The Souls of Drowned People

Prologue

They called me Seal Girl.

            They could have compared me to a dolphin, for the way I sliced through the water. Or a shark, fierce and dangerous and hungry for competitors. Or even a fish, though comparing a swimmer to a  fish was the world’s biggest cliché. But no, I was a seal. My best friend Chelsea made it up, accidently. She had a voice that projected like a foghorn, loud enough that I could hear it if I sat at bottom of the pool. It was during a meet against our rival school, I was in second place, and Chelsea was screaming at me, screaming anything that came to mind.

            “Swim like a dolphin!” I heard her screech when I came up for air, the breath sucked fast and cold into my lungs. “Like a fish! Come on! Swim like a seal, girl!”

            When I emerged on the other end, I was suddenly Seal Girl. The team had dropped the comma and made it a chant. It stuck from then on out. Everyone screamed it at meets. The boys took to cooing it in a sexy way – heyy Seal Girl— that made me blush as I saw their eyes scanning me, as if wondering if my skin was as soft as a seal’s, if I would slip from between their fingers when they grabbed for me. “Look out, Seal Girl,” Chelsea said, before slapping me across the legs with a wet towel.

            At the pool, the girl I was at home didn’t exist. There was only Seal Girl. And Seal Girl loved nothing more than the water. Loved the way it broke for her when she dived, the way it obeyed her. Loved sitting at the bottom of the pool, knees curled against her chest, cut off from the world above, watching as it grew distant and the sounds grew faint. She would have lived in the water, if she could.

            At home, there was Moira. And Moira was not allowed to talk about the water. Not the ocean, not the sea, not the lake, not the river. Only the pool, and that was water’s equivalent to artificial grass.

            I think part of the reason I let the team keep calling me Seal Girl was because my mother hated it so much. She came to a meet once, and only because I begged her. She sat in the farthest row of the metal bleachers, as if she was afraid to be inside some kind of splash zone. She was only a speck, and when I came up on the other end, she was still a speck. A frowning speck, her lips pressed tightly together, eyebrows arched.

            “What was it they were calling you?” she asked afterwards.

            “Seal Girl. It’s just some stupid nickname. Chels made it up.”

            “Tell them to stop calling you that. You don’t want to be compared to a seal, do you? You don’t want to me compared to something from the water. The water is dangerous where we come from.”

            Where she came from. Where I was taken from.

            I realized that Seal Girl was the perfect nickname. I had been three years old when my father drowned in the sea and we left Ireland, as if the country itself was out to kill us all. I didn’t remember leaving, or what it looked like. I didn’t even know why we left. But what I did know is that my mother might as well have cast a net over me. I was a seal, and I squirmed inside the nets she kept me in. I pressed against the sides, fought and kicked and chewed, and the ropes only grew tighter. From the moment we left Ireland, I was a seal in her thick nets.

            One day, I was going to break free. I was going to slip from the holes and swim toward home, the real home, and even if the water was as cold and rough as my mother warned me it would be, that didn’t matter.

            It would make getting there all the more beautiful.