The Thing About Jellyfish

During the first three weeks of seventh grade, I’d learned one thing above all else: A person can become invisible simply by staying quiet.
I’d always thought that being seen was about what people perceived with their eyes. But by the time the Eugene Field Memorial Middle School made the fall trip to the aquarium, I, Suzy Swanson, had disappeared entirely. Being seen is more about the ears than the eyes, it turns out.
We were standing in the touch tank room, listening to a bearded aquarium worker speak into a microphone. “Hold your hand flat,” he said. He explained that if we placed our hands in the tank and held them perfectly still, tiny sharks and rays would graze against our palms like friendly house cats. “They’ll come to you, but you have to keep your hand flat and very still.”
I would have liked to feel a shark against my fingers. But it was too crowded at the tank, too noisy. I stood in the back of the room. Just watching.
We had made tie-dye shirts in art class in preparation for this field trip. We’d stained our hands neon orange and blue, and now we wore the shirts like a psychedelic uniform. I guess the idea was that we’d be easy to spot if any of us got lost. A few of the pretty girls – girls like Aubrey LaValley and Molly Sampson and Jenna Van Hoose – had tied their T-shirts into knots at their hips. Mine hung over my jeans like an old art smock.
It was exactly one month since the Worst Thing had happened, and almost as long since I’d started not-talking. Which isn’t refusing to talk, like everyone thinks it is. It’s just deciding not to fill the world with words if you don’t have to. It is the opposite of constant-talking, which is what I used to do, and it’s better than small talk, which is what people wished I did.
If I made small talk, maybe my parents wouldn’t insist that I see the kind of doctor you can talk to, which is what I would be doing this afternoon, after today’s field trip. Frankly, their reasoning didn’t make sense. I mean, if a person isn’t talking-if that’s the whole point-then maybe the kind of doctor you can talk to is the very last person you should have to see.
Besides, I knew what the kind of doctor you can talk to meant. It meant my parents thought I had problems with my brain, and not the kind of problems that made it hard to do math or learn to read. It meant they thought I had mental problems, the kind that Franny would have called cray cray, which is short for crazy, which comes from the word craze, which means “to fill with cracks and flaws.” It meant I had cracks and flaws.
“Keep your hands flat,” said the aquarium worker to no one in particular-which was fine, because nobody was listening to him anyway. “These animals can actually feel heartbeats in the room. You really don’t need to wiggle your fingers.”
Justin Maloney, who is a boy who still moves his lips when he reads, kept trying to grab the rays’ tails. His pants were so loose that every time he leaned over the water, I could see several inches of his underwear. I noticed his tie-dye was inside out. Another ray passed, and Justin reached in so fast that he splashed water all over Sarah Johnston, the new girl, who was standing next to him. Sarah wiped the salt water off her forehead and moved a few steps away from Justin. Sarah is very quiet, which I like, and she smiled at me on the first day of school. But then Molly walked over and started talking to her, and then I saw her talking to Aubrey at the lockers, and now Sarah’s shirt was knotted at the waist, just like theirs.
I pushed a clump of hair out of my eyes and tried to tuck it behind my ears-Mizz Frizz, hair so impossible. It immediately fell back in my face again.
Dylan Parker snuck up behind Aubrey. He grabbed her shoulders and shook them. “Shark!” he shouted.
The boys around him laughed. Aubrey squealed, and so did all the girls around her, but they were all giggling in that way that girls sometimes do around boys.
And of course that made me think of Franny. Because if she had been there, she would have been giggling, too. I felt that sweaty-sick feeling then, the same thing I felt whenever I thought about Franny. I squeezed my eyes shut. For a few seconds, the darkness was a relief. But then a picture popped into my head, and it was not a good one. I imagined the touch tank breaking, the rays and tiny sharks spilling out all over the floor. And that made me wonder how long the animals could last before they drowned in the open air.
Everything would feel cold and shrill and bright to them. And then the animals would stop breathing forever.
I opened my eyes. Sometimes you want things to change so badly, you can’t even stand to be in the same room with the way things actually are.
In a far corner, an arrow pointed down a staircase to another exhibit, JELLIES, on the floor below. I walked over to the stairs, then glanced back to see if anyone would notice. Dylan flicked water at Aubrey, who squealed again. One of the chaperones walked toward them, already scolding.
Even in my neon tie-dye, even with my Mizz Frizz hair, nobody seemed to see me.
I walked down the stairs, toward the JELLIES exhibit. No one noticed. No one at all.