The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

LEIGH BARDUGO Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail

There were a lot of stories about Annalee Saperstein and why she came to Little Spindle, but Gracie’s favorite was the heat wave.

In 1986, New York endured a summer so miserable that anyone who could afford to leave the city did. The pavement went soft with the heat, a man was found dead in his bathtub with an electric fan half submerged in the water next to his hairy knees, and the power grid flickered on and off like a bug light rattling with moths. On the Upper West Side, above the bakeries and delicatessens, the Woolworth’s and the Red Apple market, people slept on top of their sheets, sucked on handkerchiefs full of crushed ice, and opened their windows wide, praying for a breeze. That was why, when the Hudson leaped its banks and went looking for trouble on a hot July night, the river found Ruth Blonksy’s window wedged open with a dented Candie’s shoebox.

Earlier that day Ruth had been in Riverside Park with her friends, eating lemon pucker ices and wearing a persimmon-colored shift that was really a vintage nightgown she’d dyed with two boxes of Rit and mixed success. Rain had been promised for days, but the sky hung heavy over the city, a distended gray belly of cloud that refused to split. Sweat beading over her skin, Ruth had leaned against the park railing to look down at the swaying surface of the river, opaque and nearly black beneath the overcast sky, and had the eerie sense that the water was looking back at her.

Then a drop of lemon ice trickled from the little pink spoon in her hand, startling as a cold tongue lapping at her pulse point, and Marva Allsburg shouted, “We’re going to Jaybee’s to look at records.”

Ruth licked the lemon ice from her wrist and thought no more of the river.

But later that night, when she woke—her sheets soaked through with sweat, a tangle of reeds at the foot of her bed—that sticky trail of sugar was what first came to mind. She’d fallen asleep in her clothes, and her persimmon shift clung wetly to her stomach. Beneath it, her body burned feverish with half-remembered dreams of the river god, a muscular shape that moved through the deep current of sleep, his gray skin speckled blue and green. Her lips felt just kissed, and her head was clouded as if she’d risen too fast from some great depth. It took a long moment for her ears to clear, for her to recognize the moss-and-metal smell of wet concrete, and then to make sense of the sound coming through her open window—rain falling in a steady patter onto the predawn streets below. The heat had broken at last.

Nine months later, Ruth gave birth to a baby with kelp-green eyes and ropes of seaweed hair. When Ruth’s father kicked her out of their walkup, calling her names in Polish and English and making angry noises about the Puerto Rican boy who had taken Ruth to her junior prom, Annalee Saperstein took her in, ignoring the neighborhood whispers and clucking. Annalee worked at the twenty-four-hour coin laundry on West Seventy-Ninth. No one was sure when she slept, because whenever you walked past, she always seemed to be sitting at the counter doing her crossword beneath the fluorescent lights, the machines humming and rattling, no matter the hour. Joey Pastan had mouthed off to her once when he ran out of quarters, and he swore the dryers had actually growled at him, so nobody was entirely surprised that Annalee believed Ruth Blonksy. And when, waiting in line at Gitlitz Delicatessen, Annalee smacked Ruth’s father in the chest with the half-pound of thinly sliced corned beef she’d just purchased and snapped that river spirits were not to be trusted, no one dared to argue.

Ruth’s daughter refused milk. She would only drink salt water and eat pound after pound of oysters, clams, and tiny crayfish, which had to be delivered in crates to Annalee’s cramped apartment. But the diet must have agreed with her, because the green-eyed baby grew into a beautiful girl who was spotted by a talent scout while crossing Amsterdam Avenue. She became a famous model, renowned for her full lips and liquid walk, and bought her mother a penthouse on Park Avenue that they decorated with paintings of desert flowers and dry creek beds. They gave Annalee Saperstein a tidy sum that allowed her to quit her job at the coin laundry and move out of the city to Little Spindle, where she opened her Dairy Queen franchise.

At least, that was one of the stories about how Annalee Saperstein came to Little Spindle, and Gracie liked it because she felt it made a kind of sense. Why else would Annalee get copies of French and Italian Vogue when all she ever wore were polyester housedresses and Birkenstock sandals with socks?

People said Annalee knew things. It was why Donna Bakewell came to see her the summer her terrier got hit by a car and she couldn’t seem to stop crying—not even to sleep, or to buy a can of green beans at the Price Chopper, or to answer the phone. People would call her up and just hear her sobbing and hiccupping on the other end. But somehow a chat with Annalee managed what no doctor or pill could and dried Donna’s tears right up. It was why, when Jason Mylo couldn’t shake the idea that his ex-wife had put a curse on his new Chevy truck, he paid a late-night visit to the DQ to see Annalee. And it was also why, when Gracie Michaux saw something that looked very much like a sea monster breach the waters of Little Spindle Lake, she went looking for Annalee Saperstein.

Gracie had been sitting on the bank of what she considered her cove, a rocky crescent on the south side of the lake that no one else seemed to know or care about. It was too shady for sunbathers and devoid of the picnic tables and rope swings that drew vacationers like beacons during the tourist season. She’d been skipping stones, telling herself not to pick the scab on her knee, because she wanted to look good in the jean shorts she’d cut even shorter on her fourteenth birthday, and then doing it anyway, when she heard a splash. One, two, three humps breached the blue surface of the water, a glittering little mountain range, there and then gone, followed by the slap of—Gracie’s mind refused to accept it, and at the same time clamored—a tail.

Gracie scrabbled backward up the banks to the pines and dragged herself to her feet, heart jackrabbiting in her chest, waiting for the water to part again or for something huge and scaly to haul itself onto the sand, but nothing happened. Her mouth was salty with the taste of blood. She’d bitten her tongue. She spat once, leaped onto her bicycle, and pedaled as hard as she could down the bumpy dirt path to the smooth pavement of the main road, thighs burning as she hurtled through town.

