Free Undertow by Callie Kingston Page A

Marissa’s worries.
    “Everything’s dying,” she whispered.
     
      
    Parking was a crazy mess at the airport. Christmas fell on a Friday, creating a long holiday weekend. Like Jim, hordes of travelers decided to fly home on Sunday afternoon. Kelly bitched while she made slow rounds through the parking lots. With all of Kelly’s attention sucked up with the search for back up lights, Marissa was left alone in her tortured anxiety.
    The oceans are dying. The thought enlarged each time she rolled it over in her mind, collecting her mental energy like a snowball accumulating snow. It crowded out all of her other worries: the impending introduction of Jim and her mother, the upcoming academic quarter, Jim, her mother. None of that mattered now.
    “Marissa, did you hear me?”
    Startled, she inventoried her surroundings: the dashboard, windows steamed from her hyperventilation, a man’s voice cracking over acoustic guitar. She dropped her eyes and dug her nails into her palms.
    Kelly reached over and tapped her shoulder. Marissa trembled as her control began to waver. I will not cry , she ordered herself. Not even with Kels .
    “Damn it, Issa! What is wrong with you?” Softening her voice, she said, “You’re scaring me, okay? You seem so weird lately. What’s going on with you? I think you’re starting to lose it, girl. All that crazy talk the other day . . .”
    “I’m fine, really. Okay? I’m fine. Just drop it, please.”
    Biting her lip, Kelly searched Marissa’s face and waited a minute before replying. “Okay. But I think you need some help, Marissa. You haven’t been yourself since you left Drake.”
    “I don’t even know who I was before I left Drake,” Marissa snapped, unable to keep the bitterness from seeping into her voice.
    “Well, I do. You were Issa. My friend. The girl who held me up while I was falling apart. If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead now. You made me get help, remember?”
    “You were sick, Kels. I couldn’t stand watching you do that to yourself . . . the cutting, the starving. What else could I do?” She’d almost lost her and still might. Marissa noticed her jeans were tiny again, a size one at most, and doubted she’d won the other battle, either. The scars would be there forever either way.
    “Like I said, you saved my life, even if I hated you for it at the time.”
    And Kelly had hated her for telling: for eight horrible months while she got treatment, she’d refused to speak to Marissa at all.
    Now her eyes were compassionate but her voice resolute. “All that stuff the other day, mermaids and drowning and rescues—it’s crazy. It was just a dream, Issa. Maybe you got stuck in that dream or something.” She reached out for Marissa’s hands, still knotted in fists. “It’s your turn this time. You need help.”

 
     
     
    Sixteen
     
    P rofessor Thompson gestured at Marissa and seventy other students from the lectern left of center stage. Marissa slouched in the fifth row and tuned his voice out. Instead, she watched his hands. Despite her new interest in ocean life, the material was still a bear. Getting through this quarter was going to be tough.
    Her mind conjured an image of the only marine life she cared about. She didn’t even know his name. How long could she keep thinking of him as He ? But it didn’t seem appropriate to invent a name for the creature who haunted her thoughts.
    Since returning to Corvallis the day after Jim flew back, Marissa struggled to hide her peculiar obsession. If her best friend had pronounced her crazy and threatened to force her into treatment, who could she trust?
    Entombed safely under her mattress was the notebook, filled with clues: Agnete, the Danish woman wooed by a merman, following him to sea and bearing him seven sons; blue holes, underwater limestone caves formed in the Bahamas, supposedly the origin of Atlantis; tales from a dozen other countries, attesting to the existence of mermaids and mermen.
    She