Free Girl at the Bottom of the Sea by Michelle Tea Page A

sickened and sad. “It was supposed to be me in there. Kishka was tricked into taking her.”
    â€œThat good story,” Syrena said grimly. “That make me happy, that Kishka can be tricked.” Though as she said it the mermaid sounded anything but happy. She sounded like Sophie felt: like there was a rock where her heart should be.
    â€œI don’t even know her name,” Sophie said. “And I don’t know if she’s beautiful. She looked sick. Her skin was green, like the leaves had rubbed off on her.”
    Syrena swooped her long tail around Sophie and brought her close. They lay there, side by side but each far away with thoughts of their lost sisters.

Chapter 8
    E ventually Syrena fell asleep, but Sophie couldn’t. She tried hunkering into the mud like a cat or a mermaid, but the sand felt itchy, and she was too aware of every little fish that swam by her face. After lying there in the dark for what felt like hours, she decided to explore.
    How many days had she spent at the bottom of the sea, practically traversing the whole Atlantic Ocean—and had Sophie even done any exploring? Could she even say she’d seen the deep sea? Or had she just rushed through it at the urging of a tyrannical mermaid?
    Following the steady blue glow of her talisman, Sophie set out cautiously, part walking, part human-style swimming. As she paddled around, she came upon a cluster of coral dotted with slumbering sea snails. Her stomach growled at the sight of them and she nearly burst out laughing. Sea snails? Maybe she truly was becoming part mermaid. Sophie swished over to the rocks and plucked a spiral snail shell fromits shallow crack. Before she could even consider the creature inside, she held the shell to her mouth, slurped, and swallowed. The snail left a slime of flavor upon her tongue, and it made her curious. She pulled another from the crack and slurped it from its home. Cruel, a voice rang in Sophie’s head. It was cruel to pick the innocent snails from their resting place and end their peaceful lives so suddenly in her belly. It was cruel, like the sunfish eating the mermaids, like Syrena eating the shark. The entire ocean was cruel, and all of the earth, and Sophie was a part of it, made to consume life the way sharks were, the way the snails themselves feasted on fish killed and abandoned by other fish.
    Sophie grew dizzy with the thought. She lifted the edge of her T-shirt—once boldly striped, now faded as pale as a fish bone from her time in the salty sea. She dabbed her mouth with the hem. The food chain, or rather chains, the millions of strands of life consuming life upon the planet, was suddenly something Sophie understood, more deeply than she ever had in a classroom. She held an empty periwinkle shell, covered with something fuzzy and nutritious, up to the babyoctopus still residing on her head. He grabbed it with his tentacles and went to work scraping it clean.

    Sophie moved deeper into the reef, running her hands over the ruffled lids of giant clams furred with pink algae. She was mesmerized by the pulsing, colorful mantle peeking out from the shell’s wide curves. Even more mesmerizing was a giant oyster nestled among them, flatter and wider than the clams, its ridged shell sprawling in all directions. Sophie had never heard of giant oysters, but what did that matter? She hadn’t heard of mermaid-eating sunfish, either. As she moved closer to the oyster, its shell began to lift open in greeting. The shiny sea plants and elegant sea fans fluttered with the giant oyster’s movement, and gazing at it with apprehension and wonder, Sophie could see the gleam of something dazzling on the oyster’s fleshy lip. A pearl! As the oyster cranked its shell ever wider, the pearl caught the scant light available at such depths—the blue of Sophie’s talisman, the luminescence of a passing worm, the sparkles of phosphorescence among the algae—and