Talk Vomit

By Amanda Bintz

Once, when I was 11, my friend Jessica told me she saw a mermaid in the pond behind her mother’s house. 

Jessica and I sat together every day on the school bus. I had just read Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, a book about the young son of a rich, criminal family who discovers a population of technologically advanced fairies living under the Earth. Along the footer of every page was the “language of the fairies”: Gnommish. It was a bit like hieroglyphs—a pictographic language whose symbols later came to represent sounds rather than whole words. If you translated it all, you’d discover a secret message from the fairy main character. 

Jessica leaned in and ran her finger along the row of symbols: a dragonfly, a leaf, a mushroom. “So it goes through the whole book?” 

“Yeah. I’ve almost got it all figured out.” 

We were sitting in the middle of the school bus, as far back as we could without encroaching on the big kids’ territory. I sat inside, by the window. Everyone always fought for the outside seat so they could commune with the other children in the aisle, so they could play Bullshit and show off Pokémon cards and trade gum, but I loved seeing all the farms and woodlands we passed on the winding, backroads that led to and from school. I especially loved the mornings, when a pale sun rose over the herds of cows that grazed in pastures set upon steep hills, dotted with scraggly trees and carved up by deep brooks. (The people in that rural New York town always used to say there were more cows than people; I can’t tell you if that was mathematically true, but I can tell you I quickly learned to tell the difference between the smell of regular and liquid cow manure.) On the plots of land that weren’t taken up by red dairy barns and brownish grain silos, there were fields of feed corn and potatoes. Along the edges of the forests, deer picked their way through the trees to gather in twos and threes and graze on dew-dustedgrass. When we drove by, they would stare up at the bus with softly startled black eyes. Though they were common, spying them always made my heart skip. 

“Wait, hold on.” Jessica stopped me from turning the page. “I’ve seen these symbols before!”

I could have scoffed, could have doubted like I would as the skeptic I am now.: Instead, I asked:“What?! Where?”

“On a rock near the pond at my mom’s house! I swear, they’re exactly the same. Oh my God.”

I’ve never met anyone with as good an imagination as Jessica. In those days, I let her talk me into believing every absurd, paranormal, magical thing she told me, because, somewhere deep inside, I knew my time for believing was running out. I’d already realized the truth about Santa Claus. I’d seen through the Easter Bunny’s schtick. I still put my baby teeth under my pillow, but I knew the money wasn’t coming from a fairy anymore. I knew that soon I would turn 12, and I would do so without a letter from wizarding school and without ever getting a chance to see the world at the back of the wardrobe. Every fantasy world I fell in love with left me gutted—every one of them introduced me to another realm of magic I slowly realized I would never be able to pass into through the portal. 

“That’s not possible,” I said. I knew Eoin Colfer, a regular human man, had created the Gnommish alphabet. I knew Artemis Fowl was made up, that the Lower Elements Police didn’t really exist, and I knew for sure that there were no fairies living under the crust of the Earth. But. What Jessica saw on that rock could have been something else. It could have been anything.  

“No, I swear. I saw it. I can show you!” Her thin, freckled face was set with determination. She kept her voice low so no one could overhear, pop in, and break the spell. “Lots of weird stuff happens at that pond. One time, I swear I saw a mermaid.” 

“No! Really?” 

“Yeah! I saw something pink. I swear it was a tail.”

I could see it. 

I could see Jessica entering the woods that surrounded her mother’s little A-frame house, her frizzy brown hair in two braids down her back and knobby knees peeking out of the bottom of her shorts. I could see her walking to the pond on a cloudy autumn evening when the light was fading. I could see her peering through low-hanging branches and thick sprays of leaves. I could see the flash of a tail, of variegated scales that shimmered magenta, fuchsia, salmon, and rose as they descended from hip to fins. Somehow, I could believe Jessica had seen a mermaid in the pond behind her house. 

And I wanted to see it, too. 

