swimming off in a new skin made of fish, also once dead. She flicked her tail, buoyant, seaworthy. “A monster?”
“No, not a monster,” Mr. Jabricot said. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together, as if he were trying to feel the quality of his thoughts. “Sometimes it’s close, but not exactly. A Jenny Haniver, in this modern era, is what we call the art of the rogue taxidermist. A special creature summoned from the skins of animals that are plainer and more likely. Bits of monkey, bits of fish, all you have to do is suggest and people will build their own loop of possibility where mermaids chase after ships and sing to drowning sailors.”
“We should go,” Matthew said. He whistled, blowing air across the back of my neck. It was supposed to be a signal, secret code for when we couldn’t talk, but Matthew was always changing the rules about what things meant. “My mom’s picking us up.”
We sat on the train. It was still hot. Matthew cradled the Jenny Haniver in his lap. Crisp, bright sunlight fell through the windows and broke across the fake creature, picking out its pinched, desiccated face and crumbling tail.
I couldn’t believe he took it.
“Easy,” he said. “I held it behind me and when we walked out, I held it in front of me.”
“But, why?” I asked.
He wanted to see how it was made. He wanted to find all the seams and split them open, pry off the draping and reveal whatever it was hiding. Mr. Jabricot, he said, was a genius and Matthew didn’t understand a half, a quarter even, of the things he did. He held out the creature while he talked and I took it because otherwise he would wave it around, dragging eyes to our corner where I balanced a piece of stolen loot across my knees, surprised by its lightness and clean perfection. If there were seams, they were invisible. Up close, the thing looked like no one could possibly have made it. It looked more dead than dead.
“Don’t take it apart,” I said.
Matthew stopped talking. We both stared at the creature, beautiful and dry and impossible. “I won’t do it today,” he said. “And we’ll have to keep it at your house. If my mom finds it, something bad will happen.”
“She’ll find out about Mr. Jabricot.”
“She’ll ban us from the museum.”
“She’ll ground you.”
“She’ll say I’m a bad influence.”
“She won’t let us be friends.”
We ran out of bad things before we got to my stop.
My parents didn’t notice the Jenny Haniver. I carried it to my room while Mom was in the kitchen and Dad flipped from one version to the next of the evening news. We had a nice dinner: pasta and ice cream, a conversation about plumbing and neighbors that drifted past me, stuffed with people I didn’t really know.
“How’s Matthew?” Mom asked. She reserved washing the dishes for time to talk about things she thought were important. She scrubbed tomato sauce off a plate.
“He’s fine.” I stacked glasses.
“You’ve known each other for a while.”
“Yep.” I wiped a bowl dry and thought about the creature tucked under my bed and the way Matthew had looked at it, like it was the sort of thing he saw every day, like he knew how the pieces went together. Old hat. The usual.
“Well,” Mom said. She turned on the garbage disposal and let it roar through the kitchen. “I hope you guys are having a nice time.”
In the middle of the night, the creature woke me up. I could feel it lying there, under my bed, sending woozy thoughts of upside-down waves and vast, wet shadows with rows of sharp teeth seeping up through the mattress and into my sleep. I got out from under the covers and bent over until my knees touched the floor.
“Go to sleep,” I said.
I climbed back into bed and felt really dumb.
In the middle of a dream, one that involved the underside of waves and shadows with teeth, I carried the creature to the bathroom. It needed water, it told me. I shut the door, turned on the light, and filled the bathtub.
Not too cold, it said.
And I said, please?
It splashed water on me when I dropped it in, a pale shape that sunk and then darted sideways, growing fatter and more graceful as it made circles around the tub. Its scales were sleek silver gray, its body streaked and dabbed with black from the top of its head to the tips