Free Inland by Kat Rosenfield Page B

company, to take me places, to be at the door when I get home in the afternoons. Filling the space left by the woman who came before her, looked like her, had the same musical voice. She is only a little bit older now than my mother was. Though the resemblance makes me ache—and though I know it hurts him, too, maybe even worse than me—I’m glad of it. It feels like a second chance, a substitute taste of the life we might have had.
    —
    “How’s it going?” she asks. “Tell me everything!”
    “There’s not much to tell,” I say, but I know she can hear the smile in my voice. She snorts, impatient.
    “Well, what’s it like?”
    I think for a minute, the phone pressed to my ear, while students swarm around me. Some of them look, registering the presence of an unfamiliar face, but nobody peers at me like something inside a glass case. Nobody points and whispers. In this moment, in the flip-flops and jeans and fluttery, flimsy top that Nessa insisted on buying me at the mall in Tallahassee, with my backpack slung on one shoulder, I’m one of them.
    You are here.
    “It’s not like it was,” I say.
    And she says, “Of course it’s not.”
    —
    And it’s not. I can even say it out loud, now, confidently and clearly. It’s not the same at all. It’s in the way I move through the hallways, buoyant with air that keeps me from heaving, or coughing, or crashing against the moving surge of students alongside me. It’s in Ben’s face, open and familiar, as he tugs my ponytail and then pushes my bulky backpack into safe port under the table with one deft swipe of his foot. It’s in the way I’ve started hoping his hand will accidentally brush against mine, and can’t stop myself from smiling and blushing when it happens. It even comes home with me, straightening my spine as I walk through the door, putting a Mona Lisa smile on my lips when Nessa asks me about my day.
    —
    Three weeks after my first day, we open our biology textbooks to the chapter on marine ecology, the flora and fauna that live beneath the sea. It’s full of diagrams, small text attached to narrow lines that point to the inner workings of frogs, fish, whales, and I feel the barest touch of déjà vu.
    “Every marine species on the planet has evolved, physically, to survive in its native environment,” says Mr. Strong. “Can anyone give an example?”
    I don’t even know that I know it, until he points at me. I don’t even feel my hand reach for the sky. It must be somebody else, someone with a voice that’s throaty, smoky, but as clear as a bell, who says, “Seals can collapse their lungs completely in order to dive in deep water.” It’s somebody else who receives the raised eyebrows from the kids nearby, who notices the smile from the boy sitting next to her, who raises her own eyebrows and shrugs and grins back.
    “Excellent, Callie,” says Mr. Strong. “Really excellent, that’s exactly right.”
    —
    Later, I’ll be pleased for other reasons. I’ll realize where the sudden knowledge came from, and smile to realize that something in my mother’s ancient books, paged through so many times and with so little understanding, ended up speaking to me after all.
    But as I gather my things and walk the familiar route to my next class, this is what I know:
    He looked at me, and he knew my name.

C H A P T E R 12
    IF YOU WAIT AT THE SHORELINE while the tide comes in, the surf will begin to bury you where you stand. Water rushing up and all around you, the sand shifting away like a sly living thing beneath your feet, burying you deeper and deeper still, even as the undertow slides with a come-hither tug around your ankles. If you only hold still for a moment, you become the anchor that the world swirls around.
    You are here.
    —
    In the weeks since school began, I’ve held firm while life crashes over me and springs up on all sides. I know this place, these people. I know the halls by heart. Names, faces: they’re all familiar.