It wasn’t much of a hurtle, because Little Spindle wasn’t much of a town. There was a mini-mart, a gas station with the town’s lone ATM, a veterinary clinic, a string of souvenir shops, and the old Rotary hall, which had become the public library after the library in Greater Spindle flooded ten years before. Little Spindle had never gotten the traffic or the clusters of condos and fancy homes that crowded around Greater Spindle, just a smattering of rental cottages and the Spindrift Inn. Despite the fact that the lake was nearly as big as Greater Spindle and surrounded by perfectly good land, there was something about Little Spindle Lake that put people off.

The lake looked pleasant enough from a distance, glimpsed through the pines in vibrant blue flashes, sunlight spiking off its surface in jewel-bright shards. But as you got closer you started to feel your spirits sink, and by the time you were at its shore, you felt positively mournful. You’d convince yourself to walk down to the beach anyway, maybe swing out on the old tire, but as you let go of the rope, you’d hang for the briefest second above the water and you’d know with absolute certainty that you’d made a horrible mistake, that once you vanished beneath the surface you would never be seen again, that the lake was not a lake but a mouth—hungry, blue, and sullen. Some people seemed impervious to the effects of Little Spindle, but others refused even to put a toe in the water.

The only place that did real business year-round was the Dairy Queen, despite the Stewart’s only a few miles away. But why Annalee had chosen to set up shop in Little Spindle instead of Greater Spindle was a mystery to everyone but her.

Gracie didn’t head straight for the DQ that day—not at first. In fact, she got all the way home, tossed her bike down in the yard, and had her hand on the screen door before she caught herself. Eric and her mom liked to spend Saturdays in the backyard, just lying next to each other on plastic lounge chairs, snoozing, hands clasped like a couple of otters. They both worked long hours at the hospital in Greater Spindle and hoarded sleep like it was a hobby.

Gracie hovered there at the door, hand outstretched. What could she really say to her mother? Her weary mother who never stopped looking worried, even in sleep? For a moment, at the edge of the lake, Gracie had been a kid again, but she was fourteen. She should know better.

She got back on her bike and pedaled slowly, meditatively, in no direction at all, belief seeping away as if the sun was sweating it out of her. What had she actually seen? A fish maybe? A few fish? But some deeper sense must have been guiding her, because when she got to the Dairy Queen she turned into the half-full parking lot.

Annalee Saperstein was at a table by the window, as she always was, doing her crossword, a Peanut Buster Parfait melting in front of her. Gracie mostly knew Annalee because she liked listening to the stories about her, and because her mom was always sending Gracie to ask Annalee over for dinner.

“She’s old and alone,” Gracie’s mother would say.

“She seems to like it.”

Her mom would wave her finger in the air like she was conducting an invisible orchestra. “No one likes being alone.”

Gracie tried not to roll her eyes. She tried.

Now she slid into the hard red seat across from Annalee and said, “Do you know anything about Idgy Pidgy?”

“Good afternoon to you too,” Annalee grumped, without looking up from her crossword.

“Sorry,” Gracie said. She thought of explaining that she’d had a strange start to her day, but instead opted for “How are you?”

“Not dead yet. It would kill you to use a comb?”

“No point.” Gracie tried to rope her slick black hair back into its ponytail. “My hair doesn’t take well to instruction.” She waited, then said, “So… the monster in the lake?”

She knew she wasn’t the first person to claim she’d seen something in the waters of Little Spindle. There had been a bunch of sightings in the sixties and seventies, though Gracie’s mom claimed that was because everyone was on drugs. The town council had even tried to turn it into a tourist draw by dubbing it the Idgy Pidgy—“Little Spindle’s Little Monster”—and painting the image of a friendly-looking sea serpent with googly eyes on the WELCOME TO LITTLE SPINDLE sign. It hadn’t caught on, but you could still see its outline on the sign, and a few winters back someone had spray-painted a huge phallus onto it. For the three days it took the town council to notice and get someone to paint over it, the sign looked like the Idgy Pidgy was trying to have sex with the E at the end of LITTLE SPINDLE.

“You mean like Loch Ness?” Annalee asked, glancing up through her thick glasses. “You got a sunburn.”

Gracie shrugged. She was always getting a sunburn, getting over a sunburn, or about to get a sunburn. “I mean like our lake monster.” It hadn’t been like Loch Ness. The shape had been completely different. Kind of like the goofy serpent on the town sign, actually.

“Ask that kid.”

“Which kid?”

“I don’t know his name. Summer kid. Comes in here every day at four for a cherry dip.”

Gracie gagged. “Cherry dip is vile.”

Annalee jabbed her pen at Gracie. “Cherry dip sells cones.”

“What does he look like?”

“Skinny. Big purple backpack. White hair.”

Gracie slid down in the booth, body going limp with disappointment. “Eli?”

Gracie knew most of the summer kids who had been coming to Little Spindle for a while. They pretty much kept to themselves. Their parents invited each other to barbecues, and they moved in rowdy cliques on their dirt bikes, taking over the lakes, making lines at Rottie’s Red Hot and the DQ, coming into Youvenirs right before Labor Day to buy a hat or a key chain. But Eli was always on his own. His family’s rental had to be somewhere near the north side of the lake, because every May he’d show up walking south on the main road, wearing too-big madras shorts and lugging a purple backpack. He’d slap his way to the library in a pair of faded Vans and spend the entire afternoon there by himself, then pick up his big backpack and trundle back home like some kind of weird blond pillbug, but not before he stopped at the DQ—apparently to order a cherry dip.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Annalee.

It was too hard to explain. Gracie shrugged. “He’s a little bit the worst.”

“The cherry dip of humans?”

Gracie laughed, then felt bad for laughing when Annalee peered at her over those thick plastic frames and said, “Because you’re the town sweetheart? You could use some more friends.”

Gracie tugged at the frayed end of her newly cut shorts. She had friends. Mosey Allen was all right. And Lila Brightman. She had people to eat lunch with, people who waited for her before first bell. But they lived in Greater Spindle, with most of the kids from her school.

“What would Eli Cuddy know about Idgy Pidgy anyway?” Gracie asked.

