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In times like these, Ocean thinks of The Little Mermaid.
Pretty princesses, sing-alongs, kisses at sunset: It had everything. Mrs. Blackwood’s gentle hands would pop the VHS into the player, so well-loved the spools had already needed to be rewound with the cap of a Sharpie at least a dozen times over, and for one hour and twenty-three minutes, everything was okay.
They’d harmonize softly to “Part of Your World,” squeal and throw frantic little hands around each other at Ursula’s parts, ew in resounding unison at true love’s kiss with a boy. Until the credits rolled, nothing else mattered. Behind those four sturdy walls, encased in a best friend’s arms, nothing on the outside could hurt, and the only monsters there to face were the ones in the blue light of the box TV.
And so Ocean thinks, of gentle hands and best friends and warm safety, in order to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Just have to keep running.
It’s dark, and cold. She’s not wearing a parka. She might’ve grabbed one—if everything weren’t so strange, and fuzzy.
Just have to get there.
The pain of every step is finally starting to cut through the haze, but she thunders them down the sidewalk all the same.
Just have to make it where it’s safe.
They might come looking. They might be right there, around the corner. So she runs, despite it all.
Two things, Ocean thinks of, as everything matters and nothing is okay.
The Little Mermaid, and I just have to make it to Constance.
* * *
When the door rattles at eleven o’clock on a Friday night, Constance’s brain concludes this can be one of three scenarios.
One: Mormons. For whatever reason, in spite of (or, maybe, now that she’s thinking about it a little harder, because of) the great big Catholic school down the street, and general reputation of a good three-quarters of this town being Virgin Mary-loving Hallelujah-singers, they’ve taken to knocking on doors, as of late. This event may be less likely, however, ever since Mom chased one all the way to the corner of Tenth and Nuclear with a frying pan in hand.
Two: Delivery guys. There’s always at least four or five per week, driving up with their trucks to drop off a pallet of sprinkles or cake flour or, since fall came around and hand pies started selling, Saskatoon berries. Though, they usually come when Mom and Dad aren’t on a business trip to sign for it, and/or during normal working hours—she’d know, because she’s usually the one stacking said pallets and transporting said berries.
The last possibility, however, isn’t nearly so cultish, or hard on her back.
It’s never a good thing. It should be a welcome sight, to see the face on the other side of the door—and usually, it is, when it’s for sleepovers, study dates, cake-baking sessions, movie marathons. But not now. Constance doesn’t want her brain to be right about this now.
She’s pounding down the stairs in seconds flat, faster than she might for the Mormon or the delivery guy. A sinking feeling anchors in her gut, fingers tripping to undo the deadbolt. This always sucks.
Constance swings the door open to Three: Ocean O’Connell Rosenberg.
“Hey, there, Oce,” she calls, gentle, still wrangling with the lock. Finally, the stupid thing pops back where it’s supposed to be, and her eyes swing to look at her properly. “Need a place to—”
The words stop themselves right there.
Ocean is wrecked.
On eleven o’clock kind of nights, for years since elementary, she always turns up in some sort of state. Exhausted, sure; upset, on occasion; scared, always. She doesn’t say it. She doesn’t say much of anything, really; she’ll say hi, Connie, sorry it’s, like, crazy late, and ask if it’s fine that she stays over tonight, which it is, it always is, and Constance will pop a Disney Blu-Ray or Legally Blonde into the player. An hour and a half in, Ocean passes out on her shoulder on the living room couch or the floor of her bedroom, and it’s never peacefully, so Constance will stay and soothe whatever dreams she has until the sun comes up and she leaves for school like she was never there.
Constance doesn’t ask. She’d like to, but Ocean wouldn’t answer. So instead, she comes down to open the door, makes sure whatever’s on the TV is one of her favorites, and draws the alphabet in her arm just the way she likes it to maybe, just maybe, gift to her five more minutes of the rest she doesn’t get anywhere else.
Most nights, that’s the way things tends to go.
But this isn’t most nights.
“Oh, my God.”
Tonight, Ocean’s in pieces.
If it weren’t clear from the smears of grime, blossoming bruises, oozing cuts from who-the-hell-knows-what, it may as well be spattered all over her face. Her eyes are rimmed red, hair endlessly frizzy and knotted when she never has a lock of it out of place if she can help it, but truthfully, without all of that, it’s the look she’s wearing.
She’s small, she’s worn, she’s wrecked.
Constance shoves away what residual shock has been gluing her to the hardwood and crosses the threshold in one leap. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” she babbles, like an idiot, swarming her legs and arms as they shake—God, blisters, bruises, blemishes, everywhere. “Hey, hey, what happened? Are you okay? Jesus— never mind, just, come in.”
