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The shark came up through the black water with no music at all, and Hazen shoved both hands over his mouth before the scream could get him grounded.
The basement stayed dark except for the television glow, blue-white across the boys’ faces and the wreckage of their sleepover. Blankets had slid off the couch and onto the floor in uneven piles. Two soda cans sat open on the coffee table beside a demolished bag of chips, three candy wrappers, and Manny’s QuestSwitch lying abandoned near the charger with the cord stretched across the rug like a tripwire. RJ had one pillow held against his chest with both arms, claiming through posture alone that he was not using it for protection. Manny sat nearest the remote, knees pulled up, one hand hovering near the volume button every time the movie went quiet. Hazen was on the floor in front of the couch, chin barely above the edge of the blanket, eyes huge.
On-screen, the little fishing boat rocked under gray sky. The movie title sat in the corner of the pause menu whenever Manny got too nervous and hit the wrong button: Maulwater.
They all knew they were not supposed to be watching it. Everyone knew. Maulwater was the movie older kids talked about at school in half-whispers, the one with the shark in the poster and the torn surfboard and the warning label Chloe had once seen on Legacy+ and moved past so fast Hazen accused her of “censorship.” Rated R, according to Chloe. “Not for you,” according to Hazel, which had made it worse because Hazel never said not for you unless she meant it.
RJ had found it anyway on Max’s old login, which should have stayed signed out, and Manny had muttered that this was poor decision-making while taking the remote from him to lower the brightness.
Now the shark circled beneath the boat, and the three boys leaned forward like proximity could improve survival.
“That’s not how sharks hunt,” Manny whispered, though his voice had gone tight enough to Forsaken him. “They don’t just pick one person and start plotting. They’re not villains. They react to movement, blood, splashing, pressure changes, stuff like that.”
RJ hugged the pillow harder. “Nobody asked for a lecture while people are dying.”
“It’s not a lecture, it’s context.”
Hazen did not look away from the screen. “So the shark’s not evil.”
“No,” Manny said, immediately grateful for the chance to know something. “Sharks aren’t evil. They’re apex predators. They operate on instinct.”
That lodged somewhere in Hazen’s brain so visibly that RJ glanced at him.
“Don’t make that face.”
“I’m not making a face.”
“You’re making a plan face.”
Hazen’s eyes tracked the dark shape sliding under the water. “Great whites are insane.”
“They’re not insane,” Manny whispered, annoyed now because taxonomy had become urgent. “They’re powerful. Bull sharks are actually more aggressive in shallow water.”
RJ shifted the pillow lower, chin lifting in fake bravery right as the movie cut to something floating near the dock. “Hammerheads look scarier.”
“Hammerheads have weird heads,” Hazen muttered.
“That’s why they’re scary.”
“They look like somebody drew them wrong.”
RJ threw a candy wrapper at the back of Hazen’s head. Hazen caught it without looking because the shark had surfaced again, and for the next ten seconds no one breathed like a normal person. The music crashed in, the boat lurched, somebody on-screen shouted, and all three boys jerked at once. Hazen bit into the blanket to keep quiet. RJ kicked Manny in the thigh by accident. Manny slapped the volume down so hard it muted the movie completely.
They sat in total silence with the shark frozen mid-attack.
Then Hazen whispered through the blanket, “I’d be a great white.”
RJ stared at him. “Of course you would.”
“You’d be a hammerhead.”
“Good. Hammerheads are terrifying.”
Manny unmuted the movie by one notch, eyes still narrowed. “Bull shark. Statistically underrated.”
Hazen turned enough to look at him, impressed despite himself. “That’s actually kind of cool.”
“It is cool. People ignore bull sharks because great whites get all the movies.”
RJ pointed at the screen with the pillow corner. “Great whites get the movies because they’re the main character.”
“They’re not main characters,” Manny said, “they’re animals.”
Hazen looked back at the movie, the flicker of water and teeth moving across his face. “Exactly. Animals don’t stop and explain. They just do shark stuff.”
That became the rule, though none of them said so out loud.