That Friday, I rode the bus home with Jessica for the weekend. I slept over with her almost every weekend that year, either at her mother’s or her father’s. This time it was her mother’s house, where the pond was, with the symbols on the rock and the possible mermaid. There was also a secret deep in those woods, according to Jessica—an old school bus with a tragic, morbid past. Her father’s house had its fair share of dark legends à la Jessica too. There was the little wood on the edge of the property where we found the Bone, and where the Shadow Creature had been sighted. The copse butted up against the closest neighboring house, which may or may not have been abandoned, and may or may not have been haunted. There was the decrepit outbuilding where we had dug through the boxes of inscrutable old papers and the strange, vaguely inappropriate Polaroids; the attic in the unused barn—the one where we found the Locked Chest.

Jessica’s mother lived on a twisty rural road cut through a thick forest, on which all the houses were set back so deep in the trees that all you could see from the school bus windows were mailboxes and driveways. We got off the bus at Jessica’s stop, grabbed the mail, and walked the long gravel drive, which was shaded by the thick canopy of turning leaves. Her mom wasn’t home yet, so we skipped through the kitchen and right up the narrow steps that led to Jessica’s craft room. From a closet packed with all manner of art supplies, Jessica produced an enormous roll of paper and a box of colored pencils. We spent the afternoon writing our own messages in the language. We switched around which symbols corresponded with which letters so only we could read it. When we cut off the length of paper scrawled with indecipherable secrets, rolled it up, and tucked it into an empty spot between some books on her shelf, it felt like sliding a scroll into its rightful notch in the Great Library of Alexandria. 

I wonder if Jessica found it years later, after I’d moved away, and remembered our mermaid reconnaissance mission. It was all in the scroll: Jessica’s account of her original sighting, the layout of the forest and the pond, our plan and the supplies we were bringing. I brought my biggest backpack, packed with a flashlight I’d stolen from my dad’s home office, the darkest clothes I owned, a pair of pink and purple walkie-talkies, my mom’s binoculars, and rope from the garage. Jessica’s bedroom was serendipitously located on the house’s ground floor and had one window, which looked out on the side of the house furthest from the pond. Our plan was to wait until her mom went to bed, change into our dark clothes, climb out the window, and sneak around the house and into the woods. There, we would use the rope to hoist ourselves up into a tree with long, thick branches that extended out over the pond. We would stay perched up there all night, eating the box of fruit snacks Jessica had nabbed from the pantry, and wait to catch a glimpse of the mermaid. In her coat pocket, Jessica tashed a disposable camera left over from our class field trip to Howe Caverns earlier that year, so she could capture the mythical moment on film and have proof to silence any non-believers. 

That night, we ate chicken wings with her mother at their dining room table for four. When we got bored with the TV shows her mother was watching, we went upstairs to play with their pet doves. We stroked their soft white feathers, let them perch on our fingers, listened to them flutter and coo. Jessica told me a secret about those doves once. Years before, her mother had given birth to a stillborn daughter: she told me they buried the baby under the big tree in the side of their yard and got those doves to remember her by. This seemed farfetched to me even then, but Jessica was always so gentle and sad with those doves that I think it must have been at least a little bit true. We fed and watered the birds and locked them back in their cages for the night. We said goodnight to her terrarium of hermit crabs. Then we went down to her room, sat on her bed, and waited for time to pass. I brushed her dolls’ hair while she showed me all the flavors of Lip Smackers in her collection. My backpack sat heavy at the end of the bed.

“She’ll be asleep in an hour,” Jessica said after her mom popped in to say goodnight to us. She checked the Strawberry Shortcake analog watch on her wrist. “It’s 9. At 10 we can go.”

I looked out the window, a square of darkness between pink and white curtains. Directly beneath it was her dresser. We would have to move her jewelry box and various music boxes and figurines of ballerinas and dolphins and teddy bears aside so we could climb on top and wriggle through the window, out into the night. 

“Are you sure she won’t hear us?” 

“No, she could sleep through anything.” Jessica snapped Lipsmacker after Lipsmacker back into the specially made collector’s case. “When we lived with my dad he was so loud when he came home at night, but she never woke up. She said she never heard him come in. I always heard him.” 

I nodded, though I still wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what would happen if her mom caught us. I’d never been caught sneaking out before. I’d never snuck out before. I was worried her mom would think we were trying to go to a party, trying to hang out with boys and get drunk—never mind that we were only 11 and miles away from any other kids our own age. There was no way to explain what we were really doing. If we did, the magic would disappear like the chance of your wishes coming true when you say them out loud. 