“Spends all his time in the library, doesn’t he?”

Annalee had a point. Gracie tapped her fingers on the table, scraped more of the chipped lilac polish from her thumbnail. She thought of the story of the green-eyed baby and the river god. “So you’ve never seen anything like Idgy Pidgy?”

“I can barely see the pen in my hand,” Annalee said sourly.

“But if a person saw a monster, a real one, not like… not a metaphor, that person’s probably crazy, right?”

Annalee pushed her glasses up her nose with one gnarled finger. Behind them, her brown eyes had a soft, rheumy sheen. “There are monsters everywhere, tsigele,” she said. “It’s always good to know their names.” She took a bite of the puddle that was left of her sundae and smacked her lips. “Your friend is here.”

Eli Cuddy was standing at the counter, backpack weighting his shoulders, placing his order. The problem with Eli wasn’t just that he liked to be indoors more than outdoors. Gracie was okay with that. It was that he never talked to anyone. And he always looked a little—damp. Like his clothes were clinging to his skinny chest. Like if you touched his skin, he might be moist.

Eli planted himself in a two-seater booth and propped a book open on the slope of his backpack so he could read while he ate.

Who eats an ice cream cone like that? Gracie wondered as she watched him take weird, tidy little bites. Then she remembered those shapes moving in the lake. Sunlight on the water, her mind protested. Scales, her heart insisted.

“What’s tsigele mean?” she asked Annalee.

“‘Little goat,’” said Annalee. “Bleat bleat, little goat. Go on with you.”

Why not? Gracie wiped her palms on her shorts and ambled up to the booth. She felt bolder than usual. Maybe because nothing she said to Eli Cuddy mattered. It wasn’t like, if she made a fool of herself, he’d have anyone to tell.

“Hey,” she said. He blinked up at her. She had no idea what to do with her hands, so she planted them on her hips, then worried she looked like she was about to start a pep routine and dropped them. “You’re Eli, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Gracie.”

“I know. You work at Youvenirs.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right.” Gracie worked summer mornings there, mostly because Henny had taken pity on her and let her show up to dust things for a few dollars an hour. Had Eli come in before?

He was waiting. Gracie wished she’d planned this out better. Saying she believed in monsters felt sort of like showing someone the collection of stuffed animals she kept on her bed, like she was announcing, I’m still a little kid. I’m still afraid of things that can curl around your leg and drag you under.

“You know the Loch Ness monster?” she blurted.

Eli’s brow creased. “Not personally.”

Gracie plunged ahead. “You think it could be real?”

Eli closed his book carefully and studied her with very serious, very blue eyes, the furrow between his eyebrows deepening. His lashes were so blond they were almost silver. “Did you look through my library record?” he asked. “Because that’s a federal crime.”

“What?” It was Gracie’s turn to scrutinize Eli. “No, I didn’t spy on you. I just asked you a question.”

“Oh. Well. Good. Because I’m not totally sure it’s a crime anyway.”

“What are you looking at that you’re so worried people will see? Porn?”

“Volumes of it,” he said, in that same serious voice. “As much porn as I can get. The Little Spindle Library’s collection is small but thoughtfully curated.”

Gracie snorted, and Eli’s mouth tugged up a little.

“Okay, perv. Annalee said you might know something about Idgy Pidgy and that kind of stuff.”

“Annalee?”

Gracie bobbed her chin over to the booth by the window, where a nervous-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt had seated himself across from Annalee and was whispering something to her as he tore up a napkin. “This is her place.”

“I like cryptozoology,” Eli said. Off her blank look, he continued, “Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. Ogopogo.”

Gracie hesitated. “You think all of those are real?”

“Not all of them. Statistically. But no one was sure the giant squid was real until they started washing up on beaches in New Zealand.”

“Really?”

Eli gave her a businesslike nod. “There’s a specimen at the Natural History Museum in London that’s twenty-eight feet long. They think that’s a small one.”

“No shit,” Gracie breathed.

Another precise nod. “No. Shit.”

This time Gracie laughed outright. “Hold up,” she said, “I want a Blizzard. Don’t go anywhere.”

He didn’t.

That summer took on a wavy, loopy, lazing shape for Gracie. Mornings she “worked” at Youvenirs, rearranging knickknacks in the windows and pointing the rare customer toward the register. At noon she’d meet up with Eli and they’d go to the library or ride bikes to her cove, though Eli thought another sighting there was unlikely.

“Why would it come back here?” he asked as they stared out at the sun-dappled water.

“It was here before. Maybe it likes the shade.”

“Or maybe it was just passing through.”

Most of the time they talked about Idgy Pidgy. Or at least that was where their conversations always started.

“You could have just seen fish,” Eli said as they flipped through a book on North American myths, beneath an umbrella at Rottie’s Red Hot.

“That would have to be some really big fish.”

“Carp can grow to be over forty pounds.”

She shook her head. “No. The scales were different.” Like jewels. Like a fan of abalone shells. Like clouds moving over water.

“You know, every culture has its own set of megafauna. A giant blue crow has been spotted in Brazil.”

“This wasn’t a blue crow. And ‘megafauna’ sounds like a band.”

“Not a good band.”

“I’d go see them.” Then Gracie shook her head. “Why do you eat that way?”

Eli paused. “What way?”

“Like you’re going to write an essay about every bite. You’re eating a cheeseburger, not defusing a bomb.”

But Eli did everything that way—slowly, thoughtfully. He rode his bike that way. He wrote things down in his blue spiral notebook that way. He took what seemed like an hour to pick out something to eat at Rottie’s Red Hot when there were only five things on the menu, which never changed. It was weird, no doubt, and Gracie was glad her friends from school spent most of their summers around Greater Spindle so she didn’t have to try to explain any of it. But there was also something kind of nice about the way Eli took things so seriously, like he really gave everything his full attention.

They compiled lists of Idgy Pidgy sightings. There had been less than twenty in the town’s history, dating back to the 1920s.