They watched the rest with that rule settling under every whispered argument. Sharks weren’t evil. Sharks didn’t ask permission. Sharks didn’t run inside for help. Sharks didn’t care if someone was older, younger, scared, loud, cheating, or technically in shallow water. Sharks moved because something crossed over them. Sharks attacked because that was the point of being a shark.
By the time the credits finally rolled, the basement had gone colder from the late hour and every blanket had been pulled closer. Hazen’s hair stuck up on one side from dragging both hands through it every time the music built. RJ kept insisting the jump scares were “cheap” while staying nowhere near the dark hallway. Manny had restarted one shark attack scene twice to explain why the boat angle was wrong and then stopped because Hazel’s footsteps crossed the kitchen floor overhead.
All three boys dropped flat instantly.
The remote vanished under Manny’s chest. Hazen rolled onto his stomach and shoved his face sideways into a pillow. RJ flung the blanket over his head and left one foot sticking out at an impossible angle.
The basement door opened.
Hazel’s silhouette cut into the TV glow. She stood there for a few seconds, one hand on the doorframe, hair loose from sleep, hoodie hanging off one shoulder. Her gaze moved over the wrecked coffee table, the abandoned QuestSwitch, the soda cans, the three boys posed in deeply fake sleep while Maulwater credits crawled silently behind them.
No one moved.
Hazen held his breath until his ribs hurt.
Hazel’s eyes lingered on the television. Then on the boys.
She crossed the room, picked up the remote from under Manny’s elbow with surgical patience, turned the TV off, and left the basement dark except for the stair light.
“Sleep,” she said, voice low from the doorway, and closed the door halfway.
Nobody spoke until her footsteps had gone back upstairs.
RJ lifted the blanket off his face first. “She knows.”
Hazen stared at the dark screen, heart still racing from the shark and Hazel in equal measure. “She doesn’t know.”
Manny rolled onto his back, remote gone, dignity damaged. “She knows enough.”
The next afternoon, Luca laughed so hard his floaties squeaked.
The Madrigal-Hatter backyard had been hot since noon, sunlight flashing across the pool and chalk dust bright on the patio stones where Maddie Lucia had drawn a full kingdom layout with Max’s colored chalk. Luis knelt beside her with one knee on a towel, helping outline a castle wall she kept correcting because the south tower lacks commitment. Max moved between the kitchen and the patio with lemonade, fruit bowls, and towels, the sliding door open behind him so he could keep an eye on the pool without standing over every second of it.
The boys had been trusted with the shallow end.
That made sense at the time. Manny was responsible when he wanted to be. Hazen and RJ knew the rules of the house. Luca adored them with the blind devotion of a toddler who thought bigger kids existed to make the world louder. He stood in the water with bright orange floaties on both arms and a little swim vest clipped around his middle, curls damp, face split wide as Hazen swam under the surface and popped up beside him with a dramatic gasp.
“Dun dun,” RJ hummed from the pool steps, low and terrible.
Luca squealed and slapped both hands at the water. “Shark!”
Hazen’s head turned slowly toward RJ.
RJ grinned.
Manny, sitting on the pool ledge with his feet in, should have stopped it there. Later, his face would say he knew that. In the moment, he only adjusted the goggles on his forehead and said, “If we’re doing this, roles matter.”
Hazen sank lower in the water until only his eyes showed. “Great white.”
RJ slipped into the pool, shoulders rising like some deeply committed creature from a nature documentary. “Hammerhead.”
Manny slid off the ledge with a quiet splash. “Bull shark. Shallow water specialist.”
Luca clapped because all of these words seemed excellent.
At first, it was nothing. Hazen circling under Luca’s floaties and popping up with a growl. RJ humming the Maulwater theme badly while Luca kicked toward him. Manny explaining that sharks didn’t roar, actually, which everyone ignored because roaring was funnier. Luca laughed every time one of them bumped the water near him. Max looked through the kitchen window once and saw four boys in the shallow end, Maddie explaining chalk zoning to Luis, sun on everything. Normal. Fine.
Then Hazen took it too seriously.