Ocean opens her mouth, and Constance has to strain to hear what comes out, strangled as it is: “Sorry. It’s, c–crazy, late—”
“To hell with late!” Constance cries. “Ocean, it could be—eleven o’clock or a gazillion in the morning, I don’t care. Just get in.”
“Ocea-a-a-n. Get in here, flower.”
She swallowed the frog from her throat, hoped that might do something to keep the ricketiness from her tone. “I’m busy, Dad,” she called. She wasn’t. She was sitting with her back weighted against the door. “Maybe later.” It wouldn’t be.
Sister Cathryn always said lies would send you to Hell, but if God was real, maybe this could be the exception.
“Busy,” chuffed Dad. Dread trickled down her spine. “Always so busy, busy, busy, sunshine.”
The bottom step creaked.
“It’s about time you rela-a-a-x.”
She freezes.
Constance frowns. “Ocean? Oce?”
Her breathing starts to quicken.
Okay, not good, not good. “Hey, breathe, O,” Constance urges, and she seems to try her damndest, heaving in great tremoring lungfuls. It’s like Ocean’s eyes have glued themselves to something unseeable, though, stuck in another probably worse dimension entirely, but it’s really preferable she’s in this one. “I need you to breathe, okay?”
Wide as anything, her gaze finally snaps to hers, feverish, scared, something—else in there? “Hey, yeah, it’s me,” says Constance. An instinct, as reflexive as breathing or having your knee whacked at the doctor’s, she almost reaches to grab her two hands in hers. Then, freezes, an inch away; turns a statement to a question: I’m going to hold your hands to Can I hold your hands?
Another thrum of her heart, and Ocean, tremblingly, answers that question with fingers slipping over her own. They’re waxed with sweat, but it doesn’t matter in the least.
She asks another, in the form of her wild eyes searching hers. “You’re safe,” answers Constance, maybe shaking a little, too. “We’re cool, Ocean. We’re gonna go upstairs, and get you cleaned up, and, and you’ll be safe. Does that sound okay?”
Ocean nods, imperceptibly.
“Okay.” Constance resists a sigh of relief. With a touch that goes beyond careful, she slings one gangly, freckled arm around her neck, and Ocean’s weight slumps into her side. “Hey, hey, it’s alright,” she tries to tell her, no matter how absolutely insufficient it sounds. “I’ve got you now, Oce.”
“There you are, Ocean.” It wasn’t enough. The door split open. “I’ve got you now.”
“Dad, really. I, I’m working on something.” She bit her tongue to keep it from falling over the words.
“Always workin’, workin’, workin’.” Click. The last slice of the hallway disappeared. It’s closed. Outside is gone. Her fingers shriveled the fabric of the sheets. “You’re workin’ so-o-o hard,” said Dad, and the words mushed and melted, the point where one ended and another began warped beyond recognition to anyone else. “That’s not what life’s about, sunshine.”
He lurched a step closer. “This’ll loosen you ri-i-i-ght up.”
Her legs are clumsy, tripping up each step to the apartment, and Constance has never cursed stairs with such frequency as she has done in the past five minutes. It’s more alarming than anything.
Surely, it shouldn’t be this hard.
“That’s it,” murmurs Constance, halfway to the landing, now. “Almo— whhooaa–kay!”
She stuffs back a visceral yelp when Ocean’s limbs seem to flog herself forward. Constance lunges to catch her, two split instances from disaster, and it’s a wonder she doesn’t plummet face-first into the hardwood.
“Shh—oot.” She just manages to avoid another stair-curse, voice softening. “Hey, are you okay?”
Nothing.
Constance frowns. Everything about her is flimsy and disjointed, stumbling, strange, and it’s weird, because the only people she’s ever seen like this are—
It clicks.
The edibles, she could do.
It was down to a science, by now: pretend to grind her jaw and stuff them under her tongue until they’re gone and she could promptly trip across the hall to rid herself of them in the bathroom. It was never a big deal, really, as soon as they left.
Except, they didn’t.
He watched, and so she swallowed, and this wasn’t good. This was not good. He didn’t look good.
“Why the long face, flower?” Dad drawled. “You look like you could use some—”
“No,” she bursted, too quickly. “No, thank you. That, that was enough. Please.”
Then he was holding something in his hands. That wasn’t what he usually had in his hands.
It was glass, with a long neck and a tube bent out of the side, like something from a lab, and the edibles, she could do.
This was not the edibles.
Dad’s face darkened, beneath the haze, soft around the edges but hard at the heart. He stood up straight, and held the glass between his two hands.
Ocean would’ve loved to run, if there were anywhere to go.
"Guess we'll just have to try somethin' else, huh?"
Constance whirls to peer at Ocean’s face beneath a curtain of knotted waves. Her eyes are peeled open just a slice. It’s enough.
Enough to see them veined with red.
Instinctively, Constance sucks a breath in, and like a wholly unwelcome confirmation, there’s the scent. It rolls off the St. Cassian pinafore she’s still wearing in waves, clings to the fabric like it does when she stops by to use the washing machine, only it’s—more. Worse.