“We should cross-reference them with Loch Ness and Ogopogo sightings,” said Eli. “See if there’s a pattern. Then we can figure out when we should surveil the lake.”

“Surveil,” Gracie said, doodling a sea serpent in the margin of Eli’s list. “Like police. We can set up a perimeter.”

“Why would we do that?”

“It’s what they do on cop shows. Set up a perimeter. Lock down the perp.”

“No TV, remember?” Eli’s parents had a “no screens” policy. He used the computers at the library, but at home it was no Internet, no cell phone, no television. Apparently they were vegetarians too, and Eli liked to eat all the meat he could when they left him to his own devices. The closest he got to vegetables was french fries. Gracie sometimes wondered if he was poor in a way that she wasn’t. He never seemed short of money for the arcade or hot pretzels, but he always wore the same clothes and always seemed hungry. People with money didn’t summer in Little Spindle. But people without money didn’t summer at all. Gracie wasn’t really sure she wanted to know. She liked that they didn’t talk about their parents or school.

Now she picked up Eli’s notebook and asked, “How can we surveil if you don’t know proper police procedure?”

“All the good detectives are in books.”

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“Conan Doyle is too dry. I like Raymond Carver, Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley. I read every paperback they have here, during my noir phase.”

Gracie drew bubbles coming out of Idgy Pidgy’s nose. “Eli,” she said, without looking at him, “do you actually think I saw something in the lake?”

“Possibly.”

She pushed on. “Or are you just humoring me so you have someone to hang out with?” It came out meaner than she’d meant it to, maybe because the answer mattered.

Eli cocked his head to one side, thinking, seeking an honest answer, like he was solving for x. “Maybe a little,” he said at last.

Gracie nodded. She liked that he hadn’t pretended something different. “I’m okay with that.” She hopped down off the table. “You can be the stodgy veteran with a drinking problem, and I’m the loose cannon.”

“Can I wear a cheap suit?”

“Do you have a cheap suit?”

“No.”

“Then you can wear the same dumb madras shorts you always do.”

They rode their bicycles to every place there had ever been an Idgy Pidgy sighting, all the way up to Greater Spindle. Some spots were sunny, some shady, some off beaches, others off narrow spits of rock and sand. There was no pattern. When they got sick of Idgy Pidgy, they’d head over to the Fun Spot to play Skee-Ball or minigolf. Eli was terrible at both, but he seemed perfectly happy to lose to Gracie and to tidily record his miserable scores.

On the Friday before Labor Day, they ate lunch in front of the library—tomato sandwiches and cold corn on the cob that Gracie’s mother had made earlier that week. A map of the U.S. and Canada was spread out on the picnic table before them. The sun was heavy on their shoulders and Gracie felt sweaty and dull. She wanted to go to the lake, just to swim, not to look for Idgy Pidgy, but Eli claimed it was too hot to move.

“There’s probably a barbecue somewhere,” she said, lying on the bench, toes digging in the dead grass beneath the table. “You really want to waste your last school-free Friday just looking at maps in the middle of town?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I really do.”

Gracie felt herself smiling. Her mother seemed to want to spend all her time with Eric. Mosey and Lila lived practically next door to each other and had been best friends since they were five. It was nice to have someone prefer her company, even if it was Eli Cuddy.

She covered her eyes with her arm to block the sun. “Do we have anything to read?”

“I returned all my books.”

“Read me town names off the map.”

“Why?”

“You won’t go swimming, and I like being read to.”

Eli cleared his throat. “Burgheim. Furdale. Saskatoon…”

Strung together, they sounded almost like a story.

Gracie thought about inviting Eli when she went to see the end-of-season fireworks up at Okhena Beach the next night, with Lila and Mosey, but she wasn’t quite sure how to explain all the time she’d been spending with him, and she thought she should sleep over at Mosey’s place. She didn’t want to feel completely left out when classes started. It was an investment in the school year. But when Monday came and there was no Eli walking the main road or at the DQ, she felt a little hollow.

“That kid gone?” Annalee asked as Gracie poked at the upended cone in her dish. She’d decided to try a cherry dip. It was just as disgusting as she remembered.

“Eli? Yeah. He went back to the city.”

“He seems all right,” said Annalee, taking the cup of ice cream from Gracie and tossing it in the trash.

“Mom wants you to come for dinner on Friday night,” Gracie said.

But she could admit that maybe Eli Cuddy was better than all right.

The next May, right before Memorial Day, Gracie went down to her cove at Little Spindle. She’d been plenty of times over the school year. She’d done her homework there until the air turned too cold for sitting still, then watched ice form on the edges of the water as winter set in. She’d nearly jumped out of her skin when a black birch snapped beneath the weight of the frost on its branches and fell into the shallows with a resigned groan. And on that last Friday in May, she made sure she was on the shore, skipping stones, just in case there was magic in the date or the Idgy Pidgy had a clock keeping time in its heart. Nothing happened.

She went by Youvenirs, but she’d been in the previous day to help Henny get ready for summer, so there was nothing left to do, and eventually she ended up at the Dairy Queen with an order of curly fries she didn’t really want.

“Waiting for your friend?” Annalee asked as she sifted through her newspaper for the crossword.

“I’m just eating my fries.”

When she saw Eli, Gracie felt an embarrassing rush of relief. He was taller, a lot taller, but just as skinny and damp and serious-looking as ever. Gracie didn’t budge, her insides knotted up. Maybe he wouldn’t want to hang out again. That’s fine, she told herself. But he scanned the seats even before he went to the counter, and when he saw her, his pale face lit up like silver sparklers.

Annalee’s laugh sounded suspiciously like a cackle.

“Hey!” he said, striding over. His legs seemed to reach all the way to his chin now. “I found something amazing. You want a Blizzard?”

And just like that, it was summer all over again.

The something amazing was a dusty room in the basement of the library, packed with old vinyl record albums, a turntable, and a pile of headphones tucked into a nest of curly black cords.