Luca climbed halfway onto the pool noodle like he had seen Hazen do earlier, wobbling belly-down while RJ held the other end and called it a surfboard. Hazen sank under the noodle, eyes open beneath the water, the night before living in his head with all its rules. Movement overhead. Surfer above. Great white below.
He grabbed Luca around the middle and pulled.
Luca yelped, then laughed for half a second because it still felt like a game. RJ joined from the side, hands grabbing at the noodle and then Luca’s floatie because hammerheads hunted too, apparently. Manny moved in from the other side with the awful confidence of someone trying to make the scenario “balanced.” The water churned white around them. Luca’s swim vest twisted. One floatie slipped down his arm. Hazen pulled again because the shark was supposed to commit once the attack began.
Luca went under.
Not long. Not the kind of long that made the world stop forever. But long enough.
The laughter broke into panic.
Luis heard the cry before he saw anything, that sharp baby sound tearing across the yard and cutting through Maddie’s sentence mid-word. He was on his feet immediately, chalk rolling off his knee, body moving before Max had even cleared the sliding door. By the time Luis reached the pool, Luca had surfaced coughing and crying, one floatie halfway off, vest unclipped at one side, Hazen and RJ both still too close, Manny’s face gone blank with delayed understanding.
Luis stepped into the water fully clothed.
He lifted Luca out against his chest, one hand behind his head, the other firm around his back, voice low and controlled in a way that made the boys stop moving faster than shouting would have. Luca clung to him, sobbing into his shirt, wet arms locked around his neck.
Max reached the pool edge with a towel, face drained of every bit of earlier warmth. He wrapped it around Luca where Luis held him, eyes moving from the loose floatie in the water to the vest clip, then to the three boys standing chest-deep and silent.
“What happened.”
They all answered at once, which made none of it better.
Hazen pushed water off his forehead, eyes huge now but still trying to explain the rules of a world that had turned against him. “We were sharks, and he was surfing, and in the movie when the surfer goes over—”
RJ cut in from the steps, water dripping from his chin. “He went over the water wrong.”
Manny spoke quieter, which somehow made it worse. “We were doing species roles.”
Luis’s jaw tightened. Luca cried harder when his loose floatie brushed his side, and Luis pulled him closer, turning away from the pool for one second to breathe through whatever answer wanted to come first. Max crouched at the edge, taking the vest strap in his hand and seeing exactly how easily it could have gone wrong.
The game ended there.
No lecture landed cleanly in the heat of that moment. Luis got Luca inside first, towel around him, one arm locked under him, murmuring in Spanish while Luca hiccuped against his shoulder. Max pointed the boys out of the pool with a hand that did not shake only because he was trying hard. Maddie Lucia stood near the chalk castle, silent and wide-eyed, her fingers stained pink and yellow.
The boys climbed out one by one.
Hazen looked back at the water, then toward the sliding door where Luis had disappeared with Luca. His mouth opened once, then closed. RJ wrung water from his shirt without seeming to know he was doing it. Manny picked up the loose floatie from the pool edge and held it like evidence.
By evening, the sun had gone low and the pool looked harmless again.
Chloe and Hazel came to pick the boys up after dinner, the brown Jeep idling at the curb while Hazel loaded croc wrestling duffels into the back. Manny and RJ were both staying over because practice was early the next morning, and the Hook-Charming house sat closer to the training place than Max and Luis’s. It had been planned days ago. Sleepover logistics. Sports schedules. The kind of family shuffle nobody questioned anymore.
Luis stood in the doorway with Luca on his hip, the toddler calmer now but still clingy, cheek pressed into Luis’s shoulder. He did not tell Chloe and Hazel the whole story there. Not with the boys in earshot. Not with Luca watching the big kids from under damp lashes. He only kissed the top of Luca’s head and said the boys had gotten carried away in the pool and they’d talk later.
Hazel’s eyes sharpened.
Chloe’s did too, but Charlotte was home with Red, dinner had run long, and both boys needed his things in the Jeep before the evening tipped into bedtime collapse.
