St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wallow is still watching me, his face a blank oval. I tug at the goggles and stick my head under for a second look.
    Immediately, I bite down on the mouthpiece of the snorkel to stop myself from screaming. The goggles: they work. And every inch of the ocean is haunted. There are ghost fish swimming all around me. My hands pass right through their flat bodies. Phantom crabs shake their phantom claws at me from behind a sunken anchor. Octopuses cartwheel by, leaving an effulgent red trail. A school of minnows swims right through my belly button. Dead, I think. They are all dead.
    “Um, Wallow?” I gasp, spitting out the snorkel. “I don’t think I can do this.”
    “Sure you can.” Squat, boulder-shouldered, Wallow is standing over the ladder, guarding it like a gargoyle. There’s nowhere for me to go but back under the water.
    Getting used to aquatic ghosts is like adjusting to the temperature of the ocean. After the initial shock gives way, your body numbs. It takes a few more close encounters with the lambent fish before my pulse quiets down. Once I realize that the ghost fish can’t hurt me, I relax into something I’d call delight if I weren’t supposed to be feeling breathless and bereaved.
    I spend the next two hours pretending to look for Olivia. I shadow the spirit manatees, their backs scored with keloid stars from motorboat propellers. I somersault through stingrays. Bonefish flicker around me like mute banshees. I figure out how to braid the furry blue light of dead coral reef through my fingertips, and very nearly giggle. I’ve started to enjoy myself, and I’ve nearly succeeded in exorcising Olivia from my thoughts, when a bunch of ghost shrimp materialize in front of my goggles, like a photo rinsed in a developing tray. The shrimp twist into a glowing alphabet, some curling, some flattening, touching tails to antennae in smoky contortions.
    Then they loop together to form words, as if drawn by some invisible hand:
    G-L-O-W-W-O-R-M G-R-O-T-T-O.
             
    We thought the Glowworm Grotto was just more of Olivia’s make-believe. Olivia was a cartographer of imaginary places. She’d crayon elaborate maps of invisible castles and sunken cities. When the Glowworm Grotto is part of a portfolio that includes Mount Waffle Cone, it’s hard to take it seriously.
    I loved Olivia. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t recognize that she was one weird little kid. She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, “I wanna go home! I wanna go home!” Which was distressing to all of us, of course, because she was home.
    That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Olivia was an adoptee from some other planet. She used to change into Wallow’s rubbery yellow flippers on the bus, then waddle around the school halls like some disoriented mallard. She played “house” by getting the broom and sweeping the neon corpses of dead jellyfish off the beach. Her eyes were a stripey cerulean, inhumanly bright. Dad used to tell Olivia that a merman artisan had made them, out of bits of sea glass from Atlantis.
    Wallow saved all of her drawings. The one labeled “Glowerm Groto” is a sketch of a dusky red cave, with a little stick-Olivia swimming into the entrance. Another drawing shows the roof of the cave. It looks like a swirly firmament of stars, dalmatianed with yellow dots.
    “That’s what you see when you’re floating on your back,” Olivia told us, rubbing the gray crayon down to its nub. “The Glowworm Grotto looks just like the night sky.”
    “That’s nice,” we said, exchanging glances. Neither Wallow nor I knew of any caves along the island shore. I figured it must be another Olivia utopia, a no-place. Wallow thought it was Olivia’s oddball interpretation of Gannon’s Boat Graveyard.
    “Maybe that rusty boat hangar looked like the entrance to a cave to her,” he’d said. Maybe.