“I’m so glad it’s still here,” Eli said. “I found it right before Labor Day, and I was afraid someone would finally get around to clearing it out over the winter.”

Gracie felt a pang of guilt over not spending that last weekend with Eli, but she was also pleased he’d been waiting to show her this. “Does that thing work?” she asked, pointing to the column of stereo gear.

Eli flipped a couple of switches and red lights blinked on. “We are go.”

Gracie slid a record from the shelves and read the title: Jackie Gleason: Music, Martinis, and Memories. “What if I only want the music?”

“We could just listen to a third of it.”

They made a stack of records, competing to find the one with the weirdest cover—flying toasters, men on fire, barbarian princesses in metal bikinis—and listened to all of them, lying on the floor, big padded headphones hugging their ears. Most of the music was awful, but a few albums were really good. Bella Donna had Stevie Nicks on the cover dressed like an angel tree-topper and holding a cockatoo, but they listened to it all the way through, twice, and when “Edge of Seventeen” came on, Gracie imagined herself rising out of the lake in a long white dress, flying through the woods, hair like a black banner behind her.

It wasn’t until she was pedaling home, stomach growling for dinner, singing Ooh baby ooh baby ooh, that Gracie realized she and Eli hadn’t talked about Idgy Pidgy once.

Though Gracie hadn’t exactly been keeping Eli a secret from Mosey and Lila, she hadn’t mentioned him either. She just wasn’t sure they’d get him. But one afternoon, when she and Eli were eating at Rottie’s Red Hot, a horn blared from the lot, and when Gracie looked around, there was Mosey in her dad’s Corolla, with Lila in the passenger seat.

“Don’t you only have a learner’s permit?” she asked as Mosey and Lila squeezed in on the round benches.

“My parents don’t care, if I’m just coming down to Little Spindle. And it means they don’t have to drive me. Where have you been, anyway?” Mosey glanced pointedly at Eli.

“Nowhere. Youvenirs. The usual.”

Eli said nothing, just carefully parceled out ketchup into a lopsided steeple by his fries.

They ate. They talked about taking the train into the city to see a concert.

“How come your family doesn’t stay at Greater Spindle?” Mosey asked.

Eli cocked his head to one side, giving the question his full consideration. “We’ve just always come here. I think they like the quiet.”

“I like it too,” said Lila. “Not the lake so much, but it’s nice in the summer, when Greater Spindle gets all crazy.”

Mosey popped a fry in her mouth. “The lake is haunted.”

“By what?” asked Eli, leaning forward.

“Some lady drowned her kids there.”

Lila rolled her eyes. “That’s a complete lie.”

“La Llorona,” said Eli. “The weeping woman. There’s legends like that all over the place.”

Great, thought Gracie. We can all start hunting ghosts together.

She tried to ignore the squirmy feeling in her gut. She’d told herself that she hadn’t wanted to introduce Eli to Mosey and Lila because he was so odd, but now she wasn’t sure. She loved Mosey and Lila, but she always felt a little alone around them, even when they were sitting together at a bonfire or huddled in the back row of the Spotlight watching a matinee. She didn’t want to feel that way around Eli.

When Mosey and Lila headed back to Greater Spindle, Eli gathered up their plastic baskets on a tray and said, “That was fun.”

“Yeah,” Gracie agreed, a bit too enthusiastically.

“Let’s take bikes to Robin Ridge tomorrow.”

“Everyone?”

The furrow between Eli’s brows appeared. “Well, yeah,” he said. “You and me.”

Everyone.

Gracie couldn’t pinpoint the moment Eli dried out, only the moment she noticed. They were lying on the floor of Mosey’s bedroom, rain lashing at the windows.

She’d gotten her driver’s license that summer, and her mom’s boyfriend didn’t mind loaning Gracie his truck once in a while so she could drive up to Greater Spindle. Gas money was harder to come by. There were better jobs in Greater Spindle, but none that were guaranteed to correspond with Gracie’s mother’s shifts, so Gracie was still working at Youvenirs, since she could get there on her bike.

It felt like Little Spindle was closing in on her, like she was standing on a shore that got narrower and narrower as the tide came in. People were talking about SATs and college applications and summer internships. Everything seemed to be speeding up, and everyone seemed to be gathering momentum, ready to go shooting off into the future on carefully plotted trajectories, while Gracie was still struggling to get her bearings.

When Gracie started to get that panicked feeling, she’d find Eli at the Dairy Queen or the library, and they’d go down to the “Hall of Records” and line up all the Bowie albums so they could look at his fragile, mysterious face, or they’d listen to Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas while they tried to decipher all the clues on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s. She didn’t know what she was going to do when the school year started.

They’d driven up to Greater Spindle in Eric’s truck without much of a plan, radio up, windows down to save gas on air conditioning, sweating against the plastic seats, but when the storm had rolled in they’d holed up at Mosey’s to watch movies.

Lila and Mosey were up on the bed painting their toes and picking songs to play for each other, and Gracie was sprawled out on the carpet with Eli, listening to him read from some boring book about waterways. Gracie wasn’t paying much attention. She was on her stomach, head on her arms, listening to the rain on the roof and the murmur of Eli’s voice, and feeling okay for the first time in a while, as if someone had taken the hot knot of tension she always seemed to be carrying beneath her ribs and dunked it in cool water.

The thunder had been a near-continuous rumble, and the air felt thick and electrical outside. Inside, the air conditioning had raised goose bumps on Gracie’s arms, but she was too lazy to get up to turn it down, or to ask for a sweater.

“Gracie,” Eli said, nudging her shoulder with his bare foot.

“Mmm?”

“Gracie.” She heard him move around, and when he spoke again, he had his head near hers and was whispering. “That cove you like doesn’t have a name.”

“So?”

“All the little beaches and inlets have names, but not your cove.”

“So let’s name it,” she mumbled.

“Stone… Crescent?”

She flopped on her back and looked up at the smattering of yellow stars stuck to Mosey’s ceiling. “That’s awful. It sounds like a housing development or a breakfast roll. How about Gracie’s Archipelago?”