The boys climbed into the backseat damp-haired from forced showers, sun-tired and too normal. Hazen took the middle immediately so he could keep arguing in both directions, RJ by one window, Manny by the other with both duffels shoved near their feet. Hazel adjusted the mirror and caught all three of them wearing the same carefully casual faces.
That told her plenty.
RJ leaned back against the seat. “Hammerheads have better side attack angles.”
Hazen turned toward him immediately. “Great whites have power.”
“Power isn’t everything.”
Manny, buckling his seat belt with slow resignation, looked out the window. “Bull sharks still make the most sense for pools.”
Hazel did not pull away from the curb yet.
Chloe, in the passenger seat, turned halfway around. Her face stayed calm, which was worse for all three boys. “For pools?”
Hazen’s eyes flicked to Manny.
RJ looked down at his knees.
Manny stared harder out the window.
No one in the backseat spoke again until the Jeep stopped at a red light near the harbor, and even then the quiet only lasted a few seconds before Hazen muttered, “If Luca had stayed on the noodle, the scene would’ve worked.”
Hazel’s hands tightened once on the steering wheel.
Chloe turned slowly toward the windshield.
RJ sank lower into his seat.
Manny rubbed both hands over his face.
The rest of the drive passed under a heavy kind of silence while the boys stared out opposite windows and Hazel drove with the expression she got right before somebody’s parent received a phone call.
The wet towels had started dripping onto the dining chair before anyone admitted they smelled like pool water.
Chloe stood near the island with her phone face-down beside the cutting board, not touching it again after Luis’s call, one hand resting flat against the counter as if the kitchen itself needed steadying. The dishwasher hummed behind her. Three croc wrestling duffels slumped near the front door in a heap of straps, damp slides, and rolled-up practice clothes. Hazen’s QuestSwitch charged on the far counter beside Charlotte’s juice cup, the screen dark for once. The boys had come in showered and pajama-dressed, but chlorine still clung to them faintly, sharp under the soap, in their hair and along the collars of their shirts.
Charlotte lay on the couch with Sage Derby tucked carefully in her lap beneath the soft blanket Hazel had warmed in the dryer after medicine. One sock had slid halfway off her heel. Her book rested open against her knees, but her eyes kept moving over the top of the pages toward the kitchen, where Hazen and RJ stood shoulder-to-shoulder like the act of touching elbows might be considered as legal counsel. Manny hovered behind them with his arms folded, damp curls flattened from the shower and the face of a child who had begun understanding consequences about twenty minutes sooner than the other two.
Hazel leaned back against the counter across from Chloe, arms crossed, expression too still. She had not yelled after Luis hung up. That had made Hazen nervous enough to stop shifting his weight.
Chloe picked up the phone again, tapped it once, and set it down harder than she meant to. “Let me ask him. Did you bite your cousin?”
Hazen’s eyes went straight to the phone. “Is that Uncle Luis?”
Chloe’s fingers curled around the edge of the island. “Yes. Now, did you bite your cousin?”
Hazen glanced at RJ, then Manny, then back toward Chloe with the grim sincerity of someone prepared to stand by his testimony. “Tell him. Yes, but I had a good reason.”
Hazel’s brows lifted, slow and dangerous. “You had a good reason to bite your cousin?”
“I was a shark.”
Charlotte’s book lowered half an inch.
Chloe stared at her son. “You were a shark?”
Hazen nodded, relief flickering across his face now that they had reached the most obvious part. “Yeah. We’re all playing sharks in the pool. I was a shark. He was a surfer. He surfed over top of me, and I… And I bit.”
Chloe’s mouth tightened. “You ripped his life jacket off.”
“I was a shark. I don’t…”
Hazel pushed away from the counter a little, not stepping closer yet. “He can’t swim, Hazen.”
Hazen blinked, wet hair curling at his temples. “Okay?”
Chloe’s voice dropped. “And he could have drowned.”
“It was close. I almost had—”
“You think that’s okay?”
