’t do any good. Taking a deep breath, I stood and twisted my hair into a bun, securing it with what looked like innocent hair sticks—knives, after all, weren’t allowed in school.

“Okay.” I jerked my lips into a smile and picked up my backpack. “There are sandwiches in the truck, right?” Changing took a boatload of energy, so we were always ravenous once we returned to land. Peanut butter was more filling than crayfish—and much easier to catch.

“Two for me, none for you,” Brennan joked.

“Not if I get there first,” I shot back. Falling into comforting, well-worn banter, we headed up the dark path to the truck.

We never did see the camcorder propped in the trees, watching us go.