Don’t Call the Sea ‘Cerulean’
by Megan Howell
“Or azure, or ultramarine,” Mr. Hewitt adds. He cracks a wry smile. “Or periwinkle, or atrovirens, or paisley. It’s fine to call the ocean ‘blue.’”
No one laughs. Mara-Leigh, my best friend in English 206H, doodles in her planner, face blank as she makes little hearts with detailed, hairy, little nips on their rounded ends.
I raise my hand. “What’s atrovirens?”
“It’s a color,” Mr. Hewitt says.
“Yeah, but which one?”
“A shade of green.”
“Can’t oceans be green, though?”
Mr. Hewitt looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time, though for the past ten or so minutes, he’s been picking apart the poem I wrote about Eternity Beach. The title is “Ode to Eternity.” I struggled coming up with each stanza because I could only think for so long before my worries—Mom, school—consumed me. My hope was that the same pain that held me back would filter through the words I picked out of a rhyming dictionary and transform into something beautiful.
“Of course, water can be green,” Mr. Hewitt says. “But what I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to give it an impressive-sounding name. Just write what you know.”
I nod my head. What I really want to do is cry. I’m angry at my teacher, but at the same time, part of me knows that my poem is overwrought.
Mr. Hewitt pats me so lightly on the shoulder that I can only feel air—I think the school must have some policy against any physical contact. The feeling, or lack thereof, is a million times worse than the idea of him outright calling me a failure. I wonder if he prefers Mara-Leigh over me because of her looks, which he called Rockwellian during the unit on Norman Mailer’s American Dream.
“You’ll improve down the line,” he says.
I roll my eyes to stave off tears. I just want the class to move on, but he keeps going on and on about the ocean.
“I used to surf,” he says. He flashes a hang-ten sign. “Hard to believe, I know, but once upon a time in the 90s I was young and stupid. I drained my bank account to go to this beach in Portugal that has the highest waves in the world. Luckily, it rained my whole trip, so I didn’t get the chance to drown. I did eat a ton of arroz de pato, though.”
Silence. There’re still a few minutes left of class time. He won’t dismiss us early because he never does, not even when there was a fire drill. Instead, he goes on and on about the ocean and his three-year-old’s obsession with Finding Nemo.
“Asher’s at that age where he’s trying to understand the world,” he says. “My wife and I caught him filling up all our mixing bowls with water. She asks him what he’s up to, and he gives her this super serious look and goes, ‘I’m growing the fishes.’ He thought they’d just spawn out of thin air—or thin water, I guess.”
I purse my lips, waiting for the silence to return to crush his obnoxiously high spirits. Instead, kids giggle. Even Mara-Leigh smiles. Taciturn Mara-Leigh who only speaks when called on, and only in sparse, stripped-down sentences that mimic her prose poem about a shut-in. Of all my school friends, her and Marlowe and Kei are the most reserved.
I cry. I can’t help it. Mr. Hewitt’s schmaltziness stings. I prefer the judicial harshness of my old, sophomore year English teacher Ms. Antonucci. When she told me that my analysis of Helen Burns’s death in Jane Eyre impeccable, I believed her as much as I did when she said that my other, earlier work needed improvement. She didn’t give out consolations. Mr. Hewitt, however, writes them over all my papers, but no matter what I do he keeps giving me Bs and Cs.
Mara-Leigh sees me, sees my tears. What happened? she mouths. She whips her head around, searching for ghosts that only I can see.
I shrug, sniffling. Other kids are staring. I suddenly hate everyone and everything. And I absolutely despise the new boy who critiqued my poem the most during the writing workshop. He called my language “clunky.” When he speaks up, bringing up his great-grandmother’s life as a pearl diver in rural Japan, I glare at him. He stops midsentence, cocking his head at me so that I feel like I have no choice but to say something.
“I don’t get why everyone’s being so fucking mean for,” I say in between sobs.
Mara-Leigh won’t look at me anymore. She shields her blue—not azure, nor ultramarine, cerulean, etc.—eyes with her hands. I know I’m humiliating myself. The problem is that my self-awareness only pushes me to act even worse because I know there’s no going back. The whole grade will know about this moment before dismissal.
“My mom’s dying!” I yell.
No one speaks. I can hear this one girl, super annoying, typing on her laptop that she’s allowed to use in class for vague health reasons. I look at her and just know she’s talking about me in a huge group chat. One time, I heard her complaining to a bunch of senior girls’ about her friend’s eating disorder. The names that I want to call her make my mouth bitter, but I’m not quite daring enough to spit them out.