This gets the cogs turning.
Until: “Oh, no,” it slips out loud. Oh, no, no, no.
She drops to her knees right there on the landing and darts to hold Ocean up, because she’s teetering like a Jenga tower. What happened? Constance almost craves to ask, if only for the blind hope that the answer might not be what her brain’s actively piecing together.
But then she looks her in the eye, and she knows Ocean is not just wrecked.
They wrecked her.
It was a strange thing, not wanting to breathe and having to; fighting every animal brain’s one instinct—inhale, exhale—until you just couldn’t anymore, and so she gasped in a big lungful of gray.
That’s what it looked like, at least, swirling in the neck of the bottle. But the morbidly familiar scent, the taste of it all cleared things up pretty quickly.
She tried. Really, she did. She thrashed, but he was too solid and sure; cried, but it was swallowed by glass. Mom was there, just watching. Never helping. Every thought, inside and out, every dragging voice in the ear said: Give up. Give in. That’s it, sunshine. Just relax.
But it wasn’t an option.
Even when the world began to melt, and the sheets still ripped between her fingers no longer felt quite so cotton and real anymore, she was never the type to just relax, even when she really should’ve. That’s what they always said.
On the fourth heave of gray, she broke the glass.
“You’re bleeding.”
Like she couldn’t already tell, but cut her some slack, her best friend is in tatters on the toilet seat of her bathroom.
It’s happy in here—usually. Colorful, lived in: Stitch soap dispensers, superhero toothbrushes, rainbowed shower curtains and watermelon body wash. But right now, where he’s usually quite charming, the blue little monster’s toothy grin is sardonic.
Through swirls of panic, Constance tornadoes through the medicine cabinets for—something. Anything that someone is supposed to do to help in this given situation.
“Jesus, shit—I mean, shoot… What the hell did they…”
She finds herself muttering ferociously and incoherently between Q-Tips and half-empty tubes of aloe until she finds it: “Here, here, Neosporin. Can I, Oce?”
Constance asks, waits for her to say she can, because by God if nobody else did, she will.
Ocean nods, wilted. “Thank you.”
It’s not clear whether it’s for the Neosporin or the asking. It’s also the first thing she’s said in what feels like a lifetime, and it’s hoarse and thick to all hell, voice shot from disuse.
Or, overuse.
Constance swallows that down.
She shuffles back across the tile to Ocean and her pale legs, striped and dotted with cuts, bruises, bumps of all shapes and colors. Her fingers almost reach to touch and—
Constance pauses. She squints, and dread makes a home in her chest when there’s a speck of white among the red glinting in the light.
Glass?
This isn’t right.
If it wasn’t everything else, seeing this screwed-up canvas of her best friend’s skin floods her bones with some kind of murderous instinct.
There was always something going on in that house; it became clear from the very first nights of Disney Blu-Rays and restless dreams, when the O’Connell Rosenbergs wouldn’t show up after Pre-K and so the Blackwood residence became Ocean’s second home. She knew from the lavender-vanilla perfume she’d have clinging to the fabric of her skirt since junior high that just barely wasn’t enough to mask the reek of earth lurking beneath. And it was obvious from the fact the telephone never rang for her at St. Damien’s Hospital post a near-fatal nosedive from the tip of a loop-de-loop.
But what that something was was always just barely out of reach; always an it’s nothing or I’m fine or sorry it’s crazy late, could I stay over tonight? away from an answer.
Now is when there’s got to be one.
By the time Constance has finished plucking shards, plastering her in antibiotic and Marvel band-aids, Ocean’s making for the door.
She thinks of every single time she’s reeked of earth, showed up at eleven at night, and nursed bruises on her skin, and in that second makes a choice.
“Where are you going?” says Constance, scrambling upright.
Ocean fingers freeze, inches from the knob.
She almost reaches to catch her wrist, but stops, because no. No, Constance will not keep Ocean here in the same way she must’ve been kept. She will not be the one to demand words from her she won’t say.
But she’s sure as hell asking for them.
Ocean turns over a shoulder. “I— This kept you up,” she answers, like that explains everything. “Going to, to bed. You must be tired.” She moves to twist back.
“Wait.”
She waits. She doesn’t look.
Constance’s eyes flicker over the maze of superheroes on her one more time; how they got there.
This isn’t right, echoes her brain, again.
“Ocean,” Constance says, soft and serious, “what happened?”
The shards splintered everywhere.
It didn’t matter. A cloud of gray erupted into the air, and she ran.
She railroaded past Mom and Dad, minds always a couple seconds behind, and for the first time it was good. Her legs buckled down the stairs, rammed into the dinner table that was never laughed around and the arm of the living room recliner that was never settled in, knees skidding across the rotting hardwood when she pitched this way and that because the world was tilting and so, so wrong.