“It’s not an archipelago.”

“Then something good. Something about Idgy Pidgy. Dragon Scale Cove, or the Serpentine.”

“It’s not shaped like a serpent.”

“Beast Mouth Cove,” she said.

“Beast Mouth? Are you trying to keep people away?”

“Of course. Always. Silverback Beach.”

“Silverbacks are gorillas.”

“Silver Scales… Something that starts with an s.”

“Shoal,” he said.

“Perfect.”

“But it’s not a shoal.”

“We can call it Eli’s Last Stand when I drown you there. You’re making this impossible.” She flipped back on her stomach and looked up at him. He was propped on his elbows, the book open before him. She’d had another suggestion on her lips, but it vanished like a fish slipping free of the line.

Mosey and Lila were talking in low murmurs, tinny music coming out of Lila’s phone. Eli’s T-shirt was stretched taut across his shoulders, and the light from the lamp by Mosey’s bed had caught around his hair in a halo. She could smell the storm on him, like the lightning had followed him home, like he was made of the same dense rain clouds. His skin didn’t look damp. It seemed to gleam. He had one finger on the page, holding his place, and Gracie had the urge to slide her fingers over his knuckles, his wrist, the fine blond hair on his forearm. She reared back slightly, trying to shake the thought from her head.

Eli was looking at her expectantly.

“The name should be accurate,” he said, his face serious and determined as always. It was a lovely face, all of that thoughtfulness pushing his jaw forward, making that stern divot between his brows.

Gracie said the first thing that came into her head. “Let’s call the cove Chuck.”

“Because…?”

“Because you throw things into it.” Was she making any sense at all?

He nodded, considering, then broke into a ridiculous, light-filled, hideously beautiful smile. “Perfect.”

The ride home was like a kind of punishment—cool air rushing through the windows, the radio turned down low, this strange, unwanted feeling beating a new rhythm in her chest. The dark road spooled out in front of them. She wished she were home. She wished they would never stop driving.

Eli’s transformation was a betrayal, a bait and switch. Eli Cuddy was supposed to be safe, and now he felt dangerous. She cast around for someone else to want. She’d had a crush on Mason Lee in the ninth grade, and she made Lila take her up to Okhena Beach, where he was lifeguarding, in the hope that seeing him might jolt some sense into her. Unfortunately, the only amazing thing about Mason was the way he looked with his shirt off. He was like a golden retriever. She understood the appeal, but that didn’t mean she wanted to take him home.

Mornings when she knew she was going to see Eli felt suddenly breathless and full of possibility. She bought a new shirt in lush, just-dusk purple, picked out slender silver earrings in the shape of feathers, bought apple-blossom lip gloss because it looked like something magical in its pink-and-gold tin, and when she touched her fingers to her mouth it felt like an incantation. See me. See me the way I see you.

Gracie knew she was being stupid. If Eli liked her as more than a friend, he’d never given her any clue. He might even have a girlfriend in the city who he wrote long letters to and made out with between classes. He’d never said he did, but she’d never asked him. It had never mattered before. She didn’t want it to matter now.

The summer took on a different shape—a desperate, jagged shape, the rise and fall of a dragon’s back. The world felt full of hazards. Every song on every album bristled with portent. She found herself trying to communicate through the records she chose, and interpreting the ones that he chose as code. She forced herself to spend more time with Mosey and Lila, and at Youvenirs, cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned, battling her new greed for Eli’s company. But was it new? From the first, her hours with Eli had been warm sand islands, the refuge that had made the murky swim through the rest of the year bearable.

She was torn between the need to say something, to speak this thing inside her before summer ended, and the conviction that she had to avoid that disastrous course of action at all costs. For the first time, she found herself counting down the days until September. If she could just make it to Labor Day without letting her heart spill out of her lips, she’d have the whole school year to get over this wretched, ridiculous thing that had taken her over.

On the Saturday before Labor Day, Gracie and Eli watched the closing fireworks above Greater Spindle. They sat next to each other on the edge of the truck, knees almost touching, shoulders brushing.

“I wish you had a phone,” she said, without meaning to.

“Me too. Sort of.”

“Only sort of?”

“I like saving up all the things I want to tell you.”

That has to be enough, Gracie told herself, as blue and silver light washed over the sharp gleam of his features. That should be better than enough.

It got easier. She missed summer. She missed Eli, but it was a relief to be free of the prospect of seeing him. She went to junior prom with Ned Minnery, who was funny and played trumpet. He loved puns. He wore suspenders and striped pants, and did magic tricks. He was the anti-Eli. There was nothing serious about him. It was a fun night, but Gracie wondered if maybe she wasn’t any good at fun. She drank enough peach schnapps to talk herself into kissing Ned, and then got sick by the side of the road.

When Memorial Day came around, she felt ready to see Eli, but she didn’t let herself go to the Dairy Queen. She couldn’t have that kind of summer again. She wouldn’t. She went to Okhena Beach instead, planted herself next to Mosey and Lila on the sand, and stayed there as the sun sank low and the opening weekend bonfire began. When someone brought out a guitar, she found a spot atop a picnic table a little way off, bare feet on the bench, shivering in her sweatshirt. I’m fine, she thought, telling herself she’d rejoin the others by the flames in just a minute. I’m good. But when she saw Eli walking toward her with those long, loping strides, his hair bright in the firelight, face eager, carrying that stupid backpack, all those months of hard work vanished. How had he even gotten to Greater Spindle? Were his parents letting him use the car now? Longing unfurled inside her, as if it had just been waiting for the warm weather to be aired out.

He sat down beside her and said, “You’re not going to believe what I found today. The Hall of Records has a whole collection of spoken-word albums behind the Christmas section. It’s amazing.”

Gracie made herself laugh. “Can’t wait.” Did you miss me? Did you kiss anyone? I did, and it was terrible.

