The teacher had turned into a manatee
again.
Meghan closed her eyes and turned back
to the class she did not want to see. The sheet of paper containing her
presentation notes was swiftly turning into a sweaty, wrinkled mess.
“The, uh, era of industrialisation was
cha-characterised by… um…” She gasped and stumbled back as something light but
sharp struck her face. Her eyes sprang open and she flinched at the sight of her
classmates, sitting or lounging or squatting across rows and rows of desks. In
the frontmost seats, two boys—or rather, two octopi as they now were—sniggered.
The seahorse behind them, who had been Meghan’s new best friend Natasha only
last week, snorted in disdainful comment.
The transformations had started ten days
ago, only a week after Meghan’s arrival at her new school. The first to change
had been the teacher, his already rounded form bulging out to the size and
shape of a manatee, his whiskers thickening and blackening eyes retiring to the
sides of his head. She had screamed and pointed and then fainted, and had woken
up in the school nurse’s office. The nurse herself had turned into a tuna fish
right in front of her, and Meghan had run away home.
She had tried to explain to her parents,
but they had sent her back to school the next day, not believing a word. The teacher
had been his old self at first, but then the other pupils had started to shift
shapes, some permanently, some flickering back and forth before settling into
their new habitus. They were all marine creatures: sea snakes, crabs, different
sorts of fish, even an amoeba. Meghan was at a loss to explain how these
animals could move around, or even survive, without water, but they did.
“Are you all right, Meghan?” the teacher
asked in the high, skittering squeak of a manatee. It was hard to tell, but he
seemed worried.
“I’m… I’m fine.” Meghan swallowed again
and closed her eyes. “Spinning Jenny. The Spinning Jenny was the first great,
um, innovation of the Industrial Age.”
The sniggers from the front row
intensified. The teacher directed a long-suffering look at the two octo-boys. One
of them caught his eye, but instead of simmering down he stood up, or at least
arranged his limbs so that the varicoloured sac of his body rode higher.
“Why do we have to listen to that?” His
words were hard to make out from among the watery slurps. “She’s weird, and she’s
just so dry I’m falling asleep.”
“Yeah! She’s dry!” the other octopus
confirmed, rising to flank his friend. “And you’re just a big ass-kisser of a
sea cow!”
Everyone was pulling themselves up now
and the classroom turned threatening. Meghan’s heart climbed into her throat
and she let her weakened legs drop her into the chair beside the blackboard.
“Let’s get her some water!” someone
burbled from the back, probably an enormous sea bass. Others eagerly took up
the cry, and Meghan found herself gripped tightly in the tentacles of the octo-boys.
She screamed and fought, but the suction-cupped appendages twined and twisted and
squeezed harder as they dragged her out the door of the classroom and into the
girls’ bathroom halfway down the hall. From very far away came the protesting manatee
squeaks of the teacher.
A lamprey swatted its tailfin against one
of the taps and water gushed out at enormous speed, overflowing the basin in
seconds and splashing out onto the floor. The tentacles holding Meghan began to
force her towards the stream, inexorably, ignoring her flailing and the screams
that cut off when her face hit the water.
Afterwards, everything was better. Meghan
spread out her fins and regarded the iridescent feather-like extremities with
satisfaction, admiring the combination of red, black and blue. Siamese fighting
fish, apparently.
“You look nice.” Natasha’s voice held a
tinge of envy.
Meghan looked at her friend through new
eyes and would have smiled if her mouth had been able to move that way.
“You’re beautiful,” she answered
truthfully, although beautiful did
not do justice to the girl’s rainbow colouring, not even the spring green of
her belly or the orange ridge down her back.
Meghan glanced at her own strange
reflection in the mirror.
“What will Mom and Dad say?” she
muttered, suddenly unsure.
“Oh, they can be fish, too,” Natasha
said. “Come on, we need to get to recess before it rains.”
“So what if it rains?” Meghan giggled. “We’re
fish!”