She didn’t stop when their sanities catch up, calling things down the steps that were and weren’t her name, where was she going, why won’t she relax, they knew what was good for her. She crashed into the door because nothing felt solid, but then her fingers stopped knotting and her feet stopped melting into the floor long enough to tear it open, and she ran.
Left, right, north, south—none of it made sense. The slices of sidewalk seemed like mazes; every thought bled; directions, numbers, pain, safety, the dark, the cold, nothing was right, nothing was clear, nothing was real.
But independent of her mind, her body started to move.
There was one intrinsic instinct left in the gray cloud. It was the only solution that added up, the only path that was straight, the only thing that made sense.
Constance.
Oh, God.
Ocean doesn’t say anything. Not at first, until Constance makes the guess she’s really hoping isn’t the answer.
“They—they, made you. A bong,” she pieces together, in real time. “You…broke it.” The glass. “And, ran here.”
The ensuing silence is loud enough.
Oh, God, the words are still turning around her brain, alongside another several dozen things all culminating in one tumultuous hurricane of a thoughtstorm, looking at her best friend whose first concern, wrecked and in shambles, is costing her a half hour of sleeping in on a weekend.
And so the first thing that bursts out of her mouth is: “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Ocean blinks, jaw ever so slightly slack.
She can’t stop now. “You— they— Ocean,” Constance might be pleading with her, “we, we could’ve, helped.”
She still doesn’t look at her, like she can’t. “You shouldn’t have to.”
“We would’ve wanted to,” cries Constance right back. She reaches to ask, beg for her best friend’s hands in hers, and Ocean lets her. Constance turns those palms over in hers; freckled, spindly, familiar, always a little pleasantly cold—but right now, so unsteady and clammy and everything they shouldn’t be. “What happened—has been happening—to you, that’s, not okay.”
Ocean is stock-still. “It, it’s not your—”
“It’s always my problem,” Constance really is begging, now, finishing that sentence before it’s over because of course, she knows her well enough to. “Ocean, not everything is something you can just—tough out, or hide, or deal with, alone.” When were her cheeks all wet? She has to let go of one of those palms just to push up her glasses and smear the wetness from her lashes, but none of that stuff matters—it never did. Best friends are worth shedding tears for. “Please. Why didn’t you ever just, ask us for…”
The words fizzle out into nothing. Constance’s mouth stops moving.
And it all makes sense.
She knew her well enough to finish her sentences, but not to read her damned mind. “Ocean,” wobbles Constance, deathly serious, “you know you can ask.” Something in her drops. “Right?”
The fact she’s still not looking is all she needs.
“You can,” Constance tells her, insists to her. Her fingers curl tighter around hers. “Deserve to. No, no matter how stuff, used to be. Okay?”
It’s quiet and motionless for a long stretch. Until, Ocean’s shoulders shake, once.
“You don’t understand,” she chokes. “I already, made you—”
“No, Ocean,” Constance cuts that off, because, “I do understand. You’re a choice.” She holds her, and every second she keeps holding her is a choice. “You don’t make me do anything. Not anymore,” she swears to her, desperately, because it’s the hard truth. One day it wasn’t, but as it happens, death turns so much of life upside-down in that way. “So, I’m asking you to ask me. Before it gets like—like this.”
A breath.
Everything is still. Then, Ocean nods, and when she crumbles, Constance makes the choice to catch her pieces.
She holds her together, right there on her bathroom tile, and would rather do nothing else.
“I can’t go back,” abruptly sobs Ocean into the front of her tee, words still slurred and loose in a way that makes Constance want to kill a man. “I, I don’t know where— what—”
“You won’t.” If she’s making any of these promises ones she can keep, it’s sure as hell going to be this one.
She’s got no idea how.
But, “You’ll stay here,” Constance tells Ocean, trembling but so, so sure, “and we’ll figure it out.”
They end up watching The Little Mermaid.
Ocean comes apart in her arms for a while longer, until the world stops falling and they settle beneath a nest of blankets on the living room couch.
When Constance gets up to nudge a DVD into the player, she doesn’t have to ask. It was always strange, in a sense, how she always just seemed to know these things. The TV flickers to life, a fish sails onscreen as the opening credits play, and suddenly, Ocean is seven years old again, safe behind these four walls and beside her best friend.
Maybe not everything changes.
Her mind is still swimming, treading water long after “Under the Sea,” Earth still twisted on its axis. But Connie’s hands, soft and solid, are real. They anchor her upright until Eric and Ariel share true love’s kiss and all is right with the world. Connie gifts to her clothes that don’t reek, a home that isn’t dark, and a heart that doesn’t ache.
It’s still murky, what’s going to happen next. Where she’ll go; what they’ll do.
But here and only here, things make sense.
I’m with Constance.