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t spend another summer this way. It would drive her insane. She would make up some excuse—emergency hours at Youvenirs, a cholera outbreak. Whatever it took. She pulled the pot of apple lip balm from her pocket. It was nearly empty, but she hadn’t bothered to buy more. It was too embarrassing to remember the things she’d let herself think when she’d paid for it.

Eli snatched it from her palm and hurled it into the darkness, into the lake.

“Hey!” Gracie protested. “Why would you do that?”

He took a deep breath. His shoulders lifted, fell. “Because I’ve spent nine months thinking of apples.”

Silence dropped around them like a curtain. In the distance, Gracie could hear people talking, the lazy strum of guitar chords, but it was all another country, another planet. Eli Cuddy was looking at her with all of his focus, his blue eyes nearly black in the firelight. That hopeless thing in her chest fluttered, became something else, dared to bloom.

Eli’s long fingers cupped her face, traced the nape of her neck, kept her still, as if he needed to give her every bit of his attention, as if he could learn her like a language, plot her like a course. Eli kissed Gracie like she was a song and he was determined to hear every note. He kissed her the way he did everything else—seriously.

Now summer was round and full, fruit ready to burst, a sun emerging fat, yellow, and happy from the sea. They kissed behind Youvenirs, in the red velvet seats of the Spotlight, on the floor of the record room—the sound of static filling the headphones around their necks as some song or other reached its end.

“We could go to your house,” she suggested.

“We could go to yours.”

They stayed where they were.

On afternoons, when they left the DQ, Eli’s lips were cold and tasted like cherry. On balmy evenings, when they lay on the banks of the cove named Chuck, his hands were warm and restless. Gracie floated in her sandals. She felt covered in jewels. Her bicycle was a winged horse.

But sometime around the end of July, Gracie heard the drone of the insects turn sorrowful. Despite the heat and the sunburned backs of her thighs and the neon still lit on the main road, she felt summer begin to go.

At night she’d hear her mom and Eric laughing in the living room, the television like gray music, and she’d curl up on her side, that narrow panic settling in. With Eli she could forget she was seventeen. She could forget Little Spindle and what came next. A page out of her mother’s life, if she was lucky. A car loan so she could go to community college. Watching the kids from her school leave for other places, better places. She wished Eli had a phone. She wished she could reach out to him in the dark. We could write letters. I could take the train to New York on the weekends. At night she thought these things, but by the next afternoon Eli was bright as a coin in the sunlight and all she wanted was to kiss his studious mouth.

Days and nights dissolved, and it wasn’t until the Saturday before Labor Day that Gracie said, “Mosey’s talking about applying to NYU.”

Eli leaned back on his elbows. They were lying on a blanket at the cove named Chuck, the sun making jagged stars through the branches of the oaks and birches. “Will she?” he asked.

“Probably. She’s smart enough to get in.” Eli said nothing, and Gracie added, “It might be fun to work in the city.”

The furrow appeared between Eli’s brows. “Sure,” he said. “That’s a big change, though.”

Don’t say anything, she told herself. Leave it be. But the knife was right there. She had to walk into it. “Do you not want me there?”

Eli shifted forward and tossed a pebble into the lake. “You should go wherever you want.”

The hurt that flowered in her chest was a living thing, a plant out of a science fiction movie, all waving tendrils and stinging nettles.

“Sure,” she said lightly.

There was nothing wrong with what he’d said. This was a summer thing. Besides, he was right. She should go where she wanted. She didn’t need Eli waiting for her to move to the city. She could crash on Mosey’s couch until she found a job. Did dorm rooms have couches?

“Gracie—” Eli said, reaching for her hand.

She hopped up. “I’ve got to go meet Mosey and Lila.”

He stood then. Sunlight clung to his hair, his skin. He was almost too bright to look at.

“Let’s meet early tomorrow,” he said. “I only have one more day to—”

“Yup.”

She had her bag on her shoulders and she was on her bike, determined to get away from him before he could see her pride go rolling down her face in big fat tears. She pedaled fast, afraid he’d come after her. Hoping so hard that he would.

She didn’t go to work the next day. It wasn’t a decision. She just let the minutes drain away. Eli wouldn’t come to her house. He’d never seen her room or watched TV on their sofa, just hovered outside in the driveway with his bike while Gracie went to grab a sweater or change her shoes. She’d never even met his parents. Because that was real life and they were something else.

You’re being stupid, she told herself. He’ll be gone in two days. Enjoy it while it lasts. Let it be fun. But Gracie wasn’t good at fun, not the kind of fun that other people had. The person she liked best didn’t like her enough to want more of her, and she didn’t want to pretend that wasn’t awful. She was cherry dip cones, all those old paperbacks, records stacked on dusty shelves—something to hold Eli’s interest, maybe even something he really liked, but a summer thing, not quite real when the weather turned.

She read. She watched TV. Then the weekend was gone, and she knew Eli was gone with it. That was okay. Next summer she wouldn’t be waiting at the Dairy Queen or working at Youvenirs. She’d graduate, and she’d go to New York or Canada or wherever. But she wouldn’t be in Little Spindle.

A week after school started, Gracie went to see Annalee. She hadn’t known that she meant to, but she ended up in the fluorescent lights of the Dairy Queen just the same.

She didn’t order. She wasn’t hungry. She slid into the booth and said, “How do I get better? How do I make this stop hurting?”

Annalee set down her crossword. “You should say goodbye.”

“It’s too late. He’s gone.”

“Sometimes it helps to say it anyway.”

“Can you tell me… Did he ever feel the way I did?”

“Ah, tsigele.” Annalee tapped her pen gently on Gracie’s hand. “Some of us wear our hearts. Some of us carry them.”

Gracie sighed. Had she really expected Annalee could make her feel better? This town was full of sham monsters, fake witches, stories that were just stories. But anything was worth a try.

Though the weather was still warm, the main road was quiet, and as she turned onto the narrow dirt path that led to her cove, the woods seemed almost forlorn, as if they were keeping the last watch of summer. She felt guilty. This had been her cove, nameless and comforting before Eli. Where have you been? the pine needles whispered.