I look up at the clock on the wall. Only ten minutes left of class. I stand up, grab my bag, and walk towards the door. I don’t ask to be excused. There’s no point. I just go.
“Well,” quips the boy with the pearl-diving family, “that was awkward.”
I let the door close on its own. Door opens, door closes—there’s a metaphor somewhere in all of this, I tell myself, something so powerful that it will surely make me the most authentic writer in the class. I start walking, but I don’t know where I’m going, only that I can’t stand being anywhere that I’ve ever been.
My mom really is dying. I just hadn’t told anyone at school before. I didn’t see the point in people knowing. I viewed my life as a seesaw, school on one side, home on the other—connected but distinct. Student and daughter, the two roles that I could play but never at the same time. If one was doing well, the other had to be plummeting to the earth. Freshman year: no friends, mediocre grades but also my Mom’s attention, which was so generous and overbearing—constant girls’ trips to national parks, restaurants, shopping malls, overpriced hotel tearooms—that I wondered if I’d always be that girl who had only her mother for company. Sophomore year: new friends, good grades but Mom’s cancer. Now, just one month into my junior year, the seesaw is broken. It’s bent at the middle, an upside-down u, a frowny face with two negative ends.
I just want my life’s destruction to be entirely my dad’s fault. He’s the one who called up the apartment last month to say I should plan on moving in with him and his new wife in Mississippi. Of course, I hung up. I couldn’t find the words, could barely speak to Mom when she asked if anyone had called. Writing became impossible after that.
I go into the bathroom and turn on the sink only to turn it back off again. Maybe I’m finally free, I think as I stare into my reflection and wait to feel something. My hair’s a mess, but at least I don’t have to be anything for anyone anymore, neither friend nor daughter, not even a promising student. I wonder who I am when I’m alone like this. Myself? Or nothing at all?
I hear someone come in. A new wave of shame rushes over me, making me hot again.
Agnes Rivera is looking at me weirdly. I say hi under my breath. She says nothing back, just steps around me and goes to apply mascara two sinks down from mine.
I think she’s this way with me because people are always mixing us up all the time even though I’m Black and she’s supposedly not, her dad from somewhere in Peru where the people happen to have tightly coiled hair and full lips. Being near me makes her half-Danish side seem less exotic, I guess, but maybe I’m just being bitter. Maybe she doesn’t yet know that I lost my mind today.
“Agnes,” I say.
She looks up.
“I’ve never told anyone this,” I go on, “but it’s flattering whenever someone mistakes me for you. You’re super gorgeous.”
“Oh,” she says. “Thanks.”
“D’you think we look similar? Be honest.”
“Honestly?” She looks me up and down. “I think you dress kinda badly.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. You dress like someone who pretends not to care what people think while actually caring a lot. The pants you have on plus that sweater make you look like you write essays on, like, why it’s sexist to separate women’s clothing from the men’s.”
I laugh. The performance that I’ve been putting on for so long is over and I can poke fun at it like a retired actor reflecting on their worst movie. I thought that I was meant to be a quirky intellectual because the world let me be—it was one of the personas I could choose from, either that or loner; I never thought that I could be anything more here.
“Sorry,” I say, “it’s just that, before I came here, I’d always dressed super feminine because that’s all my mom bought me: froufrou dresses and stuff—lots of Lily Pulitzer. I became known for being like that for a while. Feminine, always in pigtails. I wore what I was given.”
“What’s your preferred style?”
“No clue.”
“Do you have a favorite color palette? A favorite color?”
“A period ago, I would’ve said cerulean.”
I expect her not to know what that is, but she nods and says, “That’s a pretty color. It reminds me of the Cycladic Islands.”
I nod along, but in truth, I don’t know what cerulean really is, only that it’s a shade of blue—light or dark, I have no clue. I wonder if Agnes can sense my ignorance. She takes out her phone and pulls up a picture of white stucco houses in Greece, pointing at their blue roofs, which blend in with the bright blue sky. They’re beautiful in a way that makes me sad because my mom’s in a coma and can’t travel anymore.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Well,” Agnes says, looking me up and down with a concerned look, “I guess I’ll see you.”
“Maybe. I don’t know yet.”
“Are you moving?”
A large group of girls streams into the restroom. The bell rings as one of Agnes’s friends runs up and hugs her like they haven’t seen each other in decades. “Aggie!” she squeals. “You’ll never guess what happened.” She turns, sees me, and clasps her mouth over her hands as I fast-walk out into the hallway.