We studied our secret language some more, writing simple practice sentences in our notebooks. We hoped to memorize all the symbols so we could write notes back and forth in school that would be impossible for any nosy fellow student or annoyed teacher to read. 

I put down my pencil and looked at Jessica. She was lying across the bed, her thin, freckled arm stretched out as she drew. “You want to go now?” 

The red numbers on the digital alarm clock on her dresser read: 10:00. The nighttime outside her window seemed impossibly darker now. I wondered how well my dad’s flashlight would cut through it. There were no streetlamps and she had no porch lights. We would have only the moon and stars, and the beam of one flashlight, to see by.

“I don’t know.” Jessica looked down at the line of symbols she’d just drawn. She carefully filled in the dots on a ladybug’s shell. “Let’s wait just a little while longer.”

We waited a little while longer. 

“Hey,” I said. “What symbol is ‘y’ again?” 

Jessica didn’t answer. She was passed out sideways on the bed, our secret language cipher crumpling beneath her chest with every slow, deep breath she took. I reached out to touch her shoulder, opened my mouth to say her name, but something kept me still and silent. I pulled the cipher out from underneath her, careful not to rip it. I flattened out the sheet of ruled loose-leaf and gently closed it into her notebook. I set her notebook on the nightstand. I looked once more out the window, at the darkness of 11 o’clock in Western New York when winter is drawing near. Then I got up to turn off the lights. I lifted my overstuffed backpack off the end of the bed so I could get under that end of the covers. That’s how we always slept together: me at one end of the bed, her at the other, our feet mingling in the middle. I laid my head on the pillow I’d brought from home and got comfortable under the foreign coverlet. 

This was how our adventures always went. We never found the key to unlock the chest in the attic of her dad’s barn that we were sure was full of pirate treasure. We never researched what a human pelvic bone looks like so we could know whether or not someone had really been murdered and dumped in her dad’s woods years before. We never even got close to entering the yard of the house neighboring her dad’s that Jessica swore was possessed by a demon in the form of a cat, also known as the Shadow Creature. We never went far enough out into her mom’s woods to find the abandoned school bus that Jessica said she’d seen when she was little and had had the same nightmare about ever since: about a little girl who was killed by her classmates, a bus driver who killed them all when he swerved off the road—then, time passing by like a VHS tape fast-forwarding until the children and the bus driver turned into dirty old bones and bloody scraps of clothing in a rusty yellow bus in the deep of the woods. 

Everything we believed was in limbo—true and untrue at the same time because we never tried to disprove it, like how the cat in Schrödinger’s experiment is dead and alive until you get up the nerve to open the box. 

It would be a better story if Jessica and I had snuck out of her bedroom that night. If we had gotten lost and scared in the dark for a while; if we had clambered up into the tree, almost fallen once or twice; if, once up there, we’d realized that binoculars don’t come with a night vision setting; if we’d snapped a picture every time we heard a splash in the water, which would later develop as nothing but blackness. I knew we were never really going to go, but I was glad neither of us had to say it. Maybe she fell asleep so we wouldn’t have to. As long as we stayed in that bedroom, mermaids existed and one with a pink tail was living in the pond behind her house. 

After I turned 12, I moved away from the small school I went to with Jessica to an even smaller school three hours away. There, I grew up fast. I had to, because the me that I was at my old school wasn’t okay in this new one. It wasn’t okay that I used big words and read books in the hallway and wore glasses and always raised my hand first in class. I started wearing contacts and makeup and as close to the “right” clothes as my family could afford. I hid my good grades and my passion for the things I loved and my creativity. I shut my imagination away in a drawer under my bed, where all my stories lay hidden, gathering dust and getting harder and harder to pick up as my inner child atrophied.

Not enough time passed between our last adventure and my leaving for me to feel okay breaking the spell to ask Jessica if she’d ever really believed in any of it. She never found me on Facebook like some of my other friends from back then had, and I never went looking for her either. I prefer it that way. I prefer to remember her 11 and skinny and covered in freckles, with two braids in her frizzy hair and wide, bright eyes full of secrets, chasing after portals we would never find. But with her, I came close.