She leaned her bike against a tree at the clearing and walked down to the shore. It didn’t feel like sanctuary anymore. Hadn’t Mosey said the lake was haunted? The cove felt full of ghosts she wished she could banish. She had so many good memories with Eli. Did she have to lose all of those too?

That was when Gracie heard it: a single, soft exhalation that might have been a breeze. Then another—a rasping breath. She peered past the shady banks. A body lay slumped in the shallows.

She didn’t remember moving, only that one moment she was standing, stunned on the shore, and the next she was on her knees in the water.

“Eli,” she cried.

“You came.”

“What happened? What is this?” He was so pale he was nearly blue, his veins too close to the surface of his skin.

“I shouldn’t have waited. I get three months. That’s the rule.”

“What rule?”

“I wanted to say goodbye.”

“Eli—”

“I was selfish. I didn’t want you to go to the city. I needed you to look forward to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Gracie. The winters get so long.”

“Eli, I have my phone. I can call—”

“I’m dying now, so I can tell you—”

“You’re not dying,” Gracie shouted. “You’re dehydrated, or you have hypothermia.” But even as she said it, she realized the water was warmer than it should be.

“It was me that day. You were skipping stones. You’d skinned your knee. I saw you just for a second. It was the last day of May.” His eyelids stuttered open, shut. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, but I wanted to for so long. It was better than ice cream. It was better than books.”

She was crying now. “Eli, please, let me—”

“It’s too late.”

“Who says? Who says?”

He gave the barest shrug. It became a shudder. “The lake. Three months to walk the land. But always I must return to her.”

Gracie’s mind flew back to that day at the cove, the creature in the water. It was impossible.

“There are no books, below,” he said. “No words or language.”

No Dairy Queen. No bicycles. No music. It couldn’t be.

Gracie blinked, and Eli’s form seemed to flicker, ghostly almost, part boy and part something else. She remembered Annalee tapping her hand with the pen. Some of us wear our hearts. Some of us carry them.

Gracie’s eyes scanned the beach, the tangle of brambles where the woods began. There, a dark little hump in the leaves. She’d never seen him without it—that ugly purple backpack—and in that moment she knew.

She scrambled for it, fell, righted herself, grabbed it open, and split the zipper wide. It gaped like a mouth. It was full of junk. Skee-Ball tickets, minigolf scorecards, a pink-and-gold lip-gloss tin. But there, at the bottom, glinting like a hidden moon…

She pulled it from the bag, a long, papery cape of scales that seemed to go on and on, glittering and sharp beneath her fingers, surprising in its weight. She dragged it toward Eli, trailing it behind her, stumbling through the shallows. She pulled his body close and wrapped it around him.

“Here,” she sobbed. “Here.”

“Three months,” he said. “No more.”

“It was only a few days—”

“Leave Little Spindle, Gracie. Get free of this place.”

“No,” she shouted at the lake, at no one at all. “We can make a trade.”

Eli’s hand gripped her wrist. “Stop.”

“You can have me too!”

“Gracie, don’t.”

The water lapped against her thighs with its own slow pulse, warm as blood, warm as a womb, and she knew what to do. She curled herself into the cloak of scales beside Eli, letting its edges slice into her arms, letting her own blood drip into the water.

“Take me too,” she whispered.

“Too late,” said Eli. His eyes closed. He smiled. “It was worth it.”

Then the hand around her wrist flexed tight, retracted. Gracie watched it stretch and lengthen—a talon, razor-sharp.

Eli’s eyes flew open. The smell of rain clouds reached her, then the rumble of thunder, the roar of a river unleashed. The rush of water filled her ears as Eli’s body shifted, blurred, shimmered in the fading light. He rose above her, reeling back on the muscular coils of his body, a great snake, a serpent of gleaming white scales, his head like a nodding dragon, his back split by iridescent fins that spread like wings behind him.

“Eli…” she tried to say, but the sound that left her mouth wasn’t human.

She raised a hand to her throat, but her arms were too short, the wrong shape. She turned and felt her body, strange and strong, thrash through the shallows as her back arched.

In the sunlit water, she glimpsed her reflection, her scales deep gray and alive with rainbows, her fins the bruised violet of twilight, a veil of new stars cast against the darkening sky. She was monstrous. She was lovely.

It was her last human thought. She was diving into the water. She was curled around… who was this? Eli. The dim echo of a name, something more ancient and unpronounceable, lived at the base of her brain. It didn’t matter. She could feel the slide of his scales over hers as they slipped deeper into the lake, into the pull of the current, together.

When they found her bicycle leaning against a pine near Little Spindle, Annalee did her best to explain to Gracie’s mother. Of course, her mother still called the police. They even sent divers into the lake. The search was fruitless, though one of them claimed that something far too big to be a fish had brushed up against his leg.

Gracie and Eli had summers, three perfect months every year, to feel the grass beneath their feet and the sun on their bare human shoulders. They picked a new city each summer, but they returned most often to Manhattan, where they’d visit with Annalee and Gracie’s flummoxed mother in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, and try not to stare at their beautiful host with her running-water skin and river-green eyes.

When fall came, they shed their names with their bodies and traveled the waters of the world. The lake hated to give them up. She threatened to freeze solid and bind them there, but they were two now—sinewy and gleaming—monsters of the deep, with lashing tails and glittering eyes, and the force they created between them smashed old rules and new arguments. They slipped down the Mohawk to the Hudson, past the river god with his sloped gray shoulders, and out into the Atlantic. They met polar bears in the Arctic, frightened manatees near the Florida Keys. They curled together in a knot, watching the dream lights of jellyfish off the coast of Australia.

Sometimes, if they spotted a passenger leaning on the rails of a freighter by himself, they might even let themselves be seen. They’d breach the waves, let the moonlight catch their hides, and the stranger would stand for a moment—mouth agape, heart alive, his loneliness forgotten.