#
Mom’s asleep, not dead, her chest rising and falling as one of the palliative care nurses writes something on the little white board below the TV. I comb her long hair with my fingers. The machines keeping her alive chug along indifferently.
“Mom,” I say. “It’s me. Leelee.”
Nothing I say feels true anymore. No one calls me Leelee but her, and she hasn’t been conscious for a while now. To everyone including my dad and all four of my older sisters, I’m just Leanne. Constance, my oldest sister, the one who’s staying with me—“watching over me,” she says as if I’m still five—won’t stop texting me. My phone keeps buzzing. I can hear her yells already. Leanne, Leanne! Your school said you skipped. What the hell, Leanne?
I wonder if Mom’s favorite color is pink or if she only starting saying that when she had daughters. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I know less and less about her. My memories of her feel as sparse as the obituary she wrote for herself. Danielle Hastings, PhD. Mother, sister, wife, scientist. I wanted to hate the description, but couldn’t think of much to add that didn’t fall under those few categories. I know that she was the last of four siblings, most of whom have already passed; that she grew up in south Texas, moved to Hawaii for college, and stayed here in Honolulu for work; that part of her still loves my dad even though he cheated when she was still pregnant with me. If she lived forever, I’d still never learn what she was like when she was alone. I couldn’t just listen in to her private thoughts that used to make her smile while she did the dishes and laundry.
My mind won’t focus on Mom. She’s too much, I can’t take her or her pain anymore and almost wished she’d been abusive so that I could be unfeeling in the face of her suffering. I think about the picture Agnes showed me of those pretty, blue-domed houses that overlooked the sea.
I want to go to the beach. I don’t want to just play in the sand, though. What I crave is the ocean. I need to dive into it, let the waves wash over me. Mom never learned to swim. She was terrified of the ocean. I wasn’t allowed to go near it when I was with her, not even after I’d started taking swim classes at the Y. I think what I really want is to be truly alone.
“I’m going to go in the ocean,” I whisper in Mom’s ear, half-hoping she’ll wake up and say absolutely not. She doesn’t wake up, though. But the ghost of her concern for me still holds me back.
It’s literally right there, a thin cerulean strip between hills and sky. It’s a completely separate world that goes miles deep and sprawls outward for what feels like forever. I can smell the seawater, which the hospice’s brochure advertises as medicinal as if the residents aren’t going to die anyways.
#
Walking to the beach takes much longer than I thought. When I finally get there, it’s late and I’m already exhausted. The setting sun is a punctured egg yolk bleeding shades of orange and red onto the sky. Everyone’s gone except for a homeless man chain-smoking under a makeshift lean-to.
I undress. The air is cold. The water is much colder. Every inch of my skin screams out as I frog-kick in just yellow undies towards what feels like the end of the world. This, I decide, is the ocean’s true form. Not cerulean but inky black and very lonely. I go out so far that my arms start to ache.
I’m not trying to kill myself. I just happen to be thinking about death when the rip tide grabs me and drags me far away. I don’t panic. I know there’s no point in screaming because there’s no one around but me and a million little sea creatures who don’t care about me. I’m not thinking about the ocean safety lessons from elementary school, my mind too worn down to remember that strong currents drown those who attempt to fight them.
In this moment, I’m just curious. I want to know where the world will take me to when there’s no one else around. I close my eyes and let go. Then I’m underwater. I imagine that my obituary would be just like Mom’s minus the wife and scientist parts. Maybe someone would call me a promising or even skilled writer. But no one would know that my favorite color is now red-sky-at-morning or that I really want to go to Greece. These private pieces of me would die with my body if I don’t make it to shore. I’d never get to share them.
By the time the fear starts tingling in my brain, the current has already dissipated. It screams out as I struggle swimming back to where I came. I’m not particularly strong, I just really want to feel loved. I want to make more friends, maybe get married someday. I want to say goodbye to Mara-Leigh and fuck her older brother who flirted with me at her pool party last summer. Tomorrow, I’ll guilt my other sister Gianna into buying me the strappy type of sundresses I’ve been seeing a lot of in magazines. Then I’ll ask all my friends from class and soccer and marching band if they want to meet up, then we can go swimming, then out to eat, and then, and then, and then—on and on, desire after desire until I really die.
I crawl out of the water, coughing, sniffling, wondering why I’m still alive and if that reason is who I really am.
BIO
Megan Howell is a DC-based writer. She earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review and The Establishment among other publications. Her debut short story collection Softie is forthcoming with West Virginia University Press in November 2024.