Hazen’s shoulders came up, not defensive exactly, more confused that the categories still weren’t being respected. “As a human being, absolutely not. That’s dangerous… But as a shark, it’s kind of what I was looking for.”
Charlotte’s eyes moved from Hazen to Hazel, then back to her book, though she did not turn the page.
Chloe’s hand covered her own mouth for one second, not in amusement. Containment. When it dropped, her voice was quieter and worse. “You did this on purpose?”
Hazen looked honestly offended by the need to clarify. “I was a great white.”
Hazel turned her head toward the ceiling for half a breath, like she was asking the house itself to witness what parenthood had handed her tonight. Chloe kept going because stopping would mean absorbing too much at once. “He said when you finally let him get back to the surface of the water, RJ pulled him back down.”
RJ, who had stayed silent through Hazen’s entire great white defense, straightened at his name. “I was a hammerhead shark.”
Hazel looked at him. “The boy is 2 years old.”
RJ’s face remained painfully earnest. “Sharks don’t care about age.”
From the couch, Charlotte slowly hugged Sage Derby closer to her chest.
Chloe’s eyes widened in a way that made Manny shift farther back, though nobody had asked him to move. “You could have hurt him.”
RJ lifted one shoulder, then seemed to realize halfway through the motion that shrugging was not helping. “I tried, but he got away.”
Hazel stared at both boys. “What is wrong with you guys?”
RJ and Hazen answered together, immediate and insulted. “Nothing is wrong with us.”
The dishwasher clicked into its next cycle. Charlotte’s book sank fully into her lap now.
Chloe pressed both palms flat against the island, leaning forward enough that Hazen’s eyes dropped to her hands. “Then why didn’t you get your uncle when your cousin was crying?”
Hazen’s forehead creased. “How?”
Chloe blinked once. “You walk in the house.”
“We’re sharks.”
Hazel’s face changed into something almost blank from disbelief. “Your cousin was crying.”
RJ nodded, as if confirming a detail from the movie. “Yeah, because we attacked him.”
Chloe’s voice caught on the start of a sentence, then came out thinner. “Again, why would you—”
Hazen leaned forward slightly, desperate for the central logic to finally be heard. “Because we were sharks. If you watch maulwater, you would understand what we were trying to do.”
Chloe’s head lifted. “No, I wanna know why no one went inside and got Uncle Max or Luis.”
RJ looked lost for the first time. “And do what?”
Hazel’s hand flexed once against her arm. “Say Uncle Max—”
Hazen cut in, baffled by the suggestion. “Sharks can’t talk.”
Charlotte nodded once before she caught herself, then looked down at Sage Derby like the bearded dragon had asked for her opinion.
Hazel saw it. Chloe saw Hazel see it. Neither of them could afford to unpack that yet.
Hazel rubbed both hands over her face. “This is crazy.”
Hazen looked at her with the full force of eight-year-old conviction. “Mom, I’m dead serious. Watch Animal.”
Chloe turned slowly toward the couch. Charlotte had gone still under the blanket, book open but forgotten, Sage Derby resting in her lap with the solemnity of a witness who had seen too much. “Charlotte, do you understand why this was dangerous?”
Charlotte looked up, small and thoughtful, medicine sleepiness still soft around her eyes. She took the question seriously. Too seriously. Her gaze went to Hazen first, then RJ, then Manny behind them, then back to Chloe. “…Yeah. Becauthe Luca wathn’t really a surfer.”
Manny closed his eyes.
Hazel made a small noise into her palm, not laughter, not yet, something closer to parental collapse.
Chloe stared at all four children now, her own two by blood and the other two by sheer household repetition, and looked very briefly like she might call Luis back just to apologize again with more force. Then her eyes narrowed as another piece from the phone call seemed to surface. “And which one of you peed in the pool?”
The room went quiet enough for the dishwasher to sound enormous.
Manny opened his eyes and lifted one hand halfway, tired and resigned. “That would be me.”
Hazel’s head turned toward him. “Why?”
Manny looked at the floor, then at the boys, then at the dark window over the sink where all their damp little reflections stood beneath the kitchen light.
“I was also